Tom Aprile Family Room With View

Tom Aprile’s Family Room with View is part of Reflections of an Urban Landscape, an exhibition of three outdoor, site-specific works. Aprile (1953–2010, b. Cleveland, OH) explained, “Those that have been in New York for some time don’t seem to take notice of all the sculpture in their midst. The indiscriminate mixture of buildings, signs, and roads and the shapes they create have become a motif in my drawings and sculptures since moving here from the Midwest less than a year ago. When I first saw Walt Whitman Park I was immediately drawn to the clusters of bushes and trees throughout the area. At the entrance of the park near the Red Cross building is a particularly large group of bushes, which I chose to be part of my proposed piece.

“My piece demonstrates the contrast between landscape and cityscape, as well as private and public places. Set in the chosen cluster of bushes are five 14- to 16-foot generic skyscrapers painted various colors. On top of the buildings are pieces of furniture including three chairs, a couch, and a coffee table. To further accentuate the difference between the grown and manufactured, I made the decision to cover the furniture with lawn-grass carpet—softening its hard edges with man-made ‘“nature.’” The whole picture I strove to give the viewer was one of distinctly different ‘places’ functioning together. Private vs. public, building vs. tree, furniture vs. grass, and hard edge vs. soft—in other words an experience of the whole city in one spot.”