Exploring the Value of Public Art
Nearly 200 friends of Nevelson Chapel gathered last week for a salon discussion (“Public Art: Should We Value It?”) tracing the evolution of contemporary art beyond the confines of the gallery and museum and exploring present-day issues — access, interpretation, invigoration — at a time of constrained funding for public art.
The wide-ranging forum — featuring artist Leonardo Drew, professor Michele Bogart, and civic-art curator Kendal Henry, in conversation with Pastor Jared Stahler — had a festive air.
Stahler began by tracing the history of the Nevelson Chapel in the context of what was originally called CitiCorp Center, conceived less as “a typical corporate officer tower with public areas” than as a truly “public building with private office space, meeting space, and a religious sanctuary,” a square-block complex that originally featured 21 public corridors and passageways and a pair of open-to-everyone dwelling spaces, the tower’s grand Atrium and the church’s intimate, human-scaled Nevelson Chapel — the latter a “womb for the soul,” as Christopher Rothko called it.
Though post-9/11 security concerns eliminated most of those passageways, the Chapel and the Atrium are both in the midst of reinvestment and renewal. “ Just as Boston Properties is pressing ahead with the Atrium, so too here we’re pressing forward with Nevelson Chapel,” Stahler said. “We are glad that after months of construction, the Chapel is finally open again to the public, even while work continues within and in anticipation of the art conservation yet to come.”
Before digging into the heart of the discussion — “probing the ways in which we intentionally invest in our city, its people, its cultural heritage, and its shared experience” — Stahler asked Drew, Henry, and Bogart to each note a work of public art that had affected them.
For Drew — a Brooklyn-based artist exhibited around the world who creates dynamic sculptures from natural materials, transformed through processes such as oxidation, burning, and decay — that work was Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, the subtly curving 120-foot-long wall of corroding steel that jutted across Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan for eight controversial years before its removal in 1989.
For Henry, who directs the city’s Percent for Art program, commissioning art in conjunction with city construction and public works projects, it was Ellen Harvey’s Mathematical Star (2013), a brilliantly hued, 20-foot-diameter mosaic inlaid at Brooklyn’s Marcy Plaza that appears to be abstract but incorporates motifs from 18 Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood landmarks.
Bogart, a Stony Brook University art historian specializing in urban design and American visual culture, chose Civic Virtue (Triumphant Over Unrighteousness), a twice-exiled sculpture originally commissioned for City Hall Plaza but now residing at Green-Wood Cemetery, after a long stay in between at Queens Borough Hall. As with the Serra work, Civic Virtue and its “kind of insane history” spoke to Bogart about how shifting tastes can cause art to fall from favor for political and aesthetic reasons, and to her own “efforts to keep monuments where they are.”
That work, in which a Michelangelo-esque nude stands astride two feminine sea creatures representing vice, dates to a long-running period of “civic art” that stuck mainly to “figurative and academic” statues, monuments, and memorials, like soldiers on horseback. At mid-century, there started to be a shift to a new kind of “art in the public realm,” in a more abstract, stylistic mode. But not until Nevelson’s prime, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, would New York City truly lead the way in what would be called “public art,” in large part due to Doris Freedman and the organizations that would merge as the Public Art Fund in 1977, along with the city-funded Percent for Art program, now managed by Henry, starting in 1982.
That makes Nevelson Chapel especially compelling, coming just at the beginning of “this idea of public art as something that is supposed to resonate with audiences and audiences start talking back and matter,” Bogart said.
Accessibility brings questions of durability and long-term care, sometimes at odds with a “consciousness around ephemerality” that also became prominent in the mid-to-late 1970s, at a time when the very city itself seemed to be decaying, Bogart said.
Drew spoke to that tension in the celebrated work he created for Madison Square Park — City in the Grass, on view from June until last week — and in the hour he spent sitting with, and inside, Nevelson’s masterwork Chapel before the forum.
The Madison Square Park piece was Drew’s first public commission in three decades as an exhibited artist, a 3,000-square-foot topographical mosaic that is part cityscape and part magic carpet. He tried to persuade the park conservancy that “in order for this piece to finish itself, the public had to actually attack it,” which is why he was constantly trying to coax visitors to flout the protective “do not climb” signs posted around it.
