Liberty Science Center Launches “Big Art” Program with Inaugural Installations by Leandro Erlich and Dustin Yellin

JERSEY CITY, N.J., April 1, 2023 – Liberty Science Center—the most-visited interactive science learning center in the New York metro area—is pleased to announce the launch of its Big Art initiative, a new arts program with two inaugural installations by Argentine conceptual artist Leandro Erlich and Brooklyn-based artist and Pioneer Works founder Dustin Yellin, which will be unveiled at a private opening on the evening of Saturday, April 1st. Erlich will present a full-scale recreation of a four-story New York City brick storefront, and Yellin will offer a large piece exemplary of his habitual weaving together of forces of nature and technology. Erlich’s installation will remain on display through the summer, and Yellin’s for the next year.

Marking its 30th Anniversary, Liberty Science Center (LSC) will see one of its most conceptually ambitious programming expansions yet, with an arts program that aims to broaden the scope of what science centers of its kind offer to the public. “Science, too often, is presented as a series of results, as opposed to the long, torturous process of someone toiling away in a lab for days, months, years on end to prove an educated hunch they had,” says President and CEO Paul Hoffman. “Such processes are more often associated with art, which, in turn, is rarely acknowledged to pose questions the way science does. There’s a binary drawn between the two — they’re understood to exist on polar ends of the spectrum of how humans relate to the world, while in truth they have a lot more in common. By bringing Big Art to the Center, we hope to break down this boundary and further our pursuit of inspiring the next generation of innovators by emphasizing imagination and inspiration.”

Liberty Science Center has recruited world-renowned Argentine conceptual artist Leandro Erlich to create The Building, not only bringing his acclaimed Bâtiment series to the New York area for the first time, but also unveiling its first site-specific installment inspired by an American city. Known for his globally exhibited participatory installations built at architectural scale, Erlich has so far brought this series of monumental pieces to cities such as Paris, London, and Buenos Aires, as well as Donetsk and the Echigo-Tsumari region of Japan. Challenging the laws of gravity, the artist places a model of a building on the ground, allowing “spect-actors,” as he refers to them, to interact with the model, draping themselves across walls and pretending to hang off a balcony; a giant mirror, standing over the model at an angle, creates the illusion of the scene’s veracity. Each piece in the series is a representational composite of the architectural vernacular belonging to the locale in which it is installed; as a result, LSC will house a New York City brick storefront — complete with a deli and fire-escapes — which will greet visitors as they find themselves in the entrance hall of the Center.

Alongside Erlich’s monumental, vertiginous architectural intervention, LSC will present Brooklyn-based artist and Pioneer Works founder Dustin Yellin’s The Politics of Eternity, which, weighing 10,000 lbs, is making its debut outside of Yellin’s studio. The chevron-shaped heptaptych, executed in Yellin’s signature technique of embedding paint and snippets of various print media in multiple sheets of laminated glass, crystallizes the artist’s inquiry into humanity and the world it inhabits as a collection of enmeshed networks; contemplating historical time — past, present and future — the piece tells a story in three narrative acts. The first renders a fictive community gathered around an ancient totem, followed by a yet-to-be-born society donning jet-packs, buzzing around a techno-metropolis built around a rocket ship. These two acts bookend a set of lower panels depicting the march of modernity as tall ships and supertankers float in a central sea, fed on both ends by waterfalls cascading out from the other two parts. Constructed with the meticulous intricacy characteristic of Yellin’s practice, the piece took 20,000 hours to complete.

Since opening its doors in 1993, in the shadow of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, the museum has become the most-visited interactive science learning center in the New York metro region. Over the years the Center has expanded its offerings time and again, installing the largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere in 2017, and currently building the 30-acre SciTech Scity innovation campus featuring a business creation hub, public STEM high school, and residential housing.

Notes Yellin: “Interdisciplinarity as a method of exploration often yields findings more interesting than when things function in isolation from one another. With the new arts program, Liberty Science Center demonstrates its fundamental belief in the ability of ideas to exist fluidly across different domains, inviting us to consider the different ways in which an understanding of our universe can be expressed, and to feel the expanses of our minds.”

Notes Erlich: “Much of my work, including the Bâtiment series — and, by extension, The Building — finds its basis in questions I have about the way we perceive reality. I’m excited to be showing this piece at the Liberty Science Center, because art, the way I conceive of it, exists to pose questions about our understanding of the world; in many ways science achieves what we know it to the same way — by asking those very same questions.”

About Liberty Science Center

Liberty Science Center (LSC.org) is a 300,000-square-foot, not-for-profit learning center located in Liberty State Park on the Jersey City bank of the Hudson near the Statue of Liberty. Dedicated to inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers and bringing the power, promise, and pure fun of science and technology to learners of all ages, Liberty Science Center houses the largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere, 12 museum exhibition halls, a live animal collection with 110 species, giant aquariums, a 3D theater, live simulcast surgeries, a tornado-force wind simulator, K-12 classrooms and labs, and teacher-development programs. Before COVID-19, more than 250,000 students visited the Science Center each year, and tens of thousands more participated in the Center’s off-site and online programs. Welcoming more than 750,000 visitors annually, LSC is the largest interactive science center in the NYC-NJ metropolitan area.