Photo by Jake Dobkin While a Tom Otterness sculpture can really brighten up the dark underground of New York, for his latest installation he's shedding some sunlight on his work. The above was just installed in DUMBO near the pedestrian exit to the Brooklyn Bridge. This won't be the first time Otterness has been above ground, of course. Remember his temporary 2004 installation that spanned Broadway from 60th to 168th Streets? And in 2005......

Computer rendering of the waterfalls by the Public Art Fund. Details have emerged on the ambitious, $15 million East River waterfalls project coming to New York in mid-July to cap off the Olafur Eliasson retrospective at MoMa. The project will consist of four man-made waterfalls, ranging 90 to 120-foot tall, installed temporarily at four sites along the shores of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Governors Island: by the Brooklyn anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge, between Piers......

Danish–Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson will work with the Public Art Fund – a nonprofit that brought Anish Kapoor's "Sky Mirror" and Jeff Koons's "Puppy," to Rockefeller Center – to bring freestanding waterfalls to the East River this spring. The project will be officially announced tomorrow, but a source tells the Sun that the waterfalls will rise 60 to 70 feet above the water, which is more than half as high as the Brooklyn Bridge roadway.......

This past weekend, an aluminum tree sculpture, dubbed A Tree for Anable Basin, built upon a floating island, set sail off Hunters Point. The project by Chico MacMurtrie and Amoprhic Robot Works was conceived to investigate and celebrate "the enigmatic, rapidly changing waterfront environment of Long Island City." It also acts as a "condominium for birds"; the press release reads:It is designed to emote the displacement of nature, specifically of migratory water birds by......

We explained that many NYC taxi cabs are covered with flowery decals as part of Garden in Transit, a mobile public art project to celebrate the taxicab's 100th anniversary. The program is voluntary amongst taxi cab drivers, which is why not all cabs are decorated. Now it turns out that some of reluctance to go floral is because cab drivers think the designs are affiliated with the Taxi and Limousine Commission. The Post reports......

Hey Gothamist - Do you guys know what's up with the yellow cabs that have flowers painted on their hoods? Personally, I think they're pretty tacky- and so do a lot of people I know, but no one I've asked knows exactly why they've been painted. Well dear reader, we wrote about the flower covered cabs last year, but since we're getting several e-mails a day about it, we're going to revisit the issue.......

At the end of a row of newspaper boxes lining a street in Corona Plaza is an orange number offering a free publication titled, "This Is What I Eat." The eight-page newspaper is also being given out at a nearby Associated Supermarket. The design screams supermarket circular, but "This Is What I Eat" is actually a public art project created by Stephanie Diamond. Diamond asked the residents of New York City's most diverse nabe about......

In December the Hudson River Trust announced two new pieces of art being installed at an (also new) northern Chelsea park (at Pier 66), one being a giant waterwheel. The wheel is currently installed at the end of Pier 66 near 25th Street and was inaugurated at a ceremony yesterday. It uses the river's changing tide to power an odometer which has been functioning since April. Paul Rimirez Jonas is the mastermind behind the......

We recently got the new Creative Time book, aptly titled Creative Time: The Book. Unable to wrap our heads around what on earth The Urban Visual Recording Machine was after reading about it, surely we'd understand after getting our hands on the book where it plays the protagonist. Well, sort of. The book is essentially a look back on the group's public art projects around the city. For example, the photo at left is from......

In one of those weird societal flip-flops, The New York Times today reports on a group of graffiti artists who are suing to limit the expropriation of their commercial property for public display. The Tats Cru and a dozen other street artists whose work don the walls of buildings all over the city are suing the author, publisher, and an exhibitor of a book about urban murals - aka in NYC. They feel that......

The Gates (directed by Albert Maysles and Antonio Ferrara): As the Tribeca Film Festival winds down this weekend, the lovely closing film couldn't be more fitting for Gothamists. Perhaps you recall the orange hullabaloo in Central Park two winters ago around Christo and Jean-Claude's art piece, The Gates. But what you may not be aware of is the ongoing artistic relationship between the documentarians the Maysles brothers (also known for their doc on the Beales,......

EVENT: Charles Ray, who is thirty years deep in the art world, will be at the New School tonight for a Public Art Fund talk. The leader of the "conceptual realism" movement with a "lively, self-deprecating sense of humor" will discuss his "virtuoso craftsmanship" and his depiction of "familiar elements of everyday life and modern art in disarmingly altered ways." 6:30pm // The New School, John Tishman Auditorium [66 W 12th St] // $5 SCIENCE:......

Carlton Ingleton, an artist who also taught at Medgar Evers Colleges, was beaten to death by his son in his Crown Heights apartment. His son Assawa Ingleton had held his father, mother, pregnant wife, and their two children hostage for six hours, during which the son beat his father. The Daily News reports that when someone would try to help the father, Assawa Ingleton would hit him again. The ME's office said that Carlton Ingleton......

Yesterday afternoon, the midtown walls outside the Museum of Modern Art and surrounding buildings were bathed in a beautiful, expansive new video installation from artist Doug Aitken. The work, Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers, was commissioned by both the MoMA and Creative Time, and it turns the museum into public art space. A total of eight screens (outside the MoMA on West 53rd Street, in an empty lot onto Museum of Folk Art's exterior wall, and......

