Street sweepings, resin, bronze, and paint

October 26, 2005 – September 10, 2006

Public Art Fund is proud to present a new exhibition of contemporary art at MetroTech Center. Material World features new commissions by Rachel Foullon, Corin Hewitt, Matthew Day Jackson, Peter Kreider, and Mamiko Otsubo. The works, which range from personal monuments to visionary landscapes, are each made using materials that directly relate to or are inspired by the artist’s chosen subject matter.

Corin Hewitt’s work for MetroTech, Legacy, is a 21-foot-long rainbow made of cast street sweepings that emerges from a planter on MetroTech Commons. The rainbow’s seven bands range in tone from brown to gray, and are flecked with color. They are cast from actual debris collected on seven consecutive days by the city’s street sweeping machines: dirt, grit, gravel, gum wrappers, bottle caps, socks, plastic combs, and whatever other litter the sweeper picked up during the course of a day. There is a small bronze beard that appears to be crawling out of the hole in the ground where the rainbow emerges.

The rainbow is rich with cultural, mythological, and religious connotations; it has come to suggest multiculturalism, gay pride, and utopianism. In creating a rainbow out of the city’s detritus--the stuff we usually sweep out of the way so we can see what we want to--Hewitt creates a poignant yet ambiguous ode to the city at large. He sees the enigmatic addition of the bronze beard as signifying our “attempts to find meaning in naturally occurring, transient forms from both the body and from nature.”

Artist Bio
Corin Hewitt lives and works in Brooklyn. He was born in Burlington, Vermont; he received his BA from Oberlin College (1993) and attended both the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Karlsruhe, Germany (1996) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2004). Recent solo exhibitions of Hewitt’s work have taken place at Taxter and Spengemann Gallery and DCKT Contemporary, both in New York. His work can be seen in “New City: Sub/Urbia in Recent Photography” at the Whitney Museum of American Art through January 15, 2006.

Sponsorship
Material World at MetroTech Center is part of an ongoing program organized by the Public Art Fund and sponsored by MetroTech Commons Associates, an organization that consists of MetroTech companies Bear Stearns & Company, Forest City Ratner Companies, JPMorganChase, KeySpan, and Polytechnic University. Special thanks to Forest City Ratner Companies and First New York Management.

Corin Hewitt’s Legacy is a project of the Public Art Fund program In the Public Realm, which is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, A State Agency, the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs, the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President, The Greenwall Foundation, The Silverweed Foundation, The JPMorgan Chase Foundation, and friends of the Public Art Fund.

Location
MetroTech Center is located in Downtown Brooklyn between Jay Street and Flatbush Avenue at Myrtle Avenue. Viewing hours are dawn to dusk daily for outdoor works, Monday through Friday 8am to 6pm for Mamiko Otsubo’s sculptures in One MetroTech. Subway: A, C, F to Jay Street/Borough Hall, exit at Myrtle Promenade; R to Lawrence Street.

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