Experience art outdoors with New York’s stunning cultural spaces

Spending time outdoors can be an appealing respite from life in the big city. In New York, natural beauty and human creativity converge in site-specific outdoor sculptures, land art, immersive environments, and large-scale public artworks. In celebration of Earth Month this April, visit your nearest outdoor cultural spaces (or enjoy one virtually on Bloomberg Connects) to see modern and contemporary art in the wild.

Without leaving New York City, you can visit Governors Island – an outdoor cultural destination just minutes from Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn waterfront by ferry. This 172-acre island was previously a U.S. Army and, later, Coast Guard base, which opened to the public in 2005. Dozens of historic buildings are now complemented by an award-winning park, a rich public art program, and a 22-acre National Monument managed by the National Park Service.

The revitalization of Governors Island was conceived with resilience and sustainability in mind. The island exemplifies how cities can adapt to a changing climate and rising sea levels while ensuring public access to the water’s edge. Its innovative design includes measures against wave action, repurposing old seawalls to create lookout points, and planting over 3,500 trees that help remove pollution from the air.

Visitors can explore Governors Island through guided walking tours, self-guided public art and historic building tours, or by renting a bicycle. The island is home to a variety of site-specific, long-term artworks that respond to its unique conditions, whether engaging directly with its waterfront, embedded in its natural landscape, or reinvigorating its historic district. These artistic interventions include Shantell Martin’s bold line drawings, which cover the exterior of the deconsecrated chapel Our Lady Star of the Sea, and Rachel Whiteread’s New England-style concrete Cabin (2016), which suggests a retreat from the city. Combining public art and environmental preservation, Sam Van Aken’s The Open Orchard (2021) is a living archive of 102 fruit trees native to or grown in New York over the past 400 years.

Over in Queens, Socrates Sculpture Park is a community-based waterfront space dedicated to supporting artists in producing and presenting public art. The park was founded by sculptor Mark di Suvero in 1986, transforming a landfill site along the East River into an open studio, exhibition space, and neighborhood hub. Since then, over 1,000 artists have exhibited at Socrates, and the majority of the art on view was fabricated at their onsite studio facilities.

The park presents two major annual exhibitions: The Spring/Summer Exhibition, featuring internationally recognized artists, and The Socrates Annual, featuring early career artists selected from an open call. There is always something new to discover, as the park does not have a permanent collection. Highlights from the past 30 years include installations by Suchitra Mattai, Nari Ward, Meg Webster, and Melvin Edwards.

Socrates Sculpture Park is an early model of “creative placemaking,” now a widely recognized strategy harnessing artists and arts organizations to revitalize neighborhoods. “What makes the park so special is not any one singular activity, program or physical attribute, but rather the totality of the creative ecology and spirit that is cultivated here,” says John Hatfield, former Executive Director. Socrates also encourages a restorative relationship with nature through its horticultural program, bird walk guide, and regular art, ecology, and mindfulness workshops.

Storm King Art Center

Wave Farm is a media arts center, experimental sculpture park, and arts service organization based in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley. “This project was really a means to activate the property at large as studio space for visiting artists,” explains Executive Director Galen Joseph-Hunter. “When we talk about Wave Farm’s focus and this idea of the genre of transmission art, we talk about artists who are experimenting with the airwaves and the act of transmission.”

The 29-acre Art Park is home to 13 media art installations that reveal what would otherwise go unheard or unseen. Solar Radio (2022), by Anna Friz and Absolute Value of Noise, monitors seasonal and lighting fluctuations through its solar cells, generating an evolving AI composition in response to these environmental conditions. Meanwhile, Zack Poff’s Pond Station (2015) uses hydrophones to capture the sounds of aquatic insects, gas bubbles, and ripples in a Wave Farm pond. The site can be explored on an Indigenous soundwalk, Pumusiitookw waak Kulustaakw, which attunes visitors to their surroundings and the history of the Mohican people’s ancestral homeland. 

Wave Farm began in 1997 as a microradio collective in Brooklyn, New York, called free103point9. Motivated by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum, the organization cultivates creative practices in radio and supports artists and nonprofits in their cultural endeavors. Their continued commitment to the airwaves as a publicly accessible space is evident in their collaborative approach to transmission arts and in their creative community radio station WGXC. 

Out on Long Island, East Hampton’s LongHouse Reserve is a 16-acre landscape and sculpture garden that features over 60 outdoor works among a wide variety of cultivated and natural plant species. This dynamic setting displays pieces by Buckminster Fuller, Yoko Ono, Sol LeWitt, Dale Chihuly, and Willem de Kooning, among others. 

Highlights of the sculpture garden include Yoko Ono’s Play It By Trust (1999), an all-white chessboard that eliminates the combativeness of opposing sides, and Dale Chihuly’s ethereal blown-glass Cobalt Reeds (2000), which moves to a different site in the garden each year. The organization’s vision is to serve as a living case study of the ever-changing interactions between nature, people, and art. “The gardens inspire human life, the house and collections bring awareness to self and nature, and the program offers myriad opportunities to explore design, craft, sculpture, and our connection to beauty,” says Executive Director Carrie Rebora Barratt. 

The gardens of LongHouse Reserve exemplify founder Jack Lenor Larsen’s vision of a designed landscape as an art form. A textile designer, author, and collector, he believed that experiencing art in living spaces provides a more meaningful learning experience. The garden’s diverse collection of plants has been arranged to create a series of intimate and contemplative spaces, with an artistic eye for complementary textures and colors that echo Larsen’s approach to textile design.

You can explore the above sculpture parks and other must-visit public art destinations in New York on Bloomberg Connects — and If you don’t have a specific location in mind and want to browse more widely, you can use the filters at the top of the Explore screen to focus on “outdoor sculpture,” “parks,” or “public art.”