The blocks beside the museum the night before Thanksgiving: giant balloons under their nets, the crews, the crowd shuffling past under the streetlights, the works on the barricade walls.
The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade began in 1924, and the first giant balloons appeared in 1927. The night before the parade, crews inflate the balloons on the streets around the American Museum of Natural History, and the public walks past them under nets. This room interprets that inflation night, not the parade itself.
Source · Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade ↗
The Beaux Arts museum front, the side streets closed off, enormous character balloons lying on their sides under cargo nets and sandbags, helium trucks, police barricades, families in coats, bare trees in the park. Mood: inflation night. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.