Soon, a behemoth version of New York City’s ubiquitous street bird will be perched on the High Line above 30th Street and 10th Avenue. Iván Argote’s Dinosaur—a 16-foot-tall, hyper-realistic pigeon sculpture—has just been announced as the next High Line Plinth commission in New York Magazine. The artwork is set to replace Pamela Rosenkranz’s Old Tree this October and will be on view for 18 months.

Posed on a concrete plinth that resembles the sidewalks and buildings that New York’s pigeons call home, Dinosaur reverses the typical power dynamic between bird and human, towering over the countless pedestrians and cars that will meander below its feet. The meticulously hand-painted, humorous sculpture challenges the grandeur of traditional monuments that celebrate significant historical figures, instead choosing to canonize the familiar urban bird.

“Most of the time, we place humans on top of this pedestal. Then, my response was not to play the human card but to play the nonhuman one… I saw the pigeon would be something that people would react to in different ways,” said Iván Argote. “It’s a very iconic animal or entity, or icon of New York, and also still a marginal creature.”

Dinosaur is the fourth commission for High Line Art’s ongoing Plinth program—a landmark destination for public art in New York City—following Simone Leigh’s Brick House (2019), Sam Durant’s Untitled (drone) (2021), and Pamela Rosenkranz’s Old Tree (2023). Dinosaur was first submitted as a proposal for the High Line Plinth in 2020, among 80 proposals that included Rosenkranz’s Old Tree.

Argote is the first Plinth artist from the global south, and the youngest yet. Now based in France, his work as an artist and filmmaker is heavily focused on social justice issues and historical processes, sometimes inspired by his childhood in Bogotá, as he grew up in a family with a long tradition of political and social activism, from the 1950s to the present.

With this new commission, Argote reminds viewers that, to some degree, everyone is an immigrant. Even the pigeon, a New York fixture, initially migrated here and made the city their home, like millions of other “native” New Yorkers.

Learn more about Dinosaur →

Rendering courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Timothy Schenck.