On the High Line, Buddha Is the New Giant Pigeon
Before last year, Cecilia Alemani, the chief curator at the High Line, had never heard of—much less seen—a pigeon diaper. “We had an event for National Pigeon Appreciation Day,” she said, occasioned by a giant, hyperrealistic statue of the bird, called “Dinosaur.” Conceived by the Colombian artist Iván Argote, and unveiled in 2024, the sculpture spent a year and a half staring down commuters from its perch on the Spur, a section of the High Line that looms over the intersection of Thirtieth Street and Tenth Avenue. New Yorkers embraced it as a pop-up mascot; in Alemani’s words, “They recognized themselves in this idol hovering at the city’s edge.” More than five thousand attended the appreciation, donning pigeon drag, pummelling a pigeon piñata, and showing off their pigeon pets, diapers, “flight suits,” and all. “Dinosaur” was such a success that seven thousand petitioners tried to block its removal. “Everyone was very sad,” Alemani said. “But then they fall in love with the next one.”
She’d returned to the Spur to welcome the pigeon’s successor, a fifty-ton Buddha by the Vietnamese artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen. It was a crisp night in April. Drivers honked below, struggling to bypass an enormous crane and a flatbed truck idling by a turnoff to the Lincoln Tunnel. “On the way here, I wondered what all the traffic was about,” Alemani said. “Then I realized it was us!” The park had the air of a stage before showtime. Workers mixed mortar and drove a scissor lift to the edge of a concrete plinth surmounted by four steel rods—supports for the Buddha, whose sandstone body would slide down them in four parts, like beads in an abacus. As the first block was hoisted, Alemani darted to the railing to take a picture. “Look at those feet!” she said. “They’re so cute!”
Alemani, who was born in Milan, has the impish face of a putto in a Renaissance painting, framed by a mop of dark curls. She’s lived in Manhattan for twenty years, but still speaks of New York with a new arrival’s ebullience. “It’s already curated,” she said, gesturing grandly at the skyline. The waning crescent moon reminded her of a “giant banana,” prompting a staffer to mention Maurizio Cattelan: “All it needs is some duct tape.”
Few have taken a bigger bite out of the contemporary art world than Alemani. In 2022, she curated a landmark edition of the Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams,” which juxtaposed Surrealist masterpieces with contemporary meditations on climate and the body. (It was the first to feature mostly women artists.) Last year, she was praised for her take on Site Santa Fe. But Alemani’s heart is with the High Line, where she relishes the challenge of curating for tourists, taxi-drivers, truckers, and sundry local skeptics. “They might be provoked, they might be challenged, they might be inspired, but there’s always an active relationship,” she said. “In museums, the encounter is more prescriptive.”
Alemani started at the High Line in 2011, but devised the “Plinth commission” years later, when the Spur was still threatened with demolition. “There was a pyramid of bottles full of yellow liquid, and chunky old keyboards that must have been thrown from the windows of the old post office,” she recalled. “So, of course, every artist I brought here fell in love.” Inspired by the piazzas of her native Italy, and the contemporary sculptures exhibited in London’s Trafalgar Square, she persuaded the park’s leadership to transform the space into a plein-air gallery.
The inaugural commission, in 2019, was Simone Leigh’s “Brick House,” a bronze bust of a Black woman with cowries dangling from her braids. Next was Sam Durant’s “Untitled (Drone),” a replica of the MQ-9 drones used by the military. Nguyen’s work, “The Light That Shines Through the Universe,” also reflects on warfare. An imagined re-creation of one of the two Bamiyan Buddhas—ancient cliffside sculptures in Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the Taliban—it augments the original with two brass hands cast from discarded artillery shells gathered across the country.
For now, the Buddha’s feet were stuck near the top of their support poles; a man in the scissor lift struggled to push them farther apart. Alemani was undaunted. “The city is going to wake up with a new sculpture that looks like it’s always been there,” she declared, which even the pigeon diehards might learn to love: “Maybe they can think of it as a reincarnation.” ♦