Diana Al-Hadid, Built From Our Tallest Tales, 2008 (detail) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House Lobby as part of the Next Wave Art program.

A conglomerate of wood, metal, polystyrene, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, plastic, concrete, and paint, this assemblage comes from an artist who has previously engaged the idea of the axis mundi in Towers of Babel and Stairways to Heaven.  In the mass of honeycomb rubble, she now alludes to the architecture of nature itself. 

(Courtesy of Diana Al-Hadid and Perry Rubenstein Gallery. Photograph by Mariano C. Peuser).