Torkwase Dyson

Public Art Fund is proud to announce its 2025 exhibition program, featuring a broad range of artists at varying career stages, offering works that examine themes of communality and belonging; improvisation and temporality; and geography, landscape, and our relation to the natural world. The season’s exhibitions will challenge preconceptions and invite playful engagement through a variety of mediums, as visitors encounter the works on their journeys and in daily life.

Inviting commuters to engage with their own stories of travel and transformation, Carmen Winant: My Mother and Eye pairs images from her and her mother’s coming-of-age cross-country road trips, displayed on JCDecaux bus shelters in New York City, Chicago, and Boston. Torkwase Dyson: Akua at Brooklyn Bridge Park will feature a large-scale sculptural pavilion featuring a sound installation, immersing visitors in field recordings, poetry, and music. Thaddeus Mosley: Touching the Earth will foreground Gate 3 at City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, a monumental bronze gateway cast from tree trunks that pedestrians can walk beneath, accompanied by additional bronze sculptures. Between Tides will transform Rockaway Beach, with six artists realizing newly-commissioned sculptures that are also functional ping-pong tables and invite engagement through play. Paul Anthony Smith will debut a new body of work, exploring themes of communion, spirituality, memory, and Caribbean cultural reverence on JCDecaux bus shelters in New York City, Chicago, and Boston. Co-commissioned with the Lassonde Art Trail in Toronto, Monira Al Qadiri will present a large-scale sculpture at Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza, exploring the evolving relationship of humans with nature and other animals. For Carmen Winant, Torkwase Dyson, Thaddeus Mosley, Paul Anthony Smith, and Monira Al Qadiri, these 2025 Public Art Fund exhibitions mark their first major solo public art exhibitions in New York City.

“These exhibitions offer potent opportunities to explore the common threads that connect us—our relationship to nature, our forebears, and the ways we shape and are shaped by our surroundings,” says Public Art Fund Executive & Artistic Director Nicholas Baume. “Each artist’s work invites reflection and engagement, transforming our shared spaces into sites of discovery, community, and contemplation.”