The best outdoor art in NYC this spring

Statues of nine men from history and religion perch atop the courthouse near Madison Square Park. Now, for the first time, the representation of a woman has joined their noble rooftop plinths. 

"Havah…to breathe, air, life," an exhibition by artist Shahzia Sikander focusing on themes of justice, has brought stunning golden sculptures to Madison Square Park and the nearby courthouse at 27 Madison Avenue (officially called the Courthouse of the Appellate Division, First Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York). The statues will be on view through June 4, 2023. 

When walking around The Plaza at 300 Ashland in downtown Brooklyn, you'll notice a colorful new public art installation that you're actually encouraged to play around with. 

"Common Ground" by Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong was just unveiled by the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and the Van Alen Institute and it is expected to be on display through May 1.

The installation is a highly interactive one, featuring color-changing lighting displays and sensors that register environmental audio—think footsteps, human voices, the noise of traffic—and then shimmer accordingly. Expect performances to ignite the system and make use of the space throughout the residency.

Now through May 1, New Yorkers will get to walk inside a colorful corridor made of ropes, intended to echo the towering urban landscape surrounding it in downtown Manhattan.

"Geo" is currently on display in front of 140 Broadway by Liberty Street in the Financial District.

The 30-by-10-foot dome created by design studio Hou de Sousa boasts steel frames and over five miles of fluorescent paracord, offering an unparalleled display of lights and colors that truly stands out, especially in juxtaposition to the neighborhood it calls home.

More than 200 languages are spoken in New York City, and this new art installation at the Dumbo Archway plays audio clips of each one.

"Anchorage, Babel in Reverse" aims to bring New Yorkers and visitors together with language as a unifying force. This work of public art is on view in Brooklyn through April where you'll hear languages including Romansh, Rikou, Yiddish and Nahuatl, among many others.

This work of public art is on view in Brooklyn through April.

“Sky’s the Limit in the County of Kings” is a new 9-foot-tall sculpture of Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace in Dumbo at the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. Specifically, you’ll find the new work at the northeast corner of Prospect Street and Washington Street.

The stainless steel and bronze creation is the work of artist Sherwin Banfield, who sought to both honor Biggie and challenge "the traditions of western public sculpture by representing his African American artistry, lineage and evolution."

A hefty, both in form and in function, new piece of art has taken up residence on Governors Island.

"Moving Chains," by Charles Gaines, is a giant, 110-foot-tall kinetic sculpture featuring sturdy chains that rotate overhead. The monument "addresses the reality of systemic racism in the United States of America through embodied and visual experience and provides critical historical context on our extraordinary political division today."

The new project is the island's largest public art commission to date and you can see it through June 2023. It's presented in partnership with Times Square Arts.

It's the fifth year for Art in Focus, the public art program at Rockefeller Center. This year's display will bring the work of three contemporary artists to spaces all around Rock Center. This iteration focuses on abstraction, celebrating subjectivity to embrace a sense of escapism and surrealism within dreamlike environments. Expect texture, bold color blocking and monochrome palettes.

The first installation, by Nicaraguan-American artist Joel Gaitan, is now on display at 10 Rockefeller Plaza, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, 50 Rockefeller Plaza and the street and concourse levels of 45 Rockefeller Plaza. Next up will be installations by fiber and collage artist Basil Kincaid, then from Brooklyn-based painter Dominique Fung.

When you appreciate the greenspaces around NYC, do you ever stop to think about the people who make those spaces so enjoyable? Artist Fanny Allié hopes you do, and her new sculpture exhibition called Shadows brings those park workers to the forefront.

The mixed-media artist created 10 colorful sculptures inspired by the workers who maintain Bella Abzug Park (542 W 36th St.). To create the sculptures, Allié spent time with each person and asked them to pose in a manner that reflected themselves. She captured their poses on film, drew their outlines and translated them into steel silhouettes. Each worker chose their sculpture’s color.

The exhibit invites people to experience the park in a new way as a place for compelling, free art. In addition to the sculptures, visitors can scan a QR code to hear the subjects sing songs, whistle, hum, laugh and share stories about their work.

The Hudson Yards Hell’s Kitchen Alliance commissioned Allié to create the new public art, which will be on view until September 2023.

Marvel at the sculptures by artist Hew Locke placed on the exterior of The Met. The gold-hued sculptures are part of the museum's third facade commission series. Three sculpture sit tucked into niches at the museum's facade into the likeness of trophies, two partial and two whole, that reference works of art in The Met collection. "At once visually stunning and critically incisive, Locke’s practice relies on the strategy of appropriation and an aesthetic of excess and theatricality to deconstruct iconographies of power and to explore global histories of conquest, migration, and exchange," The Met says.

