Park Avenue Cars Series
1969–1974/2024
“Old techniques and new magic made possible a whole body of work inspired so long ago.”
—Kady JLKR
In 2024, Janet Ruttenberg returned to a long-standing project, tracing the movement of traffic along Park Avenue in Manhattan. First exhibited in the late 1970s as Park Ave Etchings, the work had lingered in her consciousness as an important but unfinished part of a decades-long practice.
In this new iteration, the steel panels are reactivated with projected video. Light moves across their surface. Reflections come and go, like passing cars on a bright afternoon. The present-day skyline rises from compositions made decades earlier. The Park Ave Car series (2024) becomes a meditation on time, with moments suspended behind windows and framed by the towering architecture of the city.
The series began in the late 1960s, shortly after Ruttenberg moved to New York. Standing on Park Avenue, she was transfixed by the stream of vehicles racing past glass towers, their reflective surfaces catching fragments of sky, buildings, and faces inside.
The section of Park Avenue leading down to Grand Central Station had recently been developed as a showcase for advanced modern architecture. The impressive skyscrapers along both sides of Park Avenue included Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe’s 1958 Seagram Building.
Skidmore, Owings & Merril’s 1951 Lever House, on Park Avenue between 54th and 53rd streets.
That fleeting moment sparked what would become one of her most technically ambitious and conceptually layered projects: an 80-foot frieze of cars in motion, developed through an unorthodox fusion of printmaking, painting, sculpture, and collage.
Each car is constructed as part of what Ruttenberg calls an “etching sandwich,” a multi-layered approach to image-making that pushes the boundaries of traditional print practice. The process begins with a base of etched stainless steel—sometimes treated with acids reminiscent of those used in Rembrandt’s era. Over this base, she sprayed the sleek silhouette of a car using industrial automotive enamel. Onto the enamel surface, she affixed small, window-shaped etchings printed on paper. These were attached with narrow strips of pasted paper, “exactly as an etching is hinged to a mat,” allowing each window to float lightly above the car body—revealing glimpses of interior scenes frozen in motion. These windows contain miniature human dramas—a couple mid-argument, a child in the back seat, a dog leaning out into the breeze. The final layer—a mirrored Plexiglas surface silkscreened with skyscraper silhouettes—simulates the architectural reflections that first captured her attention, binding the composition into a single, reflective object. “The windows of the car gave a look at the people inside.
Selections from the Park Avenue Cars Series have appeared in significant exhibitions over the decades, including early presentations at the University of Dubuque and the Flint Institute of Arts in 1976, and a major installation at the Union Carbide Building on Park Avenue in April 1977. Several panels were later shown at the Brooklyn Museum and at ArtYard in 2019. In 2024, after more than forty years in storage, Ruttenberg revisited and expanded the series with what she described as “a flourish of inspiration and possibilities.” Six-, fourteen-, and sixteen-panel compositions were reassembled, now activated by video projections that ripple across the works. In the 14-panel frieze, a floor-to-ceiling projection acts as a frame; the 16-panel installation centers on reflections shifting across the car bodies. The Park Avenue Cars Series remains a living work—not a closed chapter, but a decades-spanning artistic inquiry that continues to unfold through new technologies, new presentations, and an enduring fascination with the layered spectacle of city life.