Among foods that are improved when reheated, most people would probably not rank hot dogs very highly. But the artist duo Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw have once again defied conventional wisdom with the triumphant return of their monumental foodstuff sculpture Hot Dog in the City (2024).
Dubbed Hot Dog: The Second Serving (2026), the 65ft-long sculpture of a frankfurter, bun and generous squeeze of mustard now sports red, white and blue bunting down its sides and has had a golden, winged figure of Liberty very conspicuously duct-taped on at one end. Just as it was two years ago, it is installed in New York’s Times Square (until 8 August) and will rise every day at noon to shoot confetti into the sky. The quintessentially American food’s return is timed to the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776.
“As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, we found ourselves returning to questions that animated the original project: spectacle, patriotism, celebration and power,” Catron and Outlaw said in a statement. “Symbols persist. Myths persist. Their meanings shift. Two years after its initial appearance, the sculpture returns to a country that is both familiar and changed, revealing new tensions within a symbol that once seemed self-evident.”
Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw, Hot Dog: The Second Serving, 2026 Photo: The Art Newspaper
The sculpture’s return was marked, on Wednesday (22 July) with a pageant whose contestants, many of them in drag, were judged for their over-the-top performances of “American-ness”. Judges included the actor and designer Waris Ahluwalia, the comedian and podcaster Lily Marotta, the executive director of art non-profit Creative Time Jean Cooney and Curtis Sliwa, the perennial Republican candidate for New York City mayor.
As with its original iteration, Hot Dog: The Second Serving walks a fine line between humour and sincerity. It functions, in part, as an earnest celebration of Americana. But there is also satire and critique available in the presentation, for observers who want to dig in.
“The history of the hot dog and how it’s made, how it got to where it is today, it really is an American story, for better and often for worse—from the people who make it and the people who sell it to the people who eat it and the people who profit off it,” Catron told The Art Newspaper in 2024. “Everything is wrapped up together in this item that is also fun and silly—but you start digging in and it starts getting a little darker.”
The artists Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw pose in front of Hot Dog in the City (2024) during its initial exhibition in Times Square in 2024 Photo by Steven Molina Contreras
The golden figure of Liberty that has been added to the sculpture’s rising end matches the one that appears atop renderings of president Donald Trump’s planned triumphal arch in Washington, DC. And at the end of the 22 July pageant, the winning contestant triggered the sculpture’s confetti eruption by hitting a large button labelled “Epstein Files”.
“Times Square has always been a place where America puts itself on display for the world, and there’s no better stage, and no better moment than the nation’s 250th birthday, to ask what we’re actually celebrating,” said Anna Starling, the vice president for development and partnerships at the Times Square Alliance and the director of Times Square Arts, which presented the sculpture’s inaugural 2024 iteration and its second serving. “Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw hold that spectacle up to the light, with humor, with scale and with real provocation.”
- Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw: Hot Dog: The Second Serving, until 8 August, Times Square, New York
