An article in The Art Newspaper by Cristina Ruiz.

Five weeks ago, the Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel unveiled a dilapidated fishing boat at the Venice Biennale. This rusting vessel has a tragic story: it is the place where hundreds of migrants drowned on the night of 18 April 2015 while attempting to reach Europe from Libya. The Italian navy later recovered 458 corpses from the locked hull of this doomed ship; hundreds more are thought to be still missing at sea. But none of this information is provided in explanatory text near Büchel’s display. For reasons known only to himself (Büchel does not do interviews), the artist has chosen to show the boat, now entitled Barca Nostra, as a work of art devoid of all context.

“I think it’s a missed opportunity… Art should raise awareness and fill in the gaps in people’s knowledge. That’s my idea of art being effective,” says Federica Mazzara, a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster who researches art about migration. She is the co-curator of Sink without trace, an exhibition opening in London today which tells the stories of migrant deaths at sea which has been organised with the British artist Maya Ramsay.

Crucially, their show includes the work of several artists who are themselves refugees and have first-hand knowledge of the perilous journeys to Europe that so often end in tragedy. One of them is the Kurdish artist Behjat Omer Abdulla who first came to Britain as a refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan and is now based in Sweden. Included in the exhibition are two giant, black-and-white portraits of young brothers depicted by Abdulla with their eyes closed. The drawings, entitled Head of Child I (From a Distance) and Head of Child II (From a Distance), both 2016, are based on a story which “was being retold around Swedish refugee camps,” the artist writes in the exhibition catalogue. “Under the fear of war, as thousands of families fled their homelands, a mother of twin infants started her journey to seek a safer place.” She probably came from the Middle East or Asia, Abdulla writes, and eventually ended up “crossing the deadliest route to Europe over the Mediterranean Sea by boat.” Then, tragedy struck.

“During the harsh physical struggle of the journey, the mother lost one of her twin infants. Despite the loss, she kept the dead child with her for days on the boat. As tensions rose, the smugglers tried to force the mother to throw the body of her child into the sea. She refused and kept the body with her. One night, while the mother was sleeping, the smugglers took action. The mother woke to realise that her living child was missing and that she had been left with the dead child. The smugglers had mistakenly thrown the sleeping twin into the sea.”

In-depth investigations

Others whose work is included in the show have embarked on serious, in-depth investigations of migrant stories, including Max Hirzel, a photojournalist based in Italy, who documented the immense forensic effort to identify the 458 bodies recovered from the fishing vessel which Christoph Büchel has now appropriated as a work of art. In 2016, Hirzel travelled to the Nato base of Melilli in Sicily where medical specialists meticulously examined the recovered corpses and the personal belongings found alongside them. Hirzel’s photographs of this six-month effort are woven together in the video Migrant Bodies, 2015-2017, which also includes images related to other disasters at sea.

Hirzel also travelled to Senegal to meet Abdou and Ousman, who are still searching for their brother Mamadou who is believed to be one of the victims of the April 2015 shipwreck. He met and photographed Mohamed Motak, a Syrian lawyer who travelled to Sicily to visit the grave of his brother Bilal and recover his belongings. Bilal died aboard another boat which sank in the Mediterranean on 24 August 2014; his body was later identified by Angelo Milazzo, an official of the Syracuse Public Prosecutor’s Office. One of Hirzel’s photographs shows the emotional first meeting between Motak and Milazzo at Catania airport.

Another immense investigative effort into a migrant sea disaster was undertaken by Forensic Oceanography, a research project set up by the film directors Lorenzo Pezzani and Charles Heller, which is allied with the multi-disciplinary group Forensic Architecture. Liquid Traces: the left-to-die boat case, 2014, is a film which tells the story of a small rubber boat which left Libya in March 2011 with 72 passengers on board. Just one day later, the boat ran out of fuel and was left to drift in the Mediterranean for 14 days as the migrants slowly succumbed to dehydration and death. By combining the testimonies of survivors with wind and sea data, satellite imagery and mobile-phone location information, the film reveals that numerous military, commercial, and shipping vessels could have helped the drifting migrants but chose not to. Instead, the boat was left to drift back to the Libyan shore. By the time it reached land again, 63 migrants had died.

Other exhibitors have chosen to tackle the subject of migrant deaths at sea with more artistic responses. During a residency in Italy, the Danish artist Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen made 48 concrete sculptures which each resemble a body wrapped in canvas (End of Dreams, 2014-2016). The plan was to submerge these off the coast of Calabria in Southern Italy so that they could each acquire a patina of sea organisms and then remove them from the water and exhibit them as a group. But a violent storm engulfed the raft which was holding them in place and the sculptures were scattered across the seabed. Only 14 of these were eventually found by the artist. A film about the project shows the concrete body bags lying at the bottom of the sea in silent testimony to the thousands of migrant bodies lost in the Mediterranean.

Read the full article at The Art Newspaper.

Sink without trace is on view until 13 July at the P21 Gallery, 21-27 Chalton Street, London, NW1 1JD

An article in A/D/O by Laura Feinstein.

The Earth's average temperature increased by two degrees Fahrenheit during the 20th century, according to NASA. While this may seem minor, it has already had an outsized impact on our global climate, from the increase in extreme weather events like flooding and forest fires, to ongoing food and water shortages. But what global governments have been frustratingly slow to address, artists and designers are tackling full-throttle, using their talents to create powerful visual representations that force us to grasp climate change more tangibly.

Coinciding with the 2019 Venice Biennale, in the satellite show “Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy,” prominent artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kiki Smith made climate change a dominant issue; nearby, Lorenzo Quinn's compelling installation depicting a pair of hands emerging from the city's famous canals to support the sides of the Ca’ Sagredo Hotel – a statement on rising sea levels – underscored this sense of urgency. At Milan’s Triennale Museum, just a few hours west, the exhibition Broken Nature, curated by MoMA's Paola Antonelli, presents 22 international artists exploring and addressing issues ranging from deforestation to coral reef depletion, while Louis Vuitton’s newly appointed artistic director Virgil Abloh recently unveiled a series of climate change-inspired furniture pieces. If three makes it a trend, this may be the beginning of a movement.

Obviously, there’s no template for visualizing climate change. Some artists embrace a literal interpretation, like Finnish designers Pekka Niittyvirta and Timo Aho, who illuminated ghostly “flood lines" throughout the Scottish countryside, and New York-based artist Eve Mosher who, as part of 2007's HighWaterLine project, traced swaths of Brooklyn with a baseball field chalker to create a 70-mile flood line for a storm projected to hit the coast within three to 20 years. Five years later, Hurricane Sandy devastated much of the region. Still other artists prefer what Margaret Atwood called “speculative fiction,” a vision of a not-too-distant world that’s easy to imagine but hard to bear. American artist Zaria Forman’s ice glacier drawings explore in vivid detail the melting of the poles, while painter Jill Pelto utilizes scientific data to create illustrations depicting issues like ocean acidification and deforestation, overlaid with vibrant watercolor paintings of the affected natural areas.

Murals influenced by climate change have also appeared across the world, from Pangeaseed’s ocean-inspired murals throughout North America, to Kyrgyzstan's Aida Sulova, whose vivid designs are inspired by the heaps of trash left around the city of Bishkek. But in its most basic form, visualizing climate change is simply the documentation of our ongoing environmental degradation; for David Maisel’s The Lake Project, the artist explored, through a series of photographs, a once thriving 200-square-mile lake in California that has since been depleted by LA’s water shortage. Today, it exists as a blood-red ooze of minerals and bacterial growth.

