Over the summer, when most of New York City's galleries and museums are busy preparing their big autumn exhibitions, some of the city’s best shows are to be found along its avenues and in its green spaces. This season’s bounty of outdoor art includes an exhibition of towering bronzes cast from carved wood by the nonagenarian sculptor Thaddeus Mosley in Lower Manhattan’s City Hall Park (a Public Art Fund project, until 16 November), while across the East River at Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, the latest edition of The Socrates Annual (until 6 April 2026) finds artist-fellows Natalia Nakazawa, Pioneers Go East Collective, Rowan Renee, Catherine Telford-Keogh and Zipporah Camille Thompson making work on the theme and experience of being uprooted. Also in Queens, and firmly rooted in New York’s graffiti canon, the legendary street artist Lady Pink has created the mural Foundations (2025) on the exterior of MoMA PS1’s welcome pavilion that doubles as a tribute to many of the city’s most ubiquitous taggers (until 26 June 2026).
On the High Line elevated park, the British artist Tai Shani is lighting amblers’ ways with a trio of large-scale sculptures of cartoon-ish candles, The Sun Is a Flame That Haunts The Night (until March 2026). Meanwhile, the sculptor Alma Allen has planted a group of ten large-scale, simultaneously organic and otherworldly sculptures along Park Avenue (East 52nd and East 70th Streets) for a project co-presented by the Sculpture Committee of the Fund for Park Avenue and the city parks department’s Art in the Parks programme in collaboration with Kasmin (until 30 September). For a very different type of abstract intervention amid urban greenery, head to Brooklyn Bridge Park, where Torkwase Dyson has erected a modernist pavilion on the waterfront, Akua (a Public Art Fund project, until 8 March 2026). Inside the ship-like form, a multi-layered sound installation melds excerpts from Black audio archives, electronic sounds and nature field recordings, aurally transporting visitors to distant shores.
Organic and otherworldly: sculptures by Alma Allen dot Park Avenue from East 52nd Street to East 70th Street Photo: Charlie Rubin; Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin, New York,
Graffiti history lesson: the legendary street artist Lady Pink pays tribute to her fellow taggers in Foundations, her new mural at MoMA PS1 Photo: Will Ragozzino
Light it up: the British artist Tai Shani installed three large sculptures of cartoon-like candles, collectively titled The Sun Is a Flame That Haunts The Night, along the High Line Photo: Timothy Schenck; courtesy of the High Line
Uprooted: Rowan Renee is among the artist-fellows making work on-site for Socrates Sculpture Park’s annual group show; above, the 2025 work A loom for tender(ils) Courtesy of Socrates Sculpture Park
Wish you wood: a group of massive bronze sculptures cast from carved wood by the nonagenarian sculptor Thaddeus Mosley is on view at City Hall Park, adding monumental, organic forms to a Lower Manhattan landscape dominated by concrete, steel and glass Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy of Public Art Fund, New York
