Planting a field of light where a developer hopes to build a casino

At least a dozen companies have similar casino dreams for locations in Times Square, Hudson Yards, next to Citi Field and even atop the Saks Fifth Avenue department store near Rockefeller Center. Stefanos Chen, a colleague who has covered the fight over casino licenses, noted that the commission for Munro’s work was a sign of what developers were willing to do to generate goodwill — a key factor in convincing local officials and residents who have a say in the permitting process.

Michael Hershman, the CEO of the Soloviev Group and member of the advisory board of the Soloviev Foundation, said the installation would remain up for a year “regardless of whether we get a license or not.” He also said that if Soloviev were to win a casino license, part of Munro’s exhibition would feature in the landscape design. “It’s going to be a permanent fixture,” Hershman said.

The installation will be an immersive, walk-through experience, like “Bruce Munro: Light at Sensorio”, which opened in 2019 in Pasa Robles, California. Our writer Patricia Leigh Brown called the California exhibition a “stunning spectacle” that has become an Instagram phenomenon. “The subtly changing patterns of this light safari, activated by a spray of fiber optic cables attached to hidden projectors, seem to inspire a cathedral-like awe,” she wrote.

Hershman said the conversations that led to Munro’s commission for the East Side site began before the pandemic, when Hershman and the sons of developer Sheldon Solow were considering the future of Solow’s art collection. In the decade before his death in 2020, Solow had become a major seller of masterpieces at auction, but he “was unwilling to give the public access” to the art he acquired, Hershman said.

After Solow died, his son Stefan Soloviev (who uses a pre-Ellis Island family name) became chairman of the renamed Soloviev Group and took “a completely different approach to opening the collection to the public,” Hershman said. The foundation, also renamed, “wanted to do something as a gift to the city, to let the city know that we operate in a very different way than Sheldon operated,” he added.