8.20.25 — A Softer Bronze
Let me finally wrap up my review of 2025 New York summer sculpture now that it has all finally had its chance. To start with a bit of context, when Melvin Edwards brought summer sculpture that year to City Hall Park, it seemed only fair to New York. A city of unmatched achievement and diversity deserved a black man of exceptional achievement.
But that was the year of Covid-19 in the arts, when just soldiering on counted, and a pillar by Thaddeus Mosley towered over the scant crowds braving the art fairs. Now Mosley returns with the same dual commitment to Modernism and black America, 
and that dualism makes it shine, but its very nature has changed. When Edwards makes a point of welding and sculptural weight, he recalls both a slave’s manacles and David Smith. When Mosley turns to bronze in the same park as Edwards before him, he gives modern art a longer history and a softer edge, through November 16.
Just short of a hundred, Mosley has himself a history, and here he casts bronze after his own past sculpture in wood. Black abstraction has become a staple, and he should know. That whole time he has been living, working, and learning in Pennsylvania, between the Carnegie museums and steel country. His idea, though, of a city dweller is caught up in the woods. One could easily mistake his sculpture for wood at that, between its comforting brown and rounded surface. He takes care, he says, to retain the experience of differently kinds of trees as he gathers and cuts into them.
Sculpture for him also looks back all the way to Surrealism, with nested biomorphic shapes. Human forms peep out as dancers and pre-industrial actors rather than Smith’s icons of postwar American labor. David Q. Sheldon prefers Smith’s sharp edges overlaid and multiplied, typically with Smith’s steel shine. Up in Harlem, at one entrance to St. Nicholas Park through October 30, this version is bright yellow. If that were not welcoming enough, Michel Bassompiere sets down bears on the Park Avenue South median strip through next May 11. If that sounds more sentimental than Mosley and Sheldon combined, it is.
At least one sculpture park this summer had to do without summer sculpture. As plans tanked at the last minute and work promised online failed to appear, Socrates Sculpture Park fell back on its Socrates Annual, starting just days before summer itself bid its normal overhasty exit. Meanwhile Queens locals and others could settle for summer picnics, the view of Manhattan from Astoria, and scheduled performances by Pioneers Go East, a collective. It could be what they came for in the first place. Besides, they could always hold out for the emerging artists set for a colder New York, next through April 6. Better still, the park this year has boiled its selection down to just four contributors and the waterfront. That and New York City.
While I must defer a proper encounter to a later review, allow me to end in a more central location and on a more upscale note. Alma Allen starts her stroll along Park Avenue at 52nd Street, in the shadow of the great Seagram Building and within blocks of the Museum of Modern Art, through September 30. No wonder she creates sculpture pared down to late Modernism. A variant on a tube snakes back on itself to end at the top, with a resting place for an equally glittering bronze ball. Further up on the avenue’s median strip, self-closure has a change in spirit, but not in clarity and shine. There metal strips come from behind to land in what might be the sculpture’s lap.
Has Minimalism become rough fabric or raw flesh? Either way, it retains a dedication to symmetry, mass, and shine. Come to think of it, that earlier ball could be a seed, and Allen’s sculpture in the 2014 Whitney Biennial took the form of a giant nut. The works along the course of nearly a mile offer further variations on those themes, like the figure, headless but still gleaming, wrapping its arms around what could be a stack of waste baskets or an oil drum. An older man, fully formed and slightly daft, raises his cane in attack or defense. The poles of elegance and nature’s wildness could stand for the entirety of summer sculpture. Like Allen, it goes first and foremost for charm.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.