1. Gather at the Central Park Entrance across from the Museum of Natural History
This walk is an experiment in interspecies dialogue. As we move through the city, we’ll treat it as a place of encounter – not just between humans, but also with other sentient beings, spectral presences, and layered histories.
Our inspiration is the surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011). She lived here in New York for a short time, in the early 1940s, while fleeing World War II, before eventually settling in Mexico. In her work, Carrington often imagined worlds of equality between humans and animals. This walk draws on that vision.
Animals will accompany us – real, remembered, and imagined. We’ll look at hybrid figures, nonhuman alter-egos, the strange intimacy between women and horses, and the uncanny presence of horses in the city streets.
In New York, horses remain highly visible through the carriage trade, pulling tourists through Central Park. The movement to abolish horse-drawn carriages – intensified by a recent accident – reminds us that surrealism’s vision of human–animal equality carries real urgency today.
Initiation
Let’s gather as a herd. Before we set off, I invite each of you to imagine an alter ego animal – an invisible companion that will guide you through the walk. This is where Leonora Carrington also begins. In her short story “The Oval Lady”, the protagonist Lucre a suggests: “Let’s imagine that we have all been changed into horses.”
So, let’s call on the surrealist imagination. To spark your creativity, here are a few examples:
– a horse (symbol of freedom, and eroticism)
– a hyena (breaking out of social constraints)
– a cat (spectral, magical being, slipping between realms)
– a praying mantis (predation, devouring love)
– a bird, sphinx, or chimera (hybrid of myth and dream)…
Or perhaps another animal comes to mind. Let it guide you. It doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to be present.
Close your eyes briefly. Imagine its breath, its sound (and try it aloud if you like), feel its weight, or its outline brushing against yours. When you open your eyes, let it remain with you as we begin. And as we move, try to loosen the grip of sight and let other senses take the lead: smell, vibration, temperature, rhythm. Think of walking not just as a way to get somewhere, but as a way of becoming something else.
2. Enter Central Park and move toward Bridle Path
Slow Parade
As we move along Bridle Path – originally a path along which horse riders had right of way – we’ll adopt the rhythm of a horse’s four-beat gait, each hoof touching the ground independently, unhurried, steady. Let your body fall into a deliberately slow pace. Feel the resistance against the city’s usual tempo.
In the 19th century, the French poet Charles Baudelaire described the flâneur: a figure who wandered the city, lingering rather than rushing, resisting the rhythms of industrial capitalism. By embracing slowness and purposeless wandering, he challenged the idea that every step must be productive.
Walter Benjamin later recalled a curious fashion: “Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them.” Imagine that: a parade of turtles in the arcades of Paris, dragging the humans back into slowness, into idleness as critique.
Nearly a century later, Salvador Dalí staged his own version of this flânerie. In 1969, he paraded through Paris with a giant anteater on a leash. It was spectacle and provocation, pulling surrealism into public view – a living disruption on the boulevards of modernity.
Closer to home, New York has always been alive with unlikely animal presences. In 2013, Performa staged We Live with Animals, a projectby Catherine Seavitt and Denise Hoffman-Brandt that unearthed stories about a ger discovered in a Harlem apartment, a runaway peacock in Flushing, and an alligator hiding under a parked Datsun in Astoria. These aren’t fables, but real moments when the city revealed its hidden layers of wildness.
And this is where Leonora Carrington shifts the frame. Her animals were not tortured symbols like Max Ernst’s praying mantis, nor flamboyant spectacles like Dalí’s anteater. For Carrington, animals are equals – guides, alter egos, fellow travelers.
As we walk this bridle path, tune into your alter ego animal again. Feel how it moves alongside you. And notice how the city itself is alive with presences that aren’t only human: birds overhead, dogs on leashes, invisible networks of insects, maybe even a carriage horse passing by. Try to feel them not as background, but as part of the same story you’re in.
Intervention
One or two professional dog walkers dash past, performing a choreography with multiple dogs on leashes.
3. Exit Central Park at West 72nd Street and pause at The Dakota
Ghostly Encounters
The Dakota is an icon of New York grandeur, but also of its mysteries. Since the 1960s, workers have described the sensation of being watched, of unseen presences sharing the space. Residents have reported sightings of a little girl in period clothing, waving from the windows. And of course, the Dakota’s most famous residents were John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In 1980, Lennon was murdered at its entrance. Many have since claimed to see his spirit leaning against the wall in his white flared suit.
So, take a breath. Shift your attention from what is visible to what is invisible. What do you sense but cannot see? Notice the air, the temperature, the atmosphere around your skin. Allow yourself to feel accompanied by presences beyond sight.
This space of ghosts and apparitions resonates deeply with Leonora Carrington, who immersed herself in occultism, alchemy, and esoteric traditions. For her, these were ways of countering patriarchal logic – opening channels to powers outside rational control. Her art is full of ghostly creatures, shapeshifters who dissolve boundaries between worlds.
