WHEN the city’s con crete beat starts to get to you, there’s an easy quick fix: You’ve got to get your nature on.
So what’s the best experience to be had for free? Colorado’s got snow-capped mountains, Miami has got pink sunsets over the beach, and New York City has its public parks.
Hey, don’t knock ’em; they could be the key to your sanity. From The Bronx to the Battery, it’s the bits of green that make life bearable.
And what’s more, right now they’re seeded with what is undoubtedly Gotham’s most important and sustainable indigenous resource: art.
In an effort to demonstrate how much it wants to grow culture (as well as clover), the Parks Department has come out with the citywide, classy celebration of its four-decades-old program: Art in the Parks, Celebrating 40 Years.
It’s a free outdoor show, spanning five boroughs, rain or shine. According to Parks Department spokeswoman Abigail Lootens, it has made a point to hit spots that usually don’t see much highbrow programming, like Staten Island and The Bronx.
In Brooklyn, there’s huge, impressive stuff, like Steve Tobin’s “Steelroots,” a massive bronze sculpture inspired by tree roots, that looms 13 feet over a field in Prospect Park.
The more mysterious apparition, “Nessie,” an homage to the Loch Ness monster by artist Cameron Gainer, is plunked right into the watery Salt Marsh Nature Preserve in Marine Park.
For an edgy mix of high-concept and low-key scale, there’s “Plinth, Monument, Stoop” by Miami-based artist George Sánchez-Calderón. Situated in Joyce Kilmer Park in The Bronx, it’s intended to be a plinth – literally, a base for a sculpture, only without the sculpture. So, when you stand, sit or lounge on it, you create your own monument to, well, you.
No, you don’t have to be a bronzed war general on a horse to deserve attention in this town. However, if you hold still long enough, try to avoid the pigeons.
There are 40-foot-high intertwining steel trees in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park by art success-story Roxy Paine of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. If it’s raining, there’s a foot-high scale model of it along with all sorts of documents of historic Parks Department proposals on view at Central Park’s Arsenal.
As for the rest of the free exhibition? It’s open when the parks are, says Lootens.
One point of note: The government-run Parks Department doesn’t provide the dough for these projects (often the tabs run well into thousands). That’s up to the artists and their benefactors. Parks provides the location, the promotion and the green. Hey, what were you expecting, Aspen?
Pick up a free brochure at Central Park’s Arsenal Gallery, at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue, for a guide to what’s going on. The Arsenal Gallery is open Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Or visit nyc.gov/parks/art for a comprehensive map.