Kin to the Cove Collective

Kin to the Cove is a collective that emerged out of the pandemic. Many people slowed down and found meaningful re-connections with the natural environment (water, trees, etc) that exist within our built  environment/cityscape. We believe participatory art is uniquely positioned to connect people to the hyper local places where they live, illuminating the challenges we face as a community, city, nation, civilization  and species. With guidance from Indigenous brothers and sisters, we are reframing NYC’s water bodies  as our KIN and growing a culture of reciprocity, care, and stewardship with the water. Our process  includes extensive on-the-ground research, art and embodiment practices, and interdisciplinary  community building. Together, we seek to re-imagine, decolonize, and build a future wherein our beloved Cove (Vernon Blvd at 31st Drive) can thrive. 

 Christopher Bisram and Audrey Dimola are representing Kin to the Cove in the Water Connectors 2022 Cohort. Both artists grew up in the neighborhood and have deep ties to these waters. The greater collective includes Fuse (aka Bruce McNeil), Bella Gallo, Garfield Miller, Christina Delfico, James Manzi, Jessie Taft, Gray the They, Tecumseh Ceaser, Sarah Cameron Sunde, and an shifting group of neighborhood folx who frequent the Cove. It was initially born out of conversations Audrey and Sarah were having about how to actively engage the community around the water in relationship to 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, and has become an ongoing stewardship project. 

Buena Onda Collective (Dominika Ksel and Camila A. Morales)

Buena Onda Collective (Dominika Ksel and Camila A. Morales) is an eco-centered, paradigm shifting, transmedia collective that uses sculpture, installation and interactivity to playfully explore ideas around restoration, remediation and interspecies communication during the Anthropocene.

We work with a range of media and design techniques including: 3D Modeling, Architecture, Digital and Physical Fabrication, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Sound Composition, Video, Animation and more. Our influences range from science, art, architecture and consciousness. We enjoy subverting and transforming ideas around ‘sustainability’ into more intimate, transhuman experiences where the consciousness of non-human species is more deeply considered. We do this by mapping out the invisible landscapes of our interdependent, rhizomatic relationships via various community-based artworks and workshops.

The founders are educators and artists with over 10 + years in the art and architecture realm. The Rockaway based art collective’s focus is on the creation of a eco-centered community oriented practice. We value process and collaboration that facilitate more equitable and dynamic ways of integrating and communing with sentient and non-sentient life.

Rodrick Bell

Rodrick Bell is the Recreation Coordinator for the Bronx River Alliance. Rodrick began working with the alliance as a volunteer and helping staff to lead canoe trips. His life work is centered on the preservation of the history and cultural traditions of indigenous eastern woodlands First Nations. He is passionate about not only protecting and rehabilitating the Bronx River, but also creating outdoor personal experiences that have reshaped the attitudes of all participants and encouraged them to redevelop a love and respect for the earth.

Nora Almeida

Nora Almeida is an urban swimmer, writer, performance artist, librarian, and environmental activist. She’s an Associate Professor at the New York City College of Technology and a long-time volunteer at Interference Archive. She has curated exhibitions and organized media-making workshops, public events, and street performances across NYC. She spent the past two years working on the exhibition “Our Streets! Our City! Self-determination and Public Space in NYC” which is on view at Interference Archive through August 21, 2022. Her book, The Social Movement Archive, co-authored with the archivist and educator Jen Hoyer, was published in July 2021 by Litwin Books. She lives in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

Maya Ciarrocchi

Maya Ciarrocchi (Canada/USA) is an interdisciplinary artist working across media in drawing, printmaking, video, and performance. Her projects center on the excavation of vanished histories, themes rooted in Queerness, and the experience of her Ashkenazi ancestry. Ciarrocchi investigates how displacement writes itself into generational consciousness by layering redrawn maps and architectural renderings of disappeared and imagined places. The resulting compositions construct new, fantastical spaces that offer possibilities for healing and remembrance.

