GRYMES HILL — A group of artists who create giant, unauthorized sculptures from rocks, yarn and other debris hidden throughout the borough's parks and beaches have taken their work out of the shadows.
Eric Alter and Doug Schwartz were awarded a grant this year to build one of their environmental art pieces, this time with permission, inside the Serpentine Art and Nature Commons (SANC) in Grymes Hill.
"It kind of took me by surprise," said Alter, 29, who has worked with Schwartz on his sculptures for nearly seven years. "I thought 'This will never get a grant.'"
The pair started work on the piece in June — taking over several trees at the entrance near Van Duzer Street — and put the finishing touches on it over the weekend.
"It's very creative," said John Garcia, president of SANC who reached out to Alter about getting a grant for the piece. "It takes ingenuity and some insight."
Garcia — who said he wants to bring art back to SANC — plans to leave it up until at least the winter then work on trying to get other local artists to display their work inside the park.
For nearly 30 years, Schwartz has made pillar-like sculptures — some taller than him — with rocks and debris found on beaches inside the Mount Loretto Unique Area, spending most Fridays working on them.
A piece at Lemon Creek Park (DNAinfo/Nicholas Rizzi)
Eventually, he was joined by Alter and several others who helped with his work, which became popular after it was listed in travel guides, had articles written about it and was the subject of a short documentary.
"We're not preaching to the converted, we're not trying to get people that go to art museums and galleries, we're trying to reach people that would never set foot in an art museum," said Schwartz, a retired groundhog keeper for the Staten Island Zoo.
"We're trying to show them that art is something that's part of their daily life."
His work at Mount Loretto stopped in 2011 when the state issued him a cease-and-desist order and dismantled his pillar-like sculptures, the New York Times reported.
Since then, Schwartz and his group started to put up sculptures on various city parkland and beaches in the South Shore like the Conference House Park and near the Lemon Creek Pier, adding brightly colored yarn to the pieces this year.
Many of them don't last long, sometimes only an hour, before they're destroyed by city workers or beach goers.
"The name of the game is don't be attached to anything because it's going to get either ruined by kids or ruined by weather or by the Parks Department," Alter said.
Despite this, some of them have survived for years at various spots and Schwartz said people's reactions to his work — including adding to it or destroying it — is all part of the process for him.
"If they have intense feelings or if they want to burn it down or if they want to add to it and create their own, it's up to them," he said. "We merely create a stage and they create the action."
Schwartz said that, while he was commissioned years ago by a local theater company to make sets in parks, this is the first time he's gotten a grant to put one of the sculptures up in parkland.
Serpentine Art and Nature Commons will host an opening reception for the piece with food and music on Saturday, Sept. 10, from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. with a rain date on Sept. 17.
