Upcoming 2024 Exhibitions

Public Art Fund’s 2024 exhibition program features five artists working at the forefront of photography, painting, and sculpture to examine pressing issues of identity, the impact of history, and our social and natural ecosystems. Through their public art commissions, these artists will share stories of interconnectedness, articulated through relationships between people, animals, science fiction, and architecture. Together, they will question real and perceived boundaries between living beings and the spaces we inhabit.

Opening April 30, 2024
Brooklyn Bridge Park

Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) will present a series of four new large-scale figures against the verdant backdrop of Brooklyn Bridge Park. Based in Poughkeepsie, New York, Bhabha creates objects, drawings, and sculptural works that depict the strangeness and vulnerability of the contemporary figure. Her hybridized forms, which borrow from ancient and modern cultural sources alike, exude emotion and humor. Posing questions about the alien qualities of beings and how life forms are considered monstrous, Bhabha’s work probes the intersections of science fiction, horror, abstraction, and archaic expression. 

Drawing from both natural and manmade materials, Bhabha’s outdoor public installations serve as large-scale contemplations on nature, war, and civilizations across time. At once monumental, grotesque, and humorous, these sculptures presented with Public Art Fund will continue her engagement with the human figure.

Huma Bhabha’s exhibition is curated by Public Art Fund Artistic & Executive Director Nicholas Baume with support from Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.

Opening June 5, 2024
City Hall Park, Lower Manhattan

Cannupa Hanska Luger (b. 1979, Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota) will debut a new body of sculptures at City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan. Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota—an identity  that deeply informs his works in sculpture, installation, performance, and video. His bold style of visual storytelling presents new ways of seeing our humanity while foregrounding an Indigenous worldview. 

For his Public Art Fund exhibition, Attrition, Luger will create a site-specific installation of skeletal sculptures drawing attention to how the loss of animal species, particularly bison, has impacted North American communities and the environment over the past 150 years. The bison—a recurring thematic element in Luger’s work—is a symbol of Indigenous resilience and sovereignty for the artist. The sculptures will shed light on the history and environmental impact of the near extinction of bison examining the loss, trauma, and violence that can result from a single disruption in an ecosystem. The exhibition will highlight the interrelation of animal and human life and its impact on land.

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Attrition is curated by Public Art Fund Adjunct Curator Katerina Stathopoulou.

Opening August 14, 2024
JCDecaux Bus Shelters and Newsstands Across New York City, Chicago, & Boston 

Adrienne Elise Tarver’s (b. 1985, New Jersey) presentation on hundreds of JCDecaux bus shelters and newsstands in New York City, Chicago, and Boston, will feature a series of paintings foregrounding the bus shelter as a site of physical respite and sociopolitical catalyzation. An interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, Tarver’s practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, textiles, and video. Her work addresses multifaceted Black female identities, including history within domestic spaces, the fantasy of the tropical seductress, and the archetype of the all-knowing spiritual matriarch. 

Tarver’s Public Art Fund exhibition will explore the visibility and invisibility of Black women and the seats they can—or cannot—take within public and social spaces. She will create a series of paintings of Black women, depicted within scenes of rest and locales of ease. The seated women in Tarver’s paintings will be positioned as companions to people sitting and resting at these bus shelters, sharing a simple moment in the midst of a bustling city and complicated life. This exhibition will mark the artist’s first solo public art exhibition.

Adrienne Elise Tarver’s exhibition is curated by Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand.

Opening September 5, 2024
Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park

Public Art Fund will debut Edra Soto’s new interactive metal and terrazzo sculptural works at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park. Edra Soto (b. 1971, Puerto Rico) is a Chicago-based artist whose practice draws from her Puerto Rican roots to instigate conversations about history, diasporic identity, and constructed social orders. The artist’s ongoing series, Graft, integrates architectural intervention and social practice to investigate the relationships between Puerto Rican cultural memory, its African and Black heritage, and the threads of colonial historical lineage in the United States.

Her first large-scale public art commission in New York City, Soto’s Public Art Fund project marks the next iteration of her Graft series. Soto will continue her practice of using rejas, patterned iron-wrought screens ubiquitous in post-war Puerto Rican architecture, to illustrate the complex relationship between historical memory and community involvement. A stand-alone steel lattice-work screen will stretch across Doris C. Freedman Plaza, accompanied by domino tables and chairs that invite audiences to sit down for a game, clarifying Soto’s call for a public forum. Both an architectural intervention of space and an invitation for community engagement, Graft will welcome passers-by, locals and visitors alike to immerse in and consider the making of community and imprinting of history. 

Edra Soto: Graft is curated by Public Art Fund Senior Curator Melanie Kress with support from Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand and initial development by former Public Art Fund Senior Curator Allison Glenn.