The long awaited Bean by sculptor Anish Kapoor will be fully revealed at 56 Leonard today — the scaffolding and barriers should be all gone by 11a. As of yesterday the plywood walls were down and they were polishing away. (I thought they might be using Windex, which gave me the giggles, but it’s water.) And while I have been calling it The Bean all this time, we may soon be corrected: a dedication and naming ceremony will take place in the coming months.

The monumental (and significant) sculpture — it’s 48 feet long, 19 feet tall and 40 tons — has been under construction at the Jenga building since February 2019. The sculptor’s team installed the first of 45 sections back in November 2019. And while things seemed to be chugging along (the sections were stored locally and installed piece by piece), covid put a halt on all of it. It remained half finished until September 2021, when the team was able to travel from the UK to get the job done.

I think it looks spectacular. It gives us a nice big piece of permanent public art right in the heart of the neighborhood. And this is the city’s first permanent Kapoor. The British artist had “Sky Mirror” installed years ago at Rockefeller Center and “Descension” in Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2017. Of course Chicago has the Bean’s older cousin, “Cloud Gate,” installed in 2004.

A statement from Kapoor himself: “The city can feel frenetic, fast and hard, imposing architecture, concrete, noise. My work, at 56 Leonard Street, proposes a form that though made of stainless steel is also soft and ephemeral. Mirrors cause us to pause, to be absorbed and pulled in a way that disrupts time, slows it down perhaps; it’s a material that creates a new kind of immaterial space.”

H., who follows the art world much more closely than I, caught a Twitter post that might explain some of the delays, though I don’t know the author:

This is the story of Differential Expansion. 4 years ago, work started on anish kapoor’s 85 ton bean which is tucked under herzog de meuron’s 56 Leonard st. Last summer, though, the bean ruptured because the exposed side of bean expanded more in the hot sun than pic.twitter.com/TkxK9VxxIM

— Architext14 (@architext14) January 28, 2023