Official Website to Open 25th February, 2010

The official website for the installation will be EventHorizonNewYork, opening on the 25th.

New Media Release

New York City Skyline Plays Host To Contemporary Art In

Antony Gormley's 'Event Horizon,'

Milestone Public Art Installation Presented By Madison Square Park Conservancy's
Mad. Sq. Art Program (March 26 - August 15, 2010)
31 Sculptures To Be Installed In Madison Square Park and
On Top Of Buildings Throughout New York City's Flatiron District

"NEW YORK, Feb. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Beginning on March 26, 2010, New York City's celebrated skyline will play host to Antony Gormley's Event Horizon, a landmark public art installation presented by Madison Square Park Conservancy's Mad. Sq. Art. On the occasion of Event Horizon, thirty-one life-size sculptures of the artist will inhabit the pathways and sidewalks of historic Madison Square Park, as well as the rooftops of architectural treasures of New York's vibrant Flatiron District and environs. New York City landmarks to participate in the installation include the Empire State Building, the Flatiron Building, the New York Life Building, among others."

Read the full release

Proposed Twitter Tag: #EHNYC

Twittering an event like this offers a great supplement to the event and can help create an online community of persons interested in it and related events. A Twitter tag helps organize tweets into an easily loaded set of tweets and uploaded photographs.

I would propose the following tag: #EHNYC

#EHNYC is not presently being used by other tagged conversations and is short enough not to eat deeply into the 140 characters of a tweet.

Here We Go! New York Times Article Appears

The New York Times published an article on Friday about Event Horizon. I believe this is the first major article to appear about the display, which opens in March of 2010.

Playing Sculpture ‘I Spy’ in New York’s Cityscape
By CAROL VOGEL
The New York Times
Published: December 4, 2009

"From March 26 through Aug. 15, 31 sculptures of a naked man will dot the landscape of the Flatiron district."

Read the full article

ArtInfo.com Article (4th December, 2009)

Antony Gormley Plans a Sculpture Hunt in Manhattan
ArtInfo.com
04 December 2009

Read the article

[snip]

"Mad. Sq. Art founder Danny Meyer — who also runs the acclaimed Eleven Madison Park restaurant across the street from the park and the indisputably delicious Shake Shack hamburger stand within it — declared in a written statement, “The art encourages one to experience trees, architecture, people, light, and even sound in very fresh ways.”"

[snip]

Madison Square Park

For non-New Yorkers, the first thing to note is that Madison Square Park IS NOT Madision Square Garden (it hasn't been for a long, long time).

Madison Square Park is easily accessed by bus, subway, and foot.

The architectual foundation of the area is the Flatiron Building, one of Manhattan's iconic structures. This building gives the neighborhood its' name: The Flatiron District.

Until the late 1980's, the Park was a haven for daytime drinkers and overnight homeless sleepers and it lost its sense of being a multiple-use public space. It was known by some, disparagingly, as Madison Square Pee, for the wafting smell of urine. This has changed and one hopes that the homeless who once made it a place to sleep at night have obtained better services over the years.

In the mid-1990's, the park attained something of a television-cult following, as the location for the cable show "fX Breakfast Time." The show was famously not available for cable customers in NYC, so few people actually knew that for three hours each morning a nationally televised show was being broadcast from the neighborhood. The show (and related fX broadcasts from the site) launched the careers of several TV personalities who subsequently became famous in reality-TV world, such as Tom Bergeron, Jeff Probst, and Phil Keoghan.

The park boasts some old statuary, including a statue of William Seward.

The most famous corporation on the park was Metropolitan Life on the eastern side of the space, boasting a beautiful skyscraper [see photo above]; their headquarters have since moved elsewhere. Food was important in the regeneration of the park, as visitors will find from a kiosk opened early in the decade and from some notable restaurants. Residential buildings can be found on the south of the park.

One of the iconic photographs of the 20th century was taken in Madison Square Park: Edward Steichen's "Flatiron" image. See a copy of this image in Wiki at Steichen's "Flatiron".

New for 2010

Antony Gormley will be bringing a public art exhibit to Madison Square Park in New York City in 2010. The exhibit will formally open in March 2010. The name of the exhibit is Event Horizon.