stainless steel
 
Public Art Fund Projects
in Central Park
A collaboration with the
Whitney Biennial

April 23 – May 30, 2004

At the Conservatory Water in Central Park

Public Art Fund, in collaboration with the Whitney Museum, presents nine installations by seven artists for the 2004 Biennial Exhibition. Building upon the outdoor presentation of Biennial works in 2002, this year's show includes artists' site-specific reactions to Central Park as well as several sculptural projects that were conceived independently of location. For the first time, the exhibition includes a weekend event of openings and participatory artists' projects in the park.

Yayoi Kusama's Narcissus Garden, an installation of floating mirrored balls in the Conservatory Water, connects back to her notorious Narcissus Garden for the 1966 Venice Biennale where the artist was censured for selling 1,500 mirrored globes under a sign that read "Your Narcissism for Sale." Over the past three decades, Kusama has often revisited mirrored forms in her work, exploring notions of infinity, illusion, and repetition in discrete sculptures and room-size installations, as in the recent The Fireflies on the Water (2002), also part of the 2004 Biennial Exhibition.

Artist Bio
Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto, Japan in 1929. She lived and worked in New York from 1958-73. During this time she established herself as an avant-garde artist, exploring themes of sexuality and psychology in her paintings and sculptures. Her first series of large-scale canvas paintings, Infinity Nets, were covered in a sequence of nets and dots that alluded to hallucinatory visions. Kusama has had solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1998, traveled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1999); and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2000). She currently lives and works in Tokyo.

Sponsorship
The Public Art Fund projects in Central Park, presented in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, were sponsored by Bloomberg and generously supported by Adam Lindemann.

This exhibition was made possible through the cooperation of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation.

Location
In the Conservatory Water near 72nd Street.
View a map of Public Art Fund Projects in Central Park --A collaboration with the Whitney Biennial.