NYC Parks' Art in the Parks Program and First Street Green Announce Anthony Heinz May's Public Art Installation TXITI HÌTKUK

NYC Parks' Art in the Parks program and First Street Green are delighted to announce the exhibition of Anthony Heinz May's public art installation Txiti Hìtkuk in First Park in Manhattan. This exhibition joins Rudy Shepherd's public art exhibition Black Rock Negative Energy Absorber and newly painted murals in First Park, located on Houston Street between 1st and 2ndAvenues. Heinz May's fragmented wooden sculpture, sited along the gravel pathway along the eastern end of the park, provides a contemporary reinterpretation of Manhattan trees. The exhibit is open to the public through March 2015.

Heinz May's site specific installations are created with trees that have been uprooted or removed from public spaces. Txiti Hìtkuk consists of a London Plane tree appropriated from NYC Parks. Heinz May transplanted the trunk in the planting bed alongside existing rose bushes and London Plane trees and pixelated its appearance into a cluster of wooden cubes. The tree trunk, though untouched at its base, starts to fragment into numerous blocks that are held together with a pin system.

Through his sculpture, Heinz May addresses the dialogue between preservation and degradation; real and artificial; and obsoletion and sustainability. Additionally, he draws parallels between our society and its growing use of technology with his transformation of raw materials into a gridded system. He alters the recycled trees into a three-dimensional representations of two-dimensional organization found in digital imagery---noting that they act like "dissolving digitized glitches in the landscape, symbolizing human interaction within nature through a technological lens."

While researching the Lenape and the Wickquasgeck Trail (an early north-south trading route in what is now Manhattan), Heinz May came across an online translator for Unami/Delaware languages. The title, Txiti Hìtkuk (pronunciation 'Touee-tee Heet-kook') roughly translates to "Few Trees," which references the city as it is now in relation to how it was then.

Anthony Heinz May spent the majority of his life in the Pacific Northwest on the outskirts of forests and farmlands. Although his exposure to art was minimal, Anthony began drawing and painting at a relatively young age and built objects out of scraps found in his grandfather's woodshed. Since 2012 Anthony Heinz May has created site-specific installations in parks and sculpture gardens including DUMBO Arts Festival (Brooklyn - NY), Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City (Queens - NY), Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (Saratoga - WY), Cherry Hills Village (Denver - CO), Governors Island Art Festival (Governor's Island - NY), Stone Quarry Hill Art Park (Cazenovia - NY), Helen Day Art Center (Stowe - VT) and Annmarie Sculpture Garden (Solomons - MD), Mingan Archipelago National Park (Quebec, Canada), Columbus Sculpture Biennial (Columbus, IN), Djerassi Residency Artist Program (Woodside, CA).

Since 2008, First Street Green (FSG) has converted a derelict building lot at 33 E. 1st Street in Manhattan into an open art space serving the Lower East Side community. Collaborating with NYC Parks and Partnership for Parks, FSG has successfully incorporated the lot into First Park. Today, FSG provides ongoing cultural activity in First Park by engaging with emerging artists, architects, community and cultural groups through a series of programs that activate this public space.

NYC Parks' Art in the Parks program has consistently fostered the creation and installation of temporary public art in parks throughout the five boroughs. Since 1967, collaborations with arts organizations and artists have produced hundreds of public art projects in New York City parks. www.nyc.gov/parks/art

Photo Credit: Anthony Heinz May, Txiti Hìtkuk, First Park, Photograph Courtesy of NYC Parks.

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