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steel, balloon fabric

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

March 10, 2004 - May 30, 2004

At Lasker Rink and Pool,
near Fifth Avenue and 106th Street

Public Art Fund, in collaboration with the Whitney Museum, presents installations by Paul McCarthy, Liz Craft, Olav Westphalen, David Altmejd, assume vivid astro focus, David Muller and Yayoi Kusama 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.

McCarthy's Daddies Bighead, sited at Lasker Rink in the northern end of the park, is a 50-foot-tall pink inflatable sculpture. Sitting atop a slender, very vertical body, the oversized head is visible from 110th Street and elsewhere within the park. Daddies Bighead is the sculptural result of an ongoing series of mixed-media works that date back to 1983, when McCarthy incorporated an actual bottle of the British condiment Daddies Ketchup into a performance. The bottle, which bears the face of a man that McCarthy has called "the quintessential 1950s dad," resurfaced in McCarthy's work in 2001 as a multi-story inflatable sculpture. Since then, McCarthy has reworked and abstracted the form, ultimately creating this new inflatable, which bears only the slightest resemblance to its predecessors. Daddies Bighead was first exhibited outside the Tate Modern in London in 2003.

Artist Bio
Born in Salt Lake City in 1945, McCarthy studied at the University of Utah and at the San Francisco Art Institute where he received his BFA in 1969. He continued his studies at the University of Southern California where he received his MFA in 1973. McCarthy came to the art world's attention in the 1970s with his performances and film works, and since that time has expanded his practice to include sculptures, installations, and, most recently, inflatable objects. He has recently had solo exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London; Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. He now lives and works in Los Angeles.

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

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

Location
Daddies Bighead is located at Lasker Rink and Pool. Enter the park at Fifth Avenue and 106th Street.
Nearest subway: 4, 5, 6 to 110th Street stop.
View a map of Public Art Fund Projects in Central Park --A collaboration with the Whitney Biennial.