(New York, October 15, 2015)—Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced today that British artist Cornelia Parker has been selected to create a site-specific installation atop the Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. The installation will be on view from May through October 2016, and will be the fourth in a series of site-specific commissions for the outdoor space.
Mr. Campbell said, “The Roof Garden should always be a space that makes us think beyond its spectacular views. It is a unique source of inspiration for the artists who create site-specific works there, and I am excited to see what Cornelia Parker will create. Her work is remarkable for the ways in which she looks at things we think of as familiar, and up-ends our perception of them in the process.”
The exhibition is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Additional support is provided by Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky.
Sheena Wagstaff, the Museum’s Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art said, “In her large-scale installations, Cornelia opens our eyes to the special qualities—and sometimes darker significance—of familiar places and things we tend to overlook. Her insatiable curiosity often leads her into difficult cultural territories, but the results are never less than provocative and surprising. We look forward to sharing Cornelia’s site-specific installation and its unique take on an aspect of American architecture when the Roof Garden opens next spring.”
About the Artist
Cornelia Parker (born 1956, Cheshire, England) studied at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design (1974-1975) and Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1975-1978), and received her MFA from Reading University in 1982. Parker lives and works in London. She is well known for her large-scale, often site-specific, installations. Her engagement with the fragility of existence and the transformation of materials is exemplified in two works: Cold Dark Matter (1991), a cartoon-like reconstruction of an exploded army shed, and Heart of Darkness (2004), the formal arrangement of charred remains from a forest fire. Parker has had numerous solo exhibitions, including a 2015 retrospective at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, The Whitechapel Gallery, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Serpentine Gallery. International exhibitions include the 2014 Gwangju Biennale, 2013 Venice Biennale, and 2008 Sydney Biennale. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997. She is a Royal Academician and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2010. Parker’s work is included in many private and public collections around the world including the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, de Young Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Yale Center for British Art.
Parker is featured in Season 3 of the Metropolitan Museum’s online series The Artist Project, also supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The episode can be viewed here.
This year’s Roof Garden exhibition will be overseen by Sheena Wagstaff, and organized by Beatrice Galilee, Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design in the Met’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art.
It will be accompanied by the fourth in a series of books considering the annual Roof Garden projects to be published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.
About The Roof Garden Commission
In 2013, the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art initiated a new series of site-specific commissions on The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden and has so far featured work by Imran Qureshi (2013), Dan Graham (2014), and Pierre Huyghe (on view through November 1, 2015). After The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden opened to the public in 1987, the Department also exhibited a series of single-artist installations from 1998 to 2011, including artists Ellsworth Kelly (1998), Magdalena Abakanowicz (1999), David Smith (2000), Joel Shapiro (2001), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (2002), Roy Lichtenstein (2003), Andy Goldsworthy (2004), Sol LeWitt (2005), Cai Guo-Qiang (2006), Frank Stella (2007), Jeff Koons (2008), Roxy Paine (2009), Doug + Mike Starn (2010), Anthony Caro (2011), and Tomás Saraceno (2012).
About The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s leading art museums, with a collection spanning more than 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present. It presents dozens of exhibitions each year, and thousands of events and programs including films, talks, performance, guided tours, and family programs. A center for art appreciation, scholarship, research, and conservation, the Met also maintains a vibrant program of publishing scholarly and popular catalogues, and utilizes new technologies to enhance the visitor experience and extend the reach and accessibility of its offerings globally.
In addition to its main building at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, the Met is launching its modern and contemporary art-themed programming at The Met Breuer in March 2016, and continues to present exhibitions and collection displays related to the art and architecture of the medieval world at The Cloisters museum and gardens, its branch in upper Manhattan.
About Bloomberg Philanthropies
Bloomberg Philanthropies has supported exhibitions on the Metropolitan Museum's Roof Garden since 2007. We work to ensure better, longer lives for the greatest number of people and focus on five key areas for creating lasting change: arts, education, the environment, government innovation, and public health. The arts are a valuable way to engage citizens and enhance communities. Through innovative partnerships and bold approaches, the Bloomberg Philanthropies arts program works to increase access to culture using new technologies, empower artists and strengthen cultural organizations to reach broader audiences. For more information, please visit bloomberg.org or follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter @BloombergDotOrg.
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October 15, 2015