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AccessibilityArt in the Parks
Through collaborations with a diverse group of arts organizations and artists, Parks brings to the public both experimental and traditional art in many park locations. Please browse our list of current exhibits and our archives of past exhibits below. You can also see past grant opportunities or read more about the Art in the Parks Program.
Public Art Map and Guide
Find out which current exhibits are on display near you, and browse our permanent monument collection.
Search Current and Past Exhibits
2025
Manhattan
Alma Allen, Alma Allen on Park Avenue
May 2, 2025 to October 3, 2025
Park Avenue Malls between East 52nd and East 70th Streets, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
This public exhibition is Allen’s largest outdoor
installation to date and the newest in a series of large-scale outdoor
installations staged by Allen in the United States, Mexico and Belgium. Unique
bronze and onyx sculptures, including examples reaching over 10 feet tall and
realized especially for the exhibition, will be on view at eight sites that
span nearly 20 blocks. Park Avenue provides a unique opportunity for New
Yorkers to engage with the artist’s material explorations of consciousness,
free will, and the nature of time, unexpectedly tranquil amongst the energetic
velocity of the city. Juxtaposing the artist’s primordial formations against
the urban landscape, the exhibition encourages new perspectives on the
elemental nature of Allen’s fluid, biomorphic sculptural language.
This exhibition is presented by Kasmin
and the Fund for Park Avenue.
Naomi Lawrence, Superbloom
October 7, 2024 to October 1, 2025
Thomas Jefferson Park, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
In California, a “Superbloom” of wildflowers that occurs every 2 to 3 years after record breaking winter rains. This surplus of nutrients leads to a spectacular show of spring wildflowers across barren deserts which can at times be visible from space. Harlem-based artist Naomi Lawrence replicates the naturally occurring event from the other side of the U.S. by crocheting oversized California poppies, blue, purple, arroyo lupine, and bright yellow fiddlenecks, and an array of wildflowers that are known to be part of this phenomenon. The artist’s freehand style allows her to capture the subtle shifts of color that happen in nature.
Kerstin Bratsch, Fossil Psychic Stone Mimicry (Palladiana, Masaico_Bench I)
October 26, 2024 to September 21, 2025
The High Line, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
For the High Line, Bratsch presents Fossil Psychic Stone Mimicry (Palladiana, Mosaico_Bench I) (2023-2024), a large-scale site-specific mosaic bench that becomes a “stone painting.” The work is a material translation of one of her Fossil Psychics (stucco marmo) works, in which the painting gesture becomes a body of fossilized fragments, as if the result of geologic phenomena, enshrining the past into the present—like runes, or a fly trapped in amber. Wrapped around an Oregon Green Austrian pine tree, the work offers a moment of respite for parkgoers, quietly urging visitors to reconnect with the natural world that surrounds them on the High Line.
Center for Educational Innovation (CEI), Benchmarks: Empowering Students to Create Inspiring Community Murals on Benches for a Citywide NYC Parks Exhibition
June 7, 2025 to September 14, 2025
Thomas Jefferson Park, Manhattan
CEI BENCHMARKS is a citywide NYC Parks exhibition of 20 inspiring murals on benches created by NYC public school students. These bench murals are part of the CEI Benchmarks program, a comprehensive student arts residency program that empowers NYC public school students to become engaged citizens and create large-scale, collaborative, inspiring community murals on benches for public display in a high-profile citywide exhibition in NYC Parks. The 20 benches, created by over 540 students of grades 3-12, will be on exhibit June 7-September 14 in the Bronx at Rev. T. Wendell Foster Park, in Brooklyn at Prospect Park Parade Ground, in Manhattan at Thomas Jefferson Park, and in Staten Island at Clove Lakes Park.
This exhibition is presented
by The Center for Educational Innovation - website.
Thomas Gallagher, Lingo Bingo
March 20, 2025 to September 12, 2025
Inwood Hill Park, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
Lingo Bingo offers
an opportunity to bridge language and cultural barriers, fostering
understanding in a playful setting. It replaces bingo numbers with words and
phrases in multiple languages, inviting participants to discover shared values.
This installation features 13 languages, including five frequently used in
Inwood: Spanish, Taíno, Lenape, Hebrew, and English.
This exhibition
is presented by Korea Art Forum.
Akiko Ichikawa, Limited Limited Editions
March 20, 2025 to September 12, 2025
Inwood Hill Park, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
This exhibition
consists of four vinyl banners, which document the artist’s participatory
project Limited, Limited Edition. The artist guided participants through
stenciling their chosen translations onto secondhand t-shirts. Limited,
Limited Edition is an ongoing gifting project started in 2005 as a way for
the artist to engage with people to create singular cross-cultural experiences
in an imaginative space transcending any one-dimensional take on Japanese
culture.
This exhibition
is presented by Korea Art Forum.
Zeehan Wazed, Ball for Art
September 5, 2024 to September 4, 2025
Sara D. Roosevelt Park, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
This group of four murals by artist Zeehan Wazed are set behind the basketball hoops on the Grand Street Basketball Courts in Sara D. Roosevelt Park. Together, the murals bring a sense of movement and brightness to the retaining walls surrounding the courts.
Jeff Sonhouse, Harlequin
September 4, 2024 to September 3, 2025
St. Nicholas Park, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
The basketball courts are designed with a diamond-pattern the artist saw while researching artist Pablo Picasso’s paintings of the Harlequin: a comedic, multi-faceted character, usually masked and dressed in diamond-patterned outfits, featured in his works. As a former scholar-athlete, professional basketball player, and currently a fulltime visual artist, Sonhouse chose this pattern to commemorate those individuals, who like the Harlequin were showmen. They inspired him to be more than he imagined was expected of him.
Henry Roundtrip Marton Newman, Ectoplasm
September 28, 2024 to September 3, 2025
Riverside Park South, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
Consisting of clear acrylic panels etched with life-sized silhouetted figures set within an architectural steel frame, Ectoplasm seeks to mediate the divide between public and private grief—offering an opportunity to reflect on our shared melancholia. The structure abstracts the city and renders it transparent. As the sun moves across the sky, shadowy reflections of the figures are cast, reforming and disappearing with the sun. Through the sculpture, the divides between interior and exterior, material and immaterial, gone and present, are blurred.
Sydney Shen, SBNO (Standing But Not Operating)
September 28, 2024 to September 3, 2025
Riverside Park South, Manhattan
Map/Directions (in Google Maps)
As an artist, Shen is interested in ambivalent emotional states such as fear, wonder, pleasure and pain. A roller coaster enthusiast, Shen is particularly fascinated by how theme parks sublimate the thrill of near-death into a form of amusement. Taking the form of something unsettlingly between an anatomical model, a carnival ride, and a metronome, which measure time through beats akin to the human heartbeat, SBNO (Standing But Not Operating) speaks to an innate human desire to be moved–physically and metaphorically–beyond our limits.
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