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For immediate release

Public Art Fund presents?

Lawrence Weiner
NYC Manhole Covers

Artist Lawrence Weiner designs manhole covers for Downtown Manhattan
A collaboration with Con Edison and Roman Stone

On View Beginning November 21, 2000

New York, New York - New Yorkers, whose night sky is often too bright to see the stars, must look down instead of up to get their bearings. Artist Lawrence Weiner, having grown up in the Bronx and a long-time West Village resident, pays homage to this ritual of looking down, watching feet hit the pavement, avoiding construction zones, curbs and debris, to arrive at a destination. For a major commission for the Public Art Fund, Weiner takes the fabric of New York City to create a subtle change in the city street's surface by working with the ubiquitous manhole cover. On 19 cast-iron Con Edison manhole covers in a band across downtown Manhattan from the West Village, to Washington Square Park, Union Square Park, and Tompkins Square Park, Weiner's intriguing text appears: "In direct line with another and the next".

The Public Art Fund approached Lawrence Weiner, a seminal Conceptual Artist, and asked him to name his ideal New York project. Weiner chose to create manhole covers, to be cast with his text on the surface and embedded in the skin of the city. With the assistance of Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. and manhole cover fabricator Roman Stone, the technical aspects of designing, casting in Calcutta, India, testing and installing were accomplished.

Beginning on November 21st, as an ultimate statement of anti-monumentality, Weiner's covers will be walked across by thousands of New Yorkers. Weiner's project is based on the very materiality of New York, iron immersed in asphalt. The text refers to the grid of the city, "in direct line with another and the next." And to the asphalt surface of the street as merely a barrier between sky scrapers, brownstones and sidewalks, and subways, underground parking garages and basements. It also refers to the odd democracy of the New York City. While a city of vast extremes, the rich and poor, powerful and disenfranchised still all wait for the same "don't walk" signs to change when crossing the street. Standing on line, riding the subway, walking down the street, New Yorkers are always "in direct line with another and the next."

Special thanks to Con Edison and Roman Stone without whose support Lawrence Weiner's NYC Manhole Covers project would not be possible.

About Lawrence Weiner
Lawrence Weiner is an internationally renowned artist who has created significant artworks for the last 40 years. His public projects, often texts appearing as part of the urban landscape, have defied many of the preconceptions of "public art" and monumentality. Weiner's well-known text works exist as gallery artworks as well as in film, video, CDs and many artist's books. Major museum exhibitions of Weiner's work since the 1960s have been presented at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and most recently at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.

About Public Art Fund
The Public Art Fund is New York's leading presenter of artists' projects, new commissions, installations and exhibitions in public spaces. With twenty-five years of experience and an international reputation, the Public Art Fund identifies, coordinates and realizes a diversity of major projects by both established and emerging artists throughout New York City. By bringing artworks outside the traditional context of museums and galleries, the Public Art Fund provides a unique platform for an unparalleled public encounter with the art of our time.

The Public Art Fund is a non-profit arts organization supported by generous gifts from individuals, foundations, and corporations, and with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

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Contact:
Public Art Fund
tel: (212) 980-4575
e-mail: press@publicartfund.org