Val Britton, The Blue-Sky Line, 2023, UV printed aluminum sheet and aluminum rods, Sunset Park Avenues Elementary School, Brooklyn​

Blue-Sky Line is a site-specific artwork by Val Britton for the lobby ceiling of the Sunset Park Avenues Elementary School, Brooklyn. The hanging sculpture is composed of dozens of colorful, overlapping metal components. Inspired by the visual language of mapping, green shapes suggest landforms and bright pink webs evoke transportation routes. These forms hover below silvery-blue polygons printed to resemble street maps. To create the artwork, Britton studied the rich history of the school's original 1892 building, a Police Precinct Station House and Stable, as well as that of the surrounding neighborhood. The artist selected recognizable landmarks and transportation networks from Sunset Park to incorporate with those of her own imagining. Together, these components form a dynamic, fantastical landscape that invites viewers to consider the practice of mapping not only as a tool for exploring new places, but also as a metaphor for connections-- between people, their histories, and the environments they shape. The artwork's title is taken from a colloquial name for the N Train, which travels from Manhattan underground until is reaches Sunset Park, where it emerges into the daylight. When this train line opened in 1915, the neighborhood grew and changed as waves of immigrants moved to the neighborhood. To this day, they continue to define Sunset Park's unique character as a truly global community.