The Four Freedoms Park Conservancy announced on Thursday that it has commissioned the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei for a monumental installation on Roosevelt Island that will kick off a new public art initiative by the conservancy.
The artist’s work will be on view starting in September at the state park, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous speech on human rights is memorialized in bronze and granite. Ai plans to cover sections of the park under camouflage netting and metal scaffolding, which the artist said in an interview “is my personal commentary on what is unfolding politically and culturally in our time.”
The project is the artist’s first major public artwork in New York since 2017 and is the first piece in an initiative, Art x Freedom, that provides an annual budget of about $250,000 for works transforming the park. (In addition to having their art realized, each artist will receive a $25,000 prize.)