Join artist Genesis Belanger and Public Art Fund Senior Curator Melanie Kress for a conversation about Genesis Belanger: Heads or Tails, the artist’s first major public exhibition in New York. On view in City Hall Park, the presentation brings together three site-responsive sculptural installations that draw on familiar elements of the civic landscape to consider ideas of value, justice, authenticity, and artifice. 

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Belanger is known for psychologically charged sculptures and tableaux that examine consumer culture, advertising, and the ways objects can stand in for human emotions and experiences. For Heads or Tails, she extends this approach into the public realm, transforming park features into intriguing scenes: birds plucking pennies from a fountain, artificial fruit trees situated among living plants, and two reimagined figures of Lady Justice. In conversation with Kress, Belanger will discuss the development of the exhibition, her transition from intimate works to large-scale outdoor sculpture, and how working in a civic space shaped her thinking about monumentality, symbolism, and the contradictions embedded in everyday life. Together, they will consider how sculpture can alter our perception of familiar public spaces and invite new ways of thinking about them. 

Genesis Belanger’s practice is centered on the creation of sculptural objects and tableaux that draw from, and critique, the aesthetics of capitalist production and consumption. Working in a multitude of materials and techniques, including porcelain, stoneware, metal, wood, upholstery, and painting, Belanger creates psychologically charged mise-en-scènes, creating objects that act as surrogates for human feeling or experience. Her work considers the ways in which advertising manipulates our psychology; the dynamics of consumption; issues of privacy in our increasingly online world; and coping mechanisms for the overwhelm. 

About the Talks 

Public Art Fund Talks, organized in collaboration with The Cooper Union, connect compelling contemporary artists to a broad public by establishing a dialogue about artistic practices and public art. The Talks series features internationally renowned artists who offer insights into artmaking and its personal, social, and cultural contexts. The core values of creative expression and democratic access to culture and learning shared by both Public Art Fund and The Cooper Union are embodied in this ongoing collaboration. In the spirit of accessibility to the broadest and most diverse public, the Talks are offered free of charge.