Our residence is home to more than 100 works of art from nineteen artists curated to complement the interior and create a visual narrative for residents. President & CEO Gregory Smith wanted to be sure to include senior artists in the collection. Seven of the artists are in their 70s or older, which offers a great example to our residents, reaffirming that you can continue to live a vibrant and engaged life at any age. Art and culture play such an important role in the lives of New Yorkers. It was critically important to us to bring that experience inside Inspīr to add the culture of the city at home.
Throughout the Inspīr Carnegie Hill residence, art has been carefully chosen to create an elegant dialogue with the interior environment. Using “visual poetry” as the core concept for curating the collection, many of the works are organic and abstracted. They are in various media, including screenprint, lithograph, engravings, monoprint, linocut, woodcut, and photography, and they are rhythmic, concrete, or lyrical, just as poetry can be. In a previous blog post, Elevated Interiors and Outdoor Green Spaces, we introduced our curated art collection and highlighted Etel Adnan, who is now 96, along with briefly touching upon the works of Marina Adams, Mary Corse, Christopher Le Brun, and John Houck. In this post, which will be followed by a second part, we will delve into several artists further and highlight where their work is hung in the building.
When you enter through the lobby doors, you’ll be greeted by a large colorful piece by Jacob Hashimoto. Born in 1973 in Greeley, CO, and based in New York, NY, Hashimoto is best known for using traditional Japanese methods to create large-scale “tapestries” out of handcrafted paper and handmade wooden kites. His compositions like Cloud Reservoirs in Finite Glitch Space (Reservoir 1), 2018, (woodblock monoprint on handmade paper) are accretive, layered compositions that reference virtual environments and cosmology while staying deeply rooted in historical art traditions like landscape, abstraction, and craft.
In the Onyx bistro on the 17th floor hangs the work of Joel Shapiro. Born and bred in New York in 1941, he originally planned on becoming a physician, but after serving in the Peace Corps in India, he changed his mind and focused on art. He received his M.A. from New York University in 1969. The piece Inspīr acquired is a 12-color screenprint/lithograph, Up Down Around (d), 2011. Up Down Around is a series of five works featuring different forms and colors in different palettes ranging from bright and bold to more muted colors. Cohesively, they are one series titled Up Down Around (a), (b), (c), (d), and (e).
Shapiro is primarily known for his wooden and painted aluminum sculptures that capture human forms in abstraction. He has received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture and has many commissioned works on public display around the world, from Japan to Italy and throughout the United States. The sculpture located closest to Inspīr is on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and another can be found at Storm King Art Center, an outdoor sculpture garden in New Windsor, NY.
On the second floor in the screening room hangs the work of Sarah Sze. The piece called Day is a lithograph, screen-print made in 2003. Born in Boston, MA, in 1969, Sze is based in New York. Coinciding with the explosion of information of the 21st century, Sze’s work attempts to navigate and model the ceaseless proliferation of information and objects in contemporary life. She draws from Modernist traditions of the found object, dismantling their authority with dynamic constellations of materials that are charged with flux, transportation, and fragility. Captured in this suspension, her immersive and intricate works question the value society places on objects and how objects ascribe meaning to the places and times we inhabit.
A graduate of Yale University, BA, she went on to complete her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Like Hashimoto, many of Sze’s pieces are large 3D installations. She has exhibited in more than 50 group or solo exhibits, and her work is part of over 25 museum collections. In New York City, her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and New Museum. She also has a “monumental sculpture” commissioned by LaGuardia Gateway Partners in partnership with Public Art Fund that hangs in Terminal B at LaGuardia Airport. The piece called Shorter than the Day, 2020, is made of powder-coated aluminum and steel. Learn more about it here.
It is inspiring not only to have the works of these prominent artists on display here at Inspīr but to have many other examples of their work on display throughout the city. Art and music is one of our Nine Core Elements and is an integral part of how we curate an environment and lifestyle that supports a philosophy of vibrant, intentional living and meaningful connections.
Jacob Hashimoto Cloud Reservoirs in Finite Glitch Space (Reservoir I) Printed and published by Durham Press, 2018 © Jacob Hashimoto/Durham Press, 2018.