Still, there are optimists, like Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde, whose works have included Waterlicht, an aetherial series of aquatic projections depicting rising tides, and the Smog Free Project, an award-winning collection of smog-reducing structures. “We live in a world where there is not a lack of technology, but of imagination – how we want the future to look,” said Roosegaarde, whose ultimate aim is to envision “the city of tomorrow,” where light-emitting algae can be used in place of street lamps, and smog-clearing jewelry can be purchased as engagement rings. “These are proposals for how I would like to see the world, not as a utopia, but as a ‘protopia’ – a way to show, learn, fail, and upgrade the world around us.” Currently, Roosegaarde’s attentions are focused on expanding the Smog Free Project, which has successfully launched in China, Poland, and the Netherlands, with additional plans for Korea and Mexico.” It’s a campaign for clean air, using design and technology to improve the urban landscape,” he said. Roosegaarde has now set his eyes on the skies with the Space Waste Lab to visualize, capture and upcycle the current 8.1 million kilos of space waste created by satellites and rockets floating in the universe.

Swedish artist Johan Elmehag has also put a playful spin on environmental devastation with his Coastline typeface and climate-change maps. Originally intended as “a fictive help-guide for climate refugees in the year 2100,” the project has morphed into a dystopian topographical rendering, based on a post-glacial earth and utilizing projections from floodmap.net and National Geographic. “I began to see different letterforms in particularly exposed coastal areas and understood they could be used for organizing and presenting geographical information in a structured and innovative way,” he told The Journal. Utilizing four variables – dissemination of geographic areas, exposed areas, scalability between letters and aesthetically appropriate letterforms – he was able to tell a story for each letter, presenting a diverse picture as well as a downloadable typeface. “If you’re trying to visualize climate change, it’s important to create a perspective people haven’t seen,” Elmehag said.

“More designers, and especially design students, are focusing efforts on sustainability and, by extension, climate change,” said Steven Heller, MFA Design co-chair at the School of Visual Arts, explaining the recent boom in climate-related art. He reasoned that over the last decade, climate change has gone from a hypothetical to a daily feature, the unintended effect creating a shift in consumer patterns, and by default, affecting the livelihood of product and graphic designs. “Consumers just don’t want to buy into wasteful or world-destroying products,” he said.

"Artists have always responded to what is culturally central,” added Julia Buntaine Hoel, Director of the SciArt Center, which co-organized the Visualizing Climate Change symposium with Cooper Union in 2015. “Climate change differs from other current culturally central topics because of its global reach and pressing timeline. In many ways, these artists are giving voice to a science which, for the layperson, is too complicated to understand quickly, and too nuanced without the assistance of a platform like the visual arts.” Artists, unlike scientists, have the ability to give data meaning through form and image, to create empathetic connections between an audience and a data set. “Non-scientists don't empathize and change their behavior or actions because of a graph – they respond to images of a seahorse carrying a Q-tip, or of a polar bear floating on the only ice in sight,” Hoel said.

Others are more skeptical of the climate change-inspired design trend. For over a decade, anonymous Spanish collective Luz Interruptus has created environmentally sustainable and politically minded works, often involving large-scale, illuminated waste items like disposable baby nipples and plastic bottles. But, ultimately, the group found that gaining access to recycled materials to convert into art installations is difficult to secure and manage, and involves complicated processes that eventually end up being unsustainable. "When we recycle plastic it is often mixed with other containers, rendering it unsuitable for artistic usage,” they explained. “In spite of this unquestionable reality, museums, festivals, institutions, companies, and events of all kinds want to join the trend of big and bold messages and statements, and impose this theme on their artists."

"Afterwards, they don't know how to manage these projects,” Luz Interruptus continued. “In short, the ‘raising awareness’ boom in the art field is promoting illicit practices wherein artists become accomplices, sometimes knowingly, sometimes due to lack of awareness, in which organizers and artists buy new plastic and try to pass it off as recycled. Well-intentioned messages are delivered by the hand of prestige artists, but there's not enough time or resources to create serious work, so in the end, people like us, interested in the outcome and the process equally, have a more difficult time keeping our principles and values safeguarded.” Aware of these concerns when building Ice Watch, the newest public work examining global warming by Olafur Eliasson, the artist tapped Julie’s Bicycle, a London-based arts sustainability charity, to ensure that his project was constructed and exhibited ethically.

There is no doubt that climate change will continue to be a muse for the art and design world. According to UN reports, we are pushing many animal species towards extinction and hurling our own towards an uncertain future, with whole swaths of the world projected to be uninhabitable within half a century.  While it may be a “trend”, it’s also a global reality, which is what these creators are responding to. Ultimately, to critics who believe that artists who explore climate change are just cashing in on a fad, and that concerns for our unstable environment will soon lose their urgency, Daan Roosegaarde asks a simple question: "How is the weather on your planet?"

Read the full article at A/D/O.

Florida's historical relationship to black Americans is a mixed bag. The quick and dirty version begins with Spanish colonial rule, under which slaves who escaped adjoining states were granted freedom here if they converted to Roman Catholicism. But when Florida became a U.S. territory and later a slave state, Native and black Americans had to flee farther south to preserve their freedom.

After the Civil War, Florida was home to one of the first black townships in the United States: Eatonville, six miles north of Orlando. Zora Neale Hurston's family would move there shortly after its founding, shaping the legendary author's perception of herself and what it meant to be African-American. Surrounded by black business owners, politicians, and community leaders, Hurston's childhood seems the natural precursor to her lifetime of anthropological work documenting black communities and traditions and using them as inspiration for her fiction. It's work that bears significance today, especially for artists such as Johanne Rahaman.

"She’s constantly in my head throughout the [Black Florida] project," Rahaman says of Hurston. "She’s towering over the narrative of Florida. I try to keep the idea of her in the contemporary while I’m creating my work. She’s my muse."

It isn't difficult to see how Rahaman's photography fits within Hurston's lineage. The Black Florida Project aims to tell the stories and demonstrate the warmth and complexity of black neighborhoods and individuals in Florida in a way that similarly skirts anthropology while embracing the intimacy and affection of art.

"The project is a celebration [from] within," Rahaman explains, "but for the outsider, the project challenges you to suspend judgment, to see in a way that you’re not often seeing communities that you’re not used to. These invisible barriers make them seem so far away when they’re so close to you. It’s an opportunity to come out and see that it’s not as bad as you think it is."

Rahaman started the project in 2014, around the same time she began shooting photos in South Beach during Urban Beach Week. Though crowds of out-of-town revelers aren't as open to Rahaman's more narrative approach to the Black Florida Project, the event nevertheless embodied what first drew her to capturing the spirit of the African diaspora in the United States.

"It feels like home," Rahaman reflects. "It feels like being in Trinidad getting ready for carnival, getting to the parade route. Even though there’s no parade, there’s this sense of merriment, of excitement, of family. It feels like everyone knows each other even though they don’t. There’s this sense of community."

Despite this vibe, politicians and land owners in South Beach have been trying to shut Urban Beach Week down for years. This year, the City of Miami Beach has made a concerted effort to draw visitors indoors via cultural events. Its more insidious tactics include paring down traffic on the MacArthur and Julia Tuttle Causeways to one lane in order to scan the license plates of every vehicle entering the city. The narratives of increased crime and debauchery — conspicuously absent for similar, nonblack events such as Pride Week — are exactly what Rahaman's work attempts to combat. So it seemed only natural to bring the Black Florida Project to Urban Beach Week in an exhibition titled "Water Rights."

The concept comes, again, from history. During the Jim Crow era, community pools were immensely popular summertime gathering spots. After pools were integrated, however, white flight inevitably led pools in black neighborhoods to fall into disrepair, denying black communities access to them. Rahaman points out that beaches held equal significance for the same reason. Virginia Key Beach, for example, was a black beach that could be accessed only through a swampy, uncomfortable boat ride until integration in the 1960s, after which the beach became "too costly" to maintain. Today a toll bridge leads to the affluent Key Biscayne barrier island.

