For the next eight weeks, the meadow around Henry Moore’s “Spindle” sculpture beside Allen Parkway could be busier than usual, and it will be hard to miss at night.

On that knoll the Buffalo Bayou Partnership this week erected “New Monuments for New Cities,” a temporary exhibition of lighted structures that contain poster-like images by 25 artists who responded to the prompt, “What would you design as a monument for your city now?”

With millions of dollars being poured into the improvement of green spaces across Houston, the conservancies running some of the busiest inner-city parks are also building or planning endowments for temporary public art programs such as “New Monuments” that “activate” areas, enticing visitors to return often and view spaces from different perspectives.

The cost of temporary public artworks can vary greatly, from six figures to commission a site-specific piece for Buffalo Bayou Park’s massive Cistern to a much more modest sum for projects such as “New Monuments.” “No project is less than $20,000-$25,000,” said Judy Nyquist, a philanthropist and volunteer who leads the public art committees of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership as well as the Discovery Green, Hermann Park and Levy Park conservancies.

Buffalo Bayou Partnership President Anne Olson said “New Monuments” is just the beginning of a temporary art program about other topics that will be especially active along Buffalo Bayou Park’s still-developing East Sector, from downtown to the Houston Ship Channel. “Artists are drawn to the industrial spaces along that portion of Buffalo Bayou,” she said.

The partnership sited its “Monuments” show near Moore’s sculpture partly for practical reasons, because it has flat ground and beautiful views of downtown. But the temporary exhibition also helps to showcase the bronze sculpture, an iconic work of the city’s permanent collection that has just undergone a major restoration funded through the Houston Arts Alliance.

Nyquist appreciates how the “Monuments” pieces interact with Moore’s abstract, organically shaped work, which viewers can interpret in whatever ways speak to them, she said. “All these things evoke ideas of, ‘What do we want to be?’”

A touchy theme

In the normally tame world of public art, the topic of monuments is daring and timely. Cities are still reckoning with the fate of memorials glorifying historical heroes who have become politically problematic in the 21st century. Phillip Pyle II, one of five Houston artists who participated in “New Monuments,” noted that Houston still has a few troublesome vestiges of the past. “Dowling’s still hanging out at Hermann Park,” he said, referring to a marble statue of Confederate commander Richard Dowling that was erected in 1905.

Pyle noted that his digital design proposes a statue-like object, not just a two-dimensional poster. “I think the whole project is trying to talk about it without really having to talk about it, in a way,” he said. “The sculpture at Emancipation Park in Charlotte, where Jefferson Davis is on a horse, they’ve covered it in a big garbage bag. That’s basically the extent of what’s done with statues: Let’s put a garbage bag over it and everybody go about your business.”

Houston’s “New Monuments” display marks the debut of a joint art initiative by five organizations that belong to the High Line Network, a group of greenspaces built to reuse urban infrastructure. The structures are unique to Houston; the artists’ digital images will be presented in other ways this year at parks in Austin, Chicago, Toronto and New York. The Austin show, filling a wall at Waller Creek, opens March 2.

Five artists from each city were given free reign to invite discussion or debate about the topic of their choice. They address a range of hot-button issues including race, gender, immigration, colonialism and democracy, although the art is not uniformly confrontational. Some of the posters simply look beautiful, and some require a lot of reading.

“It’s an exhibition of ideas,” said Nyquist. She hopes people will sit on the bench-like bases of each piece and talk to each other about what they see.

Houston artists in the mix

Each organization had its own selection process. Curators from six leading local art institutions nominated the Houston artists. In addition to Pyle, they include Jamal Cyrus, who presents an evolutionary diagram with an African woman at the top; the collective Sin Huellas (Delilah Montoya and Jimmy Castillo), which features an immigrant and her child; Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin, who pay homage to a legendary gay bar; and Regina Agu, who envisions evolving layers of buildings.

Pyle’s digital design adds some serious slab bling to Barnett Newman’s “Broken Obelisk,” imagining fancy gold “elbow” rims protruding from its base. John and Dominique de Menil bought “Broken Obelisk” for Houston, to memorialize Martin Luther King, Jr., moving the sculpture to their Rothko Chapel reflection pool after City Council declined it. Pyle’s rims evoke an important aspect of Houston’s 21st century culture.

Sin Huellas’ poster places the word “apart” over a news image of a woman who was reunited with her son last summer in El Paso after they were separated at the border by U.S. agents. “We began to think about how our families are monuments and the core of our lives here in the United States,” Montoya said. “We saw the word ‘apart’ had a double meaning; we’re at a point where we can either pull families apart or allow them to become a part of us.”

Castillo said the old-school, half-tone inspired manipulation of the photograph also adds meaning: The closer a viewer gets, the more the image breaks apart. The heads of the two figures also form a heart, and one might see the placement of the word as a bar on a cross.

Margolin and Vaughn pushed pink pigment into a triangle to frame an image of Mary’s, a Montrose landmark that was once the epicenter of Houston’s gay political scene. (The triangular shape has been significant to gay communities since World War II, when Nazi forces forced homosexuals to wear triangle-shaped emblems. In later decades, it became a symbol of gay pride.) Mary’s, which operated from 1968 to 1990, has been replaced by upscale coffee shop, and the back yard garden where the ashes of many AIDS victims were scattered is now a parking lot.

“Queer spaces disappear for lots of different reasons. The internet happened, and people can go to straight bars,” Margolin said. “I’m really afraid in 35 or 40 years people won’t see them as anything other than bars. They really were like the crucible for our entire community. They were the reason we made it through crises, the reason politics were able to organize, because there were these safety zones, exclusively queer.”

Houston contemporary art consultant and educator Susana Monteverde likes the “New Monuments” project. “Getting people to think about what and who gets memorialized is an important and richly complex exercise in critical thinking,” she said. “The vastly different ways in which each artist answered the question is fascinating and thought provoking.”

More art to come

Given that any monument can be politically prickly, why make new ones at all?

Margolin answered quickly. “It’s something people have always done. We always memorialize and celebrate our history through objects, whether it’s buildings or churches or artworks or texts or oral traditions,” he said. “For me, it’s more important that we question how these memorials get chosen, what gets memorialized. I’m so aware that my community’s history was excluded from the traditional monuments. What I love about this project is that it suggests society is evolving; that we get to say we’re not stuck with the memorials we’ve got, which is hugely important.”

The Buffalo Bayou Partnership is co-presenting two other art commissions in April as part of Mitchell Center for the Arts’ Counter Current festival: one by Minnesota’s Tia-Simone Gardner, downtown at Allen’s Landing; and the other by the Arabic street artist Ganzeer, at Midway development company’s East River site. Independent of that, with funds from the national IDEA grant program, Houston artist Henry G. Sanchez also will create “Bayou-Art Bayoutorium” along the Bayou’s East Sector in April.

The “New Monuments” display is up at Buffalo Bayou Park through April 30, on Allen Parkway near Gillette Street. The partnership plans tours, a panel discussion and other programs in the coming weeks, including a workshop by the Philadelphia group Monument Lab before a final party for the project at the park’s East End silos site.

molly.glentzer@chron.com