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Artist and designer Costantino Nivola created a remarkable body of
public art in cities all over the U.S. But some of his best sculptures
and murals in New York are sadly neglected and in need of
restoration.
By Paul Makovsky
March 2002
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Metropolis Exclusive:
More about Costantino Nivola, including:
»
Nivola on Nivola
»
Nivola Catalogue Raisonné project
»
Ivan Chermayeff Remembers Tino
»
Nivola Links
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In 1963 Nivola painted graffito murals on the walls (above and below)
of P.S. 17 in Long Island City, New York.
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Today only one wall (below) remains, and it has been painted over.
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Eighteen of artist Costantino Nivola's 1964 cast-concrete horses still
stand at the Stephen Wise Towers play area in Manhattan--but they've
been rearranged, marring his original design.
Photos: Top two images, Richard Stein, courtesy Ruth Nivola; second from
bottom Sean Hemmerle; bottom, courtesy Ruth Nivola
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Costantino Nivola (1911-1988)--Tino to his friends and family--is best
remembered for his humanizing effect on midcentury modern art. In schools,
playgrounds, and public plazas all over the country, the Italian-American
sculptor, artist, and graphic designer left behind a memorable body of work.
Although his works in New York City are an integral part of many modern
buildings there, some of the sculptures and murals are in poor repair and
threatened by further deterioration.
A native of Sardinia, Nivola worked as an art director for Olivetti in the
1930s. After emigrating to the United States with his wife Ruth in 1939,
he served as Art Director for Interiors and Progressive Architecture magazines.
In the late 1940s Nivola started to sculpt seriously, exploring a variety
of techniques: traditional graffito (in which a topcoat of plaster
is etched to reveal a contrasting undercoat), three-dimensional sculpture,
and "sand casting," which he invented while playing with his two
children on the beach. "The children would draw in the sand,"
recalls Ruth Nivola, a jewelry designer. "He thought you could just
throw a little plaster over it, let it dry, and then you'd have a casting.
He did that with a footprint of my daughter."
Nivola perfected this method of sand casting bas-relief sculpture in concrete
and began creating reliefs and murals for a variety of architects including
Percival Goodman, Antonin Raymond, Eero Saarinen, and Richard Stein. In
1953 he created a much admired sand-cast relief wall for the Olivetti Showroom
on Fifth Avenue in New York City. "Nivola took the traditional graffito
technique that you see in a lot of Mediterranean countries and brought it
into the modern era," says landscape architect Michael Gotkin, who
appeared at a recent Metropolis panel discussion organized by historian
Micaela Martegani, which reexamined Nivola's work in New York City.
Gotkin studied 16 of Nivola's public art projects in New York and found
that about half of them are in good shape. The others are damaged, painted
over, removed or destroyed. Nivola's sculptures for the plaza at the Stephen
Wise Towers--a city housing project on the Upper West Side, completed in
1964 in collaboration with Richard Stein--is a typical example. Located
on the project's playground, the sculptures originally included a freestanding
cast mural, a graffito mural, 18 cast concrete horses, and a fountain
composed of two pyramids. Today the fountain's basins are filled in
with cement and the horses, originally placed in a dynamic composition,
have been corralled into a circle.
Gotkin sees the best hope for the restoration of Nivola's work coming from
a private foundation that would be more independent from the city. According
to Gotkin, the New York City Board of Education, the Parks Department, and
the NYC Housing Authority are guardians of a remarkable but largely underdocumented
collection of public art by a variety of significant artists, including
Ben Shahn, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Hans Hofmann. "These public agencies
are now stewards of wonderful works of art," he says, "but they
don't live up to their duties."
Most of Nivola's public art is characterized by a seamless integration of
sculpture and architecture. The artist's sensitivity to site is best demonstrated
by his role as a jury member in the early 1980s advocating for Maya Lin's
design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. During deliberations
there were only one or two jurors in agreement with him. "He went to
see each one of the jurors and persuaded them," Ruth Nivola says. "He
felt that Lin's was the most beautiful and showed the best sensitivity to
landscape and architecture." Persuading city agencies to restore and
preserve Nivola's public work is the best way to memorialize his contribution
to art and design.
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