Sarah Sze will discuss her LaGuardia installation, Shorter Than the Day, at special talk on April 25 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Who: Sarah Sze, Teju Cole
What: Public Art Fund Talk
Where: The Great Hall at the Cooper Union, 7 East Seventh St. at Third Ave.
When: Thursday, April 25, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
Why: In the poem “Because I could not stop for Death —,” Emily Dickinson writes, “We paused before a House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground – / The Roof was scarcely visible – The Cornice – in the Ground – / Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day / I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity –.” Those words about the cycle of life inspired the title of Sarah Sze’s largest monumental installation to date, the site-specific Shorter Than the Day. A joint venture from the Public Art Fund and LaGuardia Gateway Partners, the piece was installed in 2020 as part of a major renovation of LaGuardia Airport’s Terminal B, along with Jeppe Hein’s All Your Wishes, Sabine Hornig’s La Guardia Vistas, and Laura Owens’s I 🍕 NY.
Shorter Than the Day is a tenuous-looking sphere of aluminum and steel wiring holding hundreds of small photos of the New York City sky taken over the course of a single day, featuring shots of clouds, the sun, and the sky in white, blue, purple, yellow, orange, and red, evoking a constellation as well as the passage of time in a place where people tend to always be in a hurry, either to get home or to travel to another destination for work or pleasure. It dangles from the ceiling over an empty space above shops below. The Boston-born, New York City–based artist, whose “Timelapse” exhibit at the Guggenheim dazzled visitors last year with its fragile exploration of impermanence, will be at the Great Hall at the Cooper Union on April 25 at 6:30 to discuss Shorter Than the Day and more with Nigerian American writer and photographer Teju Cole, the award-winning Guggenheim Fellow and author of such books as Open City and Tremor. Admission is free with advance registration; the Public Art Fund talk will not be filmed, but an audio version will be available later.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]