It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Wait, yeah, it’s definitely a bird.
This October, New Yorkers should prepare to witness a colossal new addition to the Manhattan skyline: a 21-foot-tall pigeon sculpture that’s set to tower over the intersection of 10th Avenue and 30th Street.
The sculpture will roost on the High Line’s Plinth, which is a destination for temporary public art installations that has hosted three other large-scale projects since its inauguration in June 2019. Created by artist Iván Argote, the Plinth’s newest feathered resident is currently in a flatbed truck en route from Mexico, where it was fabricated, to New Jersey, where it’ll receive its final touches via a fresh coat of paint. According to Cecilia Alemani, director and chief curator for High Line art, the bird is expected to make it over the border shortly.
“We’re working with a facility called Digital Atelier,” says Alemani. “They will be painting the sculpture together with the artist in a very hyper realistic way, and it will be done completely by hand. Once the pigeon gets to New Jersey, we expect it to take four or five weeks to prime it, get it painted, and then coat it to make sure that it’s resistant to New York City weather.”
Oddly enough, the name of the avant-garde sculpture is Dinosaur.
“The name Dinosaur makes reference to the sculpture’s scale and to the pigeon’s ancestors who millions of years ago dominated the globe, as we humans do today… the name also serves as a reference to the dinosaur’s extinction,” Argote explained in a press release. “Like them, one day we won’t be around anymore, but perhaps a remnant of humanity will live on—as pigeons do—in the dark corners and gaps of future worlds.”
Dinosaur was selected by curators at the High Line out of more than 80 original proposals back in 2020. While the work obviously has an element of humor, Argote notes in his statement that it also interrogates the idea that American monuments of so-called “great men” have often turned out to honor some despicable people—and, in fact, a pigeon might be more deserving of the elevated spot.
While celebrating pigeons might seem outlandish to New Yorkers who have to face off with hoards of the birds on their way to work every day, the history of the pigeon in the U.S. is actually quite tragic (and oft-forgotten). Historians believe that pigeon domestication began thousands of years ago, likely in ancient Mesopotamian settlements. Due to their “homing” tendencies—a natural predisposition that gives them something like an internal GPS—pigeons were excellent and highly revered message carriers. As recently as World War I and World War II, they were even honored as war heroes. Now, we humans shun an animal that might have once been a cherished friend.
“The pigeon is an iconic New Yorker, and I hope that people come to see them that way as opposed to vermin,” Taylor Zakarin, the High Line’s associate curator, told Gothamist. “I think hopefully this work could inspire a deviation from that.”
So far, Alemani says that models of Dinosaur have inspired “visceral” reactions from viewers.
“This is the first time that we have a very polarizing artwork on the Plinth,” Alemani says. “People either love pigeons, or they feel completely repelled or disgusted by them. I remember, even from the very early conversations, that the public comments we received were very polarized—in a good way!”