New Harlem Art Installation Imagines Sinking Fortress

EAST HARLEM, NY — Walk down East 120th Street these days, and you may be startled to see what looks like a grand colonial building sinking into the cobblestones of Harlem Art Park.

That building is in fact a new art installation that arrived this month in the small sculpture park, depicting the guard tower of a fortress-style building in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Created by artists Kevin Quiles Bonilla and Zaq Landsberg, the installation is timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria, and depicts the grand old building as if it were being consumed by the sea. Made of green plywood and stenciled with the phrase "Post No Bills," it also connects the San Juan architecture with the style of a New York City construction site, drawing parallels between the two deeply linked cities.

Titled "For centuries, and still…(anticipated completion)," the work will be on view until November 2023. An opening reception will be held from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday in the park, on East 120th Street between Third and Lexington avenues.

The artists chose to construct the colonial Puerto Rican building out of New York-style construction fencing since both serve as "thresholds, limbos and incomplete environments" — each serving as a "visual language" for their respective cities, they said in a news release.

With the 13-foot-tall "garita," or guard tower, tilted at 15 degrees, the artwork aims to highlight the United States' colonial legacy in Puerto Rico, the long history of migration between the two places, and the devastation of Hurricane Maria, which was felt as far away as East Harlem.

"The colonial fortresses of Old San Juan, erected by the Spanish during their possession of the island as means for protection from enemies, becomes the remnant of a violent history that is constantly erased and kept hidden from both tourists and islanders alike," the artists wrote. "The construction site, with its demarcated fences and small peep holes looking at an empty space, become a threshold within the city, a prelude of something to come, but then later reappears elsewhere, continuing a never-ending cycle of development and maintenance."

Throughout its year on view, the installation will host poster-making activities inviting community members to affix their own images onto the walls of the artwork — with a special invitation being extended to Puerto Rican artists.

Quiles Bonilla, an artist who splits his time between Puerto Rico and New York, focuses his work on "power, colonialism, and history with his identity as context," according to his biography.

Landsberg is already known to Harlem for creating the popular "Reclining Liberty" sculpture on view in Morningside Park until April. (And since relocated to Jersey City.)

The New York-based artist's other recent works include the "Tomb Effigy of Margaret Corbin," on view now at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.