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Calling all artists, amateur and professional alike: Brooklyn’s Prospect Park wants to display your artwork. In celebration of the park’s 150th anniversary, the Prospect Park Alliance (the nonprofit sustaining the park in partnership with the City) is presenting a collaborative public art project entitled The Connective Project.

To commemorate the big milestone, the Alliance announced restoration plans for the park’s Rose Garden. The first phase of this restoration is raising awareness of this little-known area of the park through a massive community art project, conceptualized by AREA4 and Reddymade Architecture + Design to be a display that would engage the public in some way.

 

Beginning June 1, anyone can submit their photos, art, prose, or verse inspired by their love of the park to be featured in the Alliance’s online gallery. From there, select pieces will be printed and transformed into thousands of weather-resistant pinwheels that will be displayed across the two-and-a-half acre Rose Garden. The 7,000 pinwheels serve as a colorful, vibrant moving expression of the engaging community at the heart of Prospect Park.

“When we set out to plan our major events celebrating the park’s 150th, our key goal was the engage the community in the celebration, which The Connective Project achieves in a beautiful and innovative way,” said Sue Donoghue, president of Prospect Park Alliance in a statement. “We are looking to involve all of the diverse communities that consider the park ‘Brooklyn’s Backyard’ in the future vision of this corner of the Park, one of the few remaining landscapes untouched by restoration.”

Reddymade Architecture + Design founder Suchi Reddy hopes The Connective Project will not only bring whimsy and color to the park but also facilitate a dialogue in the community about the importance of public space. “The installation was conceived of as architecture,” says Reddy. “Architecture is accessible and tangible and easily translatable. We wanted to create something that would engage the public in a dialogue which we feel is so important right now.”

Funded in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies with support from New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital and Tesla, Inc., the final installation will feature work not only from the general public, but also from emerging artists and notable New Yorkers.

Interested in submitting your own work to potentially be featured in the park? Submissions will be accepted here on the first of the month, and the final installation will be on view from July 7-17.

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