Across four different lawns, 100 wooden elementary school–style tablet arm desks arranged in a grid are bursting and erupting with tree branches. From afar, the chaotic assemblage evokes a brier patch—a source of protection for some and danger for others, nodding to the disparities felt within an education system in which some excel and many are left behind. When peeled back, it “reveals lived experiences about rooted systems in our country and the world,” says Madison Square Park Conservancy chief curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport. “Brier Patch is lauded with inherent tensions—growth and stagnation, seduction and peril, individual and community—that ask us to consider how these dichotomies coexist in engrained systems and the work on view.” 

Photography by Yasunori Matsui