Every year the Art Students League plants sculpture in a city park, and the unveiling is a free, 45-minute excuse to stand on the Hudson at golden hour. This year’s edition opens Monday, October 5 at 3:45 p.m. on the Locomotive Lawn in Riverside Park South, with two new pieces by Alicia Ehni and Robert Franca.
- When: Monday, Oct 5, 3:45–4:30 p.m.
- Where: Locomotive Lawn, Riverside Park South — the strip of park along the Hudson between West 59th and West 72nd Streets
- Cost: free; RSVP on Eventbrite (link on the NYC Parks listing)
- Alicia Ehni, Balancing: a piece about fragile relationships between people, nature, and the built environment, built around two fractured pre-Columbian ceramics
- Robert Franca, The Chairs: human-like chairs seen from a child’s point of view — imagination, openness, family as the thing that teaches us how to see
- Who runs it: Art Students League of New York with NYC Parks, via Summer on the Hudson and the Riverside Park Conservancy. Questions: (212) 870-3089 or soh@riversideparknyc.org
The opening is short and the RSVP is free, so it costs you an hour. If you miss it, nothing is lost — the sculptures stay installed on the lawn for the run of the program, and Locomotive Lawn is one of the better places in Manhattan to look at art with the river in front of you and nobody selling you anything.
Public art openings are the best-value culture in the city: no ticket, no crowd crush, no obligation to stay. Show up at 3:45, look at two sculptures, walk the waterfront path home.