Louise Nevelson Plaza (formerly known as Legion Memorial Square), is a public art installation and park in Lower Manhattan which includes an arrangement of large abstract sculptures made by the American 20th-century female artist Louise Nevelson. Described as an "outdoor environment", the triangle-shaped plaza is bounded by Maiden Lane, Liberty Street and William Street, adjacent to the building of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 

The original site, created to display seven large-scale abstract sculptures commissioned from Nevelson by New York City, opened in 1977 as Legion Memorial Square. It was officially inaugurated as Louise Nevelson Plaza in 1978, making it the city's first public space named after an artist. The plaza, while suffering from poor maintenance, remained mostly unchanged for many years. However, following the September 11 attacks in 2001, a security booth was added to the plaza, the first deviation from Nevelson's original design.

By 2007, faded sculptures and required sub-surface repairs led to a comprehensive redesign by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the New York City Department of Transportation, and the New York City Department of Design and Construction. Reopened in 2010, the updated plaza featured new ground cover, an elevated platform, benches, plantings, and rearranged, restored Nevelson sculptures. Despite criticism from some art historians for altering the original concept, Louise Nevelson's granddaughter Maria Nevelson supported the renovations, citing her grandmother's embrace of the 'now' over the past.

Background

Louise Nevelson (1899–1988) 

Louise Nevelson was an American artist born in Kiev (then part of the Russian Empire) to Jewish parents in 1899. Having grown up in the United States, Nevelson moved to New York City in 1920, where she received formal artistic training at the Art Students League (1929-1930) and in 1933 traveled to Munich, Germany to train under the abstract painter Hans Hofmann. In 1933, she worked as an assistant to the Mexican artist Diego Rivera on one of Rivera's New York City murals. 

She moved to Lower Manhattan during the early 1940s which is when she began working on large assemblage sculptures, abstract compositions often made from found objects collected from New York City detritus which she then painted over with a single color, initially using mostly black paint. Within the next decade, Nevelson achieved commercial success and by 1954, she had produced her first "black-painted landscape sculptures". Throughout the late the 1950s, "her investigations into space grew into room-sized environments".

Commission and location 
Known as the "Grande Dame of Contemporary Sculpture", Nevelson was one of the first female artists in the U.S. to gain recognition for public art. During the 1970s, Nevelson received commissions from the federal government, numerous corporations, universities, as well as religious institutions, including the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, a 1977 sculptural environment installation at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Midtown Manhattan. 

Following Louise Nevelson's gift of her sculpture Night Presence IV to New York City in 1972, installed on the corner of Park Avenue and 92nd Street, she was asked to design a traffic triangle that would include "sculpture, seating, and plantings" across the street from the building of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The space of the plaza had been previously occupied by German-American Insurance Company Building, designed by architects Hill & Stout in 1907 and completed in 1908. It was among several buildings in Lower Manhattan demolished during the 1970s to make the streets wider and to improve traffic flow to the nearby World Trade Center complex.

History

Original plaza design (1978–2007) 

Funding was provided by the Mildred Andrews Fund and construction by a group of local New York corporations. Nevelson inspected the site from the upper floors of an office building adjacent to the space and decided she would place "seven black welded steel sculptures on columns, ranging from 20 to 40 feet high, so that they would 'appear to float like flags' above the plaza". The artist considered the large scale of the surrounding skyscrapers, likened by art historian Laurie Wilson to "high mountains towering over a tiny valley", and intended to create what she called a "people's park (...) which would serve the neighborhood as an oasis from the city's hurly-burly". In 1977, the site, then known as Legion Memorial Square, was initially dedicated by Mayor Abraham Beame who "hailed Nevelson's sculpture as an antidote to a spate of recent violence in the city".

In 1978, it was renamed Louise Nevelson Plaza in a dedication ceremony presided over by Mayor Ed Koch and business magnate David Rockefeller, becoming the city's first public space to be named after an artist. As art historian Harriet F. Senie notes, the "marriage of high art, local politics, and finance to promote a desirable civic image had become established practice". The sculptures are part of what Nevelson called "Seventh Decade Garden", which was "a series of environmental sculptures evoking botanical shapes". Writing for Time, art critic Robert Hughes called the works "big, imposing and mannered". According to scholar Richard Lacayo, the largest one of the seven sculptures installed in the plaza, 70 feet tall, "unfurls majestically against the heavy stone of the Florentine-style Federal Reserve Bank across the street". In December 1978, Nevelson dedicated another public sculpture in the Lower Manhattan; titled Sky Gate, New York it was installed in the mezzanine lobby of 1 World Trade Center on the opposite site of Financial District.

Later years and renovation (2007–now) 

While the physical condition of the plaza suffered poor maintenance, it remained largely intact for several decades. In the aftermath of September 11 attacks in 2001, a security booth of the Federal Reserve Police was erected on the plaza to screen incoming trucks, marking the first alteration of Nevelson's original design. By 2007, all sculptures had faded, one had been removed after being hit by a truck, and structural engineers had discovered that the street's sub-surface had to be repaired, prompting the city to rehabilitate the plaza. That year, a redesign project was initiated by Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, working together with the New York City Department of Transportation and the New York City Department of Design and Construction. 

The site reopened to the public in August 2010. Differing significantly from Nevelson's original design, the plaza featured a new ground covering, an elevated platform added on the north-west side, as well as new benches and plantings, among other changes. As part of the redesign process, most of Nevelson's sculptures have also been restored and their placement on the plaza has been rearranged. While criticized by some art historians for altering the original concept, the renovation was well received by the artist's granddaughter Maria, who argued that Nevelson was "not someone who held on to the past" and was "all about the 'now'".

Gallery

See also 

 Chapel of the Good Shepherd (Louise Nevelson)
 Group of Four Trees (Jean Dubuffet)
 28 Liberty Street
 Public art
 List of public art in New York City

Notes

References 
Parks in New York City
Abstract sculpture
20th-century American artists
Public art
Modern art
Outdoor sculptures in New York City

Bibliography 

 Lacayo, Richard (2022). Last Light: How Six Great Artists Made Old Age a Time of Triumph. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-5011-4658-9.
 Rapaport, Brooke Kamin (ed.). The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend (exh. cat.). New York: The Jewish Museum and Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12172-8.
 Senie, Harriet F. (July–August 2007). "The Perils of Public Art: Louise Nevelson Plaza". Sculpture. 26 (6): 48-49.
 Cullen-DuPont, Kathryn (2000). Encyclopedia of Women's History in America. New York: Facts on File, Inc.
 Wilson, Laurie (2016). Louise Nevelson: Light and Shadow. New York: Thames & Hudson.