June 2018 - August 2018

Times Square Arts, the public art division of the Times Square Alliance, presents the Summer Arts Program. As part of the Alliance’s commitment to showcasing the best of contemporary art, this season’s lineup includes works from Mel Chin, Jeff Scher, Alice Dunseath, and Carla Gannis, as well as partnerships with No Longer Empty, the Queens Museum, Streaming Museum, and more.

All events are free to the public.

July 11 – September 5, 2018
Mel Chin: All Over the Place
Artist: Mel Chin
Presented with No Longer Empty and the Queens Museum

Conceptual artist Mel Chin uses companion works Wake and Unmoored to open a physical and virtual gateway to the future of human existence, inviting participants to contemplate the consequences of climate change and its association with the past and the future.

Wake
Broadway Plaza between 46th and 47th Streets

Parts of a shipwreck, modeled full scale from the 19th-century USS Nightingale, rise up from the plaza like beached bones of a massive beast. A mysterious 21-foot carved figurehead of the “Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind, leads the wreckage. Seemingly eternally transfixed, she surprisingly comes alive to scan the sky above, and sighs as if trapped by her past. This Times Square Arts commission comments on the origins of celebrity and the human impact on the oceans and earth.

Unmoored
Broadway Plazas between 45th and 47th Streets via app

Chin’s first venture into mixed reality defies gravity, with fragments of the ocean breaking away from existing sea levels and transforming in the air above viewers’ heads. A spectacle from a future in which global warming has gone unchecked, this free app is developed in collaboration with Microsoft.

Download Unmoored on the App stores starting July 11
Explore Wake and Unmoored on the Broadway Plaza between 46th and 47th Sts

 

MIDNIGHT MOMENT

June 1 – 30
Quasi Una Fantasia
Artist: Jeff Scher
Times Square's Electronic Billboards

Quasi Una Fantasia is an abstract dance film for paint. Created by the renowned experimental filmmaker as an improvisational visualization of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata, the work loops and builds on itself in loud colors and percussive chromatic transitions, growing in richness and density until its explosive conclusion.

July 1 – 31
You Could Sunbathe in this Storm (Slight Return)
Artist: Alice Dunseath
Times Square's Electronic Billboards

Using stop motion to animate elementary geometric forms and capture inorganic growth processes, Dunseath offers a unique reflection of humanity and the natural world. From the playfully childlike to the vast and mysterious, this short film is an epic tale of transformation told through the movement of plaster, crystal, and chroma.

August 1 – 31
Portraits in Landscape
Artist: Carla Gannis
Presented with Streaming Museum and Harvestworks
Times Square's Electronic Billboards

In a contemporary remix of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s 16th-century portraits in which animals, vegetables, flowers, and books combine into human faces, Gannis composites thousands of her own digitally-painted emoji to depict two animated figures in a twinkling landscape. Immersed in their smart phones and snapping photos, they may seem uncannily familiar to viewers in Times Square.

About Midnight Moment

Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to Midnight. Presented by the Times Square Advertising Coalition and curated by Times Square Arts since 2012, it has an estimated annual viewership of 2.5 million. For more information, visit http://www.timessquarenyc.org/midnightmoment.

Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world's most iconic urban places. Through the Square's electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance's own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators to help the public see Times Square in new ways.  Times Square has always been a place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the Arts Program ensures these qualities remain central to the district's unique identity. Generous support of Times Square Arts is provided by ArtPlace America and ArtWorks. Visit TSq.org/Arts for more information. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @TSqArts.

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Artists

Mel Chin
Mel Chin (b. 1951, Houston, TX) is a conceptual artist is known for the broad range of approaches in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork and works that conjoin cross-cultural aesthetics with complex ideas. Chin received a B.S. from Peabody College, Nashville, TN. His work has been widely exhibited nationally, and internationally, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, NY; The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, PA; Swarthmore College, Philadelphia, PA; Station Museum, Houston, TX; Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York, NY; Museum Het Domein, Sittard Netherlands; Thomas Rehbein Galerie, Cologne, Germany; The Nave Museum, Victoria, TX; Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC; and New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA, among others. Chin has received many grants and awards, including those from National Endowment for the Arts, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Creative Capital, New York Foundation for the Arts, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, among others, and several honorary doctorates. Chin lives in Egypt Township, North Carolina.

