Nisha Bansil’s glass leaves turn a cathedral stairway into a meditation on visibility
At the Cathedral of St John the Divine in Manhattan, a new installation by glass artist Nisha Bansil (b. 1980s) transforms one of the nave’s 14 bays into a field of luminous ginkgo leaves. Titled UNSEEN (2026), the work is composed of more than 50,000 glass leaves arranged on the stone steps, where their pale yellow tones catch the light with a restrained, almost hushed intensity.
The sculpture is rooted in Bansil’s own shift in perspective after she moved from the Catskills to New York City in 2017. In the forest, she has said, individual leaves dissolve into a collective background; in the city, it is people who disappear. UNSEEN takes that observation as both image and argument, drawing attention to New York’s unhoused population, more than 100,000 people each night.
The work was fabricated over 14 weeks at the Corning Museum of Glass studio in upstate New York. The museum’s 5,000-square-foot casting center, built as part of a $55 million expansion in 2024, is the only facility in North America equipped for large-scale cast glass. Bansil and her assistants made rubber molds from ginkgo leaves gathered on the cathedral grounds, pressed impressions into kilns filled with talc, and sifted glass powders into the forms before firing. Between 600 and 850 pieces were produced daily, with technicians using a crane to open and close the kiln lids.
Bansil, who now divides her time between New York City and the Catskills, has long worked with natural phenomena and invisible forces such as sound and motion. UNSEEN extends that practice into the civic realm, using material delicacy to address a social reality that is often overlooked.
The installation also sits within the cathedral’s broader art and service mission. The church has commissioned temporary works such as Anne Patterson’s Divine Pathways (2023), while permanent pieces include Keith Haring’s Altarpiece (1990) and Meredith Bergmann’s Memorial to September 11 (2012). For more than 40 years, Cathedral Community Cares has provided food, clothing, and other resources to the city’s poor.
To coincide with the June 30 unveiling, 500 additional glass leaves were made available in the gift shop on a pay-what-you-wish basis, with proceeds supporting the cathedral’s food pantry. In a city where scale can so easily obscure the individual, Bansil’s installation asks viewers to look again.
