Every year, more than seven million international air passengers are greeted gladly on their arrival in the United States — not by forbidding blank corridors or a blizzard of oversize advertising, but by billowing, cloudlike, buttercream-colored curtains stretching hundreds of feet along a periwinkle sky.  “Curtain Wall,” as the installation is called, is a work of public art by the sculptor Harry Roseman in Terminal 4 at Kennedy International Airport.  Actually, it is 58 works of art; gypsum curtains molded to depict states of calm and turbulence. They range in height from about 8 to 15 feet and in weight from about 280 to 900 pounds. They were commissioned for two long walkways that bring travelers into the vast customs hall. They have been there since 2001.  “This is the front door to the city,” Wendy Feuer, who was the original art consultant to Terminal 4, said last week. “In a way, this is our Emma Lazarus.”  The elements of “Curtain Wall” can be seen as pieces of cloth, a commodity that binds the most disparate cultures. They can be seen as theater curtains parting to reveal the drama of New York. They can be seen as the clouds through which travelers journey, or as land masses linked by the seas.  But they can’t be seen for much longer.  J.F.K. International Air Terminal L.L.C., the private company that developed and operates Terminal 4 — and that commissioned and owns the sculpture — plans to remove it permanently, probably no later than this spring.  This has created a crisis for Mr. Roseman, 68, a professor of art at Vassar College. Unless he can find a new home for “Curtain Wall,” he may be helpless to prevent its destruction, only 13 years after its unveiling.  (You wouldn’t happen to have an empty 600-foot-long wall, would you?)  “Unfortunately, given the significant increase in passenger volume over the last decade, the physical limitations of the walkways at Terminal 4 compel us to find a new home for Harry Roseman’s incredible piece,” Alain Maca, the president of the development and operating company, said in a statement on Tuesday.  The removal of “Curtain Wall,” and of a protective curb that runs under the sculpture, would expand the walkways by 13 inches, to 15 feet 3 inches.  Mr. Maca said that his company’s “commitment to public art remains strong” and that it was working with Mr. Roseman and others to find a “solution that would be acceptable to all parties.”  The company offered to give the work back to Mr. Roseman, but he does not have the space to store the enormous ensemble, nor — without some assistance — the money needed to crate and transport such a complex work.  Ms. Feuer said she was trying to help Mr. Roseman find a new site. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport, said through a spokesman that it could accommodate the sculpture temporarily if the Terminal 4 operators picked up all the related costs, including insurance.  Destruction is a possibility, should no alternative locations be found.  “Curtain Wall” is scarcely the first piece of public art in such a bind. Perhaps most famously, or infamously, the federal government removed Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc” from Federal Plaza in Manhattan in 1989.  More recently, the artist Alice Aycock battled the operators of Terminal 1 at Kennedy over the fate of her enormous “Star Sifter” sculpture, which the company wanted to move. The artwork was reconfigured last year and remains on display.  Mr. Roseman believes “Curtain Wall,” too, could be reconfigured.  “Even though it was orchestrated for this space, it has increments than can be rethought,” he said. “There are so many great works of art that are not where they were and are not complete,” he said, citing “Fragment of a Queen’s Face” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an ancient Egyptian statue that was reduced to nothing more than a beautiful chin and lips.  To create “Curtain Wall,” which he undertook in the late 1990s, Mr. Roseman needed a workroom far larger than his own. He said Frances Daly Fergusson, who was then the president of Vassar, offered him an “incredible studio” on the second floor of the All Campus Dining Center at Vassar College. Mr. Roseman carved in floral plastic foam, sprayed with a compound that made it especially malleable and capable of assuming the gentle folds and sharp edges of undulating cloth.  Rubber molds were made of his carving and taken to Pittsburgh, where they were used by Ball Consulting to cast the sculptural assembly in polymer-modified, fiberglass-reinforced gypsum. The pieces were then shipped to Jamaica, Queens, on five flatbed trailers, and hung by steel brackets anchored in the hollow forms.  “It was the artistic equivalent of extreme sports,” Mr. Roseman recalled. What he did not know in 2001 was that the toughest challenge lay ahead.
The work of art, welcoming arriving international passengers at Terminal 4 since 2001, is scheduled to be removed by this spring and could be destroyed if a new home is not found.