One after the next, they trudged through the horizontal-blowing snow on Thursday, most focusing more on the icy sidewalk than on the body of a naked woman, who stood in a gallery window in Greenwich Village. The artist Brian Reed looks at his installation, which features a nude woman, at Chair and the Maiden in Greenwich Village.

There was the occasional elongated stare, or, in at least one case, a mother breaking her prepubescent son out of his trance with a firm tug.

Then, not long after the nude woman, Megan Hanford, assumed her pose, a patrol car rolled toward the gallery, Chair and the Maiden.