Danh Vo Bringing the Statue of Liberty to Manhattan and Brooklyn

Danh Vo, We the People (detail), 2011-2013. Copper. Dimensions Variable. (Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.)

This spring New York’s Public Art Fund will bring 50 pieces from Danh Vo‘s We the People (2011-13) project—a full-size replica of the Statue of Liberty split into more than 250 copper chunks—to two parks, one in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn. Running May 17 to December 5, the exhibition will be split between City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, and the newly opened Pier 3 section of Brooklyn Bridge Park, which happens to offer stunning views of the Statue of Liberty across New York Harbor.

“We felt as though it was the perfect thing because of its proximity to the source of inspiration,” Andrea Hickey, associate curator at the Public Art Fund and organizer of the Vo shows, told the New York Times. “The Statue of Liberty evokes so many meanings to so many people around the world.”

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Danh Vo, We the People (detail), 2011-2013. Copper. Dimensions Variable. (Photo by the author.)

This major public showcase is the latest in a long string of honors for the Vietnam-born, Denmark-raised artist, who won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2012—which came with a solo show at the Guggenheim—and created an enormous installation for “The Encyclopedic Palace,” the main exhibition of the 2013 Venice Biennale. Selections from We the People were also featured in the New Museum’s second triennial, “The Ungovernables,” in 2012.

“Danh Vo’s ingenious project takes what is arguably the world’s most recognizable figurative monument and allows us to experience every detail of its vast surface as if through a magnifying glass,” adds Public Art Fund director Nicholas Baume in a statement, “each detail stands alone as a compelling work of art, yet each part also implies the whole.”

Benjamin Sutton


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