Until October 20th, we New Yorkers can see a spectacular art installation here in the city. It’s called “The Great Elephant Migration,” and the project features 100 life-size sculptures of Indian elephants crafted over the last five years by the Coexistence Collective, a team of 200 Indigenous artisans from Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in South India.
I gather from friends that the media has covered the exhibition well, so I won’t got into too much detail. Suffice to say that the beautiful old Meatpacking District, once—as its name implies—a less-than-elegant center for meat dealers, is now a vibrant neighborhood with shops, hotels, and the like. This transformation was sparked by such things as the opening of the new Whitney Museum in 2014.
For more information about the exhibition, read Sarah Cascone’s A Parade of 100 Elephant Sculptures Makes a Jumbo Entrance in New York. And look at the splendid photographs, especially the ones relating to the first stop on the American tour at Rough Point mansion in Newport. Cascone notes that the exhibition’s next stop will be in Miami Beach in December (just in time for Art Basel Miami Beach), followed by other sites throughout the country. The tour is organized by the conservation group Elephant Family USA.
Another interesting article was published by The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, a charity with which I had some affiliation when I lived in Kenya many years ago. This one also includes very fine photos, of both the Newport installation as well as a few of the New York installation, complete with (our favorites, of course) a couple of aerial views.
So photographers have fun with the exhibition, as readers can see from our own attempts. Of course neither of was competing with the splendid photographs like those on the Artnet or the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust sites. We were just having fun. Andrew’s the real photographer (and he loves photos with reflections on glass in modern buildings, as you see in the final photo). I’m just the fellow my friends called Bwana Tembo (“the elephant man”) in my Kenya days. See our photos from Gansevoort Place here. Then have a visit to New York’s Meatpacking District and see The Great Elephant Migration before it’s gone