Arts on the Beach ran for three months each summer between 1978 and 1988, generating public art installations of all media organized by Creative Time. The artists’ individual interpretations of the creative process replaced the previous multidisciplinary collaborations each year. At the Battery Park City Landfill, several artists’ collaborations emphasized the recreational quality of the site and the vacation from polemics that it offered those who pursued it.

For the summer 1978 debut of Art on the Beach, Creative Time moved outdoors to a sandy landfill site slotted to eventually become Battery Park City. The empty tract of land was a choice location due to the grandeur that framed it: the Hudson River, the Lower Manhattan skyline, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.Sprawling sand dunes, covered with natural vegetation, provided a feeling of being far from the city while actually remaining in its midst.Photograph by Redmond A. Simonsen

Two years after the first Art on the Beach, which was held in 1978, popular demand convinced Creative Time to present Art on the Beach 2. Environmental sculptures, music, dance, and conceptual art performances again graced the extensive landfill of Battery Park City.

For Art on the Beach 3, participating artists traced relationships between the Battery Park City Landfill’s visual properties and its architectural context. The handrails on Donald Lipski’s red staircase, Progress, for one, created perspective sight-lines, which converged at the nearer of the two World Trade Center towers, at the time, the magnetic poles of the landfill’s visual field.Other artists such as Kurt Ossenfort found inspiration in the tirelessly energetic Hudson River and created a Styrofoam mechanism that, once placed in the river, translated wave and tide activity into graphic patterns, which he updated daily.Photograph by Robin Holland

As elsewhere in the art world, the work produced at the 1982 Art on the Beach 4 increasingly revealed concerns with figuration and social and political issues. Taking their cue from the election year of 1982, several participating artists addressed militarism in their installations.Questioning Pentagon policies, Scott Pfaffman’s Why Stop Now transformed southern-style barbecue pits made of empty oil drums into finned and cone-nosed bombs. Steve Wood’s Firedamp, a thickly tarred, spiked expanse of plywood threaded with a narrow path, evoked the barren landscape of a post-nuclear explosion at ground zero.

In 1983, Creative Time added to the popular annual art and performance program, Art on the Beach, by presenting a series of six new projects created collaboratively by visual artists, performing artists, and architects/engineers.In the past, participants, while mindful of each others work, had proceeded independently; now, they were asked to work together on the design, development, and execution of each project. Each cooperative effort produced an installation that provided the collaborating performance artist with a set or stage, or simply a visual premise, for his or her work.

Art on the Beach 6 featured eight collaborations by thirty-two artists. One of the most memorable works was the giant megaphone entitled Freedom of Expression National Monument, a collaboration between artist Erika Rothenberg, architect Laurie Hawkinson, and performance artist John Malpede. The piece was designed, as a plaque at its base proclaimed, “to combat the sense of powerlessness felt by ordinary citizens in an age of omnipotent electronic media.” Passersby were welcomed to voice their concerns on contemporary issues and assert the importance of free expression.John Malpede’s performance with the megaphone, _Alight and Foolhearted: The Banks. The Banks. What about the Banks? What About the Banks? And What About the ________?_ featured the rantings of a wise fool—part Walt Whitman, part ambulant psychotic—addressing contemporary issues such as the international banking crisis and the plight of the homeless.

For Creative Time’s final staging of Art on the Beach at the Battery Park City Landfill, several artists’ collaborations emphasized the recreational quality of the site and the vacation from polemics that it offered those who pursued it.Sculptor Jody Culkin’s subterranean, brightly painted Vacation Homes of the Future, for one, was created with the assistance of engineer and earthquake specialist Guy Nordenson. Built to accommodate one or two people, these small pits in the sand were radically transformed by Uwe Mengel’s participatory spy thriller, Mushrooms, during which audience members listened to a talking and singing corpse, a victim, and six other characters as a story unfolded.Photograph by Lawrence I. Lesman

In 1987, Creative Time’s annual event, Art on the Beach resurfaced at Hunter’s Point in Queens, on a six-acre lot donated by the New York and New Jersey Port Authority.For the event, Creative time enacted a new format, intended to highlight cooperative work: the organization of the event’s collaborative groups was put in the hands of the artists.Photograph by Thomas Griesel

For the final summer of Creative Time’s series Art on the Beach, artists’ individual interpretations of the creative process replaced the previous multidisciplinary collaborations.Acting as overall site planners, artist Jackie Ferrara and architect Billie Tsien developed an orthogonal processional plan, around which the installations ensued.Photograph by Adam Hume

Art on the Beach

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