For Rahaman, this repetitive story goes beyond mere recreation or access.

"We’re connected to water; we were brought here by water," she says. "We survived it, and we’re constantly trying to reconcile that separation from what is home and what is homeland. Water plays a big part in that exploration of who we are and where we belong. Labor from the black community was used to develop the entire east coast of Florida, but we’ve been pushed further and further away from the water.

"There’s a constant struggle for water rights, even if it’s just the ability to go to the beach."

For "Water Rights," Rahaman is installing an LED screen onto a barge that will float from South Pointe Park to around 30th Street and back. In stark contrast to both the increased police presence and the never-ending banners beckoning people into clubs and restaurants, the slow-moving exhibition will show a selection of photos from Rahaman's work in Jacksonville, Palatka, and Miami Beach, among other places.

"Whenever the black community comes to South Beach, there’s always this militarized feel every year," Rahaman explains. "So the idea is to use the images from the communities to create a sense of welcoming, to create a feeling of familiarity. I’m sure people will recognize friends or themselves in the images. Instead of being advertised to, the images will be more like home, like looking at a slide show of images of your family going by."

"Water Rights" is a tenderly hospitable gesture to tourists in the middle of a contentious local battle. And though Rahaman's focus has been limited to Florida and Trinidad so far, this arm of the Black Florida Project could speak to the vision she has for the work's future.

"We have an entire country to do this with," she says. "I would love to expand my process and the project to train other photographers to replicate this in their city, in their town, in their state."

Read more at Miami New Times.

"Water Rights." 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday, May 26, along the beach between South Pointe Park and 30th Street in Miami Beach; blackflorida.org. It will move the slowest between 10th and 15th Streets. Admission is free.

As a child, Sigalit Landau grew up gazing out over the jagged hills of the Judean Desert to the Dead Sea and the distant skyline of Jordan beyond. The lake’s incomparable beauty entranced the prominent Israeli artist, who has returned to it throughout her career, as a metaphor and as a medium. Landau has created some of her most iconic works in its hypersaline waters, including DeadSee (2005), an 11-minute video in which the artist floats naked among a string of unraveling watermelons. For her more recent salt-dipped sculptures, Landau harnesses the Dead Sea’s salt to act as a catalyst, mutating objects including a violin, children’s shoes, a dreamcatcher, and a noose.

“Salt heals, preserves, hides, kills,” Landau told me, explaining her attraction to salt for its paradoxical qualities as much as its chemical properties. “This specific lake has myths and [pre]history all around its shores, stories of radicalism, Christianity, heroics, unbelievable agriculture—and it is a border as well, so the behaviour of salt and the natural environment is highly metaphoric, and keeps changing direction as I experiment.”

Once thought to be devoid of life, the Dead Sea is a completely unique ecological system and the lowest point on earth, at -429 meters below sea level. Recently, after the closure of Ein Gedi beach—its last public beach and once the largest public beach on the lake’s shores—there has been cause for major environmental concerns. The damming of its two tributaries, The Jordan River and the Yarmouk River, together with the unrelenting Middle Eastern sun, and intense harvesting of magnesium, potash and other minerals in Israel and Jordan have led to accelerated evaporation; much of its southern area is now gouged by sinkholes that have been appearing since the 2000s, due to the rapidly declining water level, destroying beaches and rendering roads inaccessible, while the lake’s southern area is now comprised almost entirely of evaporation pools for mineral harvesting.

The Dead Sea’s demise appears imminent, but Landau continues to use her practice to highlight its environmental and geographic problems and conserve its historic and spiritual importance. For the past few years, for example, she has been planning Salt Route Bridge, a monumental floating bridge that will create a symbolic link over the Dead Sea from the shores of Israel to Jordan. “I think that my works are also about this one directional tide... yearnings that are lost and gone, melancholic, purified, healed, petrified,” she said. I asked her if she considers her art to be a form of activism. “I hope so. Despite the extremely hard conditions and shifting of the ground… I am very much committed to this place and the ideas and experiences that activate me year after year.”

Landau’s latest project, Salt Bride (2016), now on view at Marlborough Contemporary, London, sees her return to the Dead Sea’s waters once again. To create the eight color photographs on view, Landau first worked in cooperation with the Habima National Theatre in Tel Aviv to form an exact replica of a traditional Hasidic dress, a costume worn by the female lead, Leah, in S. Ansky’s play, The Dybbuk. Written between 1913 and 1916, The Dybbuk tells the story of the exorcism of a young bride. “The play is a collage of traditional folklore stories assembled into one well-written and sought-after masterpiece, combining Judaism, mysticism and the subconscious,” Landau explains. “The role of Leah is orphaned, rebellious, possessed, and subversive in a perverse financially dominated Papa-patriarchy.”

The artist then submerged the dress several meters under the lake’s water and collaborated with photographer Yotam From to shoot the transformation, as it transitioned from black to white by the lake’s alchemy. “It was very hard to sink [the dress] and dive in the Dead Sea, where everything floats,” Landau says of the process. “The water is saturated with many materials apart from salt, and visibility is not easy to achieve. Yotam needed special equipment and weights of 70kg on his body in order to go down.” The installation of the life-size prints at Marlborough is meant to conjure an immersive space, an “underwater aquarium that speaks of time and transformation.”

The Salt Bride prints emanate an ethereal and quasi-spectral presence: They are indeed suspended in time, but also reminders that time is unstoppable, and will change the lake irreparably, just as it has altered Leah’s dress. Landau’s Dead Sea works are documents, a moving archive of a disappearing space. After decades working there, what does she personally feel is so engaging about this sea and its waters? “That it is like a place on the moon. That it is natural like no other part of nature. That it is so extremely, radically beautiful, but a complete opposite of what it looks like; it is not like a lake, blue and pleasurable. That nothing is dead there as nothing lives there—so the cycle of life-death-life-death doesn't even exist there. It is above life, beyond death.”

“Sigalit Landau: Salt Bride” showed at Marlborough Contemporary, London, in 2016.

Read the full article at Artsy.

An article in The Verge by Grayson Blackmon.

n 2014 when I first moved to New York, I visited the Brooklyn Museum and saw the exhibit Submerged Motherlands. It was a dreamlike, larger-than-life experience created by the artist Swoon, who first gained notoriety in the early 2000s as a street artist. The intense detail and scale of every piece astounded me, and I’ve been following her work ever since.

Swoon, born Caledonia Curry, has been experimenting and challenging herself for almost 20 years. Since studying at Pratt Institute, she’s been creating massive installations for galleries as well as engaging in humanitarian efforts. Her work with the Konbit Shelter in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake helped create a sustainable community center and single-family houses in Cormier, Haiti.

Swoon invited me into her studio space in Brooklyn to talk about the link between street art and studio work, the messy process of drawing, and taking her artwork out to sea.

What was the transition from street artist to studio artist like?

I always had a studio practice, since I was a little kid. I studied classical painting, and even when I was doing work that was really made to live out in the street, most of the time making it was spent in my studio. So the real question was just around, “where does the art live?” At first I was like, “I don’t want to just make a square that goes over a couch.” And now, I’ve gotten to the place where I’ve threaded through so many layers of meaning and life into my work that I’m okay if one aspect of it is also a square over a couch. Like this is a portrait that’s part of a larger process, and if there’s a piece of it you can keep, that’s awesome.

I actually prefer that to only having things disappear. It’s nice to have a dual trajectory. So the studio process was always there, it was really more about the transition from street to gallery museum. At the time when I first got asked to do that, it was like, “Okay, does this really make sense? Is this right for me?” And then as you saw at the Brooklyn Museum, we had this 70-foot tree that was guy-wired into the building. Now you could see them up close, whereas they had just been on the water before. So what I found is that there are certain things that can happen in those protected spaces.

