How Art Made Central Park a Happening Place

Like most of New York City’s landscape and cultural climate, Central Park has gone through many changes since its inception. Opened to the public in 1858, it became the first landscaped urban park in the history of the United States, and thereby inspired a nation-wide zeitgeist for urban ecology. But its lineage is also rife with controversy. Despite being a public park, Central Park has actually displaced and ostracized many local New York City communities over the years. In order to create the park, existing communities, such as a settlement of Black owned properties called Seneca Village, were seized through eminent domain and razed. It would also be profoundly remiss not to mention that the entirety of the land where the park and the rest of the island of Manhattan is situated, was acquired from the Lenape peoples by Dutch settler colonists through dubious means (see: Connolly, 2018).

Due to a combination of mismanagement of city funds, bureaucratic corruption and policies leading to racial bias and inequity, Central Park was blighted during the mid-twentieth century. Newspapers were replete with stories of violence and danger lurking in the park. Surely, some accounts were sensationalized, but being in Central Park after dark instilled fear in the hearts and minds of many New Yorkers. However, at the height of its disarray, the park experienced an unlikely renaissance. Around midnight on November 16, 1966, thousands of people gathered in the park’s largest section known as Sheep Meadow, to view the Leonid meteor showers. Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate. Particularly cloudy skies made the viewing impossible, especially when matched with the existing light pollution coming from New York’s cityscape. Nevertheless, the event became a realization that the park could be (and should be) a safe space at all times of the day. The result was a revolutionary intergenerational endeavor that embodied progressive educational theories through the lens of art.

The city’s park commissioner at the time was Thomas Hoving, who previously worked as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After the meteor shower event, which he called a “happening,” appropriating the name from the avant-garde art movement that had emerged at the end of the 1950s. Hoving envisioned an entire program of happenings within Central Park.

Allan Kaprow was the first artist to coin the term “happening” to describe the zeitgeist of modern artists turning everyday situations and experiences into unique art performances, which were often participatory and collaborative. Kaprow’s philosophy for a democratized art form recognizes the importance of art within educational and civic settings. During the mid to late 1960s he collaborated with renowned progressive educator Herbert Kohl on a curriculum called the Other Ways Project, which was implemented in the Berkeley public school system in Berkeley, California. Art critic Géraldine Gourbe (2020) explains that, “the directors (Kaprow and Kohl) were deeply convinced that learning could benefit from imagination and creating things oneself, rather than competing for diplomas and specialized skills.” Critical thinking was supported via projects such as SUPPOSE…, which incorporated a type of “score” that avant-garde artists used to elicit participation from viewers. In SUPPOSE… the artists asked public school students to consider the possibilities for turning everyday objects, social relationships and experiences into extraordinary events. Examples include prompts such as “suppose you saw basketball as a dance,” “suppose you had to make music with only a rubber band,” “suppose you could find architecture in a junk yard.” Each of these prompts were intended to familiarize teachers and students to nurturing the imaginary and creative process utilized by artists (Gourbe, 2020).

Artistic happenings were a catalyst for empowerment endeavors throughout communities during the late 1960s because of their embodiment of redemptive and generative themes. This coincided with the progressive education movement, which began to focus on experiential learning rather than the more traditional rote and didactic forms of pedagogy. Kaprow and Kohl’s work in Berkeley was intended for the student body, made up of largely Black and Latino students, to express themselves by exploring their community and playfully responding to the sights, sounds and situations that enveloped them. Many projects had a literacy element and promoted health and wellness. They took students out into the city to study urban graffiti, encouraging them to document and then contextualize the words and phrases they observed. They brought in Mike Spino, a well known track and field coach whose methods include fusing running with mindfulness and meditation. The result was basketball poetry, a unique experience where Spino gathered students and educators on school basketball courts, not to physically engage in a game of hoops, but to envision and enact the game of basketball through the lens of poetry and spirituality.

With public space in cities at a premium, parks provide ample opportunities for artistic placemaking and happenings. In theory Central Park never should have been a polarizing place. But it was conceived in an era when slavery still existed, and certainly the racial bias of the subsequent Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras extended the white supremacist hegemony over the city’s governance and resources. For most of its existence, the park was a fraught battleground for race relations. So although its architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux thought of Central Park as a social and environmental solution to the crowded conditions and urbanization of the surrounding city, by including in its design spaces for music, visual art, sports and outdoor education; Central Park became a symbol of the city’s social and racial inequity (see: Plater, 2020).

