The West Harlem Art Fund is pleased to announce that Gilbert Boro, Michele Brody and Conrad Levenson have been selected as their 2021 public artists.
Both Boro’s work Regatta III/8 Candy Blue & Teal, 2008 (Powder Coated Rolled Aluminum 8’6″ x 4’6″ x 5) and Brody’s Garden Sentinel (12 – 8’ x 55″) aluminum quadrupeds held together by various hardware) will be presented on Governors Island in the historic district of Nolan Park.
Gilbert Boro is a sculptor, architect, educator and international design consultant. He was born in New York City and has been involved in the arts since his boyhood. He has had a distinguished career, spanning more than fifty years.
His sculpture is concerned with the interplay of space, place and scale. He uses various materials, including steel, stone, aluminum, and wood. He believes the challenge and joys of creation are equally related to visualization and execution. What art should do is help us regain the creativity we all had as children.
Boro is an active member of the New England Sculptor’s Association, The New York Sculptor’s Guild, Elected Member of Mystic Museum of Art, Silvermine Guild of Artists, and the International Sculpture Center.
Michele Brody was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1967, Michele Brody received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. Utilizing her strong background in the liberal arts, she creates site-specific, mixed media installations and works of public art that are generated by the history, culture, environment, and architecture of a wide range of exhibition spaces. While living and working in such places as France, Costa Rica, California, the Midwest, Germany, and her home of New York, her art career has developed into a process of working in collaboration with each new community as a means towards developing an interpretation of the sense of a place as an outsider looking in.
The installation is made up of 12 – 8’ tall by 48” diameter towers composed of aluminum carpet strips held together by various elements of re-purposed hardware. They will be securely installed with a central reinforced concrete base holding them down to the ground in a winding row with about 4 to 5 feet in between them for easy public access.
Within each Garden Sentinel will be hanging an oversized plastic test tube filled with water within which will be planted an array of native plants throughout the season. At night the plants will be illuminated by an overhead solar powered light. The role of each Garden Sentinel is to stand guard over their charges, keeping the plants alive and vibrant for all to enjoy and learn more about the native gardens on Governors Island. Seen as a group their impact will either be that of a lab experiment coming to life, or a futuristic army of preservationists marching their way across the island guarding the future of the environment by focusing on the preciousness of the plants, while preserving and educating about them to viewers.
Gilbert Boro’s work is being presented in partnership with the Sculptors Guild. International Sculpture Day 2021 recognized Gilbert Boro’s and Michele Brody’s sculptures.
Conrad Levenson salvages scrap materials and obsolete objects. He recomposes and repurposes them as as works. Levenson often combine previously unrelated elements, in new and unexpected ways, and incorporate geometric and anthropomorphic forms, often in balance and motion.
The sculptures evoke the former times, places, lives, unique character and embedded energy of their sources materials. I tell their stories, as I explore and mediate the essential relationship between their form and content.
His sculptures range in size from the intimate to large-scale installations. They vary in height from several inches to fifteen feet and weigh a few ounces up to thousands of pounds. Displayed, indoors and out, often in spaces and settings of my own design, my sculptures connect people, visually and emotionally, to the natural and built environments.
Levenson’s sculptures and commissioned works are included in private collections, galleries and outdoor public art venues. I have exhibited throughout the region. with the Sculptors Guild on Governors Island; the Sculpture Expos in Red Hook, New York; the Studio 80 Sculpture Grounds, Old Lyme, Connecticut; the Red Devon, Bangall, New York; the Ice House on the Hudson, Poughkeepsie, New York; the McDaris Gallery, Hudson, New York; the Highland Falls Sculpture Walk, Highland Falls, New York; and the Meredith Sculpture Walk, Meredith, New Hampshire.
