A GUIDE TO THE CRAZIEST NEW OUTDOOR ART IN NYC

BEASTS ON BROADWAY

Strangely beautiful sculptures now dot six pocket parks between 64th and 157th streets. Collectively titled “In Dreams Awake,” they’re by Kathy Ruttenberg, an upstate New York artist who combines human, animal and plant forms.

“They’re all site-specific,” says Ruttenberg, who spent two years figuring out which piece to put where. For 157th Street, she devised a goat man handing flowers to a mermaid in a fishbowl. “It’s about diversity, role-crossing, and wishing you were somewhere else,” she tells The Post. “Yet a child could look at it and think, ‘How cool! A lady in a fishbowl!’ ”

The life-size bronze couple at 72nd Street — he’s half-deer, half man, she’s a tree trunk with a great pair of gams — suggests a merger of city and country. That, or a couple on their way to a costume party.

Reactions the other day were mixed. “It makes me happy,” said 15-year-old Kimberly Crasta, a visitor from Mumbai, India. “I love nature.”

“It’s weird!” a man shouted, sprinting for the subway. “Really weird!”

A HIT ON THE HIGH LINE

Near the big black cube on Astor Place is “The Last Three.” Weighing 7 tons and standing 17 feet high, it’s billed as “the world’s largest rhino statue” — apparently, someone out there is measuring these things.

While a pileup of bronzed beasts looks pretty playful, the story behind it is anything but: Husband-and-wife artists Gillie and Marc Schattner created it to publicize the plight of animals hunted to near extinction, in this case, for their horns. A plaque near the sculpture tells you how to petition for action.

Although one art critic called it a kitschy bore, passers-by disagree. “I love it,” says Giovanni Bravo, 29, of Union City, NJ. His wide-eyed, 10-year-old daughter, Ruby, agrees. “Rhinos are really big,” she says, “and we should respect them.”

HANG ON, SNOOPY

The Peanuts crew is popping up all over downtown’s Hudson Square — on billboards, warehouse garage doors; even a museum wall. And if Charlie Brown and company look odd, it’s because, well, they were drawn that way: Seven artists, invited to put their own spin on Charles M. Schulz’s characters, did just that.“No one said no to us,” says Melissa Menta of Peanuts Worldwide, which commissioned Rob Pruitt, Kenny Scharf and other contemporary artists — some more conceptual than others — to reinvent Snoopy, Woodstock and friends.

The project has the blessing of Lindsay Schulz, the cartoonist’s 29-year-old granddaughter. Now a conceptual artist in California, she came to the city the other week for the launch, joined by someone in a Snoopy costume.“I just knew my grandfather liked to draw,” says Lindsay, who was thrilled when the cartoonist used her name in one of his strips. (She says he based his Joe Motocross character on her father, Craig.)“I didn’t know what a massive influence he was until he passed away, she says. “Making these characters accessible to other artists is a big deal!

COLOR FOR CENTRAL PARK

At the park’s 60th Street and Fifth Avenue entrance, near that grand, gilded statue of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, stands a 23-foot-tall Fiberglas tower. All gold, white, brown and teal, it unfurls like a piece of African kente fabric.“Wind Sculpture (SG),” which the Public Art Fund commissioned from the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, who calls its many colors “the perfect metaphor for multilayered identities.”That metaphor may be too subtle for some passers-by, who seemed content to simply snap away, enjoying all that color against a deep-blue sky.“Other than that it’s cool, I don’t know what it means,” said Matt Metzler, 39, visiting from Boston.Said his son, Declan, 8: “It looks like a Fruit Roll-Up and I think I want to eat it!”

TAKIN’ ART TO THE STREETS