Interdisciplinary Artist Rachel Stevens led a walking tour and discussion about Collect Pond, tracing the edges of this lost body of water and unpacking histories and futures tying water to finance and speculation, from Collect Pond to Hurricane Sandy and beyond.
Since Europeans arrived in Lower Manhattan, water has been a contentious commodity and continues to be a flashpoint for struggles between private enterprise and human rights. Collect Pond, a 48-acre, 60- foot deep freshwater pond, used to occupy the land from the court houses to the edge of Chinatown in Lower Manhattan until it became polluted and then filled in. Chase Company, founded by Aaron Burr, was a private water distribution company that hoarded profits meant to provide clean water from tributaries feeding Collect Pond and used those funds to start Chase Bank.
The Play About the Bridge
Nancy Nowacek makes art that overlays the politics of the body and the politics of space. In The Play About the Bridge, two actors and two chairs traverse the incalculable span that unfolds in an attempt to walk 1200 feet. The work reimagines Nowacek’s project, Citizen Bridge, a quest to build a bridge to reconnect Brooklyn and Governors Island, once connected by a walkable sandbar at low tide. It is a dream that pits a clear and simple vision against the forces of the water, the fine print of governmental policy and the flows of capital. Success and failure lose all meaning. Time is the only truth, and yes marks the end, always just out of reach.
A nplay about the bridge was written with Celine Song.
The Play About the Bridge was part of the Arts Brookfield Series at Zuccotti Park.*
Making the Invisible Visible: Responses to Water Based Stresses In NYC and Beyond
Unexpected and profound disasters like Hurricane Sandy smash into the lives of everyday New Yorkers, forcing us to engage with our proximity and relationship to water. But slow, ongoing crises like rising water levels, contamination, and toxicity are harder to see, more challenging to grasp, and harder to respond to. Across disciplines, artists and experts are engaging in work that analyzes and responds to the slow disasters of our water, making the invisible visible. We’ve assembled a group of them for this conversation-- come meet and hear them discuss their projects and points of view here.
Walking on Water: The Play About the Bridge
Two chairs, script
Nowacek worked with theater artist Celine Song to re-imagine her ongoing project, Citizen Bridge as a performance. The Play About the Bridge was presented in the gallery on June 20, 25 and in Zuccotti Park on June 22.
Advocacy Splash Down
At one time, art was science's illustrator. Water Art today can go well beyond illustration to serve science and the natural world directly by posing questions, exposing realities, acquiring data, advocating for natural resources, and-- in some cases-- affecting policy change. When Art Advocates for Water promises to be a lively conversation, with New York Aquarium Resident Artist Christy Gast launching the conversation by sharing a 5 minute stop-motion film created by a team of artists working with teens doing advocacy around ocean plastics. Joining her will be Noah Chesnin of the New York Seascape Program; New York Times Business Day editor Ellen Pollock, and some of WOW's core artists whose work directly or indirectly advocates for policy change.
Tide and Current Taxi
Single-channel video with livestreamed and recorded footage
Lorenz takes New Yorkers on 24 hour taxi trips in a boat she built on three dates in June. Livestreaming ran during Gallery Hours on: June 5, 18 and 25.
Sunk Shore
TRYST invited participants on a roving future history of lower Manhattan, walking through an imagined tomorrow and discussing how the city landscape will change over the coming years.
Sea levels are rising, and New York City is surrounded by a series of complex waterways. The borders of Manhattan island have been expanded through landfill and soil scavenged from construction, covering over creeks and streams. Marshes have been drained and filled and formed into streets.
During Superstorm Sandy, the highest flood tide came up to the level of the pre-contact island, a premonition of what is to come. When the water rises again, what will the tip of Manhattan become? Venice in Battery Park? A series of creeks all through the Financial District?
Sunk Shore invited us to embody and invent the new watery reality through observation, physical adventure, and a series of pop-up interactive shared imaginings of a future existence.
Sunk Shore was produced and performed by Clarinda Mac Low, Carolyn Hall and Paul Benny.
Get In! Water and Play
Led by Rachel Karpf of Guerilla Science
It's no secret that bringing playful exploration into our work often leads to more surprising and impactful outcomes than staying stuck in our 'expert' brains. But how does play work when we're exploring the water? What does it mean to GET IN-- to get our hands wet-- figuratively, and literally? This conversation brings together Hudson River Park Trust Director of Science Carrie Roble, artist/scientist Clarinda Mac Low from Tryst, science-driven creative agency Guerilla Science, to flood us with ideas around physical engagement, interactivity, exploration, and playfulness on the water with a purpose.
Sunk Shore
Brochures, Artifacts
TRYST led Sunk Shore tours around Lower Manhattan, embodying and inventing the new water reality and imaging a future existence on June 16, 17, and 18.
Collaborative floor painting and single channel video of Manhattan waterways with Eve Mosher.
Walk Around South Cove
From 1985-86 Mary Miss was the lead on a ground-breaking collaborative design team with architects Susan Child and Stan Eckstut. Coinciding with the development of former landfill site Battery Park City, they created South Cove, one of the country’s most significant public artworks. Called ‘The most environmentally sensitive major sculptural enterprise that New York City has been offered’ by New York Magazine’s Kay Larson, its winding boardwalks, quay and jetty recontextualize the view of New York Harbor and reconnect residents with the water.
Miss invited participants to join her on a walking tour of South Cove to learn about her involvement 30 years ago, current thinking about the site and our relationship with water.
