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For immediate release

Public Art Fund and Whitney Museum of American Art announce…

Whitney Biennial in Central Park
Organized by the Public Art Fund

On View March 7, 2002 through June 30, 2002

New York, New York (January 4, 2002) - For the first time in recent history, contemporary art will take root in Central Park with the opening of the Whitney Biennial in Central Park, Organized by the Public Art Fund. At the invitation of the Whitney Museum, the Public Art Fund will organize and present this major exhibition, marking the first time that the two institutions have co-curated a project from outset to realization. The five artists-selected jointly by Larry Rinder, Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Tom Eccles, Director of the Public Art Fund-are Keith Edmier, Kim Sooja, Roxy Paine, Kiki Smith and Brian Tolle, all New Yorkers who have been commissioned by Public Art Fund to make dynamic new work uniquely suited for specific sites within the inimitable setting of Central Park.

This ambitious project, sponsored by Bloomberg, is the result of an unprecedented collaborative effort between the Public Art Fund, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Central Park Conservancy, and the Department of Parks and Recreation. The exhibition-conceived of as both a major component of the 2002 Biennial Exhibition and the first-ever official interaction between New York City's contemporary artists and its most beloved public space-will be on view from March 7 to June 30.

Beginning at the corner of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, signs will guide parkgoers on a walking tour of the Whitney Biennial in Central Park. Parkgoers will be able to view each of the five works in one visit, proceeding from the park's southeast entrance to the Lake just north of the 72nd Street transverse, and exiting the park near the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Keith Edmier
Sited at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Keith Edmier's Emil Dobbelstein and Henry Drope, 1944 is a seemingly conventional war memorial to his grandfathers, who both served in the Second World War. Playing upon the traditional figurative statuary located throughout the park, Emil Dobbelstein and Henry Drope, 1944 comprises two ¾-scale bronze figures, each standing atop a granite base engraved with an epitaph. These uncanny figures are depicted in formal military attire, historically accurate to what they would have worn in 1944, the year Edmier's paternal grandfather, Emil Dobbelstein, committed suicide while on active duty at a military base in Missouri. Henry Drope, his mother's father, died in 1995 at the age of seventy-nine. By acknowledging his grandfathers' unique roles in the war's massive history, Edmier uses personal narrative to complicate the notion of public statuary, even as he creates a tender memorial perhaps in keeping with our own times of bravery, heroism and loss.

Emil Dobbelstein and Henry Drope, 1944, a project of the Public Art Fund program In the Public Realm, will be accompanied by an artist book featuring an essay by artist and critic Ronald W. Jones, interviews with Edmier and his grandmother, and more than 20 pages of illustrations.

Kiki Smith
Following Wien Walk north to the entrance of the Central Park Wildlife Center, parkgoers will be greeted by twenty bronze sculptures by Kiki Smith, each one bearing the head of a woman and the body of a bird. Sirens and Harpies, based upon the deadly temptresses and voracious monsters of Greek mythology, will be sited at the gateway to the zoo. The Harpies-ranging in size from 2 ½ to 4 feet tall-will peer down at passersby from each of three pillars at the zoo's entrance. The pillars will be flanked by large granite boulders, upon which two flocks of smaller Sirens will perch, guarding the entrance at ground level. These disarming creatures, extracted from an ancient past and thrust into the present, will be both stoic gatekeepers and fantastical reminders of the possibility of a menagerie more magical than the familiar animals inside the zoo.

Kim Sooja
Just steps away, inside the zoo gates at the Leaping Frog Café, multidisciplinary artist Kim Sooja will create a vibrantly colorful installation made of Korean bed coverings. These textiles, traditionally given to newly married couples as a promise of long life and happiness, are typically embroidered with symbolic patterns and made of contrasting colors, such as red and blue, which together signify the unification of yin and yang. Kim will also use these same bed coverings to create an installation of bottari-flexible bundles used to transport household goods-inside the Whitney Museum. Taken together, these two works highlight the formal beauty and emotional potency of everyday materials. The bed covering, a universally familiar object, witnesses the intimacy of sleep and the depth of dreams. By draping these richly expressive textiles over the tables at the Leaping Frog Café-where people come to eat, drink, rest and socialize-Kim elegantly draws them into a broader context, suggesting that each one resonates with a thousand stories of past social encounters.

