Elephants in Manhattan
A herd of elephants has arrived in New York City, in the streets of the Meatpacking District, as part of the largest outdoor public art installation in the city since The Gates, Christo, and Jeanne-Claude in Central Park in 2005.
The project, titled “The Great Elephant Migration,” features 100 life-size sculptures of Indian elephants created over the past five years by the Coexistence Collective, a collective of 200 indigenous artists from the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in southern India.
The traveling exhibition raises money for 22 partner conservation NGOs dedicated to saving not only elephants but also a variety of wildlife. Each stop along the way also benefits a local nonprofit. In New York City, it’s the Wild Bird Fund.
The installation has celebrity endorsements, including Cher, Padma Lakshmi, Susan Sarandon, and Diane von Furstenberg.
The public art project is the brainchild of Ruth Ganesh, a British animal rights activist. She co-founded the collective, which is part of the non-profit Real Elephant Collective, with Tarsh Thekaekara, an elephant researcher and scientist based in India. It was his idea to create a sculptural herd from an invasive weed known as lantana camara, which threatens native species and their habitats across India by taking over forests and driving animals from their homes. The plant has spread across about 300,000 square kilometers of protected forests and reserves in India. For comparison, the total area of Poland is about 312,000 square kilometers.
This means the project is effectively directly combating the threat of invasive species while raising money and awareness about environmental issues.
The elephants are for sale, and artisans are continually creating new members of the herd — each one takes three months — to meet collectors’ demand (and help remove more lantana). A 5-foot-tall baby elephant sells for $8,000, while a 16-inch-tall adult male with tusks can go for $22,000.
Organizers have already sold more than 100 of them and raised more than $1 million. The goal is to sell 1,000 elephants to raise a total of $10 million. The exhibition cost $2 million.
Each sculpture was designed by Thekaekara’s wife, Shubhra Nayar, and is based on, and named after, a real elephant that currently lives in the Nilgiri Hills Biosphere Reserve.
The exhibit is curated by Dodie Kazanjian, founder of the Rhode Island nonprofit Art and Newport, which is co-presenting the exhibit with the Meatpacking District Management Association.
The artisans, who are members of the Soligas, Bettakurumbas, Kattunayakan and Paniyas tribes, live alongside the elephants and know their individual personalities.
The elephants have made a splash in New York City, where they have been displayed along 9th Avenue between Gansevoort Plaza and West 15th Street.
The sculptures are made of a steel frame covered with lantana strips and decorated with wooden claws and tusks and resin eyes.
The elephants will travel on a fleet of 100 electric trucks — one for each sculpture.
The project first appeared in Kochi, India, during the 2019 Kochi Biennale and in London in 2021. The tour began in earnest this year at the Lalbagh Botanical Garden in Bangalore, India. The elephants landed in the United States in July in Newport, Rhode Island. The next stop will be Miami Beach in December. The tour will continue next year with the Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana, in May; Jackson Hole in Wyoming, in June; and Los Angeles in July. The tour, which aims to add stops in Houston and Glacier National Park in Montana, is organized by the conservation group Elephant Family USA.
“The Great Elephant Migration” was presented in the Meatpacking District in New York City from September 6 to October 20, 2024.
Text and photos: Zosia Zeleska-Bobrowski
