Carole Eisner's HOSEA Sculpture Unveiled at Tramway Plaza in Manhattan

NYC Parks & Recreation's Art in the Parks Program and Susan Eley Fine Art are delighted to announce the exhibition of Carole Eisner's monumental steel sculpture Hosea in Tramway Plaza in Manhattan. The exhibit is open to the public from May 1 through December 1, 2013.

Tramway Plaza stretches from 59th to 60th streets along Second Avenue, and serves as the entryway to the Roosevelt Island Tram. Hosea will be visible to tram users, cars coming off the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge, pedestrians along the street and enjoying the park and from the surrounding residential and corporate towers.

"Parks is excited to exhibit Carole Eisner's work in Tramway Plaza, an increasingly popular location for public artwork, first programmed with Julian Schnabel's Helen of Troy in 1988," said NYC Parks Commissioner Veronica M. White. "Eisner adds to a talented list of artists who have exhibited there including Dennis Oppenheim, Dylan Mortimer, and most recently Gaston Lachaise."

The central feature of Hosea (2009), a 15-foot tall welded sculpture, is an enormous railroad gear that is supported by a tripod of wavy steel legs. This gear refers beautifully to the working yellow gear in the mechanical section of the tram, clearly visible from the park. The three legs, each about 10 feet tall, will straddle the decorative paved element in the center of the park and allow ample space for viewers to perambulate under and around the sculpture.

"Hosea was inspired by an amazing railroad gear, which I found in a scrap yard. I had worked with other gears and always thought they should be featured for their beauty," says Eisner. "I think of this very industrial object, not as the utilitarian workhorse that it was, but as the apex of a sculpture that should be celebrated for its form and strength. Its open structure allows us to focus beyond it, outside of its constricted dimensions, to the future, while remembering its past."

Sculptor and painter Carole Eisner has worked with scrap and recycled metal for over 45 years, creating elegant, abstract forms welded in steel. The artist's twisted and curved sculptures reflect metal's surprising malleability. Eisner's sculptures are ideal for public exhibition, and, indeed, have been exhibited in dozens of public parks, corporate plazas, cultural centers, museums and waterfronts all along the northeast corridor in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Florida, as well as in Belgium and France.

Eisner's longevity as an artist-she has had over 20 solo shows and 20 group shows-is a testament to the mass appeal of her work and the natural marriage between her sculptures and public spaces. Eisner is represented in private, public and corporate collections, including the Guggenheim, and has been reviewed in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Who's Who in American Art, Vogue and New York Newsday.

She was born and raised in the Bronx, and received a BFA from Syracuse University. Eisner is a life-long New Yorker, who splits her time between New York City and Weston, Connecticut.

Susan Eley Fine Art was founded in the spring of 2006 by Susan Eley as a salon-style gallery, situated in an Upper West Side Townhouse in Manhattan. The Gallery focuses on contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists, who work in a range of media, from paint to photography to sculpture and print. They showcase abstract as well as figurative work from a diverse body of artists from the U.S., Asia, Latin America and Europe. Gallery artists are dynamic, active professionals, who produce strong bodies of work that constantly shift and evolve.

Parks' public art program, 'Art in the Parks,' 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

Image Credit: Carole Eisner, Hosea. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Lantzas/NYC Parks.