Do you plan to do any more street art?

Right now I’m taking a break because [with] every piece I was making, I was always thinking that it had to live out in the street. It was starting to dictate what I was making in a certain way and I was like, “You know what? If I’m going to really evolve creatively, I have to actually pause some of the things that are my known go-tos, so that I can surprise myself a little bit.” Like I have to stop doing certain things that are comfortable in order to get uncomfortable, which is that really creative space.

So the installation like Submerged Motherlands, how long did that take you to put together?

So long. Yeah, that was at least six months. And, in fact, more because you saw there were two rafts in the project and those had been built years before. So the tree, the temple, a lot of those drawings had been coming into fruition for like a decade. It took six months to get it prefabricated and get it put up. But to really examine the labor that went into it, I would say it took like a decade.

Talking about the boats, what was it like making a piece of art that floats? Were you scared at all the first time you rode it?

Yeah. I mean it was really astonishing in this way where, we did it, we built it. But still the feeling of being out on it floating, you were like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” And driving it? You’re like, “Oh my god, I am driving my art at sea.” Just a wild feeling. Also like stepping away, like getting on the little skiff and driving out and seeing it. The first time that happened I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me, that’s what we did?” Like even I had been doing it for months. Seeing it be alive on water was just totally mind blowing.

Read the full article at The Verge.

BENNINGTON — Marie Lorenz loves to look for trash.

Not because she wants to convey a political message about our wasteful society (though she does cast into ceramic sculptures things like plastic bottles and takeout containers) and not because she wants to advocate against pollution (though she does make paper prints using oil slicks), but because trash, in all its unsettling abundance, is real.

"When I use the garbage, it's easy to see that as, 'Oh, it's so terrible we've polluted the environment,'" Lorenz said. "It's more about living in the world we made, fully. I think we are more at one with our being when we're at the landfill."

Lorenz, 46, doesn't go to the landfill proper to search out litter and her own, existential wholeness. Instead, she combs beaches and explores islands in her handmade boats as she floats and rows — and, during the infrequent emergency, swims — down urban waterways.

Next month, she'll continue this quest and set out along the Hoosic River for New York City, in culmination of her art installation, "Waterways," at Bennington College, and a class she taught there this past semester.

Lorenz plans to put in somewhere near the Bennington area and wash westward until she intersects with the Hudson River in Stillwater, N.Y. From there, the goal is to float and row down to New York City, where she lives, camping out for several nights along the way.

In addition to displaying three of her boats and five of her videos documenting past trips at the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Lorenz set up a cascading series of white tables in the shape of the local watershed.

After painting a map on its surface, Lorenz used this "water table" to both prepare for her journey and to teach a class at Bennington College. Over two weekends this past spring, students with concentrations in visual arts, environmental studies and public action contributed research to the "water table" from readings, assignments and field trips to nearby riverbanks.

On a Saturday in April, for example, Lorenz led the class to the western edge of campus, down the Short Aldrich Trail and through the woods to the edge of the Paran Creek. There they made notes, photographed, drew, questioned and collected observations: water flowing beneath the National Hanger Company building; a rusty saw blade; a bunch of tiny white pieces of plastic found sitting in a bucket.

To reach their findings, students slid down muddy slopes, dug through scrap piles, tiptoed around discarded glass and pushed their way through purplish pricker bushes. Everyone had little in the way of gear, and one student managed in a pair of black, fluffy slipper sandals.

Sitting on a mossy rock, watching the creek crest over a dam and sketching in the sun, junior Emily O'Donnell said the class was a new kind of college experience, one that got beyond the classroom.

"This is probably the most immersive thing I've done," she said.

Immersion in the world — in both its curiosity and discomfort — was Anne Thompson's goal when she asked Lorenz to teach students at Bennington College. Thompson, who is the director and curator of the Usdan Gallery, met Lorenz when both women were graduate students at Yale School of Art.

In the two decades since, Thompson said she has admired Lorenz's work, so much so that she agreed to be Lorenz's co-pilot for the journey down the Hoosic and Hudson rivers.

"When I think about things that are interesting to me as a curator, they're not things that are confined to an interior space," Thompson said.

Lorenz has never been one for interior or confined spaces. She grew up in a military family that moved every couple years, and she has memories of everyone going camping all together: Lorenz; her father, Frederick; her mother, Joan; and her older brother, Matt.

Lorenz also has photos of herself as a baby, curled up in a motorboat as her father took her out on the water.

"He taught me to sail," she said.

Lorenz started building her own boats as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1990s. The city of Providence was in the process of opening up its canals, and she wanted to explore those previously unseen places.

"The first boat I made was out of sheet metal," Lorenz recalled with a laugh. "It floated."

Over time, her boats grew more sophisticated. She started making them from plywood, covering its ribs in canvas and sealing it with roofing pitch. She also went to boat building school, where, she said, she learned to use timber and create 1,000-pound vessels intended to last for 100 years.

Nowadays, Lorenz buys boat plans from companies like Chesapeake Light Craft or finds them online for free, and she adapts them for her art and trash-questing purposes. Instead of timber, she favors plywood, fiberglass and silk-screened exteriors.

"I make it lighter and cheaper and easier to build," Lorenz said. On the ground level of the Bushwick building she also owns and lives in, she constructs these models in her studio. They often take her a month or less to build. They weigh just 100 pounds — not too heavy for her to lift —and last for about a year.

"If a boat builder saw this, they would, like, disown me," she said.

This doesn't seem to matter much to Lorenz, though, who is used to launching herself — and her handmade boats — into unconventional waters, such as New York Harbor.

"If you think about public space in New York City, it's really limited," Lorenz said. "There's a lot of water."

That's why she began The Tide and Current Taxi in 2005. For about two weeks every summer for the past 14 years, Lorenz has offered a rowboat passenger service through New York City's public, under-accessed waterways.

"Cities are so sort of regulated, and your behavior is dictated by where you are," she said. "But in the water, your behavior is unregulated."

This is partly due to the fact that Lorenz lets the tidal current determine her destination, an approach that has sunk her boat exactly one time.

"There's probably been over 300 people out in the boat, and only one of them had to swim," she said.

Lorenz did capsize while alone in a sailboat off the coast of Italy in the Mediterranean Sea. After a frantic, deadly moment in which a hook on her life jacket became tangled in a cable line, she let herself be pulled underwater so she could release herself and escape. She rescued an expensive camera her father had given her by holding it in her mouth, and it wasn't until later that she discovered it had been recording.

In the 7-minute video, the viewer can hear Lorenz's labored breathing as she swims back to shore. In the meantime, the tipped-over boat is visible, bobbing beneath an overcast sky between the rise and fall of green waves.

This event, which happened during a 2008 fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, is perhaps the most extreme example of what Lorenz intends to perform as she makes boats, looks for trash and explores urban waterways both across world and right here in Bennington. While she doesn't want to repeat the experience of nearly drowning, she doesn't want to avoid the adversity of being out in the world, either.

"I enjoy the arduousness of it because it kind of peaks your perception," Lorenz said. "[It] increases your awareness of the things that are really profound about it."

Read more in the Bennington Banner.

An article in spiked by Wendy Earle.

What is the difference between a work of art and a moral imperative? If you are a member of the contemporary art world, perhaps the two are the same. At this year’s Venice Biennale, Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel’s installation Barca Nostra (Our Boat) is making headlines. It is the wreckage of a real fishing boat that sank in the Mediterranean in 2015 on its way to Europe. Most of its passengers, migrants departing from Libya and headed to Europe, drowned, trapped in its hull. The work demands an unequivocal moral response. But should it be considered a work of art?

