Times Square Arts & Powerhouse Arts Celebrate Valentine’s Day with Love in Times Square

Kelsey Breen, Botanical Gardens rendering

The 18th iteration of the public art commission explores love through craft, care, and everyday acts of making with a human-sized pop-up book.

—On View February 12–19, 2026—

Times Square Arts, in partnership with Powerhouse Arts, is pleased to announce the 2026 commission for Love in Times Square, the annual public art commission presented each February in celebration of Valentine’s Day at the crossroads of the world. The installation, Making Love, transforms Manhattan’s Duffy Square into an immersive homage to love, craft, and the creative makers of New York City. On view from February 12-19, 2026, the work also serves as the backdrop for Love in Times Square, the district’s annual weddings, proposals and vow renewals that take place on Valentine’s Day.

Since 2009, Times Square Arts has commissioned new works for Love in Times Square, which serves as the ceremonial heart of the city’s Valentine’s Day celebrations, complete with surprise marriage proposals, weddings, and vow renewals beneath the flashing lights of iconic billboards. For its 18th iteration, the program marks a significant evolution from what has previously been a design competition: for the first time, the commission centers on the city’s makers—fabricators, craftspeople, and artisans—whose labor and ingenuity shape New York’s cultural and physical landscape, yet often remain unseen, inviting them to take center stage and feel the love.

Presented with Brooklyn-based fabrication hub Powerhouse Arts, Making Love foregrounds the artistry of fabricators often working behind-the-scenes to bring our city’s creative endeavors to life. Inspired by paper peep-shows and theatrical set design, Making Love takes the form of a larger-than-life carousel book––a three-dimensional pop-up that opens into an immersive and multi-dimensional story with a circular narrative. Visitors are invited to step inside and move across a sequence of four distinct scenes that represent a crossroads of experiences and cityscapes where one might encounter love – at a botanical garden, canal, or even the corner bodega. Visitors are encouraged to move through the structure, linger within each vignette, and in one scene, take away an artist-designed love note.

“This year’s commission for Love in Times Square with Powerhouse Arts celebrates the fabricators, artisans, and makers who are so essential to our city’s creative endeavors—honoring love not only as romance, but as care, collaboration, and the shared act of building something together,” said Jean Cooney, Director of Times Square Arts.

“At Powerhouse Arts we’re often working behind the scenes to bring dynamic visions to life for artists, museums, and institutions across the city. Making Love flips that script. Our makers are the artists and their love for what they do is front and center as they honor the everyday acts of love and care that build New York City,” said Brittni Collins, Director of Public Art at Powerhouse Arts.

Featuring the work of artists and Powerhouse fabricators Lisa D. Archigian, Kelsey Breen, Nellie Davis, Cythali Sapuis, and Jacqueline Veliz, Making Love celebrates not only romance, but love as labor, craft, and collective creation. 

ABOUT THE WORKS

• Love Letters by Cythali Sapuis — The Love Letters scene creates an intimate, immersive backdrop for three weddings on Valentine’s Day as a part of Love in Times Square. Outfitted with envelopes holding love letters, the environment invites guests into a shared, embodied experience of intimacy and attention.
• Love in the Gardens by Kelsey Breen — Inspired by visits to the New York Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, this scene explores memory through a child’s sense of scale, where first encounters feel oversized and vivid. Breen’s work reflects how environments imprint our inner lives, allowing memory to distort, reappear, and evolve over time.
• Love on the Canal by Nellie Davis — Depicting the Gowanus Canal, this scene playfully renders a once-toxic waterway as a site of fragile rebirth, where urban wildlife and beauty emerge alongside the unresolved trauma of colonization and industrial harm. Neighboring Powerhouse Arts, the Gowanus Canal has become a place the fabricator has grown to love—fostering a sense of belonging and community despite everything.
• Love for the Bodega by Jacqueline Veliz & Lisa D. Archigian — A classic New York City bodega becomes a tribute to the unseen labor that keeps the city alive—an intimate third space of care, memory, and community shaped by late-night workers, fabricators, and dreamers. Created by two New York City-born artists, the scene honors immigrant resilience, shared hustle, and the quiet magic made possible long after the city sleeps.

Find more details on Valentine’s Day programming in Times Square here.

ABOUT TIMES SQUARE ARTS
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world’s most iconic urban places. Through the Square’s electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance’s own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators, such as Charles Gaines, Joan Jonas, Jeffrey Gibson, Pamela Council, Mel Chin, and Kehinde Wiley, to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a cultural district and place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the arts program ensures these qualities remain central to the district’s unique identity.

ABOUT POWERHOUSE ARTS
Powerhouse Arts (PHA) is a not-for-profit organization committed to creative expression. Located in a purpose-built facility in Brooklyn, PHA convenes an extended network of art and fabrication professionals and educators who co-create and share artistic practices vital to the wellbeing of artists and the communities to which they belong. PHA offers fabrication programs in ceramics, print, and public art; alongside membership studios including the Community Ceramics Studio and MGC Community Print Studio, and textile workshop, The Alpha Workshops; and spaces for education, events, and public engagement. Learn more at www.powerhousearts.org.