Move Over, Shake Shack

Culture

Debbie Landau turns Madison Square Park into the hottest new NoMad District destination

At a time when art stars now rival movie stars in terms of pop cultural prominence, Debbie Landau is something of an anomaly—a true civic force who makes culture happen while somehow remaining slightly under the radar. Landau, unassuming and cheerful company, is president of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, the urban-gentrification non-profit she founded back in 2002. Armed with $28 million in mostly private sector funding, she has helped transform the once crime-ridden park from a ’90s era no-man’s-land into an art-centric oasis in the middle of the city’s thriving NoMad District.

"When we first began to restore the park, we had a vision of it becoming this museum without walls."

Indeed, while celebrated area hangouts such as Eataly, The Ace Hotel and Shake Shack may score endless headlines, the park’s most meaningful achievement is its surprising status as an art and culture destination. Under Landau’s direction, the park, which now also hosts an annual summer concert series, has managed to emerge rather quickly as New York City’s preeminent venue for large-scale, site-specific sculpture and installation art.

Aided by the Mad. Sq. Art Advisory Committee—and backed by the park’s Sol LeWitt Fund for Artists Work—Landau has mounted almost 30 major public art exhibitions by blue-chip talents such as LeWitt, Leo Villareal, Anthony Gormley and, most recently, Orly Genger. After initially partnering with the well-regarded The Public Art Fund to develop the park’s exhibitions, this year marks the 10th anniversary of the Conservancy curating the arts program on its own.

“When we first began to restore the park, we had a vision of it becoming this museum without walls,” says Landau, a Westchester-county native who currently lives on the Upper East Side. “None of us were professional ‘art people,’ and we didn’t have any museum experts on our staff,” she adds. “But we had a real sense of creative entrepreneurship and a strong passion for how art can work within public spaces.”

Debbie Landau in her element.

Orly Genger’s Red, Yellow, and Blue, is made with 1.4 million feet of layered, painted and hand-knotted rope.

Genger’s artwork creates colorful urban tunnels through the park.

Set against a backdrop of dramatic architecture—from the iconic Flatiron Building to the Italianate Met Life Tower—Madison Square Park’s 6.2 acres certainly make for a singularly suitable display space. Working with her small curatorial team, Landau mounts between three and four exhibitions annually, each up to three years in the making and on display for four to five months. The collaborations are challenging and complex, demanding a fine balance between the artist’s creative vision and the physical and spatial limitations of a bustling park used by more than 50,000 people each day.

“Our artists come with a clear concept in mind, but we have to make the art work in a way that’s both accessible and safe,” Landau says. “We have to protect our trees, fountains and infrastructure, and we have a great team who understand the nuances of working in the outside.”

With its 1.4 million feet of colorfully-painted coils, the park’s current Genger exhibition Red, Yellow and Blue, which ends its run this week, is vibrantly emblematic of what works in Madison Square.  Crafted from more than 100,000 pounds of rough, recycled lobster rope, Genger’s piece weaves and winds throughout the park, passing through flower-filled branches in some places, flowing onto grassy patches in others, or rising and falling as color-rich waves. Much like Villareal’s dazzling light spheres from earlier this year, or Spanish artist Jaume Plensa’s eerie fiberglass face-statues from 2011, Red, Yellow and Blue successfully “competes with the scale of the park,” says Landau, “and possesses the necessary heft to hold the space as its own.”

"Our artists come with a clear concept in mind, but we have to make the art work in a way that’s both accessible and safe."

While Genger may have worked with color and material, the park’s next artist, Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone, has traditionally embraced more muted formats as a key member of the Arte Povera movement. The genre, which was founded in the 1970s, celebrates art crafted from humble, quotidian objects and material; it’s literally “poor art.” Starting later this month, Madison Square Park will present three 40-foot trees devoid of leaves and crafted by Penone from muted bronze. The figures will remain through the winter, and serve as stark contrast to Genger’s colorful, warm-weather artwork. 

For artists such as Genger and Penone, who has never had a solo U.S. show, a Madison Square Park exhibition can be a career-capping experience that both affirms decades of achievement and exposes their talent to an entirely new audience. As for Landau, the decade of art curation has made her an increasingly influential voice in the “public art” community—she is an advisor to several parallel institutions ranging from Britain’s Yorkshire Sculpture Park to the Glenorchy Art & Sculpture Park in Tasmania. Still, she insists the park’s audience, rather than developers or art patrons, remains the key factor in every decision and every exhibition her team decides upon.

“There’s no doubt the park’s success has helped jumpstart the prosperity of the surrounding neighborhood,” Landau says. “But it’s most important that people come to the park who might not visit a museum or maybe can’t afford museums,” she explains. “We want folks to become their own kinds of art critics.”