By Paige Williams
May 29, 2017
"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."
The forklift stopped near the south entrance to the subway. "This is a great place for it," Brown said. "It needs a little something." The operator rotated the sculpture to face Sleepy's. Customers exiting Trader Joe's now had a view of two bulbous bare bums. The moment the straps were off, people were all over the figure-cuddling in its lap, stroking its feet. A barefoot woman in a long orange cloak caressed one mammoth calf.
The Seventy-ninth Street mall received "Sitter with Head in Hands," which looks like a big bubble man who sat down to figure out what to do next. An energy consultant, passing by with her dinner date, a corporate attorney, wondered if the figures had anything to do with a sculpture in the Time Warner Center, at Columbus Circle, whose exposed penis passersby rub for luck. The answer was no. Brown's pieces are penisless. Before walking off, the woman's date said, "Homeless guys will be peeing on that in no time."
A fellow wearing headphones and a heavy cross pendant spotted the figure and crossed the street hollering, "Yes! Yes!" He stopped at the median and, sensing an audience, waved his cigarette, addressing the phone cameras: "When do you tape art? When do you film it? When do you capture it? Is it art? Is everything art?" He winked and moved on.
The sculpture rested on a steel base, but something about the dimensions felt wrong. When someone suggested setting the figure flush by the curb, Foord said, "No. Then we'd lose some of the butt crack." A bigger concern involved tripping. The base stayed. The group caravanned north, to Ninety-sixth Street. A lone passerby stopped to watch the crew unload "One Holding Small One," which suggested a parent cradling a toddler. "Is this forever?" he asked. Until November, he was told. By then, it was after one in the morning. As the forklift advanced, Brown's sister, Carol, looked at the yews bordering the plaza and said, "Stick it in the bushes.