The boat was raised so as to excavate the bodies in 2016, and has been in storage at a NATO base in Sicily since then. According to the press release, it is being displayed in Venice to highlight the tragedy of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean. The intention is to use it as a ‘vehicle of significant socio-political, ethical, and historical importance’. It is intended to represent not just this one shocking disaster, but the many migrants who have lost their lives in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, hoping for a better life in Europe.

‘We are living in a tragic moment without memory. We all watch the news, and it seems so far away; someone is dead at sea and we change the channel’, Büchel’s collaborator, curator Maria Chiara di Trapani, tells the Guardian. She hopes visitors to the Biennale ‘feel respect for it and look at it in silence – just give two minutes of silence to listen and reflect’. If you are one of those who ‘changes the channel’, here it seems is your chance to make reparations by going to Venice and contemplating this object and all that it represents.

There is a long history of art depicting disastrous shipwrecks and deaths at sea, and it is worth comparing Büchel’s installation to a painting on a similar theme first exhibited 200 years ago. Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819) depicts the scandalous story of a ship wrecked off the coast of modern-day Mauritania due to the incompetence of its captain. Most of its 400 crew and passengers died, and the few who survived endured starvation and dehydration and practised cannibalism before they were rescued.

Géricault chose the subject partly in response to public outrage in France over the incident. His painting was deliberately confrontational, artistically and politically, and generated considerable controversy at the time. Both the brutal realism of the painting and its anti-establishment implications were alternately condemned and praised. Some critics complained about the gruesome ‘pile of corpses’ and sombre colours, while others praised its implied social critique and Géricault’s imaginative and innovative approach. The painting transcends its historic moment and continues to enthral viewers today, generations later, with its dark, dynamic expressiveness. It forces us to imagine, graphically, the horrors of being abandoned at sea.

In contemplating Géricault’s Raft, the viewer can consider its composition, its symbolism, the skill of its execution and the many layers of thought, feeling and experience embedded in the painting. We can choose how we respond. We can immerse ourselves in the emotional horror of the moment depicted, and / or we can step back to consider the artistry of the painting. Our engagement with the painting is freely given and we are free to think what we like about it, separating it – if we wish – from its political implications.

In contrast, Barca Nostra seems to take away our freedom to choose. It turns a judgemental eye on us, the viewer. It is intended to make viewers engage with the issues it evokes. As a moral person, you have no choice but to be repelled by the migrants’ deaths. Those who fail to engage in this way – who walk by ignoring it, drinking lattes under its bow, or taking selfies in front of it – are implicitly judged as morally deficient. You are compelled to respond moralistically or appear heartless. There is no separation between art and morality.

This is reflected in the commentary about it: there has been no discussion of it as a work of art. People seem embarrassed to consider its artistic merit in the face of its moral message. Indeed, where it has been criticised, it has been criticised for exploiting people’s suffering in the name of art. ‘The truth is that, despite Büchel’s good intentions’, one commentator notes, ‘turning the commemoration of such tragedies into a spectacle risks diminishing – if not exploiting – the suffering associated with the migrant crisis’. Others say there is something morally bankrupt and macabre about turning the wreckage, a coffin for 800 people, into something for the art elite to weep or beat their chests over.

Engaging with art often means distancing ourselves from the immediate demands of the real world, to engage in speculative and imaginative thought. Through this we can begin to contend with the ineffable experiences of human existence through art. But we can also take pleasure in the artwork as a physical object. As Susan Sontag put it, ‘To become involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also a vibrant, magical and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.’

Géricault’s Raft offers us this kind of thoughtful experience – it offers us enrichment through art. Barca Nostra, by contrast, is a moral message that we can’t refuse. Trying to take pleasure in it as an art object seems repugnant. There are plenty of ways in which contemporary art might productively engage with the migrant crisis, and the lives so tragically lost, but this is not one of them.

Read the full article at spiked.

By now, climate change has become an irrefutable part of our lives. We can all see and feel it.

So, what are we to do about it?

British writer, filmmaker, artist and philosopher John Akomfrah offers no specific answers in “Purple,” his elegiac six-channel video installation opening Sunday at the ICA Watershed. Instead, he offers a somber reflection on all that has been lost.

And indeed, we’ve lost a lot. Greenland's ice sheet is melting faster with each passing year. Coastal communities in places like the Marquesas Islands are being engulfed by ocean waters. In Alaska, rising temperatures are threatening wildlife and indigenous communities.

We see glimpses of all that in Akomfrah’s hour-long full-immersion experience, but of course, many of us have already had our own full-immersion experiences with changing weather patterns. We can see for ourselves what’s happening around us — mega-fires, massive cyclones, wacky weather. The sheer ubiquity and obviousness of climate change could have wrested power away from this installation at water’s edge in the Boston Harbor Shipyard and Marina. What, a visitor might legitimately ask, does “Purple” offer beyond what we all already know?

“Just accepting the rather obvious fact that we're living it, is a step,” responds the artist. “I live and work on a planet where people still deny that this is going on. Just being able to accept that, seems to me to be a step forward. The thing is that artists have both an ethical and an aesthetic responsibility to try and suggest a way of looking at, living with, and overcoming this, in their work. We have to act responsibly, not to necessarily lecture to people or preach to them about what it is, but show how to navigate it, emotionally, intellectually.”

But before we learn to navigate the depth of what we have wrought, we must confront it.

And on that account, “Purple,” a montage of clips on six large adjacent floor-to-ceiling screens that traverse an entire theater creating a surround-sound experience, is powerfully adept. Here, no matter how much we might like to, we can neither deny nor look away. Scenes arise and dissolve before us, set to a rumbling soundtrack that combines natural sounds like the clap of thunder with solemn hymns sung wistfully by unseen vocalists. We see a mix of archival footage, including educational, industrial and nature documentaries from the 1950s and '60s, as well as clips from BBC arts programming. We also see newly-shot footage collected in 10 different locations around the world that are suffering the most devastating effects of climate change.

There’s no real narrative here. We see snapshots of human life and enterprise, from pregnancy to the birth of a child. We watch that child develop and become adult, indulging in actions that degrade the planet. While we dance and cavort, shop and consume, create new industries and technologies in the name of progress, we also poison our planet. Skies darken with smoke. Rivers and streams bubble with chemical froth. Industrial farming, manufacturing, our unbridled consumerism, our sheer greed, it all plays a role. Included in this vast montage are scenes referencing such ecological disasters as Chernobyl, Bhopal and Fukushima. Interspersed into the mix are bleak but carefully composed shots of a lone human figure set before an expansive landscape often under threatening skies that allude to a black future. The human figure set so sharply in contrast with an awe-inspiring landscape seems to suggest that man is indeed at the center of this catastrophe. Seeking dominion over nature, he has destroyed it. And yet, those same scenes suggest that nature is far grander and more powerful than man. We may take some consolation in that.

“I don’t think that what I do is a step beyond, let’s say an Al Gore film,” says Akomfrah, who created the film with collaborators Lina Gopaul and David Lawson of Smoking Dogs Films. “I think Al Gore’s films are absolutely critical. Ours is in the second league, if you will. It’s about saying, 'OK, I’ve seen that, now what do I do?' Mine is about trying to suggest what you do once you accept that this is fact.”

Back when Akomfrah was growing up in England, he lived a mile away from a coal-fired power station which he describes as “one of the biggest polluters in London.” At that time, he says, no one was drawing connections between the smoke spewing into the atmosphere and to climate change.

“Industrial progress and human life were seen as two separate things,” he says. “They weren't connected at all. In fact, they were very connected. Because we were being subjected to a daily dose of carbon monoxide poisoning. And just to be able to say that, for me, that is a game changer.”

His task as an artist, and with the film “Purple” is to “make seen the unseen.”

