For Art on the Beach 3, participating artists traced relationships between the Battery Park City Landfill’s visual properties and its architectural context. The handrails on Donald Lipski’s red staircase, Progress, for one, created perspective sight-lines, which converged at the nearer of the two World Trade Center towers, at the time, the magnetic poles of the landfill’s visual field.

Other artists such as Kurt Ossenfort found inspiration in the tirelessly energetic Hudson River and created a Styrofoam mechanism that, once placed in the river, translated wave and tide activity into graphic patterns, which he updated daily.

Photograph by Robin Holland

Multiple Artists

Art on the Beach 3

Manhattan

1981