New York’s Public Art Masterpiece ‘Ruckus Manhattan’ Is Back in the Spotlight

The year was 1975, and Red Grooms and Mimi Gross were creating Ruckus Manhattan, one of the most ambitious public art projects of the 20th century, in a vacant lobby space of an office building in New York’s Financial District. It was a fantastical, monumental, hyper-detailed multimedia recreation of city landmarks from Lower Manhattan up to Times Square.

Half a century later, this colossal undertaking is back in the spotlight at the Brooklyn Museum, which is properly billing Gross as the work’s co-creator for the first time. Decidedly not to scale, and populated by garishly cartoonish figures with exaggerated features, is a zany, madcap ode to New York in all its quirky and gritty glory.

“I’m thrilled to have my equal credit,” Gross told me over a video call. Grooms, speaking by telephone, agreed of course, telling me he was “very pleased—she deserves it!”

Former creative partners, who were married at the time, Gross and Grooms oversaw a team of some 20 to 30 artists, dubbed the Ruckus Construction Co. in the work’s creation. Over a period of about 13 months, they built the city in miniature out of papier-mâché, wood, fiberglass, plaster, and other assorted materials. They worked in full view of the public, on the ground floor of 88 Pine Street, a then-new office building designed by I.M. Pei (1917–2019) just a block from Wall Street.

The display included a massive subway car, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink, and the Woolworth Building—topped by a mechanical dragon. The Twin Towers, just two years old at the time, stood 30 feet tall, with kangaroos representing the Australian National Meat Board (an actual World Trade Center tenant), plus a tiny metal figurine of tightrope walker Philippe Petit up on the roof. When the doors finally opened, 50,000 visitors descended over the initial 46-day run. Double that number would come to see it the following year at Marlborough Gallery on East 57th Street.

Celebrating a Creative Partnership

To describe what became his signature style, combining elements of painting, sculpture, and installation art, Grooms coined the term “sculpto-pictorama.” But Gross’s role as co-creator of perhaps his best-known work was obscured nearly from the beginning, when had its run at Marlborough Gallery. The gallery represented Grooms, not Gross, and marketed the show accordingly.

“Mimi is as much a creator and originator of this project as Red is,” Kimberli Gant, the museum’s curator of Modern and contemporary art, told me in a Zoom interview.

Grooms and Gross met in 1958 and were married from 1964 to 1976. Their creative partnership began with a traveling puppet show they took across Italy in 1961 in a horse-drawn carriage painted by Gross.

Back in the States, they went on to stage elaborate sculptural installations, starting with (1967–68), a massive work depicting stylized versions of some of the city’s most famous landmarks that traveled to that year’s Venice Biennale. In Minneapolis, birthplace of Target, there was Discount Store (1970–71) at the Walker Art Center, and at the Guggenheim New York, Astronauts on the Moon (1972). But  took things to another level, with countless little details, like actual bones in the Trinity Church graveyard, and built-in lighting to bring the work to life at night.

It was the Brooklyn Museum’s chief conservator, Lisa Bruno, who first raised the idea of giving contemporary audiences a little taste of the spectacle that was by bringing the two works from the show in the museum’s collection out of storage: , a bright yellow Staten Island ferry with three decks, floating on a sea of blue fabric, and the tawdry , a relic of the city’s unsanitized past, when Times Square was a hotbed of peep shows and porn shops.The timing to showcase this unique piece of New York art history, also seemed perfect as 2025 marked the city’s 400th anniversary.

But as Gant began planning the show, she quickly recognized that Gross’s contributions had been wrongfully overlooked for decades: “This was an opportunity to make sure that she gets the recognition that she should have had regarding this project,” she said.

A City Within in the City

Building the city, the Ruckus Construction Co. grew into specific roles, specializing in painting, or carpentry, or sewing, depending on their skill set.

The piece was meant to be interactive, much like the real city. The subway car rocked when you passed through it, and you could enter the Woolworth lobby and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. (Originally, the artists wanted to make it even bigger, covering the whole of the island up to the Cloisters.)

