This October, New York City's Central Park will serve as the sole American venue for Mobile Art, a traveling international exhibition housed in a gleaming futuristic pavilion designed by London-based architect Zaha Hadid.

Commissioned by Chanel, Mobile Art presents changing installations of works by foremost contemporary artists from Europe, the United States, Asia, Russia, and Latin America, each of whom has made a unique piece for the project exploring the visual, conceptual and cultural possibilities in the convergence of fashion and art.

Mobile Art will be sited in Central Park's Rumsey Playfield, off Fifth Avenue at 69th Street. The pavilion will be open to the public free of charge with reserved, timed tickets, from October 20 through November 9, 2008. Visitors will be able to view the installation during public hours each day, and Chanel will host additional special evening events in collaboration with leading New York arts institutions and cultural organizations including the Central Park Conservancy.

"Zaha Hadid's traveling pavilion will place a futuristic work of architecture and outstanding works of contemporary art in an historic setting in the heart of Central Park," says Adrian Benepe, Parks & Recreation commissioner. "The contrast will be fantastic, melding the vision of one of the world's most important fashion houses with the beauty of one of the world's most significant works of landscape design."

Mobile Art was commissioned by Chanel and conceived by the company's renowned designer Karl Lagerfeld. It was originally imagined as a means to mark the first appearance fifty years ago of the iconic Chanel "2.55" quilted stitched-leather handbag. Designed by Coco Chanel, the 2.55 has evolved over the decades into one of the most enduring examples of 20th century fashion. That bag and the traditions of the factory in France, where it is still made today, were presented by Zaha Hadid and the participating artists as jumping off points for their contributions to Mobile Art. The resulting exhibition is a multi-dimensional meditation on fashion as a powerful, exciting, sometimes perverse and occassionally poignant conductor of fantasy, identity, culture, and self-expression.

Hadid created a pavilion that, like a handbag, is a completely portable and functional container. Made of highly engineered, white arched fiberglass-reinforced polymer panels, the architect's enigmatic itinerant building is a sculpture in its own right. It is comprised of 700 components that once assembled, appear to be a very distant abstraction of the famous quilted Chanel handbag.

"For me, the fascination of the project was the challenge of translating the intellectual and physical into the sensual-experimenting with completely unexpected spaces and a totally immersive environment for this global celebration of art, fashion, and the work of Chanel. I see the pavilion as a kind of total artwork that continually reinvents itself as it moves from Asia to the US, Russia, and Europe,""says Hadid.

The exhibition has 2,300 sq. ft. of interior exhibition space. Its panels and steel base structure  are a kit of parts that allows for the assembly and disassembly in six cities on three continents.