Announcing Alma Allen on Park Avenue

10 Major Sculptures by Alma Allen Will Be Installed along New York’s Park Avenue in May 2025

April 17, 2025—Kasmin, in collaboration with The Sculpture Committee of The Fund for Park Avenue and NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks, announces an exhibition of 10 major sculptures by Alma Allen (b. 1970, Utah), which will be installed along Park Avenue in New York from May until September 2025. Unique bronze and onyx sculptures, including examples reaching over 10 feet tall and realized especially for the exhibition, will be on view at eight sites that span nearly 20 blocks of the Park Avenue Malls between East 52nd and East 70th Streets. This public exhibition is Allen’s largest outdoor installation to date.

The exhibition is the newest in a series of large-scale outdoor installations staged by Allen in the United States, Mexico and Belgium. Park Avenue provides a unique opportunity for New Yorkers to engage with the artist’s material explorations of consciousness, free will, and the nature of time, unexpectedly tranquil amongst the energetic velocity of the city. New York—an early source of inspiration for Allen, who created hand-sized sculptures using found marble from the city’s broken street curbs in the 1990s—will serve as a dynamic setting for the artist’s new monumental works realized in bronze and onyx local to the region surrounding his studio in Tepotzlán, Mexico. Juxtaposing the artist’s primordial formations against the urban landscape, the exhibition encourages new perspectives on the elemental nature of Allen’s fluid, biomorphic sculptural language.

Each of Allen’s works demonstrate the artist’s distinctive approach to sculpture as the manifestation of human intuition. In his studio in Mexico, where he has lived and worked since 2017, Allen creates small-scale clay models through a series of repetitive hand gestures, such as rolling his wrist or tightly grasping his fingers. He then scans his objects using computer technology before casting them in bronze at his on-site foundry, or employing a self-built robotic device to carve them out of a single piece of stone, at monumental scale. The resulting forms retain the softness and immediacy of the artist’s touch, appearing impossibly malleable despite their weight and density. Allen’s hand application of patinas to his bronzes results in painterly surfaces, further transforming the physical properties of his material.

Allen’s sculptures share a timeless affinity with the earliest known carvings and creations around the world. Drawing on the artist’s archaeological interests and studies—from the petroglyphs in Utah to ancient stone vessels in Egypt, the Olmec heads of Mesoamerica, and Diego Rivera’s collection of pre-Columbian objects at Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City—the works further explore humanity’s impulse to communicate with form.

An ineffable lifeforce charges Allen’s sculptures, each caught in a state of indeterminacy reflected in their shared titles, Not Yet Titled. They sharply twist, protrude and recede in eternal phases of formation,  Approaching the limits of abstraction, a new bronze on the north mall of East 57th Street folds forward to resemble a human form embracing itself. Elsewhere, Allen’s manipulation of scale reflects the playful ethos of his practice, as in a new bronze situated between East 52nd and 53rd Streets that appears to balance a small ball at the top of a large, open curvature. At East 70th Street, three ascendant spirals respond to the flowers and trees along the Park Avenue Malls. Carved in onyx, a stone having formed in the earth over millennia, the sculptures inspire a dialogue with the ephemeral spring blooms around them, offering reflection on the nature of time.

Celebrating the 45th anniversary of The Fund for Park Avenue, this marks the seventh exhibition organized by Kasmin in collaboration with The Sculpture Committee of The Fund for Park Avenue and NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks, following George Rickey: Monumental Sculpture on Park Avenue (2021), Alex Katz: Park Avenue Departure (2019), Will Ryman: The Roses (2011), Les Lalanne on Park Avenue (2009), Robert Indiana: LOVE Wall (2008) and Robert Indiana: ONE through ZERO (2003). The Park Avenue Malls provide a unique opportunity to display works of art, including the permanent installation of a major sculpture by Louise Nevelson at 92nd Street and previous exhibitions by Niki de Saint Phalle (2012), Yoshimoto Nara (2010), Beverly Pepper (2005), Bernar Venet (2004), Jean Dubuffet (2003) and George Rickey (2000), among others.

Over the last decade, Allen has staged solo and group exhibitions at Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center, Garrison, NY (2024), Museo Anahuacalli, Mexico City (2023), Van Buuren Museum & Gardens, Brussels (2022), Rockefeller Center, New York (2022), the Palm Springs Art Museum and Nevada Museum of Art (2018-19), the Whitney Biennial (2014), and other venues. A major monograph of his work was published by Rizzoli in 2020. Allen has staged three solo exhibitions at Kasmin since 2020, including one on the Kasmin Sculpture Garden overlooking The High Line in 2021. His work is held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Palm Springs Art Museum, among other collections.

Inquire

Press Requests

About The Sculpture Committee of The Fund for Park Avenue
Founded in 1980, The Fund for Park Avenue, a nonprofit organization and one of the city's first public private partnerships, is responsible for planting, lighting, and maintaining the trees and flowers on the Park Avenue Malls through its Park Avenue Malls Planting Project and Park Avenue Tree Lighting programs. The Fund's Sculpture Committee was formed in 2000 to recommend artwork for temporary display on Park Avenue. The committee has presented artists' works in 38 exhibitions since its inception.

Learn More

About NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks
For nearly 60 years, NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks program has brought contemporary public artworks to the city’s parks, making New York City one of the world’s largest open-air galleries. The agency has consistently fostered the creation and installation of temporary public art in parks throughout the five boroughs. Since 1967, NYC Parks has collaborated with arts organizations and artists to produce more than 3,000 public artworks by 1,500 notable and emerging artists in more than 200 parks.

Learn More