Artist Maya Lin’s long-awaited skeletal forest has finally opened in New York’s famed Madison Square Park.

With the help of 49 dead Atlantic Cedar trees sourced from the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the 61-year-old Lin has transformed the park into an immersive installation — her first in over a decade — meant to transplant the East Side destination’s nearly 60,000 daily visitors into the frontlines of the fight to prevent deforestation. 

Lin, who lives in Colorado, says she was particularly interested in a kind of environmental phenomenon known as “ghost forests” that are a direct product of insect infestations, extreme temperature increases, and sea level changes caused by climate change.

The park itself has played host to numerous public exhibitions over the years, lending its seven-acre space to art world mainstays like Martin Puryear, Teresita Fernandez, Kota Ezawa, Sol Lewitt, and Mel Kendrick, whose heavy concrete sculptures invert meanings and the process of form-making itself in a minimalistic way that mirrors Lin’s earlier approach to the medium. 

"Since 2004, Madison Square Park Conservancy has commissioned artists to realize public art projects on the seven-acre site. Each work demonstrates the range and polyphony of contemporary practice. The program advances the scope of possibility by artists working in the public realm," Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Madison Square Park Conservancy, said in an email.

Lin's installation is the latest turn in her ongoing activism surrounding the issue. In 2012, she founded an online memorial that chronicles the toll taken in terms of plant and animal life by the decimating effects of man-made global warming. Other projects broaching the subject have taken the form of assemblage, portable sculptures, and a noteworthy earthworks built at the upstate Storm King Art Center in 2009. Recently, the artist and Yale Architecture graduate has had her (very capable) hands full with a redesign of Smith College’s historic Neilson Library, keeping an eye on the burgeoning climate future while she helps reshape staid institutions integral to our nation's troubled past. 

18 million acres of forest have been lost each year due to climate change over the past decade, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

“We are faced with an enormous ecological crisis — but I also feel that we have a chance to showcase what can be done to help protect species and significantly reduce emissions by changing our relationship to the land itself,” Lin said in her artist’s statement for the project.

Ghosts Forests opened to the public May 10th and will remain on view until November 14th.