Then she whipped off her blue-rimmed glasses and, conducting the conversation with her ungloved hands, described her plans for that tree and four others in New York City: a 24-hour multimedia extravaganza of lighting, time-lapse filming, poetry and music, to be called “Behold.”  Ms. Jones wants New Yorkers not only to appreciate the ancient giants in their midst but also to pitch in and help conserve them. In that respect, “Behold” is an artistic intervention.  “Imagine how beautiful she would be all lit up,” she mused, stepping back from the English elm, one of just a few of its vintage left in the city. Ms. Jones assigned it a gender based on, well, women’s intuition. Her intended subject dwarfs her, but then, all of her artistic ambitions are supersize.  If “Behold” comes to fruition, it will be Ms. Jones’s first major public art project in New York City since “Metronome,” the nine-story, 500-ton, $4.2 million, steam-spouting installation at 1 Union Square South that she and Andrew Ginzel, then her partner in life and art, unveiled 12 years ago. That artwork/digital timepiece, intended as a modernist meditation on the dissolution of time, was met with scathing reaction. Herbert Muschamp, then The New York Times’s architecture critic, called it “pretentious” and dismissed it as part of an “unhappy consortium of art, architecture and real estate development.”  The fiasco unfolded as Ms. Jones’s marriage to Mr. Ginzel was breaking up, and it temporarily curtailed their artistic partnership. Her escape route: a Fulbright grant to live and work in Rome.  Her mantra, based on advice she received from her mentors Christo and Jeanne-Claude before her departure: “Never ever ever take no for an answer.”  Ms. Jones had figured to spend a year in Italy mending her heart and reputation. Instead, she stayed for a decade and returned to making public art there, focusing on the derelict banks of the Tiber.  For her “Eternal Tiber” project, she used a combination of power-washing and stenciling to fashion a dozen she-wolves, based on Rome’s mascot, on the 32-foot-tall travertine wall along one of the river’s banks. For Rome’s 2,758th birthday in 2005, she lighted the Tiber with 2,758 floating candles. She still hopes to install a ceiling-to-floor design, made from monofilament thread and called “Gravity,” in the Pantheon.  If most people simply navigate their environment, Ms. Jones prefers to imbue hers with spatial and spiritual significance. The youngest of three children of a poet and an American diplomat (or so she thought) posted to a kaleidoscopic array of European cities, she first envisioned herself as a magician.  At a family meeting over the dinner table in Oslo when she was 12 and old enough to keep a secret, she says she was enlightened about her father’s real profession: C.I.A. operative. “In Warsaw our walls were repainted every month,” she said, “because they were making sure the rooms weren’t bugged.”  In their teens, Ms. Jones and her sisters completed their schooling in the United States. For her, this meant Concord Academy in Massachusetts and then the Rhode Island School of Design, where, encouraged by a speech by Christo, she decided to expand her artistic ambitions beyond ceramics. She met Mr. Ginzel, an assistant to the artist Red Grooms, in 1981 while she was a graduate student at Yale, and they married in 1986.  They received their first Public Art Fund commission in 1987 for “Pananemone,” a temporary sculpture in City Hall Park, and in 1989 they received a commission to design the popular “Mnenomics” time capsule wall at the new Stuyvesant High School. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority commissioned their “Oculus” design for the World Trade Center subway hub connecting the Chambers Street and Park Place stations (for it, Ms. Jones photographed the left eye of 1,200 high school students, then had 300 eyes rendered in Italian mosaics). The pièce de résistance of that 1995 project is a map of New York City rendered in 1.8 million pieces of stone.  Those endeavors led to the commission, following a design competition, for “Metronome.” It was a monster project — Ms. Jones refers to it as a “four-year epic” and says that important elements of the design, including night lighting and a steam geyser, were not incorporated as planned. The goal, according to the artists, was a “grandiose public clock and glockenspiel with which New Yorkers could confront the dissolution of time.” Mr. Muschamp groused that it “incoherently tracks some chronological measurement not worth thinking about.” Another Times critic, Ken Johnson, cited the work’s “post-modernist allegorical pretension,” but more positively noted that “it enlivens our experience of the city.”  Kent Barwick, then president of the Municipal Art Society, which oversaw the design competition, said the Union Square site demanded art on an over-the-top scale. “Everyone said, ‘Let’s do something out of the ordinary,’ and something out of the ordinary was done,” he said. “Love it or hate it, you’re conscious of it.”  “Until Metronome, we were together night and day, living and working and collaborating and sharing every thought, and then suddenly we weren’t,” Ms. Jones said recently in the Bleecker Street studio/loft where she began living and working, with and without Mr. Ginzel, in 1982. She disclosed this while sipping tea from a green mug, as she nestled in an antique chair with carved wooden gargoyles for armrests. A leftover eyeball from “Oculus” stared out from above the kitchen sink. Mr. Ginzel’s collection of antique plumbs occupied the wall behind the wood-burning stove, and the man himself was at work in the front studio.
The public artist Kristin Jones plans a 24-hour extravaganza highlighting five great trees, though her last New York project in Union Square was panned.