After a particularly torrential rainstorm in April, curator Savona Bailey-McClain found herself wading through a flooded Morningside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Alongside her were sculptors scoping out the ideal location to place their artworks as part of the Harlem Sculpture Gardens. Trudging through the waterlogged park, Bailey-McClain and the artists laid the foundation for the public art project and an artist-backed climate justice effort.
The neighborhood’s largest public art show to date, Harlem Sculpture Gardens features two dozen works by artists of color documenting identity, diaspora, and Harlem tradition across local public parks, on view until October. Bailey-McClain, director of West Harlem Arts Fund, and Michael Gormley, director of New York Artists Equity Association, co-curated the show from a pool of submissions to an open call. Their final product after a year of grant-writing and curation extends through Morningside Park, Jackie Robinson Park, Montefiore Square, and elsewhere, encompassing several extant permanent installations in the neighborhood such as Alison Saar’s statue of Harriet Tubman, “Swing Low” (2008).
According to the curators, the exhibition draws on the legacy of the late Harlem Renaissance sculptor Augusta Savage, who directed the New Deal-era Harlem Community Art Center and co-founded the Harlem Artists Guild. Though her ardent criticism of racial disparities in the art world cost her opportunities to gain acclaim, Savage broke barriers for future generations and became an influential mentor to a number of Harlem artists.
“[Savage] said, ‘Let me help the next generation,’” Bailey-McClain told Hyperallergic. “These are the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.”
After Morningside Park flooded in the spring, the project took on a second mission: bolstering climate resilience in Harlem.
“We saw the impacts of climate change, flooding Morningside, soil erosion [in] St. Nicholas, soil compaction [in] Jackie Robinson,” Bailey-McClain explained.
She created the Resiliency Coalition in hopes of collaborating with the local community, joined by various tenants’ associations, city council members, state assembly members, and representatives from City College New York’s Bond Center and School of Architecture.
Bailey-McClain outlined her vision for the coalition in an op-ed for the Amsterdam News in April. She added that she wants to lobby the city for a park maintenance program that will train young people, particularly those “trapped by the justice system,” to become park culturalists who maintain local green spaces. The coalition will host a forum on September 24 to discuss local geography and engage youth in the workforce.
Bronx-based multi-media artist Dianne Smith echoed Bailey-McClain’s interest in unifying the natural world with Harlem’s urban landscape. Mixing mental wire and tree branches, she wove aluminum strands into nodes splayed across a walkway railing to create “Echoes of the Path,” currently on view in St. Nicholas Park.
“In part, I chose weaving because it’s much a part of my ancestry,” she said. “My mother and sister were weavers in Belize … I started picking it up in sort of an homage.”
“The hands are really important when we talk about this idea of labor with women throughout the diaspora of Black and Brown women,” Smith added.
Dominican Republic-born artist Iliana Emilia García’s sculpture “Jungle” in Jackie Robinson Park also honors diasporic women. Through seven metal chairs with legs that tower over her, the artist brings the island’s culturally interwoven history to Harlem, fashioning what she calls the standard “Dominican chair.”
“We think it’s ours but really the design is European, the weaving is African, and the material is from the islands,” she said. “It’s almost like the DNA of anyone on the island.”
For García, chairs represent a sense of place. She says if you have a chair, you’ll sit there and make history.
Meanwhile, sculptor Sherwin Banfield brings Kool DJ Red Alert, one of the founding fathers of hip hop, back to Harlem’s parks.
“This piece is part of a theme of work that I’ve been doing to monumentalize and preserve the history of hip-hop artists,” Banfield told Hyperallergic. “DJ Red Alert is a legend. He’s a staple in the history of hip hop.”
Banfield’s bronze sculpture in Montefiore Park, “YEAA-a-a-a-a-ah,” is equipped with a real speaker powered by a solar panel scratch pad for which Kool DJ Red Alert created a custom set of sounds. The pioneering DJ attended a grand opening sculpture activation ceremony in the park in July.
Though the historic public exhibition is only a few months into its run, the Harlem Sculpture Gardens has already set the groundwork for an artist-backed climate justice movement. Bailey-McClain hopes that the show will become an annual occurrence that continually invites new generations to interact with the symbiotic relationship between the parks and the artistic history of Harlem.
