Looking Up

Marty and I are on Park Avenue with an unusually tall figure rising behind us. Surrounded by traffic and office buildings, the sculpture stood with its arms hanging loosely and its head tilted back toward the sky. Its simple gesture gave it a distinctive presence in the middle of Manhattan.

The sculpture was Looking Up by American artist Tom Friedman. Standing 33.3 feet tall, the stainless-steel figure was temporarily installed at Park Avenue and East 53rd Street from January through September 2016. Its elongated proportions made it tower above pedestrians while still appearing small beside the surrounding buildings.

Its textured surface began with an unexpected material: disposable aluminum roasting pans. Friedman shaped crushed pans into figures, then used molds and lost-wax casting to translate their forms into stainless steel. The finished sculpture retained the creases and impressions of the original baking tins, enlarging the texture of an ordinary household object to a monumental scale.

The Park Avenue installation was the second example in the sculpture’s edition. The first had been installed at the Laguna Gloria campus of The Contemporary Austin in Texas. In New York, the exhibition brought together the artist’s galleries, NYC Parks, and the Fund for Park Avenue, placing the work where people could encounter it during an ordinary walk through the city.

Looking Up needed no elaborate action to draw attention. The figure simply directed its gaze overhead. Against the straight lines of the buildings, its uneven surface and slender limbs offered a different kind of form, while its posture suggested curiosity about something beyond street level.

Our photograph preserves that temporary encounter. The sculpture occupied this intersection for only part of a year, but it remains in our record of the visit, a figure looking skyward while the city continued moving around it.