In the summer of 2014, a year before the Whitney Museum of American Art reopened to the public in its new, downtown quarters on Gansevoort Street, David Hammons and several other artists were invited to walk through the unfinished galleries. The Whitney curators Scott Rothkopf and Donna de Salvo were planning a sequence of exhibitions that would inaugurate the fifth floor as an open, undivided space, and Hammons was an obvious but impossible candidate: an internationally renowned African-American artist who, during the past four decades, had risen to the summit of the art world by following his own rules, one of which was to turn down invitations from leading museums. Hammons was standing near the big fifth-floor windows that overlooked the Hudson when Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, joined him.

“I had met David, but I didn’t really know him,” Weinberg told me recently. “He was looking at the river, so I went over and said, ‘You know, Gordon Matta-Clark did his famous pier cut right down there.’ ” Weinberg was referring to five large openings that Matta-Clark had cut in the walls, roof, and floor of an abandoned pier shed in 1975, turning it into an immense public art work. (Both the shed and the pier were demolished in 1979.) “David didn’t say anything,” Weinberg recalled. “But a few days later we got a small drawing by him in the mail, with no explanation, no message of any kind.” The drawing showed, in schematic outline, the metal framework of a long, rectangular structure, a sort of ghost image of the pier, floating on water. Under it was the pencilled caption “Gordon Matta-Clark Monument Pier 52.”

Neither Weinberg nor Rothkopf knew what to make of it. Was this a proposal? Or was it a whim on Hammons’s part, a thank-you note for being invited on the gallery tour? So much was going on at the museum in the period leading up to the opening that the mailing went unanswered for some time. Over the next year, though, Rothkopf had several exploratory meetings with Hammons, and in the summer of 2015 the Whitney began preliminary studies for an immense structure based on Hammons’s drawing, fifty-two feet high by three hundred and twenty-five feet long, made of stainless-steel rods. In September, in a groundbreaking ceremony at the museum, Weinberg announced to about two hundred and fifty art-world insiders that work was about to begin on David Hammons’s “Day’s End,” a project that “has taken not a village but literally a city to realize.” Hammons was present, a slight figure in loose, earth-toned clothes, with his wife, Chie. The famously reclusive artist had worked with the Whitney’s performance curator, Adrienne Edwards, in planning the ceremony, which included a fireboat on the river deploying its water cannons to spectacular effect, and six musicians performing a new jazz suite by the composer Henry Threadgill. Hammons had agreed to say a few words. Standing next to him, I could see his long fingers with their elegantly squared-off nails folding and unfolding a scrap of paper, but when Weinberg walked over to offer him the mike he shook his head. “David’s actually a very shy man,” Weinberg explained later.

It had taken the museum four years to negotiate the necessary permits and authorizations from the city, the state, the Hudson River Park Trust, the Army Corps of Engineers, and other official bodies, and to raise the seventeen million dollars that “Day’s End” was expected to cost. A few Whitney Museum trustees questioned the wisdom of taking on such an expensive public art work, which the Whitney would not own—it’s on city property—but which it would have to maintain. Weinberg is a world-class persuader, though, and a majority of the trustees and a surprising number of benefactors and city officials fell in love with Hammons’s ghost pier. One side of the structure will be on land; the other sides will rest on steel piles in the river. Guy Nordenson, the chief engineer, plans to complete it by next fall. Inspired by the project, the city has cleared the Gansevoort Peninsula, the piece of land adjoining the former pier, of storage sheds and utility buildings that were being used by the Department of Sanitation, and the landscape-architecture firm James Corner Field Operations will soon start turning the peninsula into a five-and-a-half-acre public park, with a sandy beach and a landing for kayaks.

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Shopping Cartoon by Roz Chast

Hammons, whose eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch drawing could be said to have precipitated both projects, has played a quiet and somewhat gnomic role in the first one’s realization. He attended about a dozen meetings at the museum, during which he struck Nordenson as being “like a Zen master, enigmatic and unexpected.” He wore a hat, usually a round felt one with holes cut into it, and looked through “third eye” glasses, whose delicate wire frames held a single small lens, centrally positioned between his eyebrows. When asked to make a decision, he was firm and precise. Should the structure be lighted at night? No, Hammons said, it should disappear. “One thing David made absolutely clear was that it had to be on the exact same site as the pier that had been there,” Weinberg told me. “And the only reason we got permission to do it was that it was on the exact same site. He wanted the steel rods to be as minimal and pared down as we could make them. ‘A great tailor makes the fewest cuts,’ he’d say. When a question came up at a meeting, Hammons occasionally said, ‘What would Gordon do?’ ” His title for the work, “Day’s End,” was what Matta-Clark had called his pier cut. Weinberg sometimes had the impression that Hammons was submerging his identity in Matta-Clark’s. Hammons’s generosity to other black artists—buying their work, helping them gain recognition—is unending, although little known. In this case, he was paying homage to a dead white artist whom he had never met.

David Hammons and Gordon Matta-Clark were both born in 1943. They showed their work in New York galleries during the nineteen-seventies, but in those days artists of color barely registered on the mainstream art scene. Matta-Clark was born into it. His father, the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta, had joined the exodus of artists from Paris to New York in the early years of the Second World War. He had married an American art student named Anne Clark, but the birth of their twin sons, Gordon and Sebastian, so unhinged him that he fled marriage and parenthood, and returned to France soon after the war. The boys grew up in New York. Gordon, who added his mother’s name to his own in 1971, eventually reconnected with his mercurial father. He interrupted his architectural studies at Cornell to spend a year in Paris, taking courses in French literature at the Sorbonne, and he later decided, as his father had, to abandon architecture for art.

New York in the seventies was a great place for young artists exploring far-out ideas. Rents were low, and the city, after nearly going bankrupt, was full of abandoned buildings and uncollected garbage. Matta-Clark responded by developing his own art form, called “anarchitecture,” which initially consisted of chainsawing sections out of derelict buildings and presenting them as sculptures. For “Splitting,” his breakthrough work, from 1974, Matta-Clark and two assistants gained access to a suburban house in Englewood, New Jersey—it was scheduled for demolition—and sawed it in half, from roof to basement. (Widely circulated photographs of the bisected house had a powerful impact on many artists, including David Hammons.) Matta-Clark was a galvanizing presence in the downtown art world. He co-founded an artist-run restaurant, called Food, at the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets, in SoHo (Hammons went there a few times), and he helped start one of the first nonprofit, “alternate” spaces to show art, at 112 Greene Street. “Gordon was smart and funny and mischievous and quite adorable,” Alanna Heiss, who founded the Clocktower Gallery and PS1, told me. When he decided to cut holes in Pier 52, at the end of Gansevoort Street, he was acting on his own, without permits or authorization. The waterfront there had been in decline for years. Several of the piers were no longer in use, and had become gathering places for the gay community; Matta-Clark’s hope was that his light-pierced shed, with its huge, west-facing “rose window” that framed the sunset, could be part of this subculture. That didn’t happen, because two municipal inspectors appeared at the site one day and shut it down, citing unauthorized use of city property. Matta-Clark, fearing arrest and prosecution, fled to Paris, where he and a colleague, with full permission from the city, bored a very large round hole through an ancient house in the area around Les Halles. His expanding career was cut tragically short three years later, when he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of thirty-five. His brilliant but troubled twin, Sebastian, who never found his way in the world, had died two years earlier, after falling from a window in Gordon’s New York studio.