Maelstrom Opens on the Roof

The Iris B. Cantor Roof Garden finally opened for the season today with Roxy Paine's massive steel sculpture, Maelstrom. While the Metropolitan Museum of Art is hands-down my favorite place in New York City, the rooftop is truly its crown jewel — and Paine's sculpture serves to unite the architectural with the organic as it twists and mangles over the trees in the park with the midtown Manhattan skyline in the distance. I like the way the branches of the sculpture frame the negative space between them: a building in one slice, a person in another — it breaks up the background into interesting vignettes. It also reminded me of the drawings I'd make when I was a kid, freely scrawling loops and lines and then going back and filling the spaces between with different colors.