Vesuvio Playground
Spring and Thompson Streets
October 2016
Playground Parachutes is an installation of four large-scale murals by New York-based artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders whose artistic process involves manipulating a photographic image through different iterations, while changing the color, scale and medium of the work. Playground Parachutes continues this conceptual exploration, but removes the hand of the artist, instead including the marks of over 200 children taking classes at the Children’s Museum of the Arts (CMA).
The artist gridded an image from her 2008 parachute series into 72 square tiles and then printed them in the four basic CMYK digital colors – blue, pink, yellow and black. Working with Teaching Artists at CMA, students then enhanced the individual pieces with colored pencils. The finished pieces were returned to the artist, who reassembled the composition on plexiglass. The artist’s original image, clearly recognizable, is now enhanced with the visions of the many students who drew on the tiles. Consistent with her practice, Greenfield-Sanders is testing the limits of one source image, illustrating how it can be repeatedly used to different ends, here with the aid of children. Each tile can be singled out in the larger composition, yet, when taken with the whole piece, they blend into the overall picture.
SmartSpaces presented this project in collaboration with two local downtown NYC based nonprofits: Green Below 14 and the Children’s Museum of the Arts. At the end of the project, one of the murals was donated and installed at the Lerner Children’s Pavilion at the Hospital for Special Surgery. Another of panel was donated and installed in the welcoming room of the Nicholas Scoppetta Children’s Center operated by Administration for Children’s Services in New York City.