Client: NYU Langone Center for Musculoskeletal Care

Location: New York, NY, United States

Completion date: 2012

Artwork budget: $30,000

Project Team

Artist

Sarah Haviland

Sarah Haviland Studio

Art Consultant

Jodi Moise

Montefiore Health System

Industry Resource

Vanessa Hoheb

Polich Tallix Fine Art Foundry

Overview

Signature sculpture for the Center for Musculoskeletal Care, NYU Medical Center, 4th Floor, 333 38th Street at First Avenue, NYC, completed in 2012.
Bronze cast with blue-gray patina, 24”x45”x16”

Goals

For this new state-of-the-art health facility, public art curator Jodi Moise sought a life-size, iconic human form to suggest positive life-affirming activity. She tapped abstract-figurative sculptor Sarah Haviland based on her prior work, and together they recognized the appropriate design for the space: a simplified female body curled in the form of a spiral, the beginning of life and motion.

Process

Curl originated in bent plywood, built by the artist with curving planes like musical instruments; it combines pure geometric shapes with select contours of the human body. It was cast in bronze and finished with a rich blue-gray patina, courtesy of Polich Tallix Foundry. It was installed at hip level on a handmade cement base matching the Musculoskeletal Center’s golden travertine walls.

Additional Information

Curator Jodi Moise comments, “Curl is the first work patients, physicians, and staff view upon entering the CMC. It embodies the CMS’s mission to help people heal through movement. Curl has become so successful that many of the staff have employed it as their screensaver image. It is clear to me that Sarah understood the space and the specific needs that the sculpture had to embody. Curl is a site-specific work that has become the identity of the Center for Musculoskeletal Care.”