NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - A public art commission, dozens of which are awarded annually, represents one of the highest honours an artist can receive in a city like New York, where space on the sidewalk is limited, materials are expensive and competition for a commission is fierce.
The city's most prestigious commissions are distributed by non-profit organisations. These typically award established artists, who have galleries willing to shoulder production costs and ensure a fruitful afterlife for the sculptures.
But many go to emerging artists with no gallery representation, who lack the resources to ensure that every monument and sculpture has an afterlife, which can leave them scrambling to save their own work - or, in the case of Zaq Landsberg, choosing to destroy it.
In 2019, he took a shovel and unearthed the anchors keeping his exhibition, Islands Of The Unisphere, affixed to the lawns of Flushing Meadows Corona Park.
The show included a series of table-size sculptures modelled after the park's famous globe. His sculptures - outlines of Japan, Cuba and Madagascar - had been used as makeshift benches and tables by visitors.
The Parks Department had commissioned them as part of its public art programme, providing New Yorkers with cultural encounters throughout the city.
"Most of the islands ended up in the dumpster," Landsberg said, adding that he had turned the Cuba sculpture into a plant stand inside his apartment. "I try to be zen about it, but honestly, it hurts every time I have to destroy something."
Now, the artist saves whatever he can. In May 2022, he started a Kickstarter campaign to subsidise the relocation of another work, Reclining Liberty, which imagines Lady Liberty stepping off her pedestal in New York Harbor and taking a nap.
The work had survived a year of visitors climbing on its copper-painted patina in Morningside Park in Harlem, but it needed to cross the Hudson River to Liberty State Park in Jersey City, New Jersey, where Landsberg had arranged another year-long exhibition.
The hour-long drive required US$11,000 (S$15,500) to cover the costs of a rigging company, two boom trucks and maintenance work on the sculpture once it arrived at its new location.
"Artists are responsible for the artwork before and after display," Ms Megan Moriarty, a spokesman for the Parks Department, said in a statement, adding that "staff work closely with artists and can provide recommendations for other organisations, locations and agencies that they might work with beyond the exhibition term".
For example, artist Diana Al-Hadid was able to arrange a tour of her 2018 Madison Square Park Conservancy exhibition, titled Delirious Matter. With help from the conservancy and her dealer, Kasmin Gallery, the sculpture travelled to Williamstown, Massachusetts, and then to Nashville, Tennessee, for the next two years.
"Immediately it had a life, and it's at that point when it's possible for the artist to sell the work later," Al-Hadid pointed out in an interview.
But even with a gallery in the artist's corner, engaging with the public art system can become prohibitively expensive.
In 2020, Sam Moyer created sculptures for the Public Art Fund (PAF) that honoured the non-profit's founder, Doris Freedman. She embedded slabs of imported marble into concrete to create monumental doors, left just slightly ajar so viewers could walk through them.
She estimated that she and her gallerist, Mr Sean Kelly, paid nearly US$200,000 to produce Doors For Doris, while the Public Art Fund provided a US$10,000 artist fee. The art fund added that it also paid US$270,000 for the project, including maintenance, installation and cleaning.
"When a new work may have a life after the exhibition, the artist's gallery will often contribute to direct fabrication costs, which would otherwise need to be reimbursed to PAF in the event of a sale," said Ms Allegra Thoresen, a PAF spokesman.
Moyer had arranged for the sculpture to travel to Philadelphia for another exhibition, but the agreement fell through during the de-installation in New York, leaving her with almost 41,000kg of sculpture spread across six flatbed trucks.
"It was a nightmare scenario," she said. "Without gallery representation, it would have resulted in me having to destroy the piece."
Instead, she and her dealer made an agreement with the shipping company to store the sculptures at its facilities in the Bronx until another cultural institution agrees to acquire them. They remain there.