Aerobatics in Central Park
Georgina Wells

Visitors to Central Park this week may have seen an airplane do a back flip. In Paola Pivi’s How I Roll, a six-seat Piper Seneca plane rotates 360 degrees, twenty-four hours a day. The plane is suspended overhead, attached at either wing to a steel column, and slowly rotates by a high-powered motor system. The installation is free and open to the public, but viewers won’t be able to get too close to the action: a chain-link fence encloses the plane and its entire rotational circumference.

How I Roll is a project for New York City’s Public Art Fund, the same organization that produced Rob Pruitt’s monument to Andy Warhol that has been up in Union Square since March. It is the first public art installation in the United States for Pivi, who was born in Italy but now lives and works in Anchorage. You can see it spinning from now until August 26 in Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza, or in the video from the Public Art Fund website below.