Even in the daylight, Kingston residents can look up and see the moon, waxing and waning, along the skyline.
Stretched along one side of the Greenkill Avenue bridge is Emily Gui’s cyanotype print Moon Phases. On the opposite side—lush green against the concrete expanse—is Adie Russell’s Wide/way, which provides a glimpse of a winding road leading to a hidden, not-so-distant landscape. Installed in early March as part of ArtBridge: Kingston, a collaborative, art exhibition, both works will be up until September.
ArtBridge, a New York City-based nonprofit organization, transforms urban landscapes into public art canvases. The Kingston installation—the brainchild of recent Kingston transplant Raleigh Green—is the first time the group has branched out of Manhattan. Green believes the public arts concept will have a big impact on the community. “There was a wonderful opportunity to bring attention to Midtown, which has a lot of creative talent and economic and development potential, but is in real need of some tender love and care,” Green says.
ArtBridge Director Jordana Zeldin says ArtBridge was open to showing multiple artists on the bridge, but the pieces by Gui and Russell—which both received the curatorial board’s highest scores—were strong enough to stand on their own. “For Adie, it was important that her piece be on the bridge where travelers were going westward, it’s the open road,” she says. “Emily really considered the length and horizontality of the bridge in terms of time passing.”
Zeldin says Green saw the bridge—now home to the installations—as the connective tissue to two separate parts of the city. “It would have the most impact on the city and the artists, because the most people would see it,” Zeldin says. “It covered the two things we look for the most—beautification and significant exposure for emerging artists.”
This article appears in April 2013.
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