Roxy Paine
Leaving the zoo and continuing northwest toward the tree-lined promenade of The Mall, parkgoers will encounter the work that will undoubtedly become the centerpiece of the exhibition: Roxy Paine's Bluff, a fifty-foot high tree made of brilliantly reflective stainless steel. This astonishing work will be sited just east of the Sheep Meadow along The Mall (mid-park at 67th Street), its gaunt, hulking frame remaining unchanged as the natural world around seamlessly shifts from winter into spring. Bluff's heavy industrial plates form a two-foot-wide trunk that supports more than 5000 pounds of cantilevered branches, welded together from 24 different diameters of steel pipes and rods. By announcing its grand manmade artifice rather than attempting to imperceptibly blend in with the real plants and trees around, Bluff is a cunning reminder that Central Park is itself an artificial sanctuary, a product of city planners as much as Mother Nature.

Brian Tolle
By continuing north along The Mall and veering westward just past the Bethesda Fountain, parkgoers will arrive at Bow Bridge, the white 19th-century cast iron landmark spanning the Central Park Lake. There, beneath the bridge, Brian Tolle will present the most ephemeral of installations. Waylay consists of a series of scattered splashes, some tiny and some stronger, which appear to be caused by someone skipping a rock across the water. Created by an invisible underwater system of compressed air valves, this piece will have both a playful and ghostly presence, subtly disrupting business-as-usual by causing passersby to reexamine the everyday world around.

Together, these five installations represent a broad overview of contemporary approaches to public art that are both thought-provoking and accessible to the largest possible audience. In addition to its programs of major installations and new commissions throughout the city, the Whitney Biennial in Central Park builds upon the Public Art Fund's ongoing program of collaborations with other art institutions to broaden the audience for the visual arts. Recent examples include Keith Haring on Park Avenue (with the Whitney in 1997), Vanessa Beecroft: VB42-Intrepid and Barbara Kruger, Big Picture (both with the Whitney in 2000), Tony Smith in the City (with the Museum of Modern Art in 1998), and Paul McCarthy's The Box at 590 Madison (with the New Museum in 2001).

The Whitney Biennial in Central Park, Organized by the Public Art Fund is sponsored by Bloomberg. The exhibition received additional support from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Cultural Challenge Grant 2002.

Keith Edmier's Emil Dobbelstein and Henry Drope, 1944 is a project of the Public Art Fund program In the Public Realm, which is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President, The Greenwall Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, The Silverweed Foundation, The JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and friends of the Public Art Fund.

About the artists
Roxy Paine has recently had solo shows at James Cohan Gallery, New York; Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin; Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Rogar Bjorkholmen Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden; and Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, Giverny, France. Recent group exhibitions include 01.01.01: Art in Technological Times, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Give and Take, Serpentine Gallery, London, England; Greater New York, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York; and 5th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France. He attended the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn and College of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Paine was born in New York, where he currently lives and works.

Kiki Smith has recently had solo shows at International Center of Photography, New York; PaceWildenstein, New York; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Recent group shows include Unnatural Science, MassMoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; Over the Edges, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium; Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late 20th Century, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Smith was born in Nuremberg, Germany; she now lives and works in New York.

Keith Edmier has recently had solo shows at Friedrich Petzel Gallery as well as at Sadie Coles HQ, London; Metro Pictures, New York; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland; and Neugerriemschneider Gallery, Berlin, Germany. Recent group exhibitions include The Americans, Barbican Gallery, London; Casino 2001: Ist Quadrennial of Contemporary Art, Stedelijk Museum Voor Actuele Kunst and Bijloke, Gent, Belgium; and Fact/Fiction: Contemporary Art That Walks the Line at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. He attended California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. Edmier was born in Chicago; he now lives and works in New York.

Brian Tolle has recently had solo shows at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, California; Parsons School of Design, New York; Schmidt Contemporary Art, St. Louis, Missouri; and Basilico Fine Arts, New York. Recent group shows include Sonsbeek 9: LocusFocus, Sonsbeek Park, Arnhem, The Netherlands; Crossing the Line, Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York; Over the Edges: The Corners of Gent, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium; and Young Americans 2, The Saatchi Collection, London, England. He attended Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut; Parsons School of Design, New York; and SUNY at Albany. Tolle was born in Queens, and currently lives and works in New York.

Kim Sooja has recently had solo shows at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York; Rodin Gallery, Seoul, Korea; ICC (InterCommunication Center), Tokyo, Japan; and Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan. Recent group exhibitions include the 3rd Kwangju Biennale, Kwangju, Korea; 5th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France; The 48th Venice Biennale, Venice; 24th Sao Paulo Biennale, Sao Paulo, Brazil. She attended Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris and Hong-Ik University and Graduate School, Seoul, Korea. Kim was born in Taegu, Korea; she now lives and works in New York.

About the 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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