Still from Yvette Mayorga, PLEA$URE GARDEN$, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Mayorga’s Midnight Moment debuts in tandem with Magic Grasshopper, the artist’s largest installation to date
October 1–31 | 11:57pm–12am
Times Square | Between 41st and 49th Streets
Times Square Arts, the public platform for contemporary visual arts and performance, is pleased to announce Yvette Mayorga as October’s Midnight Moment. Her video work, PLEA$URE GARDEN$, screening nightly from 11:57pm–12am from October 1–31, 2025, is presented alongside her 30-foot-long pink kinetic sculpture Magic Grasshopper, which will be unveiled on October 15 at 5:30pm with remarks by the artist and a special live performance.
PLEA$URE GARDEN$ is an invitation to step inside Mayorga’s lush and layered candy-colored world. The stop motion animation transforms Mayorga’s blooming flowers, nail charms, and smiley faces into a maximalist dreamscape full of childhood nostalgia, art historical references, and alluring compositions of beauty and leisure. In a style the artist refers to as Latinxoco—a merging of Latinx and Rococo aesthetics—vessels and vehicles glide across painterly landscapes, balloons drift skyward, telenovelas flicker on a living room TV, and lovers dance in slow motion in tactile layers of desire and excess.
While Mayorga’s Midnight Moment is only on view in the evening, visitors can experience Magic Grasshopper at any time of day from October 15 to December 2, 2025. The artist’s largest public work to date, Magic Grasshopper subverts childhood nostalgia, confectionary arts, and the color pink to critically explore the intersection of migration, feminized labor, and colonial histories. Sited in Times Square, a crossroads of New York City that connotes big dreams and new beginnings, Magic Grasshopper and Plea$ure Garden$ mirror the district’s scale and sense of possibility, while inviting us into deeper conversations about the journeys taken in pursuit of a more promising future.
Elaborately piped in Mayorga’s signature faux-frosting—thickened acrylic applied through pastry bags—the carriage is drawn by carousel-style horses, and set upon spinning gold-rimmed wheels inspired by the Mexican-American lowrider culture of the artist’s hometown. Wrapped around the float are painterly scenes of migration, challenging European art historical tropes with personal and collective contemporary narratives.
Magic Grasshopper will be unveiled on October 15, 2025 at 5:30pm on Broadway Plaza between 46th & 47th Streets, featuring a live performance by a special guest and remarks by the artist. Additional programming will be announced soon.
ABOUT YVETTE MAYORGA
Yvette Mayorga (b. 1991) is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist known for her Rococo-inspired reliefs that merge confectionary labor with found images to explore themes of belonging. Dominated by the color pink, Mayorga celebrates femme power while questioning the allure of consumer culture and the American Dream as a first-generation Latinx.
Mayorga holds a MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the University of Illinois. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design, NY; Vincent Price Art Museum, CA; El Museo del Barrio, NY; The Center for Craft, NC; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico; LACMA, CA; and solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT (2024), The Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR (2022), and her first institutional international solo museum exhibition, La Jaula de Oro, at Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Mexico (2024), which was reviewed by The New York Times.
Mayorga’s works are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, MA; The City of Chicago permanent public art collection at O’Hare International Airport, IL; Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, NH; 21c Museum Hotels, KY; Cerámica Suro, Mexico; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; DePaul Art Museum, IL; El Museo del Barrio, NY; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, IL; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; and New Mexico State University Art Museum, NM. She has been featured in Artforum, ARTnews, DAZED, Galerie, Hyperallergic, Teen Vogue, The Guardian, The New York Times, and W Magazine.
Website: www.yvettemayorga.com
ABOUT TIMES SQUARE ARTS
Times Square Arts, the public art program of the Times Square Alliance, collaborates with contemporary artists and cultural institutions to experiment and engage with one of the world’s most iconic urban places. Through the Square’s electronic billboards, public plazas, vacant areas and popular venues, and the Alliance’s own online landscape, Times Square Arts invites leading contemporary creators, such as Charles Gaines, Joan Jonas, Jeffrey Gibson, Pamela Council, Mel Chin and Kehinde Wiley, to help the public see Times Square in new ways. Times Square has always been a cultural district and place of risk, innovation and creativity, and the arts program ensures these qualities remain central to the district’s unique identity.
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