Thomas Hoving was well aware of how the arts were influencing the culture at large. Due to his background as an arts administrator, Hoving had insight and access to New York City’s cultural scene and utilized these connections to bring art into the park. The Annual New York Avant Garde Festival was in its fourth year when it was held in Central Park on September 9th, 1966. The event featured a happening by Kaprow titled Towers. Kaprow instructed participants (both adults and children) to roll tires down a hill with the objective being to knock over wooden posts draped in fabric. If the participant was successful in knocking down the post, a horn would blast in celebration.

Hoving and the New York City Parks Department’s hiring of Phyllis Yampolsky to be the park’s official artist-in-residence cemented its commitment to bringing art to the public on a consistent basis. Yampolsky came into the job well versed in happenings, having participated in several at Judson Memorial Church. In his 2009 memoir, Hoving reminisces that:

“One of her ideas was to take a series of six-foot-high blank canvases, staple them together and stretch them out on poles over a hundred feet or so. Brushes and paint would be available for kids and grown-ups, too, to paint whatever they wanted. We put one up on the lawn near 79th Street with a squad of recreation Parkies supervising. PR ace Mary Nichols alerted the press and it was a splendid, all-day controlled riot of the visual arts resulting in a marvelously crazy canvas palimpsest. When dry, we cut it up and presented it to some of the artists. The caper was so successful that Yampolski recreated it in the other boroughs. ABC TV called it a ‘Happening.’ From then on anything I did that seemed unstructured and spontaneous was called a ‘Hoving Happening'” (quoted in Hoving, 2009).

Other artful happenings Yampolski and Hoving directed included a one-day festival where the park’s historic Belvedere Castle was converted into a fun house, with a giant balloon sculpture that floated in the nearby Belvedere Lake; as well as a castle building workshop for kids.

Unfortunately Hoving’s legacy includes the disastrous Harlem on My Mind exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was protested by Black artists for being hypocritical and racially biased by not including the Harlem community (see: Baum, Robles and Yount, 2021). It was a teachable moment for Hoving, who offered a tepid apology for his grave error shortly after the show opened. His efforts for supporting art in the park were far more productive, accessible and inclusive, and has clearly made a lasting impact on how the park is utilized.

Today, art is an integral part in connecting and uplifting the many diverse communities that live in proximity to Central Park, such as Harlem. In the spirit of the Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, the arts non-profit, Creative Time organized an exhibition Drifting in Daylight, which included interactive and immersive works of art like Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos (2015) was a contemporary iteration of an avant-garde happening that reclaimed the park for the Black community. Expressing the fraught racial history of Central Park and the impact Black music and art has had on the American landscape, Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos transformed the park into lively participatory performances of music, dance and spoken word. The work of art incorporated lively carnival-esque marches throughout the park’s pathways and trails, and regularly scheduled social gatherings that took place under a revival tent situated on top of the park’s Great Hill. Joseph also held weekly art salons and picnics for the nearby Harlem community on the Great Lawn.

Art in parks helps people to become more connected to their city and one another. Author and environmental literature scholar, Cheryll Glotfelty (2012) states that “in essence, to connect with a place entails forming an emotional or imaginative attachment to the place.” This is especially true when the types of art being presented are participatory, multisensory and experiential. Happenings are a great form of art for public spaces because they can be implemented on a small and tight budget and done impromptu in most cases. All that is truly required is the power of people coming together, a sense of innovation and an understanding of personalization.

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References, Notes, Suggested Reading: 

Baum, Kelly, Robles, Maricelle and Yount, Sylvia. ““Harlem on Whose Mind?”: The Met and Civil Rights,” The Met Blog, 17 February 2021. https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2021/harlem-on-my-mind

Connolly, Colleen. “True Native New Yorkers can Never Truly Reclaim Their Land,” Smithsonian Magazine, 5 October 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-native-new-yorkers-can-never-truly-reclaim-their-homeland-180970472/

Glotfelty, Cheryll, Armbruster, Karla, and Lynch, Tom. 2012. The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Gourbe, Géraldine, “Allan Kaprow, Herbert Kohl, Other Ways Project,” Switch on Paper, 30 July 2020. https://www.switchonpaper.com/en/society/counterculture/allan-kaprow-herbert-kohl-other-ways-project/

Warsh, Marie. “Happenings: Art, play, and urban revitalization in 1960s Central Park,” The Gotham Center for New York City History, 21 February 2019. https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/happenings-art-play-and-urban-revitalization-in-1960s-central-park

Hoving, Thomas. 2009. Artful Tom, A Memoir, New York: Artnet. http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/hoving/artful-tom-chapter-twenty-six-6-5-09.asp