Writing the Garden

The term “art in the park” has many connotations and, depending upon your definition, it can take a number of different forms. Following the thematic thread of my last four journal posts, which embrace the notion of Central Park as a naturalistic and architecturally embellished landscape that is a great work art in and of itself, is the story of the park conceived as being a ready-made outdoor art gallery with a congenial circulation system. To walk through it, enter here with me and read about the artist Christo’s consideration of the current surface of Central Park as a gallery floor upon which to erect an all-encompassing extraneous work of land art.

Although Central Park’s beauty is innate to its site, it is fundamentally a work of nature and art fused into a single imaginative design. Contributing to this outcome was an often-overlooked collaborator with Olmsted and Vaux, the architect, Jacob Wrey Mould, as can be seen by my journalistic tour of some of his most beautiful design contributions to Central Park, including Bethesda Terrace.