Ciarrocchi's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has received residencies and fellowships from the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Bronx Museum of the Arts (AIM), LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Process Space, Swing Space), MacDowell, Millay Arts, New York Artists Equity, UCross, and Wave Hill (Winter Workspace). She has received funding from foundations such as Bay and Paul, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Jerome Foundation, Mertz Gilmore, and project grants from Franklin Furnace Fund and MAP Fund. Ciarrocchi received a 2020 BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts and a 2021 grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding. In addition to her studio practice, Ciarrocchi has created award-winning projection designs for dance and theater. Ciarrocchi earned an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, and a BFA from SUNY Purchase, Purchase, NY.

Maya Shah

Maya Shah is an art advisor and cultural producer based in Lenapehoking aka New York City. She works collaboratively with artists, collectors and organizations to help realize their vision, further their creative endeavors and support their long-term goals. Recent projects include: management of Papo Colo’s artist republic in the rainforest of Puerto Rico including its site planning and resiliency efforts following Hurricane Maria, strategic consultation for Jane Dickson through the publication of her recent monograph by Anthology Editions and legacy planning and strategy for Sir Frank Bowling.

Maya has held leadership roles at auction houses and art advisory firms in Philadelphia and New York City.  She serves as Curator and Project Manager with Suzanne Randolph Fine Arts for public art projects throughout New York City. Trained as an architect, her collaborative design work as Project Director for the International Design Clinic, has been exhibited in the U.S. Pavilion at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale and at the Museum of Modern Art as part of “Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanism for Expanding Megacities.” She is also a performance artist and member of the absurdist circus theater company Visceral Abstractions. 

 www.mayashah.art

www.visceralabstractions.com

Marilyn Narota

https://marilynnarota.weebly.com/

Dylan Gauthier

Ella Mahoney

Ella Mahoney is a member of Wampanoag Tribe of GayHead (Aquinnah); an artist, illustrator, and teacher. Primarily working in oil, acrylic, and most recently silk paint; her work is based in storytelling and draws inspiration from creation stories; as well as from narratives of her personal experience of indigeneity through lenses of love and nature. Her recent projects explore large scale silk painting and installation as a medium that invites people to play and participate in creating comfortable, loving spaces connecting them to each other and the surrounding environments.

Zoey Hart

Zoey Hart (she/her) is an interdisciplinary collage artist and cultural educator based in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and the current director of the Art and Disability Residency Program at Art Beyond Sight. Guided by the [mis]adventures of chronic illness, invisible disability and the bureaucracies of modern medicine, Hart’s work represents [ill/well]nesses across frameworks of biological, environmental and conceptual bodies. Combining traditional drawing techniques with alternative printmaking, collage, soft science/soft sculpture collaboration and social practice design, Hart creates media, documents, performances, art objects and installations to reframe cultural perceptions of access, rest, imperfection and wellbeing. 

andrea haenggi

andrea haenggi (she/they) leads the artist project as an EPA agent. Swiss-born, she is breathing and working in Lenapehoking / New York City. Calling on plants as her guides, teachers, mentors, and performers, her body-based artist work evolves through somatic public fieldwork, dance and studio practice and creates a form of theater called Ethnochoreobotanography using choreographies, gatherings, performances, art installations and soft activist actions in response to decolonization, migration, feminism, labor, care and (re)-building multispecies futures. As part of this work, she co-founded the collective the Environmental Performance Agency in 2017. Appropriating the acronym EPA - in response to the ongoing rollback of Federal environmental policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the collective’s primary goal is to shift thinking around the terms environment, performance, and agency.

weedychoreography.com and environmentalperformanceagency.com

Ray Jordan Achan

Ray Jordan Achan (he/him/his) is an Indo-Caribbean, Brooklyn based theater-maker.  Ray is the Founding Artistic Director of EXILED TONGUES, a performance collective that provides financial, artistic and collaborative support to QTBIPOC artists (artists of the global majority) who center diasporic consciousness. Ray's performative work primarily deals with the intersection between racial and climate justice, particularly as they relate to the NYC coastline. He is the recipient of the 2022 NYSCA Individual Artist Grant for his site-specific documentary theater project, "Our Bang for Their Buck: No Pipeline for LNG", the 2022 Creative Equations Fund from the Brooklyn Arts Council and a commissioned artist with Works on Water for his site-specific documentary theater project, "(Re)Imagining Greenpoint's Green Waters" Ray is a Rising Producer Fellow at the Creative & Independent Producer Alliance, an Associated Artist at Culture Push, the Artistic & Development Liaison at the Orchard Project & a Producing Associate at Hypokrit Productions. Ray is a graduate of Wesleyan University with a BA in Government and Theater with Honors. rayjordanachan.com | exiledtongues.com

