This past weekend, contemporary artist Cj Hendry brought an immersive installation of blooms and blossoms to FDR Four Freedoms Park located in New York’s Roosevelt Island. Housed in a 120-foot by 40-foot greenhouse, Flower Market conjures childlike wonder and joy in its display of 100,000 handcrafted flowers. In collaboration with French skincare brand Clé de Peau Beauté and the Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, the artist invites viewers to stop and smell the roses.
For the exhibition, Hendry references a quote from American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.” Bringing this idea to life, viewers were invited to take a walk amongst the blooms, touch their plush petals, and take one home as a keepsake.
Among the 21 different species of flowers, you can find sunflowers, red roses, and daffodils. A bed of lilies references the natural ingredients used in Clé de Peau Beauté’s skin serum. Meanwhile, other flowers conjure Roosevelt family emblems: the yellow Eleanor Roosevelt rose, tulips for their Dutch heritage, and peonies as the signature flower of the family farm. Alongside the plush field, the exhibition also features 12 original drawings by the artist.
Known for large-scale immersive installations, Flower Market spotlights Hendry’s deft ability to engage audiences through thought-provoking artworks. “When the architect Louis Kahn designed this memorial, he said, ‘The garden is somehow a personal kind of control of nature.’ A lot of my work, and in this exhibition especially, is about manipulating my environments and building a space that takes participants out of their ordinary,” the the artist states.
If you missed Flower Market, remaining flowers from the exhibition can be purchased here.
