Public Art Fund Talks: Sabine Hornig

Sabine Hornig’s’ free virtual talk on June 4 centers on her permanent public commission La Guardia Vistas (2020), a major site specific work at LaGuardia Airport’s new Terminal B Arrival and Departures Hall. From her studio in Berlin, Hornig will join Public Art Fund Director and Chief Curator Nicholas Baume for a conversation about this extraordinary work, her largest installation to date.

La Guardia Vistas immerses visitors in a kaleidoscopic wash of color, image, and text as they pass by the expansive glass facade that connects the Arrivals and Departures Hall to the parking garage. The highly detailed artwork merges over 1100 photographs of New York City taken by Hornig; buildings pictured in twilight shades of blue reach up to the tops of inverted skyscrapers that reflect the golden morning sun. The installation’s title pays homage to Fiorello La Guardia, founder of the airport and New York City Mayor from 1934 to 1945. Hornig has included 20 quotes from and about La Guardia, reminding us of the power of visionary leadership to shape our shared environment.

For La Guardia Vistas the artist captured both minute architectural details and ephemeral moments of life in New York City. Her reinvented cityscape assimilates her research on the life and legacy of Fiorello La Guardia into a single monumental image that contends with notions of time, place, history, and memory.

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Public Art Fund Talks are presented in partnership with The Cooper Union

Sabine Hornig is known for photographs, sculptures and installations that re-envision architectural spaces and ubiquitous urban forms to explore concepts of space, perspective and memory. At once rigorously formal and poetic, her work recontextualizes familiar places and structures such as­ storefront windows, urban facades, and school houses through overlapping perspectives and inversions of scale and dimension. By blurring boundaries between pictorial and real space, viewer and object, Hornig’s work both challenges and expands upon the ways in which viewers perceive their surroundings at large. Throughout the past two decades, Hornig has presented numerous solo exhibitions of her work as well as major architectural interventions in public spaces worldwide.

A series of major permanent public art installations for LaGuardia Airport Terminal B’s Arrival and Departures Hall was commissioned by LaGuardia Gateway Partners in partnership with Public Art Fund. Opened to the public by Governor Andrew M. Cuomo in June 2020, Terminal B is a key feature of the most dramatic transformation of New York City’s aviation infrastructure in a generation.

Public Art Fund partnered with LaGuardia Gateway Partners, developer and operator of Terminal B, to formulate and implement a comprehensive art program for the new building. The goal was not simply to place existing works of art in an airport, but to commission four of the world’s leading artists to create ambitious site-specific works that would become part of the fabric of the building itself. The four artists—Jeppe Hein, Sabine Hornig, Laura Owens, and Sarah Sze—were each encouraged to draw on their own experience of New York City. The resulting works reflect a richly layered global city defined by its creative energy, openness, diversity, and democratic spirit.

Public Art Fund Talks, organized in collaboration with The Cooper Union, connect compelling contemporary artists to a broad public by establishing a dialogue about artistic practices and public art. The Talks series feature internationally renowned artists who offer insights into artmaking and its personal, social, and cultural contexts. The core values of creative expression and democratic access to culture and learning shared by both Public Art Fund and The Cooper Union are embodied in this ongoing collaboration. In the spirit of accessibility to the broadest and most diverse public, the Talks are offered free of charge.