“It was always a matter of … understanding that on the other end of this we were going to get something more magnificent, and the beginning is only the first patina,” said Drew, who found his eye in the Chapel drawn to the beauty of the “cracks [and] missing things” in Nevelson’s original installation. “When looking at Nevelson’s work, I mean, I see nothing but beauty in all these cracks, but you’re saying ‘we need to fix this.’ ”
Still, he acknowledged that his artist’s fondness for impermanence can be at odds with the long-term installations that the city seeks for public projects or with the enduring mission of the Chapel. Indeed, the city for its part now considers the distinct maintenance needs and sustainability of an artistic location from the earliest stages of building design and construction. That happens even before working with a particular artist, recognizing the extent to which different locations vary, be it a police station, public library, or sanitation plant, Henry said.
With the Chapel, Stahler noted, planning for preservation in the 1970s was far less sophisticated than it is today. “Part of what we’re addressing 40 years on is the fundamental enemy of the artwork: the old HVAC system, unregulated humidity,” with swings from 7 percent to nearly 80 percent, particularly unfriendly to wood and paint, Stahler said. “When Leo and I were in the Chapel I was pointing out that in the old system the grills that delivered that conditioned air were directly above the sculptures. … [The original planners of this space weren’t] thinking in the way that you’re thinking today, Kendal, working with artists and thinking through these issues. In the Chapel you can go right up next to the sculpture; you can bump into it if you want. There’s nothing there” protecting it.
In closing, Stahler asked each Drew, Henry and Bogart to share their hopes for the state of public art in five or ten years. That much time is “light years” away, Drew said, but he imagined in part a trend toward more Frank Gehry-esque architecture “as sculptures that we live inside”: “The artist will always be the soothsayer. Serra was that in the early ’80s, and I think that the answer to that [subsequently] is Frank Gehry,” he said. “Ten years from now, it’s up in the air, but I think it’s going to be great.”
Henry hoped to see “more artist-initiated public artwork,” where the government and the private sector “allow artists to really express themselves in the public in ways that are least expected,” perhaps through streamlining some permitting and restrictions to allow for more artistic experimentation.
“I don’t disagree, but I would have to wonder whether it were possible to do that,” Bogart said, adding a dose of professorial realism.
“We’re in a church!” Henry replied, smiling. “Have a little faith.”
Gesturing to the crowd filling the pews, Stahler asked what “the average New Yorker [can] do to support the flourishing of public art.”
Drew called for restoring the erosion of cuts to arts education over the past few decades, “so that we can start becoming spiritually larger when it comes to actually what we need for nourishment.”
Bogart agreed. “Education, education, education; history, history, history; art history, and also, art,” she said, issuing a prescription. She worried that even many college-educated people lack “aesthetic education” and “don't know how to understand art in the public realm,” missing its physical, psychological, social, and sociological dimensions and reacting in knee-jerk fashion, too often negatively.
“We’re seeing some of the impact of that I believe in the present day, exacerbated by political traumas in the nation, because people look at things in a very limited way. So without getting into what I mean by that, there needs to be more art education in the schools,” she said, to applause. “One other thing an average person can do is support organizations that ... put the art out there, and the other thing an average person can do is read — read the history of public art.”
Though Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney had planned to participate and celebrate the 350,000 grant provide to the project by the National Endowment for the Humanities, she was called back to Washington last-minute in her new role as acting Chair of the House Oversight Committee, following the recent death of Elijah Cummings. Stahler read part of a letter from Maloney in her absence, sharing her support and best wishes:
“This oasis of peace and introspection in the midst of Midtown Manhattan was created by the 20th century’s premier abstract expressionist sculptor. Like me, Ms. Nevelson was a big supporter of public art, and I am pleased that federal funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities was available to help underwrite the restoration to ensure the sculptures are available to the future generations in this city Ms. Nevelson loved so much. I will continue to keep federal funding available for this and for public works of art.”
After the salon discussion, guests heard from Maria del Toro, chair of the Saint Peter’s Chapel Fundraising Committee, and David Diamond, chair of the Nevelson Legacy Council, a group of arts professionals, cultural leaders, and philanthropic citizens dedicated to preserving the work in perpetuity. Guests were also encouraged to visit the recently reopened Chapel — up to two dozen at a time, Stahler asked, given its intimate scale as a “singular place of quiet reflection.”