Bright-Orange Sculptures Will Be Centerpieces of Staid Civic Center
Surrounded by the imposing courthouses of the Civic Center, three bright orange sculptures will enliven Thomas Paine Park beginning this spring.
The abstract Corten steel pieces, by Pittsburgh-based artist Dee Briggs, will be installed in the park in April or May and remain there for about 10 months. They will be placed on each of the main lawns of the park, bordered by Worth, Lafayette and Centre streets.
Briggs, who trained as an architect, said that out of a Parks Department list of potential sites, she selected Thomas Paine because “I really like the changing scale of buildings around the park and the way in which the approach to the park is very different than a lot of other parks in New York City that are on a grid.”
Briggs, who designed the sculptures specifically for the park, also decided on the arrangement of the work, visiting the site, she said, “probably a dozen times,” to photograph and sketch it.
“I like the way the park is naturally divided into three spaces,” the artist said. “I’ve thought [of] how, when you’re moving on the pathway, using the park in a normal fashion, how you might see into and through the sculptures.”
Two of the sculptures are what Briggs calls “ring” pieces, the other a wavy, horizontal “plate” piece. Though they appear whimsical, she said, they are actually “very highly ordered” and derive from her interest in a kind of asymmetry that in science is known as “chirality.”
“They’re made from very rigid geometry and a very rigid set of rules,” she said.
The sculptures, Briggs’s first public installation in New York City, are coming to Thomas Paine as part of the Parks Department’s Art in the Parks Program, which places sculptures in sites around the city for up to 10 months.
— With reporting by Carl Glassman