NEW YORK – Swedish artist Hanna Liden had never experienced the joys of a bagel until arriving in New York in 1998. As she told Women’s Wear Daily in a recent interview, “It took only a cream cheese-filled in a West Village park, however, for the iconic carbohydrate to make a deep impression on her. Seventeen years after that fateful bite, Liden is honoring the bagel with her new sculpture series Everything.

The two sections bookend Christopher Street from east to west, first at Ruth Wittenberg Plaza, right across from the Jefferson Market Library, and then at Hudson River Park, where Christopher Street meets the Hudson River. The sculptures were carved out of industrial Styrofoam and polyurethane.

On the plaza, the bagel stack is sprouting a tulip, which makes it not only food, but also a vase. There’s black spray paint smeared across the middle, which according to Liden’s press materials was a tribute to graffiti, but it looks so haphazard, I thought (honestly, hoped), that someone had in fact tagged the bagel.

Heading west on Christopher toward the river, another bagel vase appears by the fountain at West Street. Next to the nearly 17-foot-high stack are its siblings, a stack of three bagels and a lone bagel, which that day gleamed as if sweating in the 90-degree sun.

Between the fear of burning in the sun (harsher than even the strongest toaster oven), and the black spray paint, the bagels themselves are not particularly hunger inducing, but I’m glad that Liden loves the bagel enough to build a monument to it.

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By ILANA NOVICK