Leonardo Drew
City in the Grass

Madison Square Park, New York, New York
June 3 – September 30, 2019

Leonardo Drew’s City in the Grass is a public, site-specific installation commissioned by the Madison Square Park Art Conservancy. The installation situates the dense topography of a populous city amid the magnified patterns of a Persian carpet. In doing so, Drew plays with both the scale and contexts usually associated with urbanity. While the towers and wooden cityscapes reflect the artist’s recognized additive processes, Drew created the patterns of the Persian carpet with colored sand. Curator Brooke Kamin-Rapaport remarks “the artist builds layer on layer of materials while using the metaphor of a torn carpet as a complicated reference to home, comfort, and sanctuary.” By leaving open spaces in the installation’s surface, Drew allows the lawn to become part of the work. Further, visitors are invited to walk on the installation’s gentle swells. The resulting wear to the surface will become part of the work’s complex textures.