The Next Big Creative Time Project Will Land in Central Park

Spencer Finch, Sunset Soft Serve (2008).
Photo: the artist/ T Magazine.

Creative Time, the New York nonprofit public art organization, is planning its next move, after its recent project with artist Kara Walker, A Subtlety, achieved blockbuster status. (See Beyonce, Jay Z, and 130,552 Other People Visited Kara Walker’s Sphinx.)

Creative Time is now organizing “Drifting in Daylight: Art in Central Park,” a show that will feature seven to 10 sculptural and interactive works, reports T Magazine. The artists will be commissioned by the Central Park Conservancy to mark its 35th year of maintaining the city’s largest green area, and the projects will be on view, primarily in the northern end of the park, Fridays and Saturdays from May 15 through June 20. (It may not be Creative Time’s only big endeavor this summer; see Is Creative Time Heading to the Venice Biennale?)

Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson will reprise his 2013 Venice Biennale performance S.S Hangover, in which a sextet of horn players played on an Icelandic-style craft while repeatedly making a very short journey, from one dock to another. This time the players will be circling the Harlem Meer. Brooklyn-based artist Spencer Finch, who created a mosaic-like work depicting the skies over New York for Lower Manhattan’s 9/11 Memorial Museum, will offer ice cream via “Sunset Soft Serve,” a solar-powered ice-cream truck that will peddle treats in pastel hues inspired by the color of the sun. American artist Lauri Stallings and her dance-activist collective, glo, will dance through the thick of the park’s North Woods, while performing artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph will produce a participatory dance and spoken-word piece inspired by the musical legacy of Harlem and African-Americans’ northward Great Migration. Performance and video artist David Levine will present a project that reenacts famous film scenes set in Central Park (without the movie stars). Who wouldn’t want to see themselves in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, or the sleeper 1990s hit, Cruel Intentions?

The complete roster is yet to be announced, but Anne Pasternak, Creative Time’s president and artistic director, doesn’t expect it to be hard to find willing participants. “For the 20 years I have been at Creative Time, hardly a week has gone by without an artist proposing a project for Central Park,” Pasternak told T. “This park represents the very best form of civic space. Everyone wants to be here.”


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