The same year that made its triumphant debut, the  published its infamous cover story “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” “It was just a really wild time,” Grooms admitted. “The sexual part of the city was just going crazy with these public orgies and all kind of stuff like that!”

The work’s , in the collection as part of a gift from artist Alex Katz (b. 1927), was a nod to the city’s seedy side—displayed today with sign warning visitors of the x-rated content—but flew in the face of doomsayers predicting New York’s demise, depicting a vibrant and thriving metropolis, despite its warts.

“I think that it was a kind of a stubborn need to just celebrate New York,” Gross said.

A Challenge to Create—and Preserve

There were both logistical and financial difficulties in bringing  to life. Grooms estimated that the project cost between $100,000 and $140,000, “a catastrophic sum for us,” he said. And even then, the funding ran short about two weeks before the opening date.

“We were 100 percent without any money whatsoever,” Gross recalled. “And Red gave a speech saying, ‘We just can’t pay you anymore. We’d understand if you leave. Somehow, we’ll show what we show.’ And they all worked for the two weeks without pay! That was very dramatic.”

The artists didn’t see any profit from the exhibition. Visitors to the gallery paid a $1 toll to enter over the drawbridge to the ferry, bringing in a gate of $64,000. About $48,000 covered production costs that had been fronted by the gallery, Grooms told me. The remainder became a gift to the Brooklyn Museum, in the form of , donated by the Citizens Committee for New York City, which paid $45,00 for the work. Other than that, Marlborough Gallery failed to make any sales during the original show.

Because of the work’s size, the Brooklyn Museum has only shown twice since its acquisition. After almost 30 years in storage since its last outing, the piece was in good shape, but still needed considerable conservation. The original fabric for the waves, for instance, needed to be replaced.

“People don’t realize that objects need maintenance,” Gant said. “Unless you’re regularly checking it out, maintaining it, ensuring that it’s in its best form, it can deteriorate.”

Sadly, large portions of have not survived the past half century, with Grooms estimating only a quarter of the installation is still in existence. He and his wife, Lysiane Luong, own the large segment, but flooding from Superstorm Sandy in their storage facilities destroyed many other parts of the work, including the .

Most of the surviving elements have been scattered to the winds. The Brooklyn Bridge is at the Museum of Outdoor Arts in Greenwood Village, Colorado, and the is at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Nagoya, Japan. A German collector ended up buying the subway car, which the artists believe will be exhibited next year in Vienna, and the token booth went to the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Ohio’s Oberlin College.

“That’s the fate of big ambitious pieces. You don’t know what to do with them. That’s the problem,” Grooms said.

Absent the and other sculptural components that would have surrounded  in the original exhibition, the museum enlarged a reproduction of one of Grooms’s watercolors of the New York waterways to really set the scene.

An Unmatched Collaboration

was the last project Grooms and Gross did together before their divorce. The intervening half century has seen both artists continue to work at a monumental scale. Gross did several more Creative Time projects, including 1978’s “Art on the Beach,” on the landfill that would later become Battery Park City. And she brought her creative vision to an anatomical-themed playground that opened in 2010 at Robert Venable Park in East New York, with giant feet sculptures for children to play in.

Grooms’s later years have included an unlikely turn in the sports pages due to his controversial, carnivalesque home run sculpture for baseball’s Miami Marlins, which Derek Jeter memorably ousted from the team’s stadium in 2019. And recently, Grooms has been in the news for efforts to revive the Tennessee Foxtrot Carousel, a working carousel in the collection of the Tennessee State Museum that was on view in Nashville from 1998 to 2003.

But 50 years after its creation, the magic of remains undimmed, the city’s enduring power as a muse shining across the decades.

“New York has always been exciting and wild and, you know, calamitous. It’s always called one of the greatest cities in the world—and I believe it’s true!” Grooms said. “I’ve never topped .”