NEW YORK, NY.- Mad. Sq. Art, the free, contemporary art program of Madison Square Park Conservancy, presents Fata Morgana by New York-based artist Teresita Fernández, the Conservancy’s largest and most ambitious outdoor sculpture to date. The outdoor sculpture, which consists of 500 running feet of golden, mirror-polished discs that create canopies above the pathways around the Park’s central Oval Lawn, is on view in Madison Square Park beginning June 1, 2015.

In nature, a Fata Morgana is a horizontal mirage that forms across the horizon line. Alluding to this phenomenon, Fernández’s project introduces a shimmering horizontal element to the Park that engages visitors in a dynamic experience. The installation is a mirror-polished, golden metal sculpture that hovers above the Park’s winding walkways to define a luminous experiential passage for Park visitors. The metal forms, perforated with intricate patterns reminiscent of foliage, create abstract flickering effects as sunlight filters through the canopy, casting a golden glow across the expanse of the work, paths, and passersby. The project is Mad. Sq. Art’s first to fully utilize the upper register of a visitor’s space.

Teresita Fernández (American, b. 1968), a 2005 MacArthur Fellow, is best known for her prominent public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by landscape and natural phenomena as well as diverse historical and cultural references.

“Fata Morgana is a site-specific work designed for, and inspired by, Madison Square Park,” said Ms. Fernández. “My concept was to invert the traditional notion of outdoor sculpture by addressing all of the active walkways of the Park rather than setting down a sculptural element in the Park’s center. By hovering over the Park in a horizontal band, Fata Morgana becomes a ghost-like, sculptural, luminous mirage that both distorts the landscape and radiates golden light.”

Madison Square Park’s 6.2-acre site welcomes more than 50,000 daily visitors – a richly diverse audience including local residents, families, public school groups and day camps, office workers, students, artists, and international tourists.

“Our mission with Mad. Sq. Art is twofold: it is a consummate challenge for artists to create outdoor work on a monumental scale, and it is a partnership between the Conservancy and the public,” said Keats Myer, Executive Director of Madison Square Park Conservancy.

“Mad. Sq. Art is a singular opportunity for artists to further their current practice without the physical limitations of a traditional gallery space,” said Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Martin Friedman Senior Curator. “What Fernández has realized with Fata Morgana is the most monumental example of this approach.”

A celebrated series of sculpture exhibitions by living artists, Mad. Sq. Art was launched by Madison Square Park Conservancy in 2004 to bring free public art programs to New York. The program has received extensive critical and public attention since its inception and has developed into a world-class cultural institution. Its ambition and scale expands each year alongside an increasingly diverse range of innovative, world-class artists.

Fata Morgana was designed by Teresita Fernández in collaboration with SITU Fabrication. Fata Morgana was fabricated by Adirondack Studios. Structural engineering by Thornton Tomasetti.

Teresita Fernández (American b. 1968,) is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of many prestigious awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Grant, an American Academy in Rome Affiliated Fellowship, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, Fernández served from 2011-2014 on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, a federal panel that advises the President, Congress, and governmental agencies on national matters of design and aesthetics.

Fernández’s large-scale commissions include recent site-specific works at Louis Vuitton locations in Shanghai and Paris. Additional site-specific installations include Amethyst Cinema at the Galerie Pfriem at SCAD, France, and Blind Blue Landscape at the renowned Bennesee Art site in Naoshima, Japan. Fernández is the youngest artist commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum for Olympic Sculpture Park where her permanently installed work, Seattle Cloud Cover, allows visitors to walk under a covered skyway while viewing the city’s skyline through optically shifting multicolored glass. The artist currently has an immersive, large-scale exhibition, As Above So Below, on view at MASS MoCA through April 2015.

Fernández’s works are included in many prominent collections and have been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, TX; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.,; Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Spain; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Fernández is currently on the board of Artpace, a non-profit, international artist’s residency program. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and her BFA from Florida International University. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.