With Wagner Park now open to the public following its two-year closure for renovations as part of the South Battery Park Resiliency Project, many will be celebrating the return of Manhattan’s most stunning views across the Hudson. (And rightly so: if you’ve never seen a sunset there, make it a priority.) But the park’s return also offers visual delights of another sort, as it’s home to three of the city’s finest, and most fun, public art sculptures.
Entering the lush green lawn, you’ll first find Tony Cragg’s “Resonating Bodies,” a pair of massive instruments sculpted in bronze (one seems to be a tuba and the other is definitely a lute). Cragg’s slightly cartoonish renderings bring to mind Picasso’s fondness for such objects in particular — their surfaces are carved with giddy, exuberant lines that might represent the energy that goes into any act of musical creation and invite parkgoers to add a tactile component to the works. (They also, as it happens, pleasingly rhyme the curved walkways that thread throughout the park.) Pro tip: Picture the entire city coming together to pick up and play these huge instruments and imagine what that music would sound like for a few moments of creative meditation.
On the opposite side of the lawn is Louise Bourgeois’ iconic sculpture in granite, “Eyes.” These two perfect spheres, each dotted with a protruding pupil (more mature visitors will no doubt pick up on a certain joke very much in keeping with the artist’s feminist themes), seem to gaze across the river at the Statue of Liberty. We say “seem” because if you stand directly behind them, you’ll see that they’re actually looking just left of Lady Liberty. Bourgeois’ slightly off-center placement of the pupils gives her “Eyes” a sense of surprise, as if their attention is constantly being caught by the wonder and rich history of the view before them.
Finally, further up towards the boundary of Battery Park South is Jill and Giancarlo Biagi’s “Mother Cabrini Memorial.” While at first glance this bronze monument to the great champion of immigrants seems closer in tone to a solemn memorial than to the playfulness ascribed to Cragg and Bourgeois, it too reveals a gratifying sense of levity. Mother Cabrini and the two children she shepherds through the waters sit, wonderfully, in a larger-than-life paper boat in an homage to both her own childhood hobby and to the ingenuity that has long defined the immigrant experience. It’s a perfect wink of a counterpoint to the rousing drama of Cabrini’s billowing bronze habit.
Whether you’re visiting Wagner Park for lunch, a stroll, or take in the views, these three sculptures, with their balance of the humorous and the profound, are more than worth your time. You might even find that they’re reason enough to return often. And, just maybe, you’ll notice a delightful new detail each time.
photos: courtesy Battery Park City Authority
