High Line Art Opens Public Comment on 62 Plinth Proposals
The next chapter of the High Line Plinth is taking shape in public view. High Line Art is now collecting comments on 62 proposals for future commissions, with the selected works expected to go on view in 2029 and 2030. The artists were nominated by nine international curators, extending a process that has made the Plinth one of New York’s most closely watched public art platforms.
The current slate includes Nina Chanel Abney, Kevin Beasley, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Seba Calfuqueo, Nidhal Chamekh, Anthea Hamilton, Omar Mismar, and others. The proposals, 15 of which are highlighted in the article, range from monument-like sculpture to works that fold in housing, race, labor, migration, and cultural memory.
Beasley’s Housing (Fragment) casts a New York brownstone in resin and locally sourced clothing, turning a familiar residential form into a sealed, partial structure that points to the city’s housing crisis. Campos-Pons’s Searching for Light rises 19 feet high, a figure wrapped in cereus petals and marked by a vine that traces the spine. The work draws on a flower that blooms only briefly after years of waiting, giving the sculpture a quiet sense of suspended time.
Chamekh’s Friction joins fragments of the Apollo of Mantua and a Punu mask from Gabon into a divided figure, with the seam evoking the Atlantic Ocean and the violence of the transatlantic slave trade. Hamilton’s All Good Legs uses oversized steel and brick legs painted with colorful dots to consider race, gender, and the skyline’s phallocentric logic. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s TROPHY, meanwhile, replaces straightforward triumph with entanglement, showing a raptor and serpent around an obelisk that reveal human faces in a kiss when seen up close.
The Plinth has already become a site where public sculpture can generate unusually broad attention. Previous commissions included works by Simone Leigh, Sam Durant, Pamela Rosenkranz, Ivan Argote, and Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Argote’s Dinosaur, in particular, has drawn a Change.org petition urging that it remain permanently installed.
The public comment period runs through September 8, giving viewers a direct role in shaping which proposals advance. In a city where monuments are often treated as fixed statements, the High Line is again testing whether public art can remain open to revision, debate, and collective judgment.