Angela Miskis

Angela Miskis (b. Ecuador, 1987) is visual artist and community organizer based in South East Queens. Her work is influenced by her family upbringing, dedication to social service, and building a healthier and more sustainable future in her immediate community. Angela Miskis graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2013 with a degree in Visual and Critical Studies. Her honors include the Silas H. Rhodes scholarship (2011), and the Visual and Critical Studies Scholarship (2013) which awarded her a five-month artist in residence at the Leipzig International Art Programme (2014) in Germany. Recently, Miskis was awarded a residency at ChaShaMa's ChaNorth International Artists Program (2019) in Pine Plains, NY, and the ArtWorks Inc. Seminar Fellowship at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (2019 - 2020). She is currently a 2021-Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project in New York.

moira williams

moira williams is a disability culture activist, artist and dreamer weaving together intersectional Disability Arts, Eco-Somatics and Queer Ecologies. moira's often co-creative work reframes embodied difference as a distinct resource resisting aesthetic ideals; with interdependent ways of leading to imagine, disrupt, experience or imagine experiencing disrupted spaces and futures that make room for all bodies,  “access intimacy.” * and deepening our ecological meanings. Leading with disability for its transformative possibilities, moira approaches culture as something we actively shape together. 

Dennis Redmoon Darkeem

As a mixed-blood African American and Native American artist living in the south Bronx, Dennis Redmoon Darkeem offers a voice for his communities. Working across mediums, his work evokes a historical memory and questions the status quo, often incorporating symbolism and a craftwork aesthetic to tie traditional knowledge to the contemporary.  His work crosses boundaries of culture, identity, and perception of self and strives to be the voice for the unheard. His most recent body of work, “Standing on Shaky Ground" speaks to shared Native and Black struggles. His work has been shown at Bronx Arts Space, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Brooklyn Museum of the Arts, The Drawing Center, Wave Hill, BAAD, Longwood Gallery, Latchkey Gallery, the Lodge Gallery as well as several mixed-media performances at The Point’s CDC space.

Tyler Rai

Tyler Rai is a movement artist, writer and researcher currently based in Nipmuc/Pocumtuc Territories (Western Massachusetts) who explores the implications of geologic movement and collaborative assembly through embodied practice. Her works are often site-responsive mediations that question how we embody kinship and relational empathy with the more-than-human-world. Her works have been performed at Judson Memorial Church, ARC Pasadena, SPACE Gallery, SWALE (a barge and floating food-forest), and The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought. Her writings have been published in Culturebot, Contact Quarterly, MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE’s ON CARE anthology, and John Hopkins Medical Magazine for the Humanities, Tendon Magazine. She has performed in the works of K.J.Holmes, Emily Johnson/Catalyst, Bouchra Ouizguen, Athena Kokoronis/Domestic Performance Agency, and Mina Nishimura. She is a founding member of the collaborative curatorial platform, ERRATICS, with artists/researchers Nina Elder and Hannah Perrine Mode, an Artist Fellow with the In Kinship Collective, and is the instigator of the temporal collective, Hungry Mothers (www.hungrymothers.org).

Torkwase Dyson

Tattfoo Tan

Scott Szegeski

Scott Szegeski is a New Jersey-based surfer and artist who is known for his gyotaku art and surf-inspired interpretations of Japanese printing. 

Szegeski presents a unique blend of traditional Japanese printmaking, surf culture and history, mixed with travel nostalgia through as seen through the eyes of an avid surfer and cultural entrepreneur. 

After years printing a variety of his own surfboards while working in his family’s restaurant group, requests for Szegeski’s gyotaku prints from local surfers and galleries gained momentum. Those looking to carve out a memory in time of their favorite surfboard sought-out Szegeski’s work inspired by a century’s old Japanese fish printing process. 

https://www.scottszegeski.com/