Public Art Fund is proud to announce its 2025 exhibition program, featuring a broad range of artists at varying career stages, offering works that examine themes of communality and belonging; improvisation and temporality; and geography, landscape, and our relation to the natural world. The season’s exhibitions will challenge preconceptions and invite playful engagement through a variety of mediums, as visitors encounter the works on their journeys and in daily life.
Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye
February 5 – April 6, 2025
JCDecaux Bus Shelters in New York, Chicago, and Boston
Showcasing over 1,200 individual images assembled into 11 unique compositions, My Mother and Eye brings together groupings of stills from two films: one made by Winant’s mother when she was 18 years old on a road trip from Los Angeles to Niagara Falls, and the second made by Winant herself when she, in turn, was 17 years old and traveling on a road trip from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. Winant explores themes of freedom, self-representation, and interconnected narratives set amid recognizable landmarks and rolling horizon lines. The exhibition will unfold across JCDecaux bus shelters in New York City, Chicago, and Boston, inviting commuters to engage with their own stories of travel and transformation.
Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye is curated by Public Art Fund Senior Curator Melanie Kress.
Torkwase Dyson: Akua
May 6 – November 9, 2025
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1, Bridge View Lawn
For Dyson’s first major installation with sound in New York City, the artist experiments with “breath as geography.” Inside a large sculptural pavilion, Dyson introduces a multichannel soundscape comprising the artist’s recordings of a range of spoken sounds. In what Dyson envisions as a kind of spatial drawing of field recordings, she explores the idea that the sound in between the words we speak can carry memories of places and spaces. As audiences move through the installation, the sonic textures and compositions change. Surrounded by grand waterways and architectural landmarks, the work encourages audiences to reflect upon the ways that our experience is grounded in the landscape beneath and encircling us.
Torkwase Dyson: Akua is curated by Public Art Fund Senior Curator Melanie Kress with Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.
Thaddeus Mosley: Touching the Earth
June 3 – November 16, 2025
City Hall Park, Lower Manhattan
Thaddeus Mosley is best known for crafting monumental sculptures from fallen trees, which embody a poetic dialogue between form and intuition. This exhibition highlights a number of Mosley’s sculptures, including Gate 3, a monumental bronze archway which showcases the tactile qualities of hand-carved timber. Throughout Mosley’s works, the weighted organic trunks and intertwined limbs result in biomorphic sculptures which dually evoke gravity and flight. Sited in City Hall Park, the exhibition highlights the interplay between self, sculpture, and architecture, creating a dialogue on the relationship between human-made structures and the natural world.
Touching the Earth draws its title from an essay by author bell hooks which considers the replenishing properties of nature, particularly in Black cultural contexts, and reflects on her continual longing for lush landscapes while living in New York City. hooks explains that, by existing in natural environments, one becomes a witness to beauty and cultivates a spirit and reverence for life.
Thaddeus Mosley: Touching the Earth is curated by Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.
Between Tides
June 28 – August 24, 2025
Rockaway Beach, Queens
Sited on Rockaway Beach, Between Tides is a group exhibition featuring newly commissioned sculptural ping-pong tables by emerging and mid-career artists Moko Fukuyama, Ilana Harris-Babou, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Carlos H. Matos, Amalia Pica, and SUPERFLEX. Installed on the sand, the sculptures will be directly embedded in the waterfront landscape and accessible to beachgoers. The works will respond to Queens as one of the nation’s most demographically diverse regions and home to Rockaway Peninsula’s delicate ecosystems of numerous wildlife species.
Between Tides centers on community participation and celebrates ping-pong’s history. Originally a game for the elite in Victorian England, table tennis later served as a tool for diplomacy between the US and China, became an Olympic sport, and transformed into a leisure activity enjoyed by people of all backgrounds. Due to its accessibility, the game cuts across class, race, age, and gender divisions, bringing people together. Between Tides energizes ping-pong through the visions of artists exploring sculpture, public engagement, and ecology on a New York City beach.
Between Tides is curated by Public Art Fund Associate Curator of Public Practice Gabriela López Dena.
Paul Anthony Smith
July 9 – September 7, 2025
JCDecaux Bus Shelters in New York, Chicago, and Boston
For his first solo public art exhibition, Paul Anthony Smith will debut a new body of work which explores themes of communion, spirituality, memory, and Caribbean cultural reverence. His process begins with capturing his subjects via film photography. Utilizing his distinctive picotage technique, where he employs a needle-like tool by hand, he picks away patterns that overlay the figures or the environment. The picotage functions as a tool to conceal visual information, upending traditional uses of photography which has, historically, used images to reveal information.
This exhibition features grayscale images of two Caribbean figures––St. Thomian fencer Daryl Homer, and Jamaican performance artist Zachary Fabri––in a lush, natural environment. Despite their seemingly dissonant practices, Paul Anthony Smith finds congruences in their life stories and physical movements. Smith will capture Homer and Fabri’s swift and expressive movements individually, using motion blur photography. Layering the images atop one another, using varying degrees of opacity to reveal elements from both images, Smith creates an illusion that the subjects were photographed simultaneously, seemingly in search of each other. The grayscale images, exhibited on spaces typically used for advertising, reject tropical fantasies of the Caribbean, while the figures’ balletic movements highlight themes of spirituality, communion, and ephemerality, which remain integral to the region’s culture.
Paul Anthony Smith is curated by Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.
Monira Al Qadiri
September 3, 2025 – August 2026
Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park
Monira Al Qadiri’s first public art exhibition in North America, and her first major institutional project in New York, features a large-scale human bust with a scarab beetle for its visage, inspired by the ancient Egyptian god of the rising sun, Khepri. The painted cast aluminum sculpture serves as a monument to a time when insects were revered as deities and regarded as the oldest creators of the universe. Al Qadiri highlights the divide humans often create between themselves and nature, inviting reflection on the interconnectedness of all life forms and the need for conscious environmental stewardship.
Al Qadiri is co-commissioned by Public Art Fund and the Lassonde Art Trail in Toronto, a new site for rotating contemporary art commissions connected to the revitalization of Toronto’s waterfront. The exhibition will be on view at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York City from September 3, 2025 – August 2026, after which it will be exhibited on Lassonde Art Trail, scheduled to open in Fall 2026.
Monira Al Qadiri is curated by Public Art Fund Senior Curator Melanie Kress, and Lassonde Art Trail Chief Curator and Artistic Director November Paynter, with Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.
Bloomberg Philanthropies is the Presenting Sponsor of Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye; Torkwase Dyson: Akua; Thaddeus Mosley: Touching the Earth; Paul Anthony Smith’s exhibition; Between Tides; and Monira Al Qadiri’s exhibition.
Leadership support for Torkwase Dyson: Akua is provided by GRAY and Pace Gallery.
Monira Al Qadiri’s exhibition is made possible through a partnership with the Lassonde Art Trail.
Public Art Fund is supported by the generosity of individuals, corporations, and private foundations including lead support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, along with major support from Abrams Foundation, the Charina Endowment Fund, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, The Fuhrman Family Foundation, Agnes Gund, The Marc Haas Foundation, Hartfield Foundation, William Talbott Hillman Foundation- Affirmation Arts Fund, The KHR McNeely Family Fund | Kevin, Rosemary, and Hannah Rose McNeely, the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, Red Crane Foundation, the Meyer and Deanne Sharlin Foundation, and The Silverweed Foundation.
Public Art Fund exhibitions and programs are also supported in part with public funds from government agencies, including the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Special thanks to Brooklyn Bridge Park, JCDecaux, and NYC Parks.
