High Line Art announces Fall 2026 installations

Marianna Simnett, Interlude, 2025. Installation view at Art Basel Parcours 2025. Courtesy of Marianna Simnett and Société, Berlin. Photo by Sebastiano Pellion di Persano.

Fall 2026’s Commissions for High Line Art Continue Explorations of the Year’s Themes of Bodies, Labor, and Infrastructure

The High Line announced the Fall 2026 season of new art commissions and billboard installation, created by an array of artists from around the world. Marianna Simnett, Amol K. Patil, Alvaro Barrington, and Christopher Williams create works in a variety of media that explore themes around bodies, labor, and infrastructure that are also reflected in artworks on the High Line installed earlier in 2026.

The High Line’s new sculptural commissions open in early September with Marianna Simnett’s Interlude, a haunting video installation in a pair of food vendor carts. Amol K. Patil’s The Voices Cast in Dust, a towering bronze jumble of bodies jostling towards the sky, follows later in early October. In November, Alvaro Barrington will present Western Beef-High Line, a tribute to New York City’s multifaceted communities.

“Each of this fall’s commissions considers our relationships to various forms of labor and each other, in revealing and startling ways,” said Ceclia Alemani, the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art. “Marianna Simnett’s concession stand with a video of a solitary vendor transforms a routine work shift into a powerful performance of survival. Amol K. Patil bridges the distance between Mumbai and New York with a bronze sculpture depicting a multitude of figures, a monumental tribute to the labor that supports city life. And Alvaro Barrington’s luminous composition stands as a public celebration of heritage and shared humanity.”

Also opening in September, on the billboard at 18th Street, Christopher Williams presents MODEL (High Line Billboard, 18th Street and 10th Avenue, New York, 10011), centered around a sign of the word “MODEL,” amid sleek new buildings surrounding the High Linein Chelsea.

HIGH LINE COMMISSIONS

Marianna Simnett

Interlude

September 2026 – August 2027

Marianna Simnett presents Interlude, an installation of two concession stands on the High Line at 30th Street near Hudson Yards. Housed inside a radioactive-orange resin cart, the screen displays a looping video depicting a food vendor. As the metal shutter rises, it reveals a solitary figure bathed in neon and fluorescent light, engaging in the rhythmic, seemingly rote task of preparing stadium food. She oozes and squirts condiments onto sweating hotdogs while singing an eerie and melancholic song: “I put a winning ticket in your pocket. A one-way ticket to the next life. You can win, you can sin, you can do anything, in the next life.” The stand has a haunting, viscid quality; even when the shutter is closed, the grime on the metal and the buzz of the cheap lightbulbs remain. By spotlighting this space and the vendor—one who is typically relegated to the background to a point of invisibility—Simnett turns the worker’s shift into a powerful and humanizing performance of agency, despair, and survival.

Simnett is known for her provocative multidisciplinary work that explores vulnerability, pain, metamorphosis, and care. Her work blends dark humor with elements of music, theater, and horror to present psychologically charged scenes and surreal environments.Marianna Simnett (b. 1986, London, United Kingdom) lives and works between Berlin, Germany, and New York, New York.

Amol K. Patil

The Voices Cast in Dust

October 2026 – September 2027

On the High Line at 24th Street, Amol K. Patil’s The Voices Cast in Dust is a monumentalbronze sculpture depicting a melee of human figures merging into a single mass. Errant arms and legs stick out of the pile, from one angle, evoking a sense of collective striving, and from another, a ruthless fight for survival. The work reflects the contradictions of modern cities, where strength should be found in solidarity and community, but instead, workers are pitted against one another, and success is always just out of reach. Patil’s work bridges the experiences of those in Mumbai and New York, drawing parallels between global patterns of aspiration, social immobility, and insecurity. Positioned against the city’s soaring buildings filled with white-collar workers, The Voices Cast in Dust stands as both a tribute and a warning, a monument to the labor that underpins urban life and a reminder of the precarity that defines it.

