High Line Art has announced its fall 2026 season of commissions, with new sculptural works by Marianna Simnett, Amol K. Patil, and Alvaro Barrington, alongside a billboard by Christopher Williams. The works will open throughout September and November and continue themes of bodies, labor, and infrastructure that have run through the park‘s 2026 program.
Opening in September at 30th Street near Hudson Yards, Simnett’s Interlude (2026) installs a pair of concession stands. In one stand, a video loop shows a food vendor preparing stadium hot dogs under fluorescent light while singing an eerie, melancholic song. The Berlin- and New York–based artist is known for multidisciplinary work blending horror, humor, and theater to explore vulnerability and metamorphosis. With this work, she turns an ordinarily invisible worker‘s shift into what High Line Art describes as “a powerful and humanizing performance of agency, despair, and survival.”
Patil‘s The Voices Cast in Dust (2026), opening at 24th Street near Chelsea in early October, is a monumental bronze sculpture depicting a mass of human figures merging into a single form, limbs jutting outward in what reads alternately as collective striving and a fight for survival. Patil, a conceptual and performance artist based between Mumbai and Amsterdam, draws on a family history of working-class advocacy—his grandfather was a folk poet, his father an avant-garde playwright who chronicled the struggles of Mumbai‘s mill and sanitation workers—to bridge labor conditions in Mumbai and New York.
In November, Barrington will present Western Beef-High Line (2026) at 14th Street near the Whitney Museum of American Art, a work constructed with a steel-framed billboard strung with colored plastic vinyl strips of the kind used in supermarkets and butcher shops, framed by plastic milk crates. The work engages the sunset views over the Hudson River once painted by the Hudson River School. “We are best served as an immigrant nation, in dialogue with each other,” Barrington wrote of the piece, which he called a “contemporary ‘stained glass’ proposition.” Barrington, who was raised between the Caribbean and Brooklyn, is primarily a painter whose tactile, multimedia practice incorporates burlap, textiles, and industrial materials such as chain-link fencing.
“Each of this fall‘s commissions considers our relationships to various forms of labor and each other, in revealing and startling ways,” said Cecilia Alemani, director and chief curator of High Line Art, in a statement. “Marianna Simnett’‘s concession stand with a video of a solitary vendor transforms a routine work shift into a powerful performance of survival. Amol K. Patil bridges the distance between Mumbai and New York with a bronze sculpture depicting a multitude of figures, a monumental tribute to the labor that supports city life. And Alvaro Barrington‘s luminous composition stands as a public celebration of heritage and shared humanity.”
Williams‘s billboard, MODEL (High Line Billboard, 18th Street and 10th Avenue, New York, 10011) (2026), meanwhile, opens in September at 18th Street in West Chelsea. Built from an object in his enamel-on-glass series, the sign appears industrial from a distance but up close reveals handmade brushwork. Its texture recalls the woodchip-patterned Rauhfaser wallpaper common in 20th-century European working-class interiors—a pointed juxtaposition against the luxury towers now surrounding the High Line.
The fall lineup follows the April opening of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s 27-foot sandstone Buddha sculpture on the High Line Plinth, and joins current-season works by Katherine Bernhardt, Patricia Ayres, and Derek Fordjour.
