The Path of Most Resistance: a guided walk through Flushing, Queens with Cody Herrmann

This series of guided tours through Flushing, Queens is inspired by the recently rezoned Special Flushing Waterfront District (SFWD) and other similar developments in the downtown Flushing neighborhood. With an emphasis on supporting housing and habitat for all, the tour will highlight how new developments in the area are displacing both human and non-human long term area residents, overlooking the importance of diversity to create homogenized shopping centers.

The tour will trace public space and privately owned publicly accessible space through Flushing, and end along the Flushing Creek coastline with a species ID session highlighting wetland ecology lead by Queens based naturalist Mike Feller in collaboration with Guardians of Flushing Bay.

 Later this year, a video highlighting main themes from the tour will be produced with translated texts made available in English, Chinese, Spanish, and Korean. The projects allows participants to experience the crowded streets of Flushing’s central business district and transportation hub while demystifying the dynamic environmental and socio-economic forces reshaping the neighborhood and waterfront area.

Breathing Together: A Love Story by Buena Onda Collective

Breathing Together: A Love Story by Camila Morales and Dominka Ksel of the Buena Onda Collective embodies the symbiotic relationship between people and plants. The artists invite audiences to send loving energy to the algae growing within the sculpture.

For years, science has revealed the power of caring intention and its incredible impact on plant life. These findings and those demonstrated in Cleve Backster’s studies on plant consciousness, led to the realization that plants register stress and sensed thoughts of harm. The sculpture, formed with the letters that make up the word CARE asks viewers to rethink and expand their relationship to plant life and consider the work plants do for us and their need for our love and respect toward them.

The sculpture is located by the 96th Street entrance to Rockaway Beach until July 18th. Please look back again for upcoming workshops.

Thank you to NYC Parks for their support of this project.

June 26 - Join Buena Onda for a workshop and soft opening at 2pm
July 16 - closing event on Ocean Conservation
More details coming soon!

(Re)Imagining Greenpoint's Green Waters by Ray Jordan Achan

(Re)Imagining Greenpoint’s Green Waters integrates artistic programming with community sustainability initiatives to bring wider attention to the polluted waters of Newtown Creek, offering methods that use community participation, techniques of ARTIVISM within an abolitionist framework, and aesthetics of “Theater of the Oppressed” to promote remediation of the Creek and bring the climate justice conversation to marginalized communities. Local residents will go on a canoe tour of the Creek and experience the water up close, while also witnessing (and being a part of) a community performance celebrating the waterfront.

Performances at Newtown Creek Nature Walk
June 24, 25 and 26 from 6-8 pm

for the depths of us performance-walk + gathering by the Kin to Cove Collective

In the late 1800s a body of water that ran through Ravenswood to the East River was buried underground to make way for increasing industrialization. What in us has been buried in the name of progress– what have we sent down into the dark? Kin To The Cove artists Christopher Bisram and Audrey di Mola lead a neighborhood performance-walk tracing the path of Sunswick Creek down to the Cove, woven with personal and collective mythologies in the form of dance, storytelling, song, and ritual. What can be recovered when we make the ecological practice of “daylighting” a stream, metaphorical? What can be found, inside us, out of the Depths?

Kin To The Cove's full day event in Astoria/LIC, Queens: June 25th 10-11:30am beach cleanup, communal altar creation, and opening ritual at The Cove (31st Dr & Vernon Blvd) with Blue Bus Project; 5pm we gather at 16 Oaks Grove (21st St & 37th Ave) to begin the performance-walk down to the Cove, followed by a 'kindig' gathering as we move into sunset and nighttime.

June 25, 10 am beach clean-up and opening ceremony at the Cove

June 25, 5 pm FOR THE DEPTHS OF US, meet at 16 Oaks Grove in Ravenswood. The performance weaves storytelling and dance back down to the Cove.

Special thanks to dancers: Angela Eslava Jennifer Vazquez, Graciela Morena, and Nicole Ulloa.

The Nukkone Project by Rodrick Bell

The Nukkone project is a ramble and art installation that brings coastal communities and indigenous communities together to celebrate life, self awareness and moving forward into the future with a kinesthetic approach. Using the senses to observe a hand built ancient wetu home structure that will be constructed by the hands of tribal members from several east coast first contact tribes.