Tags: artists

Since its inception, the Freshkills Park team has fostered partnerships with artists from a variety of disciplines in an effort to document this preliminary phase of park development through creative expression. Over time, a number of works have emerged, ranging from ink studies produced within the confines of an old shipping container to bound notebooks created from the park’s ubiquitous invasive Phragmites plant. 

Freshkills Park’s ongoing Field R/D project has been named one of sixty awardees of the Rubin Foundation’s grants toward their Art and Social Justice Initiative. This re­search and development phase of the expansive and collaborative art-research project began through artist conversations and visits to Freshkills Park over the course of 2017.

In October, 2016, to launch the Field R/D public art initiative, co-curators Mariel Villeré and Dylan Gauthier organized a public boat tour of Confluence, the meeting of two historic rivers at the center of the future Freshkills Park. They invited artists working in the public realm to narrate the trip. 

Shortly after Winter Storm Jonas, artist Kirk Finkel recorded this time lapse video of his installation at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in St. George. This interactive sculpture, called NEST, is designed to bring Freshkills Park wildlife to people in New York City and encourage visitors to see the park firsthand.

The Freshkills team is always on the lookout for engaging initiatives that combine education, sustainability, and art – not to mention recycling. Recology, a waste management company based in San Francisco, supports a young artists program that combines all these topics in one exemplary project.