Art Blooms Alongside Nature in Riverside Park
By The New York Times
In an exhibition that sprawls across nearly 100 blocks of park, 24 contemporary artists address literal, metaphoric and poetic ideas of regrowth.
In Riverside Park, behind the locked bars of an Amtrak maintenance entrance near 108th Street, a large still-life painting of flowers leans against a wall. The canvas appears to be rotting and fraying into a tangle of dead roots and leaves, with new blossoms erupting three-dimensionally from the surface. The artist Valerie Hegarty wanted to blend fiction with fact: She imagined a Dutch Vanitas painting — a reminder of mortality — had been stolen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and hidden here, only to be abandoned when the pandemic struck.