The Elephants Are Coming! A Striking Traveling Exhibition Troops Through Manhattan’s Meatpacking District

“It was really just a vision that dropped in my head: Let’s make a herd of 100 elephants and migrate them across America,” says Ruth Ganesh, a UK-born animal rights activist, conservationist, and arts advocate. After moving to the United States, her new home had her musing about the Route 66 cross-country road trip. But she also had another idea: “Could these elephants be made out of something that was entirely good for the environment?”

It wasn’t until Ganesh connected with Tarsh Thekaekara—an animal researcher and conservationist based in India who had long studied elephant behaviors—that her phantasm morphed into a joyous, roving art installation, with New York as the next stop in its national tour. “The Great Elephant Migration” will be on view around the Meatpacking District through October 20.

The elephant sculptures are life-size, modeled after real-life cows (female elephants), bulls (male elephants), tuskers (male elephants with tusks), and lovable little calves, all made from dried lantana plants—an invasive species that crowds out native plant life, reduces biodiversity, and encroaches on wildlife habitats. (This was at Thekaekara’s suggestion: He has been working with indigenous populations in India to craft furniture out of the plant.)

“[Thekaekara] added so much texture to the project because of his work with the elephant personalities—they’ve all got names, and the craftspeople who make the elephants know the characters of the elephants as well,” Ganesh says.

But why elephants? “The Great Elephant Migration” is a story of coexistence. Historically, elephants and humans in India have been able to live peacefully together, but urban development and habitat loss have resulted in shrinking elephant populations. So the project places sculpted elephants into busy, human-populated quarters as a reminder that this land is ours to share. “It’s more of a storytelling way of looking at the world,” Ganesh says. “It’s not humans over here and animals over there in some protected area.”

The first stop of the migration was Hyde Park in London during the pandemic. Prototyping the elephants, and then crafting enough to make 100, took years. (“It was always 100. It had to be completely and utterly unreasonable,” Ganesh jokes.) Unlike the rattan elephants you might happen upon in a cocktail bar in Palm Beach, the elephants in the exhibition rely on a more complex fabrication: Dried reeds from the noxious lantana shrub—which, per the project’s organizers, takes up more than 115,000 square miles of India’s protected forests and preserves—are bent, warped, and shaped into close approximations of an elephant’s real bone structure and musculature. “These have the boniness that people don’t naturally associate with elephants,” Ganesh says.

The next stop was Lalbagh Botanical Garden in Bangalore, India, earlier this year. And then, in a collaboration with Art&Newport founder and longtime Vogue arts writer Dodie Kazanjian, the elephants summered along Newport, Rhode Island’s scenic cliff walk. From July 4 to September 2, they were stationed at the Peabody & Stearns–built mansion Rough Point (formerly owned by Doris Duke); outside the Breakers, the former home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II; and on the lawn of Salve Regina University.

Now they’ve migrated south to Manhattan, where, in true elephant fashion, they are grouped together in clusters based on their matriarchal communities. “Some will look like they’re crossing the road on 14th Street, the trunks calling to each other, trying to communicate whether it’s a safe time to cross,” Ganesh says.

She has delighted in observing the public’s interactions with them. “I’ve seen people with a suit on—they might be going to work—put their bag down and come up to them, hug them, or put their hands on their flanks and look up into their eyes,” she says. “What I find most beautiful is just how the urge to touch them is so overwhelming.”

Each elephant is for sale—with proceeds benefiting a range of conservation-focused NGOs around the globe—and there has already been a lot of interest: In Newport alone, more than 100 elephants were sold. (The elephants are shipped out as quickly as the artisans can replace them in the herd.) “I feel like I’ve been on a garden tour for the whole summer,” Ganesh says with a laugh, referring to the many prospective buyers who have lured her to their homes. “Should I put this elephant here? Or do you think they’d go there? What would an elephant do if it were actually wandering through my garden?” She is aiming to sell 1,000 by the time the elephants get to Los Angeles—with stops in Miami Beach, for Art Basel, and Browning, Montana, along the way—to reach a grand total of $10 million in sales. (Ganesh’s own grounds in Somerset also feature a few elephants, one of which is Tara, a matriarch she describes as dainty and sweet.)

As New Yorkers wander through the herds on the High Line, in Gansevoort Plaza, and at the Chelsea Triangle, they’ll discover plaques denoting the biography of the real-life elephants and their patrons—people like Diane von Furstenberg, Cher, Dr. Jane Goodall, Kristin Davis, Susan Sarandon, and Sabyasachi Mukerjee, whose support helped bring the project to life. (He also hosted a big opening-night bash in his store on nearby Christopher Street.)

After her many years of work on “The Great Elephant Migration,” Ganesh points out an unexpected outcome of the endeavor—the elephant in the room, if you will. “With their being the symbol of the Republican Party, the elephants seem to have found some homes that way,” she says. But in fact, “it seems to be that the elephants are loved by a combination of Republicans and Democrats alike, for different reasons, so they seem to be engendering a sort of happy coexistence, a moment of harmony between different points of view.” She likens them to “a herd of Trojan elephants, spreading a coexistence message—not just between humans and elephants, but humans and humans too.”