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Public Art: Floral Canopy at Albee Square NYC

by Amanda McCavour | Aug 31, 2023 |

Short Summary: My new installation Floral Canopy transforms native New York plants into hundreds of suspended wire sculptures that create a floating wildflower meadow. In August 2023, just as students and staff prepared to enter their new building for the first time, Floral Canopy was installed in the lobby ceiling of the Albee Square Campus in Brooklyn. This site-specific public artwork represents the culmination of a four-year journey that began in 2019—a project that deepened my understanding of how art can honor place, celebrate local ecology, and create a sense of belonging for the communities that encounter it daily. Floral Canopy is composed of hundreds of hand-shaped, powder-coated steel sculptures painted in vibrant greens, yellows, and oranges that form a floating field of native plants above viewers’ heads. Like three-dimensional drawings, these intricately crafted and gestural wire forms accumulate into a suspended wildflower meadow—shifting perspective and inviting students, teachers, and visitors to look up and discover a garden where they might least expect it. The foundation of this work lies in botanical research and careful observation. I spent considerable time at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Native Flora Garden and the New York Botanical Garden’s Steere Herbarium, examining plant specimens that call New York home. I made dozens of drawing studies of local species including May Apple, Button Bush, Milkweed, and many others—plants that have adapted to this specific climate and soil, plants that have their own stories within this ecosystem. This process of documentation became integral to the artwork itself. By translating scientific observation into artistic interpretation, Floral Canopy demonstrates how different ways of knowing—the scientist’s careful cataloging and the artist’s imaginative rendering—can work in harmony....