Tony Cragg and Paula Hayes Next Up for Madison Square Park

Three Tony Cragg sculptures at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas.
Photo: Benjamin Sutton.

On July 24 the Madison Square Park Conservancy announced the next pair of exhibitions in its Mad. Sq. Art program: A new, bronze trio of Tony Cragg‘s trademark wavy pancake stack sculptures, due to open on September 18 and continue through February 8, 2015; to be followed by an installation of 18 snow globe-like crystal balls by Paula Hayes, which will run February 19 to April 19, 2015. The park’s current contemporary art exhibition,

Cragg’s show, “Walks of Life,” will feature three of his bendy, simultaneously futurist and organic towers, each sited on a different lawn in the park. Meanwhile, for Hayes’s first outdoor project, she is creating a set of small crystal balls, each of which will be installed on a pedestal and contain some vestige of contemporary culture, like old electronics. The pieces in the show, titled “Gazing Globes,” will seem to glitter thanks to a fine dust of pulverized compact disks sprinkled into each ball.

“I think that sculpture is a kind of sensitizing activity and that it has a role in being a catalyst that may lead to more sensitive thinking,” Cragg said in a statement. “It’s a materialist’s too, which I would hope would also lead to a more open-minded approach to the world around us.”

Hayes will take up that mantra in her environmentalism-themed installation, which will see the globes, ranging in diameter between 14, 18, and 24 inches, installed at various heights—between 24 and 47 inches.

“I use vintage parts because technology moves at such a fast pace,” Hayes said in a statement. “These play a role in the current landscape and how information is transmitted from one part of the globe to the next. I am making an illuminated landscape evocative of the designed landscape of Madison Square Park. Both are born of human imagination and technology.”


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