Coo! The Next High Line Plinth Commission Is a Giant Pigeon

The next sculpture for the High Line? A giant pigeon. A monumental statue of New York City’s most ubiquitous feathered friend will touch down on the High Line Plinth at 10th Avenue and West 30th Streets in October.

The High Line pigeon is the work of Colombian artist Iván Argote. Titled , the aluminum statue will tower over visitors at 16 feet tall. Cast in a foundry in Mexico, the sculpture is currently en route to New York, on a truck at the border.

“I think it’s going to be really uncanny—frightening, but at the same time with a kind of charm,” Argote told me.

“Pigeons are animals that trigger very deep reactions in New Yorkers,” High Line Art director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani added. “There are people who completely love the community of pigeons and are obsessed, and then there are people who are literally disgusted and horrified by pigeons.”

The world’s oldest domesticated bird, pigeons have functioned as messengers and also been kept as beloved pets. But in more recent history, they’ve become something of a maligned creature, often likened to “rats with wings.”

Argote wanted to celebrate the beauty of these birds, elevating this humble animal to a status normally reserved for leaders of state. If animals appear in monuments, it’s normally a horse, bearing a military leader.

“Our treatment of animals is in general very cruel,” Argote said.

The 40-year-old been able to relate to pigeons since the early years of his career, living as a young migrant in Paris and creating work in the streets. “Building things in the sidewalk or in the subway, it was all about paying attention to and making precious again this banality of daily life,” he said.

The artist has done several projects about public monuments, digitally removing men from equestrian statues and surrounding sculptures with mirrored boxes that essentially erase them from the landscape. He also has a fallen monument, Descanso, in the current Venice Biennale, a replica of Madrid’s the statue of Christopher Columbus.

is a rumination on extinction, serving as a reminder that giant lizards once roamed our planets, but that birds are their descendants.

“I like this narrative that birds are what remain of dinosaurs today,” Argote said, suggesting that perhaps humans will one day too go extinct, leaving a pigeon-like creature as our only trace on the planet.

High Line Art announced plans to commission public sculptures for the plinth, located on the Spur, the park’s final section, in 2017. The first finalists were announced in 2017, with the project kicking off with  by Simone Leigh and  by Sam Durant.

Argote was one two artists chosen from 12 finalists for the second round of plinth proposals unveiled in November 2020. The other winner, Pamela Rosenkranz, has her hot pink monument on view through September. Each project lasts for 18 months.

Maquettes of shortlisted candidates for the fifth and sixth sculptures in the series are on view on the High Line at the Coach Passage at West 30th Street through September. The artists are Dana Awartani, Leilah Babirye, Natalie Ball, Sammy Baloji, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Rachel Feinstein, Camille Henrot, Mire Lee, Candice Lin, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Emeka Ogboh, and Gala Porras-Kim.

“It’s a sculpture that talks about many other quite profound issues such as the relationship between the human world and the animal world, and ideas of immigration and who has the right to be the guest in New York city,” Alemani said.

When choosing an artwork for the plinth, “you want something that can capture people’s attention in a second,” she added. She thinks is up to the challenge.

“We can’t wait to see what the reaction will be from people and the cars driving underneath,” Alemani said. “It will be fun!”