Splashes of Color in Central Park will be a series of ephemeral installations in Central Park which I will photograph to create stop motion animation celebrating the Park and the Natural Environment through Art.
I would use most of the funding to hire women artists and other artists from underrepresented communities. We will come together to create ephemeral roving installations throughout Central Park which I will photograph to create series of stop motion animations. The artists will hold Giant Paper Hands and Red Cloth between them to create streaks of color in the winter landscape of the park.
We would hold the colorful artwork in our hands and move through the park non-destructively and without obstruction to paths drawing temporary colorful lines. We would not attach artwork to trees or bridges or any other objects, and we will not harm branches or stalks. We will use our hands and bodies to move the artwork around the landscape.
The photographs will trace the movement of the artists and the colorful artwork, a stream of color thought the muted January landscape of the park. The splashes of color will move over rocks, hug tree trunks, rest on benches, hang over bridges, and glide over the landscape.
We will intersect the colorful art with the vertical lines of the trees and the sloping shapes of rocks, and frame the muted greens of the new grass with dashes of red, orange and yellow.
As we move through the park I will direct the group and take photographs. I will put together the photographs into animated sequences. These stop motion animations would be my deliverables.
To celebrate Central Park - oasis of nature, an urban refuge and a center for street culture
This will be a creative act to celebrate Central Park and the natural environment. During the pandemic I created installations in Central Park as a way to cope with stress and deal with isolation and met many people who told me they were able to cope with the pandemic in the city by coming to the park every day.
I go to Central Park very often to take long walks and to think about future work. Along these walks I would take photographs and pay attention to the colors of the trees and the landscape. It is a way to relax, exercise and think about future projects. I pay attention to very small things like leaves and branches. Central Park is never the same, it changes with the seasons, the time of day, the weather and the mood of people.
In the summer It is frequently full of artists, musicians and performers, drum circles and dancing. This is where the community comes together to spend creative time with strangers.
So the idea of this project actually happened after one of these long walks.
The colors of Central Park in January and February are very muted and the mood a bit more somber.
After one walk in winter early this year I took photographs with my phone and noticed the very muted palette, the shapes of the trees and the sloping surfaces of the rocks, the muted new green of the lawns. Sprinkled across the landscape in the winter landscape in Central Park were these Red Ice Rescue Ladders which naturally contrasted with the landscape and serve to save people and dogs in case they fall through the ice.
I felt wouldn't be great to have splashes of orange and red, dashes of color slicing throughout the landscape.
Through my long walks to the park I've noticed many places like small and large rocks and other features in Central Park that could lend themselves to a splash of color.
Giant Hands Installations
My idea for this project grew as a natural progression from almost 25 installations with Giant Hands made with paper and acrylic paint I created over the last 4 years, in and around New York City and Central park.
These were one woman operation where i would be the artist, the drawer, the painter, the stage hand, public relations, photographer and videographer.
For the past 4 years I've been making ephemeral installations in Central Park and other places using Giant Hands made of paper and acrylic paint. Especially during the lockdowns in Manhattan I noticed that people were very happy to see them, colorful splashes in the landscape.
I would put up the hands for a few hours, take pictures and then I will take him down, fold them in take them home on the subway.
Over the years I have learned the rules to working with art in the park like not attaching things to structures or vegetation, do no damage and be mindful of the people and the environment.
On Thanksgiving Day this year I asked people to hold colorful Giant Hands over the Bow bridge in Central Park as a symbolic gesture, I was very surprised to find people respond enthusiastically. I named the installation Rainbow Bridge.
For our roving installations we will use 36 Giant Hands painted in bright orange, yellow, red and blue colors, and 50 yards of Red Cloth.
The 36 giant hands I created over the past 3 years gradually, starting with one and then developing 12, which I painted. Eventually I was invited by a New York City art organization to make an installation in a former bank and got a chance to grow the hands to 36. This year I painted them all and created more installations in Central Park in the same ephemeral manner.
The red cloth is a homage to the artist Christo Yavashev, his installation the gates and other work, and especially his installation Over The River which was never realized.
Since then I've used the red cloth in various ways in the studio and in the park, and it has serves to remind me that we artists never work alone and in isolation, and that we owe to the many artists that came before us.
Sometimes people in the park pick up on it and they say that it reminds them of the Gates. So in a way this will be a little tribute as well, owing to the past but looking out into the future.
The Hands
I've been working with hands since 2010. The hand is a symbol of our civilization, we create and destroy by it. When you look at our built environment especially in New York City you see these enormous skyscrapers that were essentially built by hand.
Handprints are present in cave art from 40,000 years ago and scientists claim that tracing a hand on a wall of a cave is the first time humans represented a three-dimensional object with a two-dimensional line.
A New Approach to Creating - to create efficiently and sustainably
One of my favorite artists is Christo Yavashev, he sadly passed away but his Gates project created in Central Park in 2005 is still vivid in my mind.
It took Christo 30 years to convince New York City authorities to let him create the Gates in the park and many of his projects like Over The River never saw the light of day because of environmental concerns.
It is my dream and intent to create efficiently and sustainably. I feel that we can create much beauty and make interventions in public spaces without investing millions of dollars, concrete slabs and steel beams. I sometimes joke that my installations cost the carbon dioxide of my breath and the ticket for the subway.
This is why early on I realized that I would like to have a new approach to creating, I like to create non-destructively and ephemerally. I make my installations very easy to transport and deploy, I could literally take my installation on the subway.
Daydreaming reality
I've always been a bit of a daydreamer, I've never been shy on thinking on large scale at least in my mind. I grew up on science fiction novels and my blueprints for great things came from space operas, where strange creatures roam the universe and fold space.
It is my dream that possibly one day our civilization would rely on creativity to create on a grand scale in the universe. I thought what better time than to start now.
