Further up the spine of Manhattan, St. Nicholas Park hosts an elegant work by Kori Newkirk, who is based in Los Angeles but was born in the Bronx and raised in upstate New York. Titled Sentra, his installation consists of three tall metal gates that frame the lower part of one of the park’s steep staircases. Across the top of each structure, about 25 feet up, hang some 40 strips of clear plastic, akin to those protecting the refrigerated section in the grocery store. The piece is a kind of outdoor, all-weather equivalent to Newkirk’s work with beaded curtains (some woven with hair extensions) in which the patterns of colored beads produce intricate images, particularly those depicting the city skyline. It also echoes, inevitably, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 2005 Central Park gates.
The contrast between that lavish venture and Newkirk’s utilitarian piece parallels the differential care that parks, and public facilities in general, get depending on where they are in the city. St. Nicholas Park is overgrown; the staircase under Newkirk’s structures, at roughly 137th Street, is in poor shape, with many steps loose or askew. The artwork brings a kind of industrial ceremony into this semi-feral landscape. A sign invites viewers to contemplate how the work frames the walk up the steps; but the perspective from up the steps is even grander, the metal lines and shimmering plastic planes restructuring the view across the tapering width of upper Harlem and over to the Bronx.
Crossing 145th Street on Bradhurst Avenue, you pass a Starbucks in a luxury building named for Langston Hughes, then the hulking Jackie Robinson Recreation Center, with its Robert Moses public pool. At the base of Jackie Robinson Park is a paved plaza, with parallel lines of trees, benches, and a bandshell. A sculpture by Rudy Shepherd, a mass of black wood and concrete with four protuberances like vestigial fingers or branches, sits at one end of this formal setting, exuding a simmering mystical aura, like a Celtic dolmen. Shepherd is a Harlem-based artist concerned with peace and healing. He makes paintings of victims and perpetrators of police violence and hate crimes; the sculpture, titled Black Rock Negative Energy Absorber, is one of a series that serves the same aim.
The sun dipped behind Sugar Hill. In the plaza, a young boy kicked a soccer ball with a teenage girl, perhaps his sister, who was simultaneously engrossed in conversation on FaceTime. In the bandshell, a group of Latin dancers practiced steps. If any bad vibes were around, Shepherd’s sculpture was ably neutralizing them. “InHarlem” is, sadly, a temporary installation; but spend a little time with it, and it may leave a trace.
InHarlem runs to July 25, locations around Harlem. Info: studiomuseum.org
Article Appeared @https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/05/26/across-110th-street-public-art-takes-root-in-harlem/