Public Art | NYCEDC

The Public Art at BAT program is fundamentally rooted in honoring and integrating Brooklyn Army Terminal’s (BAT) rich military past, present role as a modern industrial and creative hub, and its potential future.

Today, BAT gets much of its character from its tenants and connection to New York City’s working waterfront. Most critically, the sheer number of tenants working within the complex—a diverse ecosystem of more than 3,500 visionaries, entrepreneurs, advanced manufacturers, makers, local workers, and artists —forms an engine of contemporary innovation.

Public Art at BAT celebrates this concentration of creative and entrepreneurial energy. It treats the space of the terminal and surrounding public spaces as a massive canvas that reflects this industrious spirit. By commissioning sixteen site-responsive works, the program uncovers, interprets, and celebrates layers of history, commerce, and creativity, embedding the arts as a vital, permanent part of the terminal’s ongoing narrative.

At first glance, the works represented In Plain Sight possess a distinct aesthetic, material, and narrative focus. However, the highly personal interpretations of the past, present, and future of both BAT and the Brooklyn waterfront unite the artwork. Each piece reflects the lived experience of the fourteen Brooklyn-based artists we have engaged across these sites, many of whom are current or former BAT tenants themselves.

As each artist's statement reveals, these works showcase the histories, emotions, perceptions, and the obscured processes of creation that define this campus. Some works look to Brooklyn’s wilder, ecological past, while others take up the changing waterfront or the labor and materiality that have shaped BAT from 1918 to the present. In each case, the artist engages with the space between revelation and concealment. This tension, between the overt and the covert, the visible and the veiled, provides the profound and unifying context for In Plain Sight.