Permission for someone other than a scientist to consider climate change, is, according to Eva Respini, chief curator at the ICA Boston, what distinguishes Akomfrah’s work in an era in which ecological disaster is the daily fodder of news reports, scientific reports and policy papers.

“What's really so moving and so interesting about this work is this point of view of an artist,” she says. “This is not a point of view of a scientist or a journalist.”

She adds that artistic choices such as the soundtrack allow this film to take us places that Al Gore never did.

“It's a soundtrack that kind of comes at you almost in waves, like water,” says Respini. “You feel like you're being tugged in and it's washing over you in this amazing way when you actually experience this as an installation. It’s truly meant to be a physical experience.”

“Purple” is the second in a quartet of Akomfrah films in which the topic of climate change plays an important role. His first was "Vertigo Sea" (2015), which was shown at the 56th Venice Biennale. That film explored man's fraught relationship with the sea, including whaling and fishing practices and the sea’s role in slavery, migration and conflict. His third film in the quartet is “Four Nocturnes” (2019) and explores patterns of change in Africa. That film is currently being shown at the Venice Biennale. But with “Purple,” Akomfrah has allowed himself to ponder with more depth than the others the full import of climate change.

And as it should happen, the Watershed is perhaps the perfect venue for such a film. When you walk into the ICA annex, formerly a copper pipe and sheet metal factory, you are struck by the irony that a film on climate change should be shown in a setting that partially contributed to the problem. Outside the theater, you walk beneath a “chandelier” of old plastic jugs of the sort that used to hold water, oil, chemicals and various other solvents. The cloud of jugs was created by Akomfrah to accompany the exhibition.

“This issue of climate change, the issue of how human activity has affected our planet, really seemed just to be the natural fit for what we're hoping to do with the Watershed,” says Respini. The East Boston Shipyard’s role in history, its ties to immigration and industrialism made the Watershed the right place for the American premiere of “Purple.” And in fact, the ICA co-commissioned the film, along with Barbican in London and museums in Sweden, Lisbon and Moscow.

Viewers may wonder how Akomfrah settled on the name “Purple” to title his film. For Akomfrah, who was born in Ghana but who moved to England at the age of 4, the color is nuanced and involves opposites, which seemed fitting for the subject.

“Purple is a great color for discussing {opposites} because of course it’s a hybrid, it’s a mix of blue and red, it’s an inbetween, it’s not natural,” he has said.

Purple is also the color of mourning in Ghana. For this exhibit, in fact, the Watershed has been splashed in purple, including the walls and speakers and a purple carpet, to heighten the immersive effect.

In “Purple,” Akomfrah warns of the dangers threatening our dying planet. He draws compelling connections through time, and, beseeches us to take quick action against climate change, without sentimentality, but with conviction. The reality is, sadly, it may already be too late.

Original article at wbur.org.

“Purple” is at the ICA Watershed from May 26 to Sept. 2. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, and open until 9 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. Admission to the Watershed is free and Water Shuttle transportation between the Watershed and the ICA is included in the ICA admission.

An article in Bloomberg by James Tarmy.

The artist Christo and his late wife/collaborator Jeanne-Claude have used fabric to spectacular effect. They wrapped Germany’s Reichstag in polypropylene, “hung” a curtain across a Colorado Valley, and, in 2016, built a floating, 3-kilometer-long walkway across a lake in northern Italy for a work called The Floating Piers.

The installation lasted just 16 days, and was intended to have a maximum daily capacity of 45,000 people.

By the second day though, nearly 20,000 people an hour had poured onto the pier. Even after organizers instituted aggressive crowd control by closing down the nearby train station and restricting bus access, the final visitor tally, when the 16 days were over, was more than 1.2 million people. For context, that’s about a fifth of the annual attendance of the Vatican Museums.

In the new documentary Walking on Water, directed by Andrey Paounov and in theaters May 17, viewers are treated to a behind-the-scenes look at how the project unfolded—and how Christo has gamed the art market to serve his own ends.

As a record of the floating piers themselves, the documentary is invaluable. From planning meetings with local bureaucrats to the construction of the piers themselves (they were made up of 220,000 high-density plastic cubes that fit together like puzzle pieces, which in turn were wrapped with 100,000 square meters of dazzling, orange-gold nylon), the project evolves from an abstraction into a cultural phenomenon.

As the crowds literally sprint towards the piers on the opening day, the power and draw of participatory artworks is brought home with astonishing force. “We [are on track to have] 200,000 people in one day,” one of the organizers says, panicking. “If it was half that amount—100,000 people would be too much. It’s madness.”

Later, the same man is less sanguine: “Who f*cked up and told us the maximum we’ll ever have is 45,000 people?” he asks, wild eyed as crowds surge their way through the town.

By the time the project was realized, Jeanne-Claude had been dead for seven years, and Christo, then in his mid 80s, was in charge of organizing it on his own. But even though he’s at the center of it all, the documentary doesn’t provide insight into why he wanted to build a floating walkway in the first place. 

The closet viewers get is at a kick-off talk to the builders in charge of assembling the project. “It’s a project Jeanne-Claude and myself tried to do—where you can walk on water,” he says. “All of the money from the project comes from me, the works of art I do by my own hand. We have no assistant. I sell the works, and it pays the bills.”  (The only real glimpse of Christo’s “process,” if you could call it that, is a series of excruciating clips where he bickers with subordinates.)

In one of the more fascinating scenes in the whole documentary, a collector in a suit and tie gets out of a gorgeous wooden motor boat and is led by a team—presumably all representatives of Christo—into a building on the shore of the lake, where he’s shown a series of Christo’s artworks that depict the Floating Piers.

It becomes apparent that the collector was promised one price for a large work—$250,000—but that in the interim, the price has changed. “Christo produced 40 original works,” a representative explains with a half-hearted stab at contrition. “Very few are available, they are gone each day, [and each day the prices] go up.”

The same representative gestures to a large drawing on the wall. “A week ago, this was 1.6, today it’s 2.2,” he says, shrugging, meaning $2.2 million. “I mean, what can we do?”

Finally, the collector settles on a mid-sized work, which costs $500,000. “I have a CEO, which is my wife,” he says. “And luckily she has good taste for contemporary art.”

It’s rare that you can see the sausage getting made so explicitly, but in the film, Christo is unapologetic about using his collectable art to fund his transient installations. It’s also clear which version of his practice he actually cares about. 

Read the full article at Bloomberg.

An article in Hyperallergic by Bedatri D. Choudhury.

[Editors note: I’ve shared articles about this work before, but as my goal is to bring you perspectives of artists working on and with water, if a work has garnered more than one article, I will share the best of these.]

“Jeanne-Claude and my art exists because we like to see it and realize it. There is no meaning to it and it is of no real use,” says Christo as he addresses a classroom full of children. He is explaining how he plans to build his next project, “The Floating Piers” (2016), on Italy’s Lake Iseo. Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude became famous for their site-specific art installations, such as “The Gates” (2005) in New York’s Central Park and Berlin’s “Wrapped Reichstag” (1995), in which they wrapped monuments and elements of nature. Andrey Paounov’s documentary Walking on Water chronicles the making of “The Floating Piers,” a larger-than-life installation of walkways that allowed people to walk above the surface of the lake, from the mainland to nearby islands. It boasted approximately 1.2 million visitors over the course of its 16-day run (from June 18 to July 3, 2016). The artist couple first conceived the installation in 1970; following several permit disapprovals, Christo was finally able to realize it in 2016, seven years after Jeanne-Claude’s death.

