High Line Art is pleased to announce its spring program, including a performance by Azikiwe Mohammed, and commissions by Yu Ji, Gabriel Chaile, and Baseera Khan.
Azikiwe Mohammed: First Excursions First Horizons
June 5–8, 2023, 7pm
Azikiwe Mohammed (b. 1983, New York, New York) works fluidly across a wide variety of mediums, making paintings, jewelry, furniture, photographs, tapestries, and sculptures that draw from a set of aesthetics found in the Black home as it exists in America. As DJ Black Helmet, Mohammed realizes First Excursions First Horizons, a new sound performance for the High Line. New York City-based musicians Taja Creek, Peter Toussaint, and CX KIDTRONIK perform sets based on custom-made records made by Mohammed. The records hold recordings of sounds of the everyday Black experience and encapsulate DJ Black Helmet’s search for the less terrestrial sounds of Blackness. The work builds on Mohammed’s multidisciplinary practice that extends into sound and performance and activates the full length of the park, creating an immersive and transformative experience.
Yu Ji: Column-Untitled No.3
On view through March 2024
Yu Ji (b. 1985, Shanghai, China) creates installations and sculptures that come alive over the course of their exhibition, and an extensive interest in the natural living world can be seen in many of her works. Located on the High Line at 20th Street, Column-Untitled No.3 comprises two twisting columns whose design reflects magnified images of the Equisetum—an over 100 million-year-old family of ferns—growing on the park. The columns Yu makes are cast in concrete and soap, which will change in color and form over the 12 months of the installation in the open air, coming to life as the nearby plants transform around the sculptures. This project is Yu’s first public art commission and her first solo presentation in New York City.
Gabriel Chaile: The wind blows where it wishes
On view May 2023 through April 2024
The wind blows where it wishes, Gabriel Chaile's (b. 1985, San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina) large adobe sculpture conceived for the High Line at 24th Street, is the result of numerous observations, including Leonardo da Vinci’s nature drawings, Biblical passages about the wind as a transmitter of forces, and representations of natural phenomena in art history: rain, steam, and speed in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, spatial continuity in Umberto Boccioni’s paintings and sculptures, and Hayao Miyazaki’s film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Above all, the artwork is the result of Chaile’s observations of pre-Columbian archeological ceramics from northwest Argentina, gathered in a small museum in Tucumán. The artist imagines these ceramics as ceremonial objects, wind instruments, kitchen containers, planters, and so much more. He intends for his sculpture to come to life through its interactions with its surrounding natural forces: wind, rain, snow, and vegetation, which will create music when in contact with the sculpture.
Baseera Khan: Painful Arc II (Shoulder-High)
On view June 2023 through May 2024
For the High Line, Baseera Khan (b. Texas) installs a monumental archway made of inscribed tablets under The Standard, High Line, near Little West 12th Street. To create Painful Arc II (Shoulder-High), Khan interviewed High Line staff members and photographed the numerous cardboard shipping boxes of supplies that circulate within the complex ecosystem of the park. Khan’s inscriptions on the archway include packaging labels and handwritten notes jotted down by staff members onto incoming shipping boxes. Perforating the sculpture are patterns referencing punctuation symbols from the Quran, drawn with motifs inspired by the park’s flora and fauna. The archway is made from recycled granite and a man-made stone-like composite commonly used for countertops in home kitchens. While historically archways have been inscribed with the names and symbols of nobles and leaders, this archway is a monument to the ecosystem of often unseen labor and people around the world who make the High Line possible.
