For "Landscape and Memory", Cristina Iglesias recovers, in her first major temporary public art project in the United States, the memory into the Madison Square Park’s Oval Lawn, with five subterranean bronze sculptures connected to a flowing stream whose presence reminds us the former configuration of Cedar Creek. The installation will be on view through December 4, 2022.
"Madison Square Park has a rich history, witnessing and participating in several hundred years of New York City’s growth and evolution," the Conservancy’s Executive Director Keats Myer said of the significance of the site, which before the 19th century had been called Cedar Creek. “[Cristina’s] commission digs deep into this history, evoking an era that predates even our centuries-old park, to reconnect today’s visitors with the natural wonder of the original site."
Nodding to historian Simon Schama’s major 1995 volume of the same name, which surveyed the history of landscape across time and terrain, Landscape and Memory is informed by Iglesias’ research into the history of the site. For the project, Iglesias located and studied antique maps that documented the water flow beneath Madison Square Park, where the Cedar Creek and Minetta Brook once coursed for two miles before flowing into the Hudson River. With nineteenth-century industrialization, streams like the Cedar and Minetta were buried underground to create additional land for building sites, underground drains, or sewers. Through Landscape and Memory, Iglesias renders this buried history visible again, inviting viewers to contemplate centuries of transformation of urban sites that were once natural.