Alice Dunseath
Alice Dunseath (b. 1984, lives and works in London, UK) grew up in Somerset, UK and is now a filmmaker, animator and Lecturer in Animation and Digital Image Making at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has a BA in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths and an MA in Animation from The Royal College of Art. She has screened and given talks about her work internationally at a number of film festivals, design weeks and universities, and has sat on the panel at Leeds International Film Festival, judging Best International Animated Short. Commercially, she has directed work for the BBC, Somerset House, Red Bull, Manchester International Festival, The Barbican, E4, La Mode Verte, Tom Rosenthal, Rosie Lowe and The School of Life. www.alicedunseath.com

Carla Gannis
Carla Gannis (b. 1970, lives and works in New York City) received an MFA in painting from Boston University, and is faculty and the assistant chairperson of The Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute. Upon her arrival to New York in the 1990s, Gannis began incorporating digital elements into her painting-based practice. Gannis’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and screenings, nationally and internationally. Recent screenings, commissions and solo exhibitions include “Sunrise/Sunset,” Whitney Museum of Art, NY; “Until the End of the World,” DAM Gallery, Berlin; “A Subject Self-Defined,” TRANSFER Gallery, Brooklyn; and “The Garden of Emoji Delights,” Hudson River Museum, Yonkers. Gannis’s work has been featured in press and publications including ARTnews, The Creators Project, Wired, FastCo, Hyperallergic, Art F City, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The LA Times. www.carlagannis.com

Jeff Scher
Jeff Scher (b. 1954, lives and works in Westport, Connecticut) has taught at Columbia University, SUNY Purchase and is currently teaching at New York University in the Animation program, and is a Paul Rand lecturer at the School of Visual Art, MFA graphic design department. He is also a Spring 2018 visiting artist at Parsons. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Academy Film Archives, Hirshhorn Museum, Pompidou Centre, Musee d’Art Moderne, Vienna Kunsthalle and Austrian National Archive. www.fezfilms.net

Partners

No Longer Empty
No Longer Empty curates bold, site-responsive exhibitions in unconventional locations across New York City. We foreground art as a catalyst for community-led conversations about place, and commission diverse artists at all stages of their careers to expand their practices through site-specific works.

Queens Museum
The Queens Museum is dedicated to presenting the highest quality visual arts and educational programming for people in the New York metropolitan area, and particularly for the residents of Queens, a uniquely diverse, ethnic, cultural, and international community. The Museum fulfills its mission by designing and providing art exhibitions, public programs and educational experiences that promote the appreciation and enjoyment of art, support the creative efforts of artists, and enhance the quality of life through interpreting, collecting, and exhibiting art, architecture, and design. The Queens Museum presents artistic and educational programs and exhibitions that directly relate to the contemporary urban life of its constituents, while maintaining the highest standards of professional, intellectual, and ethical responsibility.

Streaming Museum
Streaming Museum was founded in 2008 by Nina Colosi as a public art experiment to produce and present exhibitions and programs of art, innovation and world affairs. Since then programs have reached millions on seven continents in public spaces, at cultural and commercial centers, and at streamingmuseum.org.

Harvestworks
Harvestworks, founded as a not-for-profit organization by artists in 1977, has helped a generation of artists create new works using technology. Our mission is to support the creation and presentation of art works achieved through the use of new and evolving technologies. Our goals are to create an environment where artists can make work inspired and achieved by electronic media; to create a responsive public context for the appreciation of new work by presenting and disseminating the finished works; to advance the art community’s and the public’s “agenda” for the use of technology in art; and to bring together innovative practitioners from all branches of the arts collaborating in the use of electronic media. We assist with commissions and residencies, production services, education and information programs, and the presentation and distribution of their work.

Times Square Advertising Coalition (TSAC) is a trade association comprised of major advertisers, retailers, real estate firms, media companies and other businesses involved in the outdoor sign industry in Times Square, along with organizations representing Broadway and the community.   Members of TSAC include:  ABC Regional Sports & Entertainment Sales, Clear Channel Spectacolor, Daktronics, D3 LED, Digital Domination, Hines Management, Jamestown One Times Square, Lamar Advertising Company, Landmark Sign & Electric, Metro Media Technologies, Newmark Knight Frank, North Shore Neon, P.R.omotion!, Sherwood Outdoor, SL Green, Times Square Alliance, The WOW Factor and Thomson Reuters. www.timessquareadcoalition.org. Follow TSAC on twitter at @TSACNYC.

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