Sculpting a New York perspective

Jeffrey Gibson’s new animal creations on the Met’s facade engage a wide audience

- MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Public sculpture in America has been under fire in recent years, from the politics of portraiture to a wild hypothesis that a man is living inside Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate (2006) — nicknamed The Bean — in Chicago.

One genre that seems to have navigated the culture and conspiracy wars without much tumult is sculpture popular with children. The beloved José de Creeft’s Alice In Wonderland (1959) in Central Park remains an all-ages favourite, while Greg Wyatt's Peace Fountain (1985) at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine, with its cavalcade of mythical creatures, has become a more recent classic.

I thought of these when I saw Jeffrey Gibson’s new sculptures on the Fifth Avenue facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you've ever run into a friend pushing a stroller through the Met, they'll likely tell you they're searching for tigers in the paintings — or dogs or cats or birds. (It's a perennial strategy for keeping the youngest visitors engaged in a gigantic survey museum.) Now, four more creatures have joined their ranks: a deer, a coyote, a squirrel and a hawk. Gibson was a logical choice for the sixth edition of the Met's Facade Commission, which invites a contemporary artist to fill the niches on the beaux-arts facade. He represented the United States in the last Venice Biennale, and his work draws on the global history of abstract painting and textiles as a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and his Cherokee heritage. He follows a stellar group of artists chosen for the Met facade after the niches sat empty for more than a century: Wangechi Mutu (2019), Carol Bove (2021), Hew Locke (2022), Nairy Baghramian (2023) and Lee Bul (2024).