CURATION
Monument to All Species
Conversation
Co-curation with Marina Zurkow
Featuring Una Chaudhuri, Bronislaw Szerzynski,
and Sam Muka
Panel
Fall 2020
Monuments, as we think of them, celebrate power, grief, victory. They employ specific visual languages that frame them as such. Some monuments, at least in the US, protect significant lands and mark noteworthy geographic features. They historically tend to feature the human species, first and foremost, and most often avoid sticky subjects and non-dominant histories. And within the world of non-dominant narratives, we consider non-human species to be significant members.
Tending the Edge
Co-curated with Works on Water
Public Interventions
May-June 2021
Making sense of New York City’s Waterfront is not an easy task. How does one find meaning in the 520 miles of coastline that surround the city, and its ever-changing neighborhoods, histories, cultures, and issues? Then, how does one convince mayoral candidates to pay attention to a 10-year plan that maps out conceptual structures, priorities, and policies for this complex space...and commit to act on it.
That was the charge for Tending the Edge artists. They were asked to respond to the New York City Department of City Planning’s (DCP) draft of the 2020-2030 Comprehensive Waterfront Plan (CWP), the city’s roadmap for managing, developing, and caring for its waterfront, with a work that addressed candidates and the public. The DCP’s research and development process for the CWP began in 2019, with weekly public outreach, including school visits, community meetings and tabling at weekend community events. Their research continued in 2020 on Zoom meetings and through Walking the Edge, a collaborative project with Works on Water and Culture Push that encouraged New Yorkers to explore their waterways safely during the pandemic lockdown.
Tending the Edge artists approached the breadth of the task through the lenses of their practices and their localities—each focused on a small area of the waterfront that they know well. Their projects form a portrait of the city’s waterfront today, and the intersectional urgencies resulting from histories of systemic oppression, industrialization, privatization, and the emergency of a rapidly changing climate.
All 22 Mayoral candidates (one of the largest fields in recent history), as well as some City Council candidates, were invited to participate in Tending the Edge artist projects. Those who accepted experienced a wild variety of approaches to understanding and stewarding the New York City waterfront. For Exmple, Nancy Nowacek—in consideration of the breadth and depth of the waterways’ roles in the civic life of the city—offered a ceremonial key made from all the waters to NYC in return for their commitment to the waterfront.
Focusing on specific waterways and ecological features, Ray Jordan Achan began a journey of understanding Newtown Creek. Cody Ann Herrman immersed City Council hopefuls in the complex environment of Flushing Bay and Creek; and Sunk Shore brought visitors to Flushing Creek on a journey to two alternative futures. Simone Johnson brought awareness to the city’s surviving wetlands. Focusing on the increasing impacts of climate change, Sarah Cameron Sunde brought attention, with local community partners, to sunny day flooding in the Rockaways.
Other projects illuminated various intersectional issues of our waterways: Dennis RedMoon Darkeem created a flag that honored Black and Indigenous water stewardship. Elizabeth Velazquez and her community partners investigated the relationship between practices of worship and the practice of caring for the waterways. Zoey Hart created a map that highlighted the need for a new understanding of “accessibility”; and Moira Williams gathered her disability community to advocate for a waterfront that is accessible to all bodies and created an all-bodies celebration of the waterfront.
Giving voice to the more than human world, Dylan Gauthier developed an augmented reality work that allows New Yorkers to see the land of the city in new contexts; and Andrea Haenggi gave voices to non-human creatures and plants along the waterfront. Focusing on their local communities, Rejin Leys invited Queens residents to connect today’s waterways to the past through papermaking, while Ella Mahoney created a large scale painting based on the concerns of denizens of Rockaway Beach and immersed it in the waters that inspired her.
— Clarinda Mac Low and Nancy Nowacek
Walking the Edge
Co-curated with Works on Water
Participatory performance
May-October, 2020
A walk is a multitude of thoughts, felt through the rhythm of the body in motion. Walking the Edge was originally designed to be a participatory event inviting New Yorkers to encounter and reflect up on New York City’s 520 miles coastline, to embody the reality between solid and liquid, constructed and unconstructed worlds. This 24-hour-a-day consecutive walk was designed to discover the ground truth of the waterfront: its functions, paths, and impasses.
Though the pandemic shutdown foreclosed the possibility of large-scale public group gatherings, it amplified the original goals of this project: to move through space with attention and reflection. As New Yorkers took to their sidewalks one by one, Walking the Edge transformed into a weekly series of artist’s prompts for individual walkers, inspired by engagements with the artist’s own waterfronts.
Staged in weekly takeovers of the Works on Water Instagram account, this archive tracks a variety of strategies to inhabit and simultaneously reflect upon the shared relationship to public space during covid, including the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement upon the brutal deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. From May to October, artists employed meditation, dance, costumes and props, history, and futuring as means to focus public attention and reflection on the water through lenses of race, disability, identity, access, and climate change.
A collaboration between Works on Water, Culture Push and the New York City Department of City Planning
Works on Water
Triennial Exhibition
2017
Works on Water was the first triennial dedicated to art made on, in and with the water. The inaugural event took place from June 2017 at 3LD Art & Technology Center in New York City, and featured artworks, theatrical performances, conversations, and field expeditions that explored diverse artistic investigations of water in the urban environment. This exhibition featured gallery re-imagining of nine site-based projects, and 15 field expeditions that engage water as site and material in response to the urgency of a changing climate, increasing urban density, and burgeoning public awareness of the intersectionality of ecological issues. The featured works connect to current economic, political, and global issues and are related to traditions of Land Art, Public Art, and Performance Art, among others.
Worksonwater.org
MVR
Nomadic lecture series
co-curated with David Shienkopf
2014-2017
With
the decreasing size and cost of computer vision, digital components,
and advances in virtual reality, we are faced with a renewed awareness
of the impact of current digital practices on the physical body. MVR is a
lecture event series focused on new forms of exchange between body and
technology developed by Eyebeam alumni Nancy Nowacek and David
Sheinkopf, Director of Technology at Pioneer Works, and curated by Nancy
Nowacek. MVR ran for three nomadic seasons moving from Eyebeam to
Pioneer Works and other like-minded institutions such as Baby Castles
and New Inc.Series speakers included Ken Perlin, Jacob Gaboury, Claire Volpe, Amelia Bearskin-Winger, Luke Stark, Cassie Tarakajian, Syed Salahuddin, Tega Brain, Robert Yang, Joanne McNeil, Brian House, Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde, Greg Trefry, Kate Sicchio, Liat Berdurgo, Sydney Skybetter, Carlin Wing, Gene Kogan, Pablo Garcia, Pam Liou, Nancy Diniz, Matt Romein, Madeline Schwartzman, Ella Klik, Maria Aiolova, Rodrigo Ferreira, Salome Asega, Nicholas Fortungo, Stephanie Dinkins, Miriam Simoun, Kristin Lucas, Toni Dove, Javier Molina, Laine Nooney, Jae Rim Lee, Brian Knep, Lainie Fefferman and Jascha Narveson.