Plein Air the Future
with C'naan Hamburger, Carmen Bouyer, Meryl Ranzer, Brad Marshall, Rae Richards, Sarah Olson and Alyssa Fridgen, Arielle Lawson, Seth Wandersman.
A half-dozen New York artists imagine the past and the future of Zuccotti Park in real time, evoking the streams that were buried underneath Manhattan, the shipwreck that was found underneath the World Trade Center site, and the potential impact of rising sea-levels.
Plein Air the Future, envisioned and organized by Lise Brener, was part of the Arts Brookfield Series at Zuccotti Park.
A Field Guide to Whale Creek
FDSE led a special walk to launch their audio tour of New York's Whale Creek, a tributary of Newtown Creek, a waterway hidden in plain sight.
The concept of “dark ecology” brings people, actions, and ecologies into one sphere, in which our tangled cultural and natural histories are available to be reimagined. Field Guide to the Dark Ecologies of Newtown Creek is intended to serve the communities at stake, and to use the affective strengths of art to forge a fair and creative model of how to live and work together alongside brownfields and Superfund sites. This guide addresses the complexities of this post-natural landscape, and empowers citizens to imagine the waterway's future.
Download the Field Guide to the Dark Ecologies of Newtown Creek.
The Power of Ten
Working creatively with water and waterways is inherently interdisciplinary, and requires artists and other creative people to infiltrate and collaborate with many different sectors. The Power of Ten is an opportunity to intersect with people from different fields, and imagine collaboration. All thinkers and doers are welcome–scientists, social/environmental justice activists, designers, artists, performers, planners, architects, and more.
Why Water / Why Water Now
Panel discussion with Works on Water artists and curatorial team members Eve Mosher and Sarah Cameron Sunde, facilitated by Tal Beery
There seems to have been a major expansion of artists working in, on, or with water over the past few years. Artists are building boats and taking people on tours, sculptures are being installed in rivers and oceans, and performances draw audiences to the waterfront. Many artists are at least partly responding to the vulnerability of water to industrial pollution and climate change. The panel considered the environmental, social, and technological changes that have sparked the new water art movement.
Featured
Coney Island Creek Exploration & Residency
Artists and storytellers have long drawn inspiration from New York's cityscape. But under the waters that define our islands is another landscape entirely, every bit as gritty and urgent, as lonely and cluttered, as deadly, nonsequitous, singular and siren as the City itself.
Nicki Pombier Berger and Helen Georgas, editors at Underwater New York’s a digital journal of writing, art, and music are inspired by the waterways that surround New York City and the objects submerged within them. They led an exploration and residency at Coney Island Creek.
Participants explored and created. See what came of it here.
The 10-Year Process: Callaghan & Topol in collaboration
Led by New Georges Artistic Director Susan Bernfield with playwright Sheila Callaghan, director Daniella Topol, Rachel Karpf of Guerilla Science and members of the creative team
Ten years ago, playwright Sheila Callaghan and director Daniella Topol set out to make a play about water. Their exploration covered multiple processes, two design teams, two coasts, water-related incidents worldwide —and many drafts and devisings. New Georges producing Artistic Director Susan Bernfield will chat with Sheila and Daniella about their singularly rich and deep-rooted collaboration and the bittersweet experience of finally seeing their project produced. We’ll add actors April Matthis and Polly Lee, who’ve been with the project most of the way (and whose current roles draw directly from the experience); and pull up to the present with current collaborators, including science dramaturg Rachel Karpf of Guerilla Science—all tracing the unexpected and astonishing journey to (NOT) WATER.
Bringing Multiplicity to the Table
Art engaged with ecology offers new forms of environmental engagement and advocacy, yet the community of artists working on NYC waterways represents a relatively narrow range of perspectives, compared to those that make up many of the communities along the water’s edge. Bringing Multiplicity to the Table invites organizations who excel at engaging a broad spectrum communities in art, culture, and ecology through a wide range of methods. At this Long Table conversation, WOW artists Eve Mosher and Nancy Nowacek join these representatives as well as practitioners from the fields of art, maritime ecologies and community activism to discuss methods of engagement and strategies towards multiplicity around the NYC waterways. Note: The Long Table format (developed by performance artist Lois Weaver), is designed to equalize audience and invited participants, by providing a simple and specific structure for listening and conversation.
Opera in the Shower
Rachel Parish & Audrey Gamez
Opera in the Shower is a playful meditation on the use of water in our daily lives.
A shower appeared in Zuccotti Park. From within, an opera singer, dressed in an old-fashioned bathing costume and shower cap, sang nature-themed arias from her repertoire interspersed with operatic renditions of water-themed songs a la “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
Opera in the Shower was inspired by Helen Banner’s concept of a “medieval water opera”. It is part of the Arts Brookfield Series at Zuccotti Park.
Liquid City: Desire
200 blue bottles and maps
As part of Mosher’s ongoing investigation with Liquid City, Desire invites gallery visitors to wander and explore the rich history of Lower Manhattan’s waterscape through a participatory map. Visitors were invited to take a bottle and map and enjoy the journey, creating city-scaled maps of their own.
Collaborative floor painting and single channel video of Manhattan waterways with Clarinda Mac Low.
36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea
Four-channel video installation
Duration: 12 hours, 46 minutesand 12 hours, 21 minutes, looped
Sunde pairs durational video from 36.5 / North Sea and 36.5 / Bay of Bengal where she stood in tidal bays for the full tidal cycle. A short movement piece based on the public participation for the piece was performed in Zuccotti Park on June 29.