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This Ethereal Installation is Transforming LaGuardia

At LaGuardia Airport’s new Terminal B, artist Sarah Sze’s spellbinding sculpture stops time
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Artist Sarah Sze with Shorter Than the Day, the site-specific work she created for LaGuardia Airport in New York City as part of a series of commissions by LaGuardia Gateway Partners and Public Art Fund.Meghan Marin

Midway through the installation of Sarah Sze’s site-specific artwork at LaGuardia Airport, the clock stopped. On March 22, under executive order by Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York State officially went on pause as part of emergency measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

But Terminal B, the centerpiece of a comprehensive overhaul to LaGuardia by LaGuardia Gateway Partners, the Governor and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, depended on the sculpture’s completion to open. So Sze and her team—all deemed essential workers—labored on, working through early May to finish the artwork, itself a standstill representation of hours gone by. 

Sarah Sze, masked and on the job at LaGuardia during the installation of her sculpture this past May. 

“An airport is a portal into the displacement of time and space,” reflects Sze, one of four artists commissioned by LaGuardia Gateway Partners and Public Art Fund to create works for Terminal B. Her sculpture—a monumental assemblage of scaffolding and photographic imagery that is suspended through two levels of the headhouse—visualizes both time and space, creating what Sze calls a “record of light.”  

Affixed to ethereal rods of powder-coated steel are some 1,200 photographs of the sky above New York, all takenover the course of a day. Blown-out snapshots capture the blaze of high noon; gentle gradients reveal the soft glow of dawn and dusk; and gaps stand in for the darkness of night while creating an opening through which to observe the spectrum, which encloses a spherical void. Taken as a whole, the sculpture distills time into a poetic brushstroke of sorts, one that will leave travelers in awe on their way to their gates and coming through arrivals.  

The artwork as seen from below in the terminal’s arrivals hall.

Meghan Marin

“I am always trying to make sculptures that look radical, unlike anything you’ve seen before,” notes Sze, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner whose intricate sculptures, often made up of everyday objects, explore themes of memory and the mundane. Public art has always been an important part of her practice, most recently in the case of her celebrated tiled installation for New York City’s Second Avenue Subway. “I’m committed to having the biggest audience possible, having art be accessible, be owned, shared, and seen by the many.” 

A feat of engineering, her concept required a leap of faith on the part of LaGuardia Gateway Partners and Public Art Fund. To translate it from a drawn proposal into a structurally sound sculpture, Sze worked closely with longtime collaborators at Amuneal, the Philadelphia-based fabrication studio, devising an intricate system wherein small components appear woven, like twigs in a nest, creating the illusion of a floating sphere. While there was no welding done on-site, elements were added and subtracted to make sure the void properly appears and disappears from view. “It had to feel like a cloud—uneven but not unbalanced, teetering on a thread,” says Sze. That fragility extends to the photos, printed with polyester pigments onto aluminum panels that were laser-cut to resemble torn paper. “It was important that they felt like they could fall off at any moment and float away.” 

The process was exhausting but also invigorating. “Everyone made a heroic effort to get it done so Terminal B could open,” Sze explains, noting that no one was required to work on-site during the pandemic but team members still opted to do so. “We were driven by the belief that finishing the piece would be a sign of light in a dark time, a show of resilience, a symbol of functioning government, and a reminder that art has the capacity to be uplifting.”