Forget the ticket line. This summer, one of the most important exhibitions in New York happens while you wait for the bus. Gabriel Orozco Public Nature, presented by Public Art Fund, runs from July 8 through September 6 on 300 JCDecaux bus shelters across New York City, Chicago, and Boston.
The premise is simple and radical at once. Orozco created twelve new photographs exploring the relationship between nature and the built environment, and Public Art Fund placed them where millions of commuters encounter them daily. No admission fee, no opening hours, no velvet rope. Just art, weather, and the rhythm of the street.
Nature Versus City? Not Quite
Orozco refuses the easy opposition. His images treat nature and infrastructure not as opposites, but as systems continually shaping one another. Vines wrap around pipes, landscapes form from piles of dirt and trash, and street stalls fill with plastic animals in compositions that highlight moments of friction across the urban fabric.
The photographs function as trompe l’oeil interventions that dissolve the boundary between image and site. In one work, a tree grows through a concrete wall; installed on a shelter, its roots seem to extend into the sidewalk below and its branches into a nearby tree. Orozco uses images as sculptural material to reconfigure how we experience the city.
The Life Behind the Lens
Gabriel Orozco was born in 1962 in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico. Art surrounded him from birth: his father, Mario Orozco Rivera, worked as a muralist and art professor who collaborated with David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of the giants of Mexican muralism. Dinner-table conversations about art, politics, and revolution shaped the young Gabriel’s eye.
He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico City and later at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. Then he made an unusual choice: he rejected the traditional studio. Instead, he walked cities with a camera, finding art in the overlooked details of daily life, a practice he continues four decades later.
A New Yorker Among Four Cities
Orozco lives between Mexico City, New York, Tokyo, and Paris, and that nomadic rhythm defines both his life and his art. New York, however, holds a special place in his story. The city gave him his breakthrough: the legendary 1993 “Projects” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Where he placed fresh oranges in the windows of apartments facing the museum, a work titled “Home Run.”
That same year, his yellow scooter piece and his radically altered Citroën sedan, “La DS” (1993), were featured. He sliced the car lengthwise and reassembled it without its middle third, making him an international sensation. Marian Goodman Gallery, now located at 385 Broadway in Tribeca, has represented him in New York for over three decades.
Where to See Orozco in New York
MoMA (11 West 53rd Street) holds several of his most celebrated works, including “Black Kites” (1997), a human skull covered in a hand-drawn graphite checkerboard that he created while recovering from a collapsed lung. The museum crowned his career with a full retrospective from December 2009 to March 2010, which then traveled to Basel, Paris, and London.
The Guggenheim (1071 Fifth Avenue) presented his exhibition “Asterisms” in 2012, built from thousands of objects he collected on a coastal wildlife reserve in Baja California and a playing field in New York. His famous “Yogurt Caps” (1994), four transparent lids pinned to empty gallery walls. It remains one of the most debated gestures in the city’s exhibition history.
Beyond the Gallery Walls
Public space has long served Orozco as both a site of observation and a medium. Over the past decade, he expanded this engagement through large-scale landscape projects. A permanent garden for the South London Gallery (2016), the cultural master plan for Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park (2019 to present). And a garden commission for the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul (2026).
His best-known works include drawings on airline boarding passes and a whale skeleton covered in graphite patterns, “Mobile Matrix” (2006), permanently installed in Mexico City’s Biblioteca Vasconcelos. Across every medium, Orozco reconfigures existing objects and situations, revealing unexpected possibilities within them.
How to Experience Public Nature
Turn the exhibition into an urban treasure hunt. Public Art Fund publishes a city-specific map of all shelter locations at publicartfund.org. And every artwork sits along a bus route across the five boroughs. One artwork appears at each shelter, so mapping a route through Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island makes a perfect summer afternoon.
Gabriela López Dena, Public Art Fund Associate Curator of Public Practice, curated the project. Her advice holds: look twice. Orozco built his reputation on small gestures with large implications. And these photographs reward the second and third glance more than the first.
The Takeaway
Gabriel Orozco Public Nature marks the first commissioned photographic series of his career and his first large-scale public art project in the United States. For an artist who found his voice photographing city streets. The bus shelter feels less like a compromise than a homecoming.
For New York Art Life readers, the message is clear: some of the best art this summer costs nothing. Slow down at your next bus stop. You might find yourself standing inside an exhibition.
Public Art Fund – 2026 Exhibitions
