The Artist’s Park is a public, albeit exclusive area constructed in the Chelsea arts’ district of Manhattan. Once known solely for its parking lots and similarly static, expansive spaces, Chelsea was created quite literally by the labors of artists. But as the district grew into the famed artistic epicenter it is today, an area that began as an artists’ base developed into a neighborhood that most artists can’t afford to live in.

Suggestive of the way that participants in any extreme situation achieve some level of shared consciousness, the park, as a permanent installation, frames the collective contributions and impact of all artists, regardless of their degrees of commercial success or anonymity.  As the placard states, the Artist’s park is “always open to those who have taken the chance to live and make work in the greatest arts city in the world,” – an experience that does not generally include the commercial rewards necessary for proximate park living, nor significant park time.

We create dialogue when we claim a space – be it a two-dimensional surface, a three-dimensional interaction of materials and forms erected in a gallery, or even a self-appropriated park. Especially when such a familiar designation of space like “house,” or “park" is reconstituted suddenly only in the lack of permission the claimer had in claiming it, we are incited to consider it not as it is, but for what it might be.  The Artists’ Park, created without sanction or license, is intended to function both as an instance of, and ongoing arena for participation in, this dialogue.
 
As a site-specific installation, the square yard of park serves as a psychological marker of the complex cultural space in which it exists, and prescribes, perhaps most fundamentally, the notion that a small area claimed for nothing more than the possibilities of what can happen by engaging with and within it will most likely be no less influential in the future than it has been in the acute shaping of the city’s art history – a city in which such spaces, paradoxically, are becoming less and less publicly available.