The Four Freedoms Park Conservancy announced on Thursday that it has commissioned the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei for a monumental installation on Roosevelt Island that will kick off a new public art initiative by the conservancy.
The artist’s work will be on view starting in September at the state park, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous speech on human rights is memorialized in bronze and granite. Ai plans to cover sections of the park under camouflage netting and metal scaffolding, which the artist said in an interview “is my personal commentary on what is unfolding politically and culturally in our time.”
The project is the artist’s first major public artwork in New York since 2017 and is the first piece in an initiative, Art x Freedom, that provides an annual budget of about $250,000 for works transforming the park. (In addition to having their art realized, each artist will receive a $25,000 prize.)
“We are really excited about turning a presidential memorial that is typically backward-looking into something that is very much forward-looking and continuously relevant,” said Allison Binns, a venture capitalist who is chairwoman of the program alongside the philanthropist Agnes Gund. Binns said the project would be timed to coincide with the 80th session of the U.N. General Assembly and the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Selecting Ai for the inaugural commission was an easy choice, the chairwomen said, because he is one of the most politically outspoken artists of his generation. The 67-year-old left China in 2015 after years of pressure by the government for criticizing its record on human rights and has since maintained studios all over the world in cities including London and Berlin. He is currently the subject of a large retrospective at the Seattle Museum of Art that includes 130 works created over the last four decades.
Ai’s last public artwork in New York was during the first Trump administration, when he installed cages to protest the White House’s immigration policies. Ai said that the new commission in Four Freedoms Park would invite visitors to think about the current administration’s efforts to shape public discourse, which he described as “shockingly outrageous.”
But the camouflage has a lighthearted touch. It was created with a pattern of cats — and one dog for eagle-eyed spectators to find.
“I didn’t want to use conventional military camouflage, because I find it personally repulsive,” the artist said. “We’ve all seen too much harm associated with that pattern — it’s essentially a uniform that negates life.”
Instead, he chose an animal pattern to honor a cat rescue shelter near the park. “I believe you can judge a society’s humanity by how it treats animals,” Ai explained.
