Street Art Mural at FiDi Construction Site Evokes Lower Manhattan as a Tapestry of Color and Texture
“The streets here give you the weird impression of being under the canopy of a forest of gigantic trees,” artist Eirini Linardaki says of Lower Manhattan, recalling the months of urban exploration she undertook after being selected for her most recent commission, “I See the Sky from the Other Side,” a mural surrounding a construction site at 77 Water Street that is eight feet tall and 700 feet long, and depicts a panoramic view of the East River waterfront. “The tall buildings cast giant shadows, and change the colors that reach the ground.”
To capture these colors, Ms. Linardaki set about taking more than 1,000 photographs, with a counterintuitive focus. “I zoomed in very tight to snap pictures of the fabrics people were wearing as they walked along local streets,” she says. “I wanted to capture not only the colors as they appeared in Lower Manhattan’s natural light, but also the texture of the material.” She cites as case in point the Brooklyn Bridge, the towers of which are bathed in yellow and green, while the surface evokes the tactile dimensionality of corduroy, with its ridged, ribbed wales. “That came from a dress that I saw a woman wearing,” Ms. Linardaki recalls. Elsewhere, the local skyline takes on festive print patterns along with tactile look of cloths like muslin, wool, twill, and linen.
“Sometimes I find physical samples of these materials and scan them,” she says. “My goal is to view these surfaces so closely that the texture becomes more visible than the patterns of color. Then I used the result to create a landscape that was no longer glass or steel or brick. This is meant to represent, literally, the cultural fabric of the City, with all its many overlapping communities.”
After scouring her trove of Downtown photos for color and granularity, Ms. Linardaki next began plugging this raw material into the geometric profile of the local skyline. Using Photoshop, she plotted out each pixel in more than 5,600 square feet of vinyl, before sending the finished project to a printer that specializes in art pieces.
“I wanted the mural’s energy to capture the dynamism of a neighborhood that is being transformed,” Ms. Linardaki says, referring to Lower Manhattan’s ongoing evolution from an office district to a residential enclave. “It makes sense that 77 Water Street is being converted from an old office tower into a new apartment building.”
Ms. Linardaki has become renowned in recent years for public art pieces across a range of media, including the sculpture “Working Background” in Penn Station (inspired by the unsung toil of laborers who work within the complex, such as cleaning personnel and train conductors) and the video installation “Diaphanous Pareidolia” at Grand Central Terminal, where five screens offer digital evocations of the Hudson Valley communities served by Metro North. Her work has inspired distinctly postmodern forms of praise, such as “young people who pose in front of the piece in Penn Station, making TikTok videos or taking selfies,” she says. Not long ago, part of a sculpture she created for Owl’s Head Park in Brooklyn was stolen “even though we had bolted it into the ground.” With a laugh, she adds, “if somebody loved it that much, I don’t mind.”
“I See the Sky from the Other Side” was commissioned by the Downtown Alliance (which operates Lower Manhattan’s business improvement district) and ArtBridge, a nonprofit organization that seeks to transform the fencing surrounding New York City construction sites into large-scale art exhibitions.