High Line Art Announces The Park’s Spring 2025 Art Season

Mika Rottenberg, Foot Fountain (pink), 2024. Installation view, Antimatter Factory / Retrospective at Museum Tinguely, Basel. Image: © Mika Rottenberg, Courtesy of Mika Rottenberg and Hauser & Wirth

The Spring season’s public artwork include works by Britta Marakatt-Labba, Mika Rottenberg, Tai Shani, and Zhang Xu Zhan.

The High Line announced the new artwork exhibitions that will be presented to millions of parkgoers in the Spring of 2025. Created by internationally-recognized artists—Britta Marakatt-Labba, Mika Rottenberg, Tai Shani, and Zhang Xu Zhan—these artworks offer the public a range of topics to consider and engage with, in the unique setting of the elevated park. Over the course of the season, and throughout 2025, visitors will encounter within this group of artworks themes and connections across cultures regarding spirituality, the body, the environment, and more, in forms that range from natural materiality to the brightly cartoonish and humorous.

The 2025 art program began with Zhang Xu Zhan’s exhibition of video works for High Line Channel, and will be followed by sculptural commissions by Britta Marakatt-Labba, Tai Shani, and Mika Rottenberg beginning in April.

“Each artist plants such a unique intervention into the landscape of the High Line,” said Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, who commissioned the artworks for the High Line. “I hope visitors enjoy finding their own resonances within the specific cultural references and clever perspectives 2025’s artist commissions offer.”

HIGH LINE COMMISSIONS

Britta Marakatt-Labba

Urmodern

On view April 2025 – March 2026

On the High Line between Gansevoort and Little West 12th Streets

For her commission for the High Line, Britta Marakatt-Labba draws from her cultural heritage as Sámi, the Indigenous transnational population of Sápmi, a region that stretches across parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. To sit on the High Line amid the birch trees between Little West 12th and Gansevoort Streets, Marakatt-Labba will present Urmodern, which, from Swedish, translates to “primordial mother.”

Sámi mythology is guided by the animistic belief that each stone, plant, and body of water have a spirit living inside of them, and the cosmos and the earth were created and remain protected by goddesses, highlighting women’s pivotal position in Sámi culture. Through this lens, Urmodern serves as a representation of these female deities. The boulder-like base of the work is made of green Masi quartz found in Finnmark, close to the artist’s home, topped with the head of the goddess, rendered in bronze. Marakatt-Labba’s contribution to the High Line underscores the importance of environmental stewardship on a global stage, engaging audiences in critical dialogues about indigenous rights, feminism, and ecological sustainability.

Marakatt-Labba is renowned for her contemporary artistic representation and visual storytelling methods that bridge Sámi culture and the Nordic landscape. She employs vibrant colors and duodji techniques (traditional Sámi handicraft) to create intricate embroidery work, for which she threads fine wool, silk, and linen onto white fabric grounds. Her pieces serve as powerful narratives, addressing issues such as land rights, environmental concerns, and cultural preservation, while challenging stereotypes about indigenous peoples. Marakatt-Labba’s art serves as a poignant reflection of Sámi life and the enduring connection between the Sámi people and their land.

Britta Marakatt-Labba (b. 1951, Idivuoma, Sweden) lives and works in Övre Soppero, Sweden.

Mika Rottenberg

Foot Fountain (pink)

On view April 2025 – March 2026

On the High Line at 30th Street

Mika Rottenberg presents the colorful Foot Fountain (pink) on the High Line along 30th Street. Originally created for an exhibition at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, the sculpture stands ten feet tall, takes the shape of a giant pink foot and lower-leg, and is topped with a working sprinkler. The creature like work is playfully dotted with tongues sticking out from small lipsticked mouths, and each toenail is painted haphazardly with bright red nail polish. Activated by a set of pedals installed nearby, Foot Fountain (pink) is an irreverent take on the tradition of classical fountains that are commonly plopped into the middle of a square or in gardens, their water forever self-contained. In contrast, Foot Fountain (pink) is more intimately connected with its surroundings, nurturing the place and people by where it sits with water.

Rottenberg is devoted to a rigorous practice that combines film, architectural installation, and sculpture to explore ideas of labor and the production of value in our contemporary hyper-capitalist world. Using traditions of both cinema and sculpture, she seeks out locations around the world where specific systems of production and commerce are in place, such as a pearl factory in China, and a Calexico border town. Rottenberg connects seemingly disparate places and things to create elaborate and subversive visual narratives. By weaving fact and fiction together, she highlights the inherent beauty and absurdity of our contemporary existence.

