Spoken-word performances will take place under Teresita Fernández’s “Fata Morgana” installation in Madison Square Park on September 17 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Madison Square Park
23rd to 26th Sts. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Thursday, September 17, free, 6:00
Installation continues through winter 2015-16
www.madisonsquarepark.org
We still haven’t made up our mind about American artist Teresita Fernández’s “Fata Morgana,” a five-hundred-foot-long sculpture winding through the walkways of Madison Square Park. Consisting of canopies of mirror-polished discs with small sections cut out of them resembling clouds or leaves, the work blocks the otherwise 6.2-acre open area’s access to the sky, creating a claustrophobic feeling despite very cool reflections above and intriguing shadowy forms below. “By hovering over the park in a horizontal band, ‘Fata Morgana’ becomes a ghostlike, sculptural, luminous mirage that both distorts the landscape and radiates golden light,” Fernández explains on the Mad. Sq. Art website. In conjunction with the site-specific installation, the park is hosting a number of special events, so maybe that will shed more light on the project. On Thursday, September 17, “Poetry under ‘Fata Morgana’” will feature spoken-word performances by Sandra María Esteves, Bonafide Rojas, Machete Movement, True, and Emanuel Xavier, who curated the program with Fernández as part of National Hispanic Heritage Month. Among the other free September events in Madison Square Park are Mad. Sq. Reads with Sophie McManus (September 17, 12:30), the Studio Series: Time & Luck Quartet and Kristin Diable (September 19, 3:00), Singapore: Inside Out (September 23-27), and Mad. Sq. Reads with Amanda Lee Koe and Jenny Zang (September 24, 12:30).