NEW YORK, NY.- Madison Square Park Conservancy has commissioned Leonardo Drew to create a monumental new public art project for the Park on view this spring. Marking the Conservancy’s 38th commissioned exhibition and the artist’s most ambitious work to date, City in the Grass presents a topographical view of an abstract cityscape atop a patterned panorama. Building on the artist’s signature techniques of assemblage and additive collage, the installation extends over 100 feet long with a richly textured surface that invites visitor engagement. City in the Grass is on view from June 3, 2019, through December 15, 2019.

“In this teeming urban space, Leonardo Drew's goal has been to bring people close in to his work, to study the swells and folds of his cityscape, and to locate a personal place within the purposeful voids in the work,” said Brooke Kamin Rapaport, exhibition curator and Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Senior Curator of Madison Square Park Conservancy. “This is a symbolic and literal multilayered project. 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. Viewers can look onto City in the Grass as if they are giants assessing a terrain; upon sitting along the Oval Lawn's green expanse, they are able to embed themselves within the fabric of the sculpture.”

For City in the Grass, Drew has crafted a sprawling work of varied materials that undulates across the lawn and, at various points, crescendo into towers rising up to 16 feet tall. These sculptures grow in and around a patterned surface made black and white wood mosaic and of colored sand that mimics Persian carpet designs, reflecting the artist’s interest in East Asian decorative traditions and global design more broadly. Bringing together domestic and urban motifs, City in the Grass invites the Park’s visitors to walk on its surface and to explore the abstract terrain of the work from all angles.

Added the Conservancy’s Executive Director Keats Myer, “We look forward to welcoming Leonardo Drew’s City in the Grass to our Oval Lawn. Through this monumental, interactive, and visually dynamic work, Drew will encourage visitors to consider and celebrate their relationships to the cities they inhabit and explore, and the agency that each individual possesses in their making.”

City in the Grass is organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Senior Curator of Mad. Sq. Art; Tom Reidy, Senior Project Manager; Julia Friedman, Senior Curatorial Manager; and Tessa Ferreyros, Curatorial Manager.

Leonardo Drew is a New York-based artist known for his unique manipulation of natural materials and creation of additive sculptures and installations. While his treatment of materials—which often includes techniques like burning, oxidizing, and weathering—evokes found objects, Drew chooses to work with new materials that provide him with complete control of his material choices and compositional form. Celebrating the materiality and symbolic resonances of his chosen media, Drew creates work addressing both formal and social concerns.

Recent solo museum exhibitions include shows at de Young Museum, San Francisco (2017); SCAD Museum of Art at the Savannah College of Art and Design (2013); Beeler Gallery at the Columbus College of Art & Design (2013); Palazzo Delle Papesse, Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena (2006); Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (2001); and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2000). Drew’s mid-career survey, Existed, premiered at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston in 2009. The exhibition went on to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, and the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, MA.

Drew’s work is included in numerous public and private collections. Public collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; and Tate, London. He has collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and has participated in artist residencies at ArtPace, San Antonio and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among others. In 2011 he was awarded the prestigious Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Drew was born in 1961 in Tallahassee, FL, and grew up in Bridgeport, CT. His talent and passion for art was recognized at an early age, and he first exhibited his work at the age of 13. He attended the Parsons School of Design and received his BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1985. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.