Mika Rottenberg (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina) lives and works in New York, New York.

Tai Shani

The Sun Is a Flame That Haunts The Night

On view April 2025 – March 2026

On the High Line between 28th and 30th Streets

On the High Line between 28th and 30th Streets, Tai Shani presents The Sun Is a Flame That Haunts The Night, a series of three towering candlesticks. The almost cartoon-like candlestick, rendered here in resin with a bright and shiny flame that lights up at night, is a recurring image throughout her body of work. For Shani, who often creates work that explores spirituality, mortality, and mythology, the candle has become a multivalent object — drawing to mind a vigil or memorial candle as saliently as it symbolizes hope and healing. Candlesticks also have links to manifestation, the occult, and witchcraft, all of which have become often closely associated with fourth wave feminism — subjects that permeate the artist’s films, writings, performances, and installations. Though melting candles often represent the passage of time, The Sun Is a Flame That Haunts The Night stays forever lit, paused on the High Line — a respite where one loses sense of time and space.

Shani’s practice encompasses performance, film, photography, and sculptural installations. Taking inspiration from punk rock, cult cinema, Greek mythology, feminist theory, and science fiction, Shani creates dark, fantastical worlds, brimming with utopian potential. These deeply affective works often combine rich and complex monologues with arresting, saturated installations, manifesting equally disturbing and divine images in the mind of the viewer. Shani is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner together with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo.

Tai Shani (b.1976, London, England) lives and works in London, England.

HIGH LINE CHANNEL

Zhang Xu Zhan

Animism

On view January 21 – March 17, 2025

On the High Line at 14th Street

As part of the High Line’s nightly-screening video program, Zhang Xu Zhan presents Animism, an exhibition of three stop-motion films: Compound Eyes of Tropical (2020–2022), AT5 (2019-2020), and Si So Mi (2017–18). All three films are populated with nature spirits, mythical creatures, and musical instrument-playing animals. While this may seem, on the surface, like the stuff of fairy tales, Zhang Xu’s absurd, dark, and sometimes grotesque imagery presents a cinematic universe more akin to a fairytale’s grisly underworld than a Disney utopia.

Artist Zhang Xu Zhan works across various media, including video art, stop motion animation, sculpture, and installation. He was born into a family that specializes in crafting joss paper offerings—effigies to be burnt during funerals and religious ceremonies. His practice is deeply connected to this tradition, often exploring themes of ritual and death, and using paper as a key material. Zhang Xu’s animations explore the interplay between Taiwanese culture and global influences, showing how music, traditions, and folktales evolve and transform as they travel across regions, countries, continents, and languages. By mixing these stories and songs, he creates a universal vision where boundaries between cultures—or even between humans and animals—become blurred.

Zhang Xu Zhan (b. 1988, Taipei, Taiwan) lives and works in Taiwan.

SUPPORT

Lead support for High Line Art comes from Amanda and Don Mullen. Major support is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, and Charina Endowment Fund.

High Line Art is supported, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams.

ABOUT HIGH LINE ART

Founded in 2009, High Line Art commissions and produces a wide array of artworks on the High Line, including site-specific commissions, exhibitions, performances, video programs, and a series of billboard interventions. Led by Cecilia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, and presented by the High Line, the art program invites artists to think of creative ways to engage with the unique architecture, history, and design of the park, and to foster a productive dialogue with the surrounding neighborhood and urban landscape.

For more information on High Line Art, please visit thehighline.org/art.

ABOUT THE HIGH LINE

The High Line is both a nonprofit organization and a public park on the West Side of Manhattan. Through our work with communities on and off the High Line, we’re devoted to reimagining public spaces to create connected, healthy neighborhoods and cities.

Built on a historic, elevated rail line, the High Line was always intended to be more than a park. You can walk through the gardens, view art, experience a performance, enjoy food or beverage, or connect with friends and neighbors—all while enjoying a unique perspective of New York City.

Nearly 100% of our annual budget comes through donations. The High Line is owned by the City of New York and we operate under a license agreement with NYC Parks.

For more information, visit thehighline.org and follow us on Facebook, X, Instagram.

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