East Ender Eric Fischl is now making sculpture as well as paintings. Like his multi-figure canvases, his statues are garnering acclaim. Fischl’s Tumbling Woman, a mate to the Arthur Ashe Memorial bronze at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center, goes on view at LongHouse this season. Commissioned to commemorate those who lost their lives at the World Trade Center on September 11, it was deemed controversial and withdrawn after being installed along a Rockefeller Center concourse. In LHR’s garden, it will be seen under different circumstances. “If you look at the piece itself,” Fischl told interviewer David Rakoff, “it feels like a dream in which somebody is floating. There’s no weight…sending the crushing, rippling current back through the body as it hits a solid mass. It feels more like a tumbleweed, even though it is a massive sculpture.”

Magdalena Abakanowicz was born in Poland in 1930, and continues to live in Warsaw.  The years of war and the upheaval of a socially and economically repressed society have had a profound effect on her life as an artist.  Her sculptures speak to the human condition. LongHouse will reinstall Rabdomante, two figures that gazed across Peter’s Pond in 2000. In Magdalena’s own words “They were so successful in your environment. Your open spaces and water were building a whole legend about these beings, which are created to bewitch the environment. Their arms are like the sticks that a shaman uses to enchant the world.”     

Abakanowicz has had many solo exhibitions in major museums in Europe and Asia, as well as in leading venues across the United States. Permanent outdoor installations can be seen at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY; Olympic Park, Seoul, South Korea; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan; and in a recently developed area of the Philadelphia waterfront, to name but a few sites. Abakanowicz was awarded the International Sculpture Center’s 2005 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture.

Installation of new work in the gardens was made possible with the generous support of the Johnson Family Foundation and Barbara Slifka.

Vermont-based Johnny Swing, formerly of New York City, is an artist and furniture designer who hates to throw things away. Taking common, everyday materials and re-purposing them, Johnny Swing has created practical art that is as stunning to view as it is stimulating to use.  He is known to LH visitors for his collection of seating that uses a variety of coins, quarters, nickels, and half-dollars. This season Swing’s most recent work is The Quarter Lounge coming directly from the Museum of Arts and Design from their exhibition Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary.

Mia Westerlund Roosen was born in New York with Cuban heritage. She considered two careers, one as a dancer, the other as an artist.  She cites her interest in dance to be the reason her sculpture often refers to the body, its flow and movement. Battenkill  2008, stucco and running water invites the viewer inside to sit and listen as water cascades through the sculpture from above.  The sculpture comes to LH directly from Thomas Pain Park where it was on view as part of NYC Dept. of Parks and Recreation’s Art in the Parks program. This is a collaboration piece with Eric Westerlund.

Mia Westerlund Roosen has been exhibiting since the early 1970’s. She has received several prestigious awards, including a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Her work can be found in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, and at the Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY, where her work is permanently installed. A native of New York, Mia currently divides her time between New York City and her studio in Buskirk, NY.