The film opens with then-81-year-old Christo painting a canvas larger than himself. He wears a button-down shirt, trousers, and a face mask as he spray-paints on a sketch of “The Floating Piers.” His fingers are thin and wrinkled and his wispy, white hair surrounds a bald spot. Just when we begin to see him as a frail, elderly artist creating in a quiet corner, the scene changes and we see him shouting at his manager over Skype. He does not like a proposed catalogue design, and does not trust technology. Foul-mouthed when angry, he asserts, “We do it my way.” A portrait of a fastidious and uncompromising artist emerges. What is sometimes called “eccentric” in (mostly) male artists — the temper or quirks that are widely considered part of his genius — raises the question of whether a female artist would be called a genius after being rude to a professional contact. Jeanne-Claude’s presence is especially missed at this moment.

What makes Christo’s genius endearing and often awe-inspiring is the immense curiosity that motivates his artistic vision. His face lights up when he speaks about “The Floating Piers.” “It’s out of this world,” he tells everyone he meets at a press conference, and the joy in his voice when he sees the installation coming together is palpable. “Look at that, it looks like fabric!” he exclaims of the small plastic blocks floating with the currents of Lake Iseo, as they come together to form the path that would connect the mainland of Sulzano, Monte Isola, and the island of San Paolo.

While the film provides glimpses into the artist’s daily life — sitting in bureaucratic meetings with a long face and grudgingly making social appearances — the only time he seems genuinely happy is while taking tours of the finished installation. In these scenes, his visible pride is accompanied by a giddy sense of happiness from accomplishing an almost impossible goal. He flashes a wide smile at the strangers taking selfies with him and he waves to the thousands of people cheering him on as they walk along the saffron-colored pathway. He promised people they would be able to walk on water, and he kept his word.

Read the full article at Hyperallergic.

Walking On Water opens in New York and Toronto on May 17, followed by Los Angeles and San Francisco on May 24, before its national rollout.

Artichoke Dance Company’s Director, Lynn Neuman, lives six blocks from the Gowanus Canal. She’s been working at the intersection of arts and environmental activism for nearly 10 years, creating work focused mainly on water and plastic pollution. When she found out about the impending rezoning of Gowanus, she joined the Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice, a group of organizations and individuals working to make coordinated and pointed demands from an environmental justice perspective.

“Gowanus is poised for a great deal of change and now, before the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure begins, is the time to make your voice heard and fight for the things that are important, and that we value in the neighborhood” states Neuman. “Rezoning proposals do not take into account canal remediation and vice versa, so this has the potential to be a very expensive, and very ineffective, clean up with more and more people moving into a toxic zone.”

Neuman was well aware of the environmental issues, including flooding, combined sewage overflow and urban heat effect, plaguing Gowanus and created a work performed along the canal in 2017. Gowanus Visions: A Festival of Art and Action expands this line of work to include community involvement, education and activation. The festival includes clean and green volunteering, an eco-walking tour, canoeing on the canal, visual art exhibits, performances by Artichoke Dance, Gowanus Wildcats, Fureeous Youth, students from PS372 and Murrow High School, and a DJ dance party.

From May 18 – June 15, Artichoke Dance Company offers weekly movement and trashion workshops as opportunities for community members to join Gowanus Visions. Movement workshops involve participants in a dance that will be performed on June 15 and enables them to perform it with the Company. “The dance follows the journey of a community facing the impacts of climate chaos and involves people in a process of collaboration that’s needed right now,” Neuman reflects.

Trashion (fashion made from trash) continues Artichoke Dance Company’s practice of using materials otherwise headed to landfill, for productions. For the past few years, the target material has been plastic bags, which will continue to be used but are less a focus since the passing of plastic bag legislation. These workshops will utilize other single use plastics, including bottles, caps, straws and more, all collected locally. Trashion will be paraded on June 8 at the March for the Ocean at Coney Island as well as at the Gowanus Visions Festival on June 15.

This announcement was originally published in Artichoke Dance Company’s website.

An article in The Daily Beast by Allison McNearney.

As Mary Sue Anderson Ader drove away from the Cape Cod coast on July 9, 1975, she began crying.

She had just returned from towing her husband, artist Bas Jan Ader, out to sea to begin what he estimated would be a three-month voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. It was to be the second piece in his three-part conceptual art project titled “In Search of the Miraculous,” and, if he succeeded, he would make history in the smallest sailboat ever to complete the journey.

Anderson Ader believed in her husband—he was a skilled sailor and confident in his quest—but she says she wasn’t unrealistic. She knew there was a possibility she wouldn’t see him again. Today, over 40 years after Ader was declared lost at sea, presumed dead, Anderson Ader still tears up when talking about her late husband and his last work of art.

“In Search of the Miraculous” is featured in a new exhibition now open at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth that explores the work of three conceptual artists active in California in the 1960s and '70s.

Disappearing—California, c. 1970 showcases the work of Chris Burden, who disappeared into the woods for three days among other performance art pieces often involving extreme bodily acts, and Jack Goldstein, who explored the idea of disappearance throughout his career starting with his shocking student art piece in which he buried himself alive leaving only a single light above ground blinking red.

But it is Ader for whom disappearance became the unintentional heart of his incomplete last work and the void around which the tides of his legacy would swirl.

“In Search of the Miraculous” was conceived in three parts. The first is a series of black and white photographs showing Ader walked around L.A. and making his way to the ocean. It was accompanied by a video of his students singing sea shanties.

The second part was to be his three-month journey from the coast of Massachusetts to the coast of England in a 12.5-foot sailboat, while the final installment involved his attendance at an exhibition of his work at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands.

“In the tradition of vision quests, this passage was his own epic poem where the artist serves as the central heroic figure,” Pilar Tompkins Rivas wrote in the catalog for a 2010 Bas Jan Ader exhibition at Pitzker College. “In this work, Ader pits himself against the elements, a proposition in which the reconciliation of existential truths, and queries of fate and faith likely played a major role.”

Anderson Ader said the boat was constructed to be virtually unsinkable. It was swathed in styrofoam and Ader planned the trip so that, even if the sail was somehow lost, the ocean currents would naturally carry him to the coast of the U.K., just in a bit more time than he had allotted.

“But the problem was that it was a very small boat in a very large ocean,” Anderson Ader said.

The boat was found 10 months after Ader set sail on the path that he had predicted it would naturally take. The artist was not on board.

Read the full article in The Daily Beast.

Many students, faculty and staff at UWT have participated in the All the Rivers in the World, Tacoma, river gathering workshops.  River names gifted to the project are included in the permament artwork on campus. Here is a list in progress of river names. In partnership with Danica Miller, Puyallup Tribal Liaison, and with approval of the Tribal Council, we have worked to place in central positions the Lushootseed words for the river and the mountain- in the final form these will be written in Lushootseed text.

Participants share stories from the rivers they have known:

Puyallup
Chambers 
Greenwater
Nisqually
Duwamish
Green
Carbon
Cayada
Clarks
White
Clover
Snoqualmie
Kelsey
Issaquah
Mashel
Sammamish
Jim 
Kachess
Skokomish
Deschutes
Whatcom
Cowlitz
Dungeness
Chehalis
Cedar
Tilton
Columbia
Olympic
Elk 
Willamette
Yakima
Wenatchee
Cooke
Snake
Lewis
Capilano
Napa
Klutina 
Colorado
Rio Grande
Río Bravo
Arizona
Missouri
Amacuzac
Big Piney
Tallapoosa 
Maumee
Detroit
Potomac
Shenandoah
Mississippi
Pemigewasset 
Navesink
Charles
Lafayette
Rainbow 
Page 
Usumascinta
Amazon
St. Lawrence
Amber
Fun 
Segura 
Neckar
Danube
Rhein
الفرات‎ al-Furāt 
دجلة‎ Dijlah 
Nairobi
እደላ Shebelle 
النيل  
Selem
Arghandab 
Langtang 
Kita
한 강 Han 
녹색 Green 
Pampanga 
Pilar
Panguil
四万十川 Shimanto 
荒川 Arakawa 
แม่น้ำโขง 
Mekong
Sông Cửu Long
Bồ Đề 
Saigon
Yu Cheng
Yangtze
珠 江河 Zhujiang Pearl 
淡水河 Tamsui 
Bride’s Pool 
Keelung
Indus
Beas
“Tahoma” Mt Rainier in Lushootseed

The waters that flow in the Puyallup River begin on the slopes of the mountains, particularly Tahoma- Mt. Rainier. Eventually these streams come together and flow to the Salish Sea. Here are some field recordings of the sounds of some of this water.

