The High Line's new public art space, the Plinth, will feature one of these artists

Expect the High Line to get even more congested next year: The popular elevated park will get a new section dedicated entirely to showcasing commissioned artwork to the public. The space, dubbed the High Line Plinth, will be perched above West 30th Street and Tenth Avenue, and draws its inspiration from London’s Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.

The new platform will serve as a venue where sculptures from various artists, both local and international, will be on display for a year and a half at a time. In a call for artists, more than 50 proposals were submitted and from those, 12 were chosen as finalists.

Though it’s not scheduled to open until 2018, the High Line will host an exhibition with the sculptures of each finalists sized down to models at 1/16th of their proposed size. The maquettes will be on display at West 14th Street through April 30th and come summer 2017, two of the artworks will be chosen as the Plinth’s inaugural commissions.

Participating artists will range in experience level and subjects of interest (some works are political, while others are more comical, and pretty much anything else is fair game). Among those who’ve submitted work are emerging artists like Jonathan Berger and Minerva Cuevas, to those with more experience, like Haim Steinbach and Charles Gaines.

Though the Plinth is designed to be highly visible from street level, the space aims to create a sort of escape from the city. “It’s like you leave the city for a while and go somewhere else,” High Line Art director Cecilia Alemani told the New York Times during a recent tour. Whether or not the Plinth will accomplish that remains to be seen (given how packed the elevated park already gets).

• A Permanent Plinth for New Art Coming to the High Line [The New York Times]