Patil is a conceptual and performance artist whose work addresses working-class communities and the injustices of the caste system in India. The human body, or references to its presence, recur throughout—often rendered in bronze, and produced in Mumbai. Patil hails from a line of creative resistance: his grandfather was a folk poet and performer, and his father was an avant-garde playwright who chronicled the struggles of Mumbai’s working-class, mills, and sanitation workers. He brings their work into the present, weaving references to and recordings of them throughout his practice. The artist continues their legacy, using his work to share untold stories of urban life. In doing so, Patil sheds light on the fragile foundations of our cities, dependent on invisible and exploitative labor.

Amol K. Patil (b. 1987, Mumbai, India) lives and works between Mumbai, India and Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Alvaro Barrington

Western Beef-High Line

November 2026 – October 2027

For the High Line, Alvaro Barrington presents Western Beef-High Line on the High Line overlooking 14th Street. Resembling a rugged steel industrial billboard, the work swaps traditional commercial vinyl for colored plastic vinyl strips—a material often used in supermarkets and butcher shops. Western Beef-High Line engages in direct dialogue with the Hudson River and the sunset vistas that were once depicted by the Hudson River School, an early American art movement. Inspired by the rhythm of New York City’s streets and the sense of community found on its sidewalks, the artist frames this scene with plastic milk crates, a ubiquitous “readymade” of immigrant neighborhoods, used as everything from a makeshift hoop for a pickup basketball game, to stools and tables. Barrington writes, “we are best served as an immigrant nation, in dialogue with each other…Western Beef-High Line is a contemporary ‘stained glass’ proposition—how can painting be an experience, an event, a meeting point for individual or collective contemplation of who we will choose to become as Americans?” As the sun sets each day and the light pierces the plastic, it reveals a glowing landscape that can only be experienced together, in person, at that exact moment.

Barrington’s practice is deeply rooted in his experiences, coming from an immigrant working community, raised between the Caribbean and Brooklyn. His work considers the idea of home as something lost, found, and reimagined, woven together anew from equal parts of the self, community, and culture. Primarily a painter, Barrington utilizes a tactile, multimedia approach—incorporating burlap, textiles, and industrial readymades like concrete or chainlink fences—to disrupt traditional art historical narratives, and exploreinterconnected histories of cultural production, from the Harlem Renaissance to Modernism.

Alvaro Cadet-Barrington (b. 1983, Caracas, Venezuela) lives and works between London, United Kingdom, and New York, New York.

HIGH LINE BILLBOARD

Christopher Williams

MODEL (High Line Billboard, 18th Street and 10th Avenue, New York, 10011)

On view September – November 2026

Christopher Williams creates photographs that mimic high-end commercial advertising, industrial cataloging, or architectural photography, working with professional studios and technicians to produce a flawless, slick aesthetic. The artist then embeds subtle anomalies—a surface flaw or odd angle—into these seemingly perfect images to unsettle the viewer.

Williams extends this approach to his High Line billboard, centered around the word “MODEL. ” The term not only denotes a fashion model or mockup, but also a system of instruction or control—as in “Model City.” Based on an object from his enamel-on-glass series, Williams’s billboard appears to be an industrial sign yet reveals a handmade brushstroke quality upon closer inspection. It also evokes the woodchip texture of Rauhfaser wallpaper, synonymous with 20th-century European working-class interiors. Juxtaposed against the luxury towers surrounding the High Line, the billboard forces a direct confrontation with modern real estate speculators and developers, asking: whose “Model City” are we actually building?

Christopher Williams (b. 1956, Los Angeles, California) lives in Cologne, Germany and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.

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 a public park on the West Side of Manhattan operated, maintained, and funded by the nonprofit conservancy Friends of the High Line. Through our work with communities on and off the High Line, Friends of the High Line is 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 operating budget comes through donations. The High Line is owned by the City of New York, and we operate the park under a license agreement with NYC Parks.

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

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. Major support of High Line Art digital infrastructure is provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Program support for High Line Art is provided by Sarah Arison, Suzanne Deal Booth, Charlotte Ford, Joyce F. Menschel and Stardust Arts. Additional support is provided by Agnes Gund and Shane Akeroyd.

Amol K. Patil, The Voices Cast in Dust, is made possible in part by the Mondriaan Fund.

High Line Art is supported, in part, with public funds from 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 the Speaker’s Office.

@HighLineArtNYC @mariannasimnett @amolkpatil @alvarobarrington

#ChristopherWilliams