Art in the Asphalt Jungle
From 2 June 2022 to 16 January 2023, MoMA PS1 presents "Life Between Buildings", an exhibition that explores how New York artists have made the most of the city's public space.
Source: MoMA PS1 · Image: Becky Howland. “Tied Grass”. 1977. Photograph by Howland of site-specific installation on traffic island bounded by Franklin Street, Varick Street, and West Broadway. Digital c-print. 8 x 11 3/4 in. (20.32 x 29.84 cm). Courtesy the artist. (c) 1977 Becky Howland.
"Life Between Buildings" features works by 14 artists and collectives, and includes drawings, photographs, sculptures, multimedia works and performances spanning from the 1970s to the present. The interventions on display range in scale from a park or a vacant lot to a crack in the pavement.
In a press release, MoMA PS1 explains: “Beginning in the 1970s, at a moment when New York City faced a severe fiscal crisis, grassroots groups across New York City began converting unbuilt lots into community gardens. This coincided with artists’ efforts to think beyond the confines of the studio, gallery, and museum as sites for their work, and to consider the politics of public space through an ecological lens. Life Between Buildings draws from archival materials and artworks to examine the history of artists making work in conjunction with or parallel to community efforts to rethink the cityscape, recovering space towards creative, communal, and ecological ends. The exhibition looks beyond a history of artists transforming buildings (such as MoMA PS1) to how they have engaged the spaces in between. Through such engagement, both gardeners and artists challenge conventional ideas of individual property rights in a city increasingly subject to environmental crisis and gentrification, emphasizing the importance of, and unequal access to, public space.”
Artists included in the exhibition include Tom Burr, Mel Chin, Danielle De Jesus, Niloufar Emamifar, Becky Howland, David L. Johnson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Margaret Morton, Aki Onda, Poncili Creación, POOL (Performance On One Leg), Matthew Schrader, jackie sumell & The Lower Eastside Girls Club, and Cecilia Vicuña.

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