A CONVERSATION BETWEEN MICHELE OKA DONER AND JULIA P. HERZBERG – TALISMAN, A SACRED GROVE

Arte al Dia, August 31, 2026

Talisman, A Sacred Grove is a natural grove featuring twenty-one different species of trees that support approximately two hundred hand-formed heads, known as Talisman. The grove is installed on Park Avenue mall near the corner of East 66th Street in front of The Park Avenue Armory.

It is the first sculptural installation of its kind installed under The Fund for Park Avenue in its twenty-six-year history. Michele Oka Doner’s mise-en-scène, with its reference to the sacred and the magical, is a very exciting creative endeavor that draws on the artist’s art work across multiple media with innumerable forms of natural life. Among the artist’s exceptionally diverse works, made with nature’s materials in unusual sizes and forms, Oka Doner is especially renowned for her more than forty public artworks throughout the United States and abroad.

Travelers from the world over are likely familiar with A Walk on the Beach (1995-2010), a 1.5-mile-long concourse at Miami International Airport with 9,000 embedded bronze and mother-of-pearl elements, each one a unique shape of marine life, including seaweed, sea urchins, and tropical seeds, among other aquatic forms; Radiant Site (1990) at the Herald Square MTA station, New York; Flight (1997), made of terrazzo/cast bronze at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, VA; SoulCatchers (2009) at the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory, Munich, Germany; and Bird House (2026) in Bayshore Park, Miami Beach. 

Having worked for more than six decades with nature’s materials, Oka Doner’s Talisman, A Sacred Grove is the epiphanous sculptural installation realized after a series of material experiments and technical decisions related to the landscape on the Park Avenue mall and to the theatrical aura associated with the many cultural productions held at the Park Avenue Armory, a preeminent arts and cultural venue between East 67th and East 68th Streets in New York City.   

JPH: Let’s talk about the meanings conveyed by a sacred grove, the Talisman, and their relationship to contemporary sensitivities.

MOD: Sacred groves were natural places of reflection for our ancestors who engaged creatively with plants, that were the source of their shelter and sustenance. The notion of a biblical tree of life is more than metaphoric. When early homo sapiens were done pulling roots, collecting edible herbs and leaves, even scraping bark from trees, they gathered around the fire at night, looked up at the stars, and wondered. Awe turned to speculation and to invention of ritual. The trees’ leafy domes provided a site for subsequent ceremonies that have come down to us in the form of myths, stories, and songs that carry these golden threads—all leading to a conscious awareness of our place in the scheme of things. I learned one of these songs in elementary school, The Ash Grove, and I continued singing it over a lifetime. Years ago, I found a vinyl recording by Benjamin Britten on the piano and Peter Pears singing. I still have the recording and the record player, so I can listen to it! 

The ash grove, how graceful, how plainly ‘tis speaking,

The harp through it playing has language for me;

Whenever the light through its branches is breaking

A host of kind faces is gazing on me.

The friends of my childhood again are before me,

Each step wakes a mem’ry as freely I roam;

With soft whispers laden, its leaves rustle o’er me;

The ash grove, the ashgrove alone is my home.