All Photos By Gail
By the time Improvisations in the Park reaches its final weeks, Larry Bell’s glass sculptures feel less like a temporary installation and more like part of Madison Square Park’s visual memory. Since opening in the early fall of 2025, the exhibition has slowly revealed itself through shifting light, changing weather, and now, the stark clarity of winter. When I visited a couple of weeks ago, snow still lingered on the ground from a recent storm, and the park felt hushed — an unexpectedly perfect setting for Bell’s work as it prepares to disappear at the end of March.
Bell, a Taos-based artist with a career spanning nearly seven decades, is best known for his mastery of glass and his central role in the Light and Space movement that emerged in Southern California in the 1960s. His work has always asked viewers to pay attention to atmosphere — to light, reflection, and perception itself. In Madison Square Park, those concerns have played out on a grand scale. This is Bell’s first public art commission in New York and his largest outdoor presentation to date, spreading vibrantly colored glass cubes and nested forms across six lawns within the park’s 6.2 acres.
Over the past several months, the sculptures have been quietly improvising alongside the city. In bright autumn sun, their architectural glass surfaces bounced color outward, reflecting trees, sky, and passersby. As winter arrived, the works sharpened and cooled, their reflective and translucent qualities heightened by bare branches, low light, and snow-dampened sound. Bell has often described atmosphere as one of his materials, and here it became a true collaborator — transforming the work daily, sometimes hourly, depending on cloud cover, temperature, and time of day.
The exhibition’s title nods to music, and that sense of variation feels apt. The cubes and standing wall sculptures — ranging from six to eight feet tall — are simple in form but endlessly mutable in experience. As you move through the park, the works appear and disappear along pathways, first glimpsed at a distance, then encountered up close. Some of the pieces debuted here for the first time, sitting comfortably alongside existing works, reinforcing the idea that Bell’s practice is both cumulative and open-ended.
Seeing Improvisations in the Park in winter underscores one of its quiet achievements. Rather than fighting the season, the sculptures seem to accept it, absorbing the muted palette and reflective calm that comes with the cold. In the freeze, the glass feels sharper, more meditative, and almost architectural — as if temporarily borrowing the stillness of the park itself.
As the exhibition enters its final month, there’s a sense of closure without finality. Bell’s works have spent months responding to New York’s rhythms, and now they are winding down at the coldest point of the year. Soon, the lawns will return to their familiar openness, but for those who encountered the exhibition — especially in moments of snow and silence — Improvisations in the Park will linger as a reminder of how profoundly light, weather, and time can shape what we see.
