The Pamela Council set a deadline and prayed. It’s been about seven months since the Pandemic Survivor Memorial first appeared in Times Square. On its shell, 400,000 hand-painted acrylic nails enshrine a bubbling fountain, allowing visitors to think about Covid-19’s patience.
However, when the artist’s commissioned exhibition with Times Square Arts ended in December and the 18-foot-high cave was moved to a Brooklyn storage facility, the council invoiced $ 5,000 for monthly fees and insurance. I was shocked to receive it. Empty the artist’s bank account. Times Square Arts pays for the first five months of storage, but the organization said it was the council’s responsibility to choose between submitting a continuing bill or dismantling the work.
Without the gallery’s representation, the artist decided that crowdfunding was the best chance to save a “fountain for survivors” and 26,000 to store £ 20,000 of sculpture until a permanent home was found. I bought time to raise dollars.
“There is a history of queer and black artists creating and destroying works,” the council, which identifies black and non-binary, said in an interview. “I don’t want to see that fate in my work.”
The Public Art Commission, which receives dozens of points each year, is one of the highest honors artists can receive in cities like New York, where sidewalk space is limited, materials are expensive, and the commission is highly competitive. is. The most prestigious committees in the city are distributed by non-profit organizations. Nonprofits usually honor established artists who bear the cost of production and have a gallery that guarantees a fruitful afterlife for sculpture. However, many go to emerging artists who do not have a gallery representative. They may leave scrambling to preserve their work, as they lack the resources to ensure that all monuments and sculptures have a posthumous world. ..
In 2019, he took a shovel and unearthed an anchor that continues the exhibition.Unisphere islands, “It is affixed to the lawn of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The show included a series of table-sized sculptures modeled after the park’s famous Earth. His sculptures (contours of Japan, Cuba and Madagascar) were used by visitors as makeshift benches and tables. The Parks Authority commissioned them as part of a public art program to provide New Yorkers with cultural encounters throughout New York City.
“Most of the island was put in the trash,” Lansburg said, adding that he turned Cuba into a plant stand in his apartment. “I try to be Zen about it, but to be honest, it hurts every time I have to destroy something.”
Now the artist saves whatever he can do. Landsberg is now Tomb effigy He created it last year in a studio in Brooklyn in honor of the Revolutionary War hero Margaret Corbin to save on storage costs. The sarcophagus commissioned by the Park Authority was on display at Fort Tryon Park for almost a year until June, but now its last break may be under the artist’s workbench.
In May he started Kickstarter campaign To help relocate another piece, Reclining Liberty, which imagines the Statue of Liberty getting off the pedestal of New York Harbor and taking a nap. The artwork survived a year of visitors climbing the bronze patina in Harlem’s Morningside Park, but this time they had to cross the Hudson River to Liberty State Park in Jersey City. The one-hour drive cost $ 11,000 to cover the cost of the sculpture rigging company, two boom trucks, and the sculpture maintenance work that arrived at the new location.
“Artists are responsible for the works of art before and after the exhibition,” Park Bureau spokeswoman Megan Morialty said in a statement, “Our staff work closely with artists and other organizations and places. , They can suggest to the institution. It may work beyond the exhibition period. “
For example, Diana al-Hadid was able to arrange a tour of the 2018 Madison Square Park Conservancy Exhibition “Delirious Matter”. With the help of Conservancy and her dealer Kasmin Gallery, the sculpture moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts, and to Nashville for the next two years. “Life started right away, at which point artists could sell their work later,” Al-Hadid said in an interview.
Kara Walker enjoyed a similar arrangement at Creative Time’s 2014 exhibition “A Subtlety”. The work focused on the giant sugar sphinx inside Brooklyn’s old Domino Sugar Factory. At the end of the show, the artist’s gallery, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Arranged for the film crew to record the removal. The dealer also helped keep the Sphinx’s left hand. Exhibited later By the Deste Foundation on the Greek island of Hydra in 2019.
However, even if there is a gallery in the artist’s corner, using a public art system can be very expensive. In 2020, Sammoyer created a sculpture of the Public Art Fund in honor of Doris C. Friedman, the founder of the nonprofit organization. The artist embeds imported marble slabs in concrete to create a monumental door that is slightly half-opened to allow viewers to pass through. She and her corridor Sean Kelly said, “Doris doorMeanwhile, the Public Art Fund offered an artist fee of $ 10,000. (The Art Fund added that it paid $ 270,000 for the project, including maintenance, installation and cleaning of the work.)
Allegra Tresen, a spokeswoman for the Public Art Fund, said: ..
Moyer arranged for the sculpture to travel to Philadelphia for another exhibition, but an agreement was reached during the removal in New York, leaving the £ 90,000 sculpture spread on six flatbed trucks. became.
“It was a nightmare scenario,” Moyer said. “Without the expression in the gallery, I would have had to destroy the work.”
Instead, she and her dealer agreed with the shipping company to store the sculptures at the Bronx facility until another cultural facility agreed to acquire them. They stay there.
“Public art logistics are absolute bananas,” Moyer added. “It was miserable to face the crisis at that time.”
Nicholas Baume, director of the Public Art Fund, said his organization is trying to help. “Many of the public art projects we do are site-specific and designed for specific times and places,” he said. “In many cases, they can live more lives and move, but sometimes they are not intended to be permanent.”
However, many sculptors who have experienced attempts to create public art find it difficult to comment on what happened. If the council understood the challenges associated with the storage of “fountains for survivors,” the artist could have adopted a more modest style.
“I probably designed one color, one material, one bronze and boring one with less maintenance,” the council said.
“I thought it would all be easy,” the council added.
However, the artist said Times Square Arts continues to provide support. The group paid about $ 20,000 for the first five months when the fountain was stored to help find the next home for the project.
Jean Cooney, director of a non-profit organization, acknowledged the asymmetry of public art production and said it reflected the economically biased nature of the art world. “This system is ready to create inequality, so we continue to work with emerging artists and build partnerships with organizations that have the resources to handle what we are not doing. need to do it.”