Public Space/Public Artworks
We’ve shown ephemeral installations in libraries, on the streets and in public parks around the country since 1994. Words and their meaning, where we site them, how we display them and how the public interacts with them are central in this work.
In 2008, we started our ongoing project Melted Away placing sculptures of words carved in ice on streets and in city parks during hisoric events and the political conventions to let them disappear. There have been 7 sculptures in 8 different cities throughout the United States.
The first temporary public artworks took place in libraries in New York City and Brooklyn in 1994 and 2004.
Acid Migration of Culture, Donnell Public Library Center, 1994
Public Space/Public Artworks
We’ve shown ephemeral installations in libraries, on the streets and in public parks around the country since 1994. Words and their meaning, where we site them, how we display them and how the public interacts with them are central in this work.
In 2008, we started our ongoing project Melted Away placing sculptures of words carved in ice on streets and in city parks during hisoric events and the political conventions to let them disappear. There have been 7 sculptures in 8 different cities throughout the United States.
The first temporary public artworks took place in libraries in New York City and Brooklyn in 1994 and 2004.
Acid Migration of Culture, Donnell Public Library Center, 1994
Melted Away
LigoranoReese’s time-based conceptual, performative work is a disappearing monument. Its lapsing, shifting, and changing text is a strategic form of passive destruction. Questioning the permanence of traditional monuments and what they stand for emphasizes the tension between creating and destroying and between forgetting and remembering, and prompts the question: What should a twenty-first century monument look like? What truth should it tell?
– Marisa Lerer, Truth, Monuments, and Memory, Truth Be Told, September 2018
Free Speech Zone
Free Speech Zones are set aside during public events such as political conventions or protests for the exercise of free speech. With the increase of book challenges and attempts to ban books, public libraries have become the real free speech zones.
In 2004 and 2005, we installed 2 electronic triptychs of illuminated images of blindfolded library users. They sandwiched an LED zipper sign that displayed passages from censored and challenged books in the Brooklyn Public Library Grand Army Plaza branch and at the Donnell Public Library Center across from MoMA.
Acid Migration of Culture
At the height of the culture wars, we transformed the entrance of the Donnell Public Library Center into a 45-foot long, 8-foot high photo mural of a dictionary defining cultural terms about art, freedom of speech, and representation.
The dictionary’s pages were damaged and deteriorated with worm holes, foxing and acid migration. Rolling text on video screens displayed statements by artists, critics, curators, religious leaders, and politicians on the role of the artist in society. The public entered and left the library through the center of the book.