Arturo Di Modica: ROCKEFELLER CENTER (1977)

  • Back to: HOME PAGE When Arturo Di Modica arrived in New York in the early 1970s, the city’s art world...

    Arturo Di Modica Monumental Abstract

    ©Arturo Di Modica

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    When Arturo Di Modica arrived in New York in the early 1970s, the city’s art world was electric with intensity. Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual practice dominated galleries, yet beneath the surface ran a shared restlessness — a desire among artists to break free of institutional confines and force art into the public realm. Land art, performance, and provocation were redefining what it meant to make work at all.
     
    This was the volatile landscape into which Di Modica stepped. Trained in Florence, he had been carving pure modernism from Carrara marble, absorbing the lessons of Brancusi and Henry Moore — sculptors steeped in European timelessness. Yet Florence had weighed heavily on him. History loomed. Tradition watched. In Manhattan, he felt something different: permission. New York was not burdened by the past. It was immediate, unruly, and open to risk.

  • "I loaded eight monumental works onto the back of a truck and turned up during the night and dumped it all right outside the Rockefeller Centre, blocking 5th Avenue, in protest against the art critic Hilton Kramer"

     
    -Arturo Di Modica

    Di Modica set up a studio on Grand Street and began working at scale, importing vast blocks of marble from Carrara — sometimes so large they spilled onto the pavement outside. The street itself became part of the studio, a place of friction and visibility. He watched closely as graffiti writers and street artists claimed the city through danger and defiance, understanding instinctively that exposure, not permission, was the currency of attention.  By 1977, Di Modica had built a body of monumental abstract sculptures and attempted to present them conventionally, staging a six-week installation in Battery Park. The response was silence. No press. No audience. The system, he realised, was indifferent. So he bypassed it.

  • After a dismissive encounter with the New York Times’ chief art critic, Di Modica loaded eight monumental abstractions onto a...

    Arturo Di Modica post Rockefeller Center installation

    ©Arturo Di Modica

    After a dismissive encounter with the New York Times’ chief art critic, Di Modica loaded eight monumental abstractions onto a truck and drove them straight to Rockefeller Center — one of Manhattan’s most symbolically charged sites. The works were unloaded without authorisation. The driver fled. Police arrived with weapons drawn. Di Modica, barely fluent in English, distributed flyers explaining his intent.

     

    What followed was a quintessential New York moment. The mayor arrived. A modest fine was issued. Temporary permission was granted. The next day, Di Modica appeared on the front page of the New York Post. The intervention worked. Collectors came. Every sculpture was sold. More importantly, Di Modica had learned a defining lesson: in New York, visibility was power — and sometimes, you had to take it.

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