Stephen Glassman
Resistance. And Then...
Stone, Steel, 2024
As a creative symbol, the feather is timeless and universal. Since the dawn of human imagination, feathers have scribed the edges of the mundane and magical.
At Sutterville Road a boulder rests defiantly upon the tracks, etched with a feather. Entitled Resistance, it marks the end of a line and a continuum of greater forces — gravity, geologies, mythologies, migrations . . .
At the northern trailhead a giant feather floats atop a needle at nearly forty feet. Seemingly adrift in a global wind, And Then . . . brings our eye to the sky and beyond our horizons. It is a gesture of radical hope embedded in our civic landscape for generations to come.
The two pieces frame the trail as a single sitework – a connection of sky to ground, one era to another . . . always.
Stephen Glassman Studio is:
Stephen Glassman
Aaron Slavin
Freesia Torres
Gavin Laughland
Stephen Glassman, Hope is a Thing of Feathers, Digital print on bamboo paper, 2023.
About Stephen Glassman
"Stephen Glassman's art is an inquiry of gesture, scale, and social impact – generating the intuitive human gesture on a civic scale to humanize our built environment. His eponymous Stephen Glassman Studio (SGS), creates large-scale, conscious, site-specific artworks around the world, born from the intimacy of hand and brush, that meet the most exacting standards and constraints of the world’s best builders. The studio’s
culture is “rhizomatic” – a tangible collaboration of specialists, stakeholders and community creating public sculpture that weaves and intersects site and form to spark an authentic and transformative “crack” in the civic grid – a space of wonder between people, story, and place.
Under my leadership, SGS created the 8-story NYC skyline sculpture, Flows Two Ways. Structurally integrated as the public edifice to Bjarke Ingels inaugural skyscraper, Flows Two Ways (2016) is a literal and figurative reflection upon the Hudson River. Hailed as “...the most innovative wall work in New
York...” (William Menking, Architects Newspaper), Flows Two Ways is now a signature presence of Manhattan’s far west skyline, even featured in the finale of Steven Soderberg’s “High Flying Bird” (2019).
For Stephen, an artwork is successful when it moves and contributes to a community and vice versa. This is always the ultimate intent of Stephen Glassman Studio.