The formality of Glyndor House is a foil for artists who invigorate the rooms and the lawn with provocative installations that explore the complex twenty-first-century relationship to the natural world. In responding to the exuberant summer garden, each artist has tapped into different decorative art, painting, or architecture traditions. Andrew Cooks’s painted wall panels transport the viewer to dreamy faraway places much in the mode of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wallpaper. In the center gallery, Maria Martinez-Cañas’s evocation of the woods decidedly doesn’t fit neatly within the wallpaper idiom, but it instead envelopes the space with a photographic installation that is both sensual and contemplative. With an eye to decorative ceramics and nature illustrations, Christopher Russell instills a sense of awe and wonder in observing the world of bees. The installations in the sunrooms take advantage of the intermediate position of both spaces between indoors and out. Christian Nguyen inserts a drawing of utopian, invented monumental space along with furniture-scaled landscape forms. In his suspended ceiling piece, Milton Rosa-Ortiz contrasts the wildness of nature with the human impulse to intervene. On the lawn Scherezade’s baroque wall engages the viewer to read the fluttering pages as a meditation on the necessity of nature and technology.

Public Programs

Exhibition Tours: Thursdays at 12noon and Saturdays at 2:15pm. Group tours can be arranged on Wednesdays and Fridays by contacting 718.549.3200 x209.

June 28 & 29, 1–4pm: Build Up a Nature Wall, Family Art Project led by Scherezade, collage your own hanging paper wall.

July 5 & 6, 1–4pm: Buildings Under the Earth, Family Art Project led by Christian Nguyen, draw and color an underground fantasia.

July 12, 1–3pm: Demonstration by Christopher Russell who sculpts bees and birds from clay.

July 13, 2:15pm: Exhibition Tour with curator Jennifer McGregor and artists Christian Nguyen and Milton Rosa-Ortiz to get a behind-the-scenes look at the projects in the exhibition.

In Response: Summer Projects is made possible, in part, with support from Juan P. Loumiet. The Visual Arts Program is supported by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, the Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Target, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts–a state agency. Sustaining support for Wave Hill is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

The Arts at Wave Hill are sponsored by