Camille Henrot is bringing a pack of sculpted dogs to Central Park this fall, with Public Art Fund preparing to open “Dogs,” the artist’s first public exhibition in New York City, at Doris C. Freedman Plaza on September 9. The organization announced the project as featuring 15 new sculptures positioned at the entrance to the park, where they are scheduled to remain through August 29, 2027.

The installation moves Henrot’s recurring interest in dogs into one of Manhattan’s busiest public settings. Rather than depicting a standardized breed or idealized canine form, the works emphasize difference. Public Art Fund has described the sculptures as having distinct characteristics expressed through their forms, materials and crafted details, producing a group intended to echo the varied shapes, sizes and personalities of dogs encountered across New York.

The works are being produced in outdoor-suitable materials including bronze, stone, steel and concrete. Public Art Fund says Henrot built the sculptures from an accumulation of visual references that range widely across art history and popular culture, including drawings by Saul Steinberg, Tex Avery cartoons, ancient Egyptian sculpture and the stylized presentation of animals at dog shows.

Those references serve a broader conceptual interest that has run through Henrot’s multidisciplinary practice. The artist has repeatedly examined the structures people create to organize private and social life, from systems of knowledge and communication to expectations surrounding care, authority and behavior. With dogs, she turns to an animal whose relationship with humans is unusually shaped by companionship, training, dependency and domestic routines.

Public Art Fund describes Henrot’s interest in the animals as tied to questions of attachment, delegated care and domestication. Placing the sculptures at Central Park gives those ideas an unusually direct setting. The site is not an enclosed art space in which visitors deliberately seek out an exhibition; it is a heavily traveled urban threshold where joggers, commuters, tourists, families and dog walkers routinely pass between the city grid and the park.

The location gives “Dogs” a particularly New York context. Henrot, who was born in Paris and lives and works in New York, has drawn inspiration from the individuality visible in the city and from canine companions she encounters in her Upper West Side neighborhood. The sculptures can therefore function both as independent artworks and as a stylized counterpart to the real animals moving through the park around them.

The project is curated by Public Art Fund Senior Curator Melanie Kress. The nonprofit organization has used Doris C. Freedman Plaza for a succession of prominent contemporary-art commissions, making the small but highly visible site at the southeast corner of Central Park a regular platform for large-scale public sculpture. Public Art Fund’s current program lists an opening celebration for Henrot’s installation on September 9 from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

There is a discrepancy in recently published descriptions of the installation’s size. Public Art Fund’s announcement, carried by ArtDaily in August and repeated by the organization on social media, said “Dogs” would feature 15 new sculptures. A September 1 ARTnews report described Henrot as installing 12 large-scale dog sculptures. Public Art Fund’s current exhibition page refers simply to a group of sculptures and does not state a numerical total. The available materials do not explain whether the difference reflects a revised installation plan, distinctions in scale or another change.

What remains consistent across the organizer’s materials and recent reporting is the exhibition’s scope, setting and duration. “Dogs” opens September 9 at Doris C. Freedman Plaza and is planned as a yearlong project extending into late August 2027. It builds on an existing series of canine sculptures that Henrot has developed in recent exhibitions, including works shown in her 2025 presentation “A Number of Things” at Hauser & Wirth in New York.

Henrot works across sculpture, drawing, painting, installation and film. She received international attention for “Grosse Fatigue,” a 2013 film created following a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution that won the Silver Lion at that year’s Venice Biennale. Public Art Fund notes that her work has since appeared in solo exhibitions at institutions including the New Museum in New York, Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin, Art Sonje Center in Seoul, Fondazione Memmo in Rome and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.

Her 2026 activity has also extended beyond the Central Park project. Public Art Fund says Henrot premiered the film “In The Veins” at the New Museum and LUMA Arles and has participated in projects in London, Copenhagen and Aspen. The New York public-art commission nevertheless represents a different kind of exposure because it removes the practical barrier of entering a museum or gallery and places the work directly in the daily circulation of the city.

That accessibility is central to Public Art Fund’s model. Its exhibitions use parks, transportation infrastructure and other civic spaces to place contemporary art before broad audiences without requiring admission. “Dogs” joins a 2026 program that has also included projects across New York and other U.S. cities, reinforcing the organization’s emphasis on art experienced as part of ordinary urban movement.

Henrot’s choice of dogs could make the Central Park installation unusually approachable without stripping it of conceptual weight. The animals are familiar, emotionally legible and ubiquitous in New York, but their relationship with humans is built on complicated systems of affection, responsibility, ownership and behavioral rules. By turning them into individually crafted public sculptures, Henrot gives those everyday relationships a physical presence in a space where comparable interactions unfold continuously.

The result will be an exhibition operating simultaneously as a group of sculptural characters, an observation of New York life and an inquiry into how people construct bonds with other species. Beginning September 9, visitors entering Central Park at Doris C. Freedman Plaza will encounter Henrot’s artificial pack alongside the city’s real one, with the installation scheduled to remain in place for nearly a full year.