One of her earliest stories, The Debutante (1937), tells of a young girl who sends a hyena to a ball in her place. The hyena kills the maid, wears her face as a mask, and attends the party – only to peel it off in a grotesque reveal. The hyena is not simply animal, not simply human, but something in between: mocking social rituals, overturning expectations, and embodying suppressed desires.
Now, let’s continue along West 73rd Street at a trot – the horse’s two-beat gait, where diagonal legs move together in rhythm. Imagine you’re moving in tandem with your ghost-companion, half in this world, half in another.
4. Pause briefly at Camp Canine, 46 West 73rd Street
At a Gallop
Here at Camp Canine, a doggy daycare, let’s pause and reframe these sidewalks. For the next stretch of our walk, we’ll imagine New York not as a grid of pedestrian paths, but as an equestrian arena – a stage where humans and horses perform together.
Intervention
A group of young women bounces past on hobby horses, zigzagging between obstacles, racing in an imaginary derby.
In 1975, the British artist Rose English presented Quadrille, a performance at the Southampton Horse Show. Six women trotted into the arena, styled as hybrid horse-women, their hair tied into ponytails, leather harnesses strapped around their waists, real horse tails swinging behind them. They balanced precariously on shoes made with horse hooves – restrictive, uncomfortable, demanding discipline. As they circled solemnly, the spectacle exposed a disturbing overlap: the domesticated, obedient show pony and the societal expectation of the “obedient” woman. At once erotic, grotesque, and subversive, Quadrille revealed the power dynamics between gender, performance, and spectacle.
Two decades later, another British artist, Lucy Gunning, explored the same terrain differently. As a child, like so many young girls, she spent hours pretending to be a horse. When she made a call for others who shared this memory, she was overwhelmed by responses. Her film The Horse Impressionists (1994) shows five women who never gave up this embodied play. They gallop, prance, and neigh in public parks and city streets – sometimes earnest, sometimes absurd. In their awkwardness lies the power: they expose how deeply horse-play structures girlhood, sexuality, and imagination.
All of these performances carry forward Leonora Carrington’s legacy.
In Western culture, the heroic male warrior astride his virile stallion, or the wild cowboys of the American West, represent power, conquest, and virility. The female horse relationship, by contrast, is often sexualized or dismissed as childish. Carrington and the women artists who followed her, reimagined the horse as something else: a space of ambiguity, eroticism, and transformation –
a way to move beyond patriarchal order.
Now, let’s shift pace. We’ll continue along West 73rd Street at a gallop – the horse’s fastest gait, a four-beat rhythm with a moment of suspension, when all four feet are off the ground. As you gallop, feel the suspension – that brief flight when nothing touches the ground. Feel your alter-ego animal pushing you forward, faster, freer, as we move toward Verdi Square.
5. Pause briefly at Verdi Square, West 73rd Street
The White Horse
Let’s take a moment to catch our breath. From here, we’ll continue just a few blocks west, along 73rd Street.
As we walk, let’s let the pace settle back into a calm rhythm – a steady stride, carrying us to our destination: Leonora Carrington’s former apartment at no. 306.
Imagine Leonora herself once passing along these very sidewalks, in exile, searching for a foothold in the city. Carrington grew up on her family’s estate in Lancashire (UK), surrounded by horses she rode and sketched. Equally important was her Irish nanny, who filled her childhood with Celtic myths, ghost stories, and tales of enchantment. From these layers, Carrington built a bestiary of her own: hyenas, spectral cats, bird-women, and, above all, the horse.
The horse, especially the white horse, was central. In her Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) from 1938, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York, Carrington shows herself seated in jodhpurs, hair styled like a mane. A hyena crouches beside her, a toy rocking horse floats above her head, and through the window a wild white horse runs free. The rocking horse signals confinement; the white horse signals liberation, the untamed unconscious. Together, they show the tension she felt between restriction and freedom.
Interest in Carrington’s work continues to grow, as new generations uncover her subtle imagery that anticipated ecofeminist ideas and envisioned communities built on care, kinship, and companionship across species – inviting us all to rebel against the persistent misogyny of society.
6. Arrive at 306 West 73rd Street
Releasing the Animal
Now we arrive at 306 West 73rd Street, the end point of our walk. This is where Leonora Carrington once lived with her husband Renato Leduc, during 1941–1942. Let’s take a quiet moment here. Imagine this space holding traces of her presence.
We will end our walk – as Carrington might have liked – with a small ritual. Each of you has carried an alter ego animal along this journey. Now close your eyes. Call this animal to your side one last me. Sense its presence – its breath, its warmth, its weight. Then, with a small gesture – a stomp, a neigh, a whispered word – release it back into the city, into the unseen.
Thank you for your attention. Thank you for walking In the hoofprints of Leonora Carrington.
