Warm weather means a lot of different things to different people. A lot of that has to do where you’re located and what the sun and longer days brings your area. For us New Yorkers, that means we get to climb to the tops of our buildings and be at one with our skyline. It’s the time of year that we get to enjoy the magnificent views up close! In fact, there is such a thing as ‘rooftop season’ in New York City. Tell that to your friends from the plains! As you’re likely aware of all the great food and drink you can find on our roofs, we bed you didn’t know that you can find Big Bird! Yes, that Big Bird!
This year’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden Commission features a very familiar friend—Big Bird. The one you grew up with and maybe even had a stuffed animal of (no judgement). For The Met’s 2021 Roof Garden Commission, Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte (born 1980) has created a 26-foot-tall kinetic sculpture featuring the beloved Sesame Street character Big Bird and the modern aesthetic of Alexander Calder’s standing mobiles. The Roof Garden Commission: Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts will be on view April 16 through October 31, 2021.
The work is comprised of a base with three interlocking pieces and a mobile component that sways and rotates gently with passing air currents. With his design, Da Corte evokes the liveliness and unpredictability of Calder’s practice, while also emphasizing a do-it-yourself inventiveness by fashioning the base of the work in the modular language of an outdoor activity set by Little Tikes, which requires no tools for assembly and can be easily reconfigured. Suspended from near the top of the sculpture, covered in roughly 7,000 individually placed laser-cut aluminum feathers, Big Bird is found perched on a crescent moon with a ladder in hand—suggesting the possibility of passage back to Earth or to other galaxies.
As we often say…only in New York! Happy rooftop season!
For more information, visit metmuseum.org