Big Bling, Martin Puryear
Madison Square Park Conservancy
May 16, 2016 - January 8, 2017
Madison Square Art commissioned this large sculpture by renowned American sculptor Martin Puryear.
Puryear’s sculpture is a multi-tiered wood structure wrapped in chain link fence, with a gold-leafed shackle anchored near its top. It achieved colossal scale and elicited a range of readings, stimulating diverse and profound interpretations of it meaning. The artist has described it as a visual poem of praise to Manhattan.
Read about the installation at Madison Square Park’s website here.
Martin Puryear (American, b. 1941) lives and works in the Hudson Valley region of New York. He served in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and attended the Swedish Royal Academy of Art, after earning his BA from Catholic University in Washington, DC, and his MFA from Yale. Among his many exhibitions and achievements, Puryear had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2007. His awards include the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. He was elected to the America Academy of Arts and Letters and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Yale.