Kathy Ruttenberg’s Broadway Sculptures

The reason Canadian Art Junkie so often features process images and videos is they remind us of the intense work and passion behind almost any artist’s work. This scene-setting film for Kathy Ruttenberg’s massive New York City sculpture series is a superb example.

Her project – In Dreams Awake – encompassed six monumental sculptures on the Broadway malls, the tree-lined green way between 64th and 157th Streets in Manhattan, in 2018 and 2019. Some works went on to gallery or museum sites, such as “A Snail’s Pace,” (below) at the Decordova Museum.

Ruttenberg’s first major outdoor sculpture installation – in cooperation with NYC Parks and the Broadway Mall Association – “enabled viewers a moment to escape from New York’s urban intensity with dreamlike fables derived from rural settings,” Ruttenberg said at the time.

Ruttenberg created narrative works—combining human, animal, and plant forms—that brought to life a wonder world in which different species merge and figures serve as landscapes. The artist employed a variety of sculptural media including patinated bronze, glass mosaic, transparent cast resin, and carefully orchestrated LED lighting – Broadway Mall Association.

Here are images from Ruttenburg’s website of the other five sculptures from the project, which ran from April, 2018 to February, 2019.

Here is a slightly longer version of the video, with more info about the artist and her surroundings.

Kathy Ruttenberg’s website, here.

Her Instagram, here.

Her early work, in a 2012 Art Junkie post here.