The sculptor Joy Brown creates enormous bronze humanoid figures, and, on a recent Monday night, nine of them arrived in the city on flatbed trucks, to be installed on the Upper West Side. The bodies, zaftig and bald, stand as high as eleven feet tall. Each weighs well over a thousand pounds. They’re like Teletubbies that grew up, chilled out, lost their headgear, and took up nude sunbathing. New Yorkers would awake to find them encamped on the medians of Broadway, from West Seventy-second Street to 166th, as if giants had stomped into town overnight and found a nice place to rest.
“Tell you what, this got more attention than the Wienermobile,” the driver, Mike Jennett, said as he disembarked from his truck at Seventy-second Street, around 10 p.m. “I could’ve drove here naked and nobody would’ve noticed.”
Four sculptures loomed on the flatbed, wearing tie-down straps. Their facial expressions were serene and inscrutable, suggesting absorption in the spectacle of Gray’s Papaya. People out walking their dogs or lugging grocery bags stopped to ask, “What are they?” But mostly the gathering crowd held up cell phones, to document the moment.
A forklift arrived. It trundled over to a piece called “One Leaning on Another,” which depicted a seated adult, with a child crawling up its back. The sculpture was raised by its straps and swung gently onto the street. The forklift moved toward the Seventy-second Street subway station, the bronze dangling like a mutant pendant. Traffic stopped as the phone zombies followed.
Brown, a tall woman in her sixties, wearing jeans and Merrells, followed the forklift. She grew up in Japan and apprenticed with a master potter there. She now lives and works in Kent, Connecticut. The pieces begin as small clay models, and Brown oversees their final fabrication in Shanghai. The Broadway Mall Association, a nonprofit that maintains the parklands along the boulevard, had arranged for the exhibition. Deborah Foord, a board member, explained that Brown’s pieces were perfect for the sites because they’re “big enough to be seen, but too heavy for anyone to walk off with.”
Brown’s friends and relatives had come to watch the installation. Many were artists from the Kent area, who, once a year, use Brown’s anagama kiln. “We all fire with her,” Don Mengay, a potter who had taken the train from Beacon, said. “In the pottery world, she’s like the Earth Mother to all of us.”