We're adding this to our holiday wish list: The MTA has published a book about the art in the subways, Along The Way: MTA Arts For Transit. From the description:Initiated in 1985, this collection of site-specific public art now encompasses more than 150 pieces in mosaic, terra-cotta, bronze, faceted glass, and mixed media. The program takes its cue from the original mandate that the subways be "designed, constructed, and maintained with a view to the......

+ Derek Jeter claims there's no air to clear with Alex Rodriguez and says reporters don't know about what's really going on + In the trial of a cop accused of killing his federal agent girlfriend, a letter she wrote suspecting he might do something to her was read in court + Jared Leto hurts Stereogum's blogging finger! + Hey, doesn't everyone need a Post-9/11 shirt? + A Guineanese immigrant and high school student......

Yesterday's Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing over 980 Madison Ave. was a relatively staid affair. On the second floor of the Surrogate's Court building on Chambers Street, Lord Norman Foster told the 150-plus audience that 980 Madison Ave. was about one thing: regeneration. But Foster, wearing a bubblegum pink tie, took it one step further, characterizing the Upper East Side as a neighborhood with "a tradition of radicalism." He compared 980 Madison Ave.'s role, architecturally,......

City yellow cabs will get more colorful in the fall of 2007 as the city embarks on a project to decorate cabs with flower decals. Yes, you heard it right - the City of New York is working on the temporary, mobile public art project, Garden in Transit, which will "celebrate the 100th anniversary of New York’s first motorized taxi." Starting this fall, children will paint flowers onto decals that will then be placed on......

We were biking down by City Hall park this afternoon and noticed they had finished installing the new Alexander Calder sculptures. They look good! Fun fact: the exhibit is organized by the Public Art Fund, but sponsored by Forest City Ratner, the company building the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. [Via NLG. Related: Calder.org has a great set of Alexander Calder images, and a biography of the artist.] UPDATE: here's a picture showing what......

Albert Maysles, Documentary Filmmaker...

With his new Humpty Dumpty balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, the NY Times has three great video pieces with sculptor Tom Otterness. One is naturally about having a balloon in the parade, and another is about his themes as an artist. But the best one is about his wonderful subway installations at the West 14th Street A/C/E and L station: Otterness discusses the statue that's in the stairwell (see the screengrab at left)......

Back in September Robert Smithson's Floating Island was followed by a replica of the Gates gates (attached to an outboard motor.) Shoving off from DUMBO, with it's saffron flag waving in the wind, it sailed free on the water chasing the island. From November 18 through December 22, the boat with its makeshift saffron sail will be on display along with a film that documents the adventure. As the press release states, "It's about artists......

Anne Pasternak,
Executive Director,
Creative Time...

Sylka and John, Flag Makers...

In addition to the two great events we mentioned earlier, there are also a number of other worthwhile art happenings going on this week. Plenty in fact to satisfy even the most dedicated fine art junkie. On both June 23rd and June 27th, the Public Art Fund will be presenting 9 Drawings for Projection, a outdoor performance and film screening of short animated films by renowned South African artist William Kentridge. The films, from Kentridge's......

- Queens get to join in the reindeer Olympic Games bid "fun" - Keeping your teeth clean while drinking wine - Gothamist does damage at the 3rd Annual Big Apple BBQ Block Party - New Yorkers react to the Michael Jackson verdict - There are free UN Tours this month - Summer movie fun! Drive-In movies at Rockefeller Center and Bryant Park's movies - Apparently the Manhattan Borough President has a great voice -......

For all the city's many joys, there is still nothing more disgusting than New York during a heat wave. It's just something about the city's distinctive olfactory blend of rotting garbage, urine, and (if we're in the vicinity) stale booze, that just makes us want to encase ourselves in an hermetically sealed white space until the temperature drops. So, as you can imagine, it takes a quite lot to tear us away from the little......

Tomorrow is the official opening of the Japan Society exhibit, Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture. The show will focus "on the phenomenally influential subcultures of otaku (roughly translated as "pop cult fanaticism") and its relationships to Japan's artistic vanguard." In other words, there are adorable yet disturbing works. Takashi Murakami, international pop artist of the moment, curated the show, and has been the center of last weekend's New York Times magazine feature......

Gothamist always wondered how public art got around, and now, in the case of > Exhibitions >> Broadway Mall" href="http://www.tomotterness.net/exhibitions_broadway.html">Tom Otterness's Broadway Mall sculptures, we know that it's by flatbed truck, as skilled art movers were packing things up. Gothamist is sad to see his fun sculptures leave the stretch of Broadway from 64th Street up to 168th Street go, but since they are heading to Indianopolis to brighten the streets there, we're not......

It's the spirit of old "We're pioneering artists" SoHo versus new "I'm flipping this condo" SoHo: The owners of a building on the southwest corner of Houston and Broadway are fighting to take down a sculpture on the outside wall of the building. Known as "The Wall," and also a landmark, according to the city's Landmarks Commission, Forrest Myers' 1973 sculpture consists of aluminum beams sticking out of the wall; it hasn't been there the......