There’s only one Broadway. That much is true. And right now, it’s not just the rhythm of taxis, footsteps, and sirens composing its usual urban symphony. This summer, a different kind of beat punctuates the Broadway Malls—a sculptural hum, a visual murmur, a colorful hubbub that stretches from 64th Street to 117th like a surreal parade. The artist behind this playful intervention is Carl D’Alvia, a master of contradictions who invites us to laugh, reflect, and reimagine the role of sculpture in our public life.
Born in Sleepy Hollow, New York, in 1965, D’Alvia is no stranger to the uncanny or the mythical. He lives and works between West Cornwall, Connecticut and New York City, and his artistic trajectory—over three decades—has consistently danced between the monumental and the intimate, the heavy and the hilarious. From marble to bronze, resin to aluminum, his work refuses to settle into one category or material logic. Instead, it transforms: breathing life into stone, giving softness to metal, and injecting humor into histories we thought were fixed.
In Broadway Hubbub, presented by the Broadway Mall Association in collaboration with NYC Parks and HESSE FLATOW, D’Alvia places five towering sculptures from his Liths series into the heart of Manhattan’s kinetic artery. These are not passive monuments. They bend, slouch, lean, and loiter with us. They shimmer in gleaming auto paint—electric orange, bright pink, radiant blue—emitting a joy that feels both alien and oddly familiar. They seem to have walked out of a dream of Calder, gotten lost in a Tony Smith blueprint, and stumbled into the 21st century with new questions about form, presence, and humor.
The names—Hot Rod, Tandem—tell us something: these are characters, not just objects. And D’Alvia sees them as such. “Itinerant characters who slouch, bend and wander through the world alongside us while holding a sort of sculptural mirror up to us,” he says. There’s something disarmingly human about these hunks of aluminum. They feel like friends from another dimension—monoliths with attitude, ancestors who got bored with standing still.
D’Alvia’s genius lies in this: he makes the monumental feel light, both physically and emotionally. His Liths may nod to ancient stones, but they flirt with us like cartoons. They play with the very idea of public sculpture: instead of asserting power, they provoke delight; instead of dominating space, they join it, mingle in it, react to it. In a city that rarely pauses, they force us to do just that—not out of reverence, but out of curiosity, affection, surprise.
It’s easy to imagine children hugging these sculptures, lovers using them as meeting points, or tired passersby leaning on them without realizing they’re part of an art installation. That’s the beauty of it. Broadway Hubbub collapses the space between the art world and the everyday world. D’Alvia doesn’t pedestal his work—he embeds it in the mess, the music, the madness of Broadway. And in doing so, he honors the lineage of artists who have reimagined public space: from the abstraction of the 1970s to the dynamic experiments of contemporary urban sculpture.
But perhaps more profoundly, he restores a sense of wonder to the street. In a city that often trains us to look down or look past, Carl D’Alvia makes us look up—and smile.