Locke was born Scotland and raised in Guyana, a multiracial, multicultural nation in South America that was formed in the crucible of indigeneity, European colonialism, the African slave trade and Indian indentureship. 

The Facade Commission: Hew Locke, Gilt is now on view outside of the musuem through May 22, 2023. 

Stand next to a new 18-foot-tall patinated bronze sculpture called Ancestor at the southeast entrance to Central Park. The colossal artwork depicts a universal mother figure linking our cultural and personal pasts and futures. Adorned with the heads of her 23 children that extend from her body, she embodies multiculturalism, pluralism and interconnectedness. They manifest a sense of belonging and celebrate the mother as a keeper of wisdom and the eternal source of creation and refuge.

"Ancestor" is by New Delhi and London-based artist Bharti Kher, and the exhibition is presented by the Public Art Fund. 

See Ancestor for free at Doris C. Freedman Plaza through August 27, 2023. 

A new 25-foot-tall statue celebrating the life of abolitionist hero Harriet Tubman now sits in the recently renamed park Harriet Tubman Square by Broad Street in Newark, New Jersey. It's located just 20 minutes from NYC.

“Shadow of a Face,” designed by architect and New Jersey native Nina Cooke John, replaced the monument of Christopher Columbus that stood in its place until its removal in 2020, following George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis.

Every day, thousands of people walk through Times Square, rushing to catch the subway, heading to work, meandering through shops—many of them unaware that they're stepping over a revolutionary art project that's been a part of the city for decades. 

Purposely unmarked, it's easy to miss this piece of auditory art because truly experiencing it requires tuning into a specific frequency in the most cacophonous place in America. The late artist Max Neuhaus's installation called "Times Square" sounds like the echo of a bell ringing. It's hard to place this droning tone among all the other noises there, especially because the sound emanates from a typical grate right beneath your feet. 

The work is on view 24/7, but we recommend visiting in the early morning when it's quieter. Head to the Broadway Pedestrian Plaza between 45th and 46th Streets (between Broadway and Seventh Avenue), remove your headphones and listen. 

Next time you're near the Times Square subway station, check out the entrance found within the pedestrian plaza near the corner of 43rd Street. It has a massive new mosaic by artist Nick Cave that commuters can admire. Commissioned by the MTA's public arts program, the work is called "Every One, Each One, Equal All," and it is made up of three separate art pieces.

"Times Square is one of the busiest, most diverse and fabulously kinetic places on the planet," Cave said in an official statement. "For this project I took the above ground color, movement and cross-pollination of humanity, bundled it into a powerful and compact energy mass that is taken underground."

A cool art installation that uses augmented reality is transforming Battery Park City into a bird watcher's paradise. Those who walk along Battery Park City's riverfront, from South Cove north along Rockefeller Park, will be able to access an invisible world of birds.

Named "Bird’s-Eye View," this new artwork by New York City-based artist Shuli Sadé showcases 30 species of birds that seek temporary or permanent refuge near Manhattan’s waterways via photographs and original watercolors by Sadé through the Adobe Aero app and a smartphone camera. All you need to do is scan one of 70 QR codes on any of the 14 signs along the water to view local birds and explore their habitats and migratory patterns.

The massive ghostly figure of a shed now rises out of the Hudson River near Pier 52.

The permanent exhibitition, named "Day's End" by its creator David Hammond, is made of slender steel pipes that reach 52 feet at its peak and together measure 325 feet long and 65 feet wide. It pays tribute to an artist, Gordon Matta-Clark, who transformed an abandoned shed that once sat on Pier 52 as well as to the history of the city's waterfront. In 1975, he carved massive openings into the shed, which he described as a "temple to sun and water," according to the Whitney, which proposed the public art installation.

Weighing in at 1,000 pounds, Isa Genzken's "Rose III" was unveiled on the seventh anniversary of Occupy Wall Street’s takeover of Zuccotti Park.

Genzken works in a wide range of mediums, and giant flowers have been a recurring theme for her: A similar rose sculpture was installed on the New Museum’s facade from 2010 to 2013, while a pair of gargantuan white orchids (rising to 28 and 34 feet respectively) stood at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in front of Central Park during the spring and summer of 2016. As for "Rose III," it remains on long term view at Zuccotti Park.