Okay, this one is very Westchester and I am into it.
Armonk has quietly turned its whole downtown into a scavenger hunt. Walk around the village, go inside the stores, and you will start running into hearts. Twenty of them. Each one is a sculpture about 23 inches tall, sitting on a little black stand, tucked in among the merchandise at participating businesses all over town. They went up on August 26 and they are staying put through the end of September. The whole thing is called Armonk Has Heart, and the Armonk Outdoor Art Show puts it on with the Armonk Chamber of Commerce and the Town of North Castle.
Every Heart Is a Different Artist
None of these are the same. Every heart was made by an artist exhibiting at this year's Armonk Outdoor Art Show, and they went in wildly different directions with it. Carol Luz painted her Jack Russell terrier trotting down a sidewalk with a basket of hearts in his mouth, past a chalkboard sign reading "Love Lives Here" and an Armonk, New York street sign. Another artist covered hers in a dense painted cityscape, all water towers and rooftops. Tricia Caracappa went abstract, a wash of yellows and pinks with one small teal heart buried in it. That range is the fun of it. You are not looking at twenty versions of one idea, you are looking at twenty artists handed the same blank shape.
Three High Schoolers Made One of Them
This is the detail that made me like the whole project more. One of the twenty hearts was made by three students from Byram Hills High School: Adley Aronsky, Shannon Moloney and Daniela Marder. Theirs is two ducklings on a pale blue sky, ringed by a border of hand painted flowers, and it holds its own next to artists who do this for a living. And it goes further than that. The photographs of all twenty hearts, the ones on the show's own site and the ones in this post, were shot by Nate Zipper, another Byram Hills student. Two different sets of teenagers, one making the art and one documenting it, inside a program most people would assume was handled entirely by adults.
The Show Behind It Is 64 Years Old
Armonk Has Heart is not a standalone thing. It is the lead up to the 64th Armonk Outdoor Art Show, which runs Saturday and Sunday, September 26 and 27, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Community Park on Business Park Drive. About 160 juried artists get in, and more than 300 volunteers put the weekend together. Earlier this year the show was named Armonk's 2026 Organization of the Year, which after six decades of doing this feels overdue rather than surprising.
Then They Get Sold for the Library
Here is the payoff. All twenty hearts go up for online auction. Bidding opens September 16 and closes at 5 p.m. on September 27, and the net proceeds go to the Friends of the North Castle Public Library. That money funds programming at both the Armonk and North White Plains branches, plus the Armonk Players theater group. So the sculptures sitting on counters in shops around downtown are, in a very literal way, library funding. There is also a printable map and a scavenger hunt on the show's site if you want to hunt down all twenty before the bidding starts.
Thank you to the Armonk Outdoor Art Show for putting the details and the photography out in the open, to Nate Zipper for shooting all twenty hearts, and to Adley Aronsky, Shannon Moloney and Daniela Marder for the ducklings.
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