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A New Cityscape Rises in Madison Square Park

Artist Leonardo Drew just installed a monumental new piece at the iconic Madison Square Park, mere blocks away from the NoMad condominiums at 88 & 90 Lex. This sprawling interactive installation, titled City in the Grass, invites visitors to engage with physical space and question their own place in the urban fabric.

Leonardo Drew

Drew was born in Florida and lived most of his life in Bridgeport, CT, before attending Parsons School of Design and completing a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He has been a New Yorker since graduating, and currently lives in Brooklyn. Drew makes large sculptures that explore texture and shape, often taking the form of massive layered edifices that force the viewer to step back and appreciate the whole before diving into the details.

City in the Grass

When tasked with creating his installation at Madison Square Park, Drew decided to look at the project as an opportunity to create his own tiny version of New York City. The result is part topographic model, part map, and part sculpture, where tiny wood block skyscrapers live in the melting shadow of massive organic-looking towers. At over 100 feet long, City in the Grass takes up most of the park’s Oval Lawn, and visitors are invited to walk around the piece and discover its many intimate facets for themselves.

The Passage of Time and People

Brooke Kamin Rapaport, deputy director and senior curator of Mad. Sq. Art at the Madison Square Park Conservancy, told the New York Times that cities like ours “can be places of great inspiration but also great denigration, and that complexity is in this project.” In fact, the denigration of the piece itself was planned by Drew, who looks forward to City in the Grass being eroded and changed by visitors as well as the weather itself. “I would love it to take abuse because my work really is about a weathered history of our journey on this planet,” Drew explained in the New York Times article. “The piece is going to find itself in a whole other level of loveliness if it’s allowed to live.”

The accessibility of nearby studios, galleries, and exhibitions, such as City in the Grass, certainly provides the ideal backdrop for the art aficionado living in NoMad. And within each residence at 88 & 90 Lex, the graciously-scaled living areas are accented with intentional design features, such as gallery-inspired art walls, allowing one to design an entire room around a piece of art.

If you’re looking to give your new home a character of its own, visit our availabilities page or on-site sales gallery today at 88 & 90 Lex.

When the show Maurice Sendak: Drawing the Curtain opened at The Morgan Library & Museum in June, The New Yorker wrote of Sendak’s work as a set designer and his creative relationship with this unique New York institution: “He (Sendak) often turned to the archives of the Morgan Library for inspiration and later returned the favor, bequeathing nine hundred of his preparatory works to the museum.” The show is not only a testament to Sendak’s talent but to the vital role the museum has played in the creative life of the city since it was given to the public in 1924.

The Morgan was born out of Pierpont Morgan’s incomparable collection of artworks, books, and artifacts, a collection amassed with the greatest care and respect for history and the arts. It’s a reflection of a particular mind, and it’s a work of art in and of itself. A veritable time capsule into the past, and into the depths of the greatest human imaginations, this museum, which both inspires and is a showcase for masterworks, is just a short walk from the new luxury condos at 88 & 90 Lex.

The works in Drawing the Curtain are taken mostly from the 900 pieces that Sendak left to the museum, but it also features works from the collection by greats like William Blake, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Domenico and Giambattista Tiepolo, grounding Sendak’s creations in an art-historical continuum that reveals how much the world of his books and sets is in constant conversation with the past. It’s an apt exhibit for a museum whose physical, architectural presence in the city is a campus that includes Morgan’s original library, designed by the renowned Charles McKim to look like a building of the Italian Renaissance, along with a set of glass pavilions designed by Renzo Piano that expanded exhibition, dining, and performance spaces in 2006.

Another exhibit not to be missed is Walt Whitman: Bard of Democracy, a show that brings the viewer intimately close with the poems, notebooks, and letters of another New York luminary. It includes correspondence with Ralph Waldo Emerson and original writings by Oscar Wilde, Hart Crane, Federico García Lorca, and Allen Ginsberg that attest to Whitman’s lasting influence on letters and the world. Another museum highlight that links the past and the world to come is Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 552D, a piece donated to the museum by the artist’s family; its geometric, architectural form is like an abstraction of Pierpont Morgan’s original library—a time capsule that carries our history into the present.

And living so close to the Morgan in the NoMad residences at 88 & 90 Lex means the museum campus can be everything from a local lunch spot and a place to shop to an exhibition space, a performance space, or, as was the case for Maurice Sendak, a research facility for your personal and professional interests.