Alexandre Arrechea, Orange Functional
October 2026
Location
Flowers Field
Parking
Flowers Cottage Parking Lot
Big Field Parking Lot
The Dix Park Conservancy is proud to present Orange Functional, a playable sculpture by Cuban-born artist Alexandre Arrechea. Arrechea is known for public works that reshape familiar buildings and objects to show how design guides the way people behave in shared space. A co-founder of the Cuban collective Los Carpinteros, he has presented large-scale public projects from Park Avenue in New York to Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
In Flowers Field, next to the Flowers Cottage, Arrechea turns his attention to the basketball hoop, a fixture of public parks everywhere. Orange Functional is a 23-foot painted steel tree whose branches hold 23 regulation-size hoops. Visitors are invited to bring a ball and play, and every shot that drops through a net falls to the grass like fruit from a tree. Because the hoops are spread throughout the branches, each player decides how difficult to make the game, and the meaning of the work grows out of those choices.
Artist Statement
A basketball court comes with rules built into its architecture, telling players where to stand and what counts as success, while a tree grows according to its own logic. With Orange Functional I wanted to bring those two structures together and see what happens when a space designed for order begins to behave like something alive. That tension between structure and spontaneity runs through much of how we share public space, and it sits at the center of this work.
I don't see myself as the author of what the sculpture means. That meaning belongs to the people who engage with it, in the same way a park takes its character from the people who gather there, and I think of the work as a small model for that kind of democratic participation.
The moment that interests me most comes just before the shot. Faced with more possibilities than anyone could pursue at once, you have to commit to one without knowing how it will turn out. We make that kind of decision every day in much larger ways, and I hope the sculpture offers a playful way to notice what it takes to choose and then live with the result.
About Alexandre Arrechea
Alexandre Arrechea was born in Trinidad, Cuba, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose colonial architecture was built on sugar wealth. As a descendant of enslaved people who worked the region's sugar fields, he developed a lasting interest in how buildings carry power and memory. He earned his BFA from Havana's Instituto Superior de Arte in 1994 and was a founding member of the collective Los Carpinteros from 1991 to 2003. His solo public works include No Limits (2013) on New York's Park Avenue and Sunset Garden (2026) in West Hollywood. Arrechea has exhibited at MoMA PS1 and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana.
