The park in Queens will put up with no such modesty. These artists fought for their land, and they fought hard. They reclaimed it from the junk heaps, they incorporated it, and they got it funding. They arrange community events and draw their public from nearby. They feature artists such as John Ahearn, with his politically correct sculpture of ghetto kids.
Sculpture is bound to look scrappy on that scuzzy, intermittent patch of grass.
Indeed, it insists on it. Like Mark di Suvero , one of the park's founders, these artists like to toy with junk. Jene Highstein stands as another older contributor. Works often return to industrial materials, with a ramshackle, castoff kind of construction. It is as if art, nature, and the community had fought back against the factories and failed.