Mountain Water Sounds

Visit All the Rivers in the World.

An article in Crain’s Cleveland Business by Michael Von Glahn.

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga and the river's restoration, this year's Cleveland Fusion program is called Waterways to Waterways and its projects aim to encourage ongoing progress here and around the world, while sharing Cleveland's lessons in how to reimagine a river.

“When we were considering how our artist residency program could have an impact in 2019, we thought the Cuyahoga River and environmental justice would be a perfect fit,” said Lillian Kuri, Cleveland Foundation vice president for strategic grantmaking, arts and urban design initiatives, in a news release. “The Cuyahoga River Valley, clean water and Cleveland’s role in environmental protection are important focal points for the local and international artists to share ideas, reflect and innovate together.”

It's hoped all the projects will be in place on or near June 22, the anniversary of the blaze, although some will continue throughout 2019.

Waterways to Waterways also is part of Cuyahoga50, an array of more than 40 community programs throughout the year to mark the anniversary of the fire and celebrate how far the river, the city and our attitudes have come.

"Our Creative Fusion: Waterways to Waterways cohort is really shaping up to be a robust collection of public events and innovative projects," Kuri said in an email. "This work is going to be celebratory, while both respecting Cleveland’s history and presenting forward-thinking ideas that demonstrate a real commitment to the future of water in our region."

Read the full article at Crain’s Cleveland Business.

An article in artnews by Sarah Cascone.

For two years, artist Melissa McGill has had a vision: A fleet of traditional wooden boats, rigged with sails in shades of vivid crimson, sailing across the Venetian lagoon. Tomorrow, that vision will finally come to life in the inaugural outing of Red Regatta, a public art project that is both a celebration of the city’s maritime history and a cautionary tale about the effects of climate change and mass tourism.

“It’s all about the wind and the waters, and this rich sailing culture,” McGill told artnet News. “Sailing is an environmentally friendly tradition. The motor boats throw wake that eats away at the city.”

When we met, she was preparing to set sail on Borin, one of the 52 locally owned boats that will take part in Red Regatta. The boat’s captain, a Venetian native in his 70s named Giorgio Giacometti, was hoisting the bright red sails. Th boats were custom-made for the project, and hand-painted by local college students and other volunteers.

“It became this huge community bonding thing. It was really magical,” McGill said. To paint the sails, her team used large paintbrushes and brooms. “They’re very expressive brushstrokes, so when the sails are raised and the light comes through, it becomes a painting.”

“A huge part of this project is to connect the visitors and the people who live here. There’s one Venetian for something like every 350 tourists,” McGill said. “The vela al terzo is a really important tradition, and they’re really excited about sharing it more widely.”

The red color represents both a sense of strong emotions and the city of Venice itself, with its red-brick buildings and terracotta roofs, its flag, its historic trade in Venetian red pigment, and the use of red in the work of local Old Masters such as Titian and Tintoretto.

Red Regatta will offer a striking visual spectacle ripe for Instagram, but it also presents a picture both of Venice’s past, and of an alternate future, should the city survive the threat of climate change.

Read the full article at artnet.

“Melissa McGill: Red Regatta” is on view in the north lagoon in Venice, May 11, 2 p.m.–4 p.m. Viewing points are along the Fondamente Nove, from Fondamente Nove vaporetto stop to Ospedale vaporetto stop; Calle Giazzo, from Celestia vaporetto stop to Associazione Vela al Terzo headquarters. A reception with the artist will follow at the Associazione Vela al Terzo headquarters, Calle Giazzo 30122, Venice. 

The June 30 Red Regatta will sail along the Lido between the islands of San Servolo and Poveglia, 12 p.m.–2 p.m. Viewing locations are Riva dei Sette Martiri, Viale Giardini Pubblici, San Servolo Island, and Lido’s Lagoon waterfront.

The September 1 Red Regatta will sail along Canale della Giudecca, Bacino San Marco, and Canal Grande, 12 p.m.–2 p.m. Viewing points are Fondamenta Zattere, Punta della Dogana, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Piazza San Marco, Riva degli Schiavoni, Fondamenta della Giudecca, side of Canale della Giudecca Canal Grande.

The September 15 Red Regatta will sail between Burano and Torcello, 2 p.m.–4 p.m. Viewing points are the Burano waterfront and Torcello waterfront.

An article in Atlas Obscura by Jonathan Carey.

THE RIVERS OF THE UNITED States have a certain lore and mystique within American culture. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these roaring waterways were home to thousands. Entire communities existed on or near the water in self-made houseboats. The history of these communities has been explored briefly in river memoirs such as Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat Journal, but hasn’t been thoroughly examined in a present-day context. That is, until a modern shantyboat came bobbing down the Mississippi in the summer of 2014.

Wes Modes was at the helm of that vessel. Modes is a lecturer at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is also the primary force behind “A Secret History of American River People,” a project aimed at capturing “the lost narratives of river people, river communities, and the river itself.” Modes, an artist by trade, has spent the last six years traveling the Mississippi, Hudson, Tennessee, and Sacramento Rivers during the summers, creating a moving museum/work of art, while also documenting the oral history of American river culture and people’s connection to the water.

Through interviewing members of contemporary river communities, Modes says he has been able to compile a “complementary and contradictory collage of unexpected stories that people tell.” For example, he has spoken to people whose homes have been pushed off a river by shifting socioeconomic conditions. But he has also chatted with a family who owns a very expensive home near the same river, and that family was unaware they were doing the pushing.

Read the full article at Atlas Obscura.

The project has until May 9th to raise funds to bring the shantyboat to the Ohio River and work their way downriver collecting stories for the archive. Check out the project Kickstarter.

Full transparency: The editor of the Works On Water blog and the artist whose work is profiled in the article are one and the same.

In correlation with its current exhibit, Waterfront Heroes, City Lore will be presenting a panel dedicated to women who help to preserve the region’s working waterfronts, restore historic vessels and other forgotten maritime objects, perpetuate the occupational culture of our waterways, and keep the waterfront accessible so that future generations can learn of New York’s majestic maritime heritage.

Join us on Wednesday, May 1 for a panel discussion about women on the waterfront. The evening's conversation will be moderated by maritime journalist Betsy Haggerty, and will feature several of our honorees, including Fulton Fish Market painter Naima Rauam, Carolina Salguero, founder and director of PortSide NewYork, Jasmine Benitez, Public Programs Manager of Rocking the Boat, and Capt. Cait Field, captain with Classic Harbor Line.

Our panelists will describe their experiences working on and around New York's 520 miles of coastline and Long Island’s 1600 miles of shoreline, and will answer questions from the audience. A reception will follow.

Panelists include:

Moderator Betsy Frawley Haggerty is an award winning journalist and U.S. Coast Guard licensed captain. Her maritime articles have appeared in Offshore Magazine (where she was editor for seven years) Northeast Boating, Soundings, WorkBoat and Professional Mariner. She has taught sailing in New York Harbor, Long Island Sound and the Hudson River, where she also worked as a relief captain on a 65-foot passenger vessel.

Naima Rauam is recognized for her watercolors of the South Street Seaport Historic District and the Fulton Fish Market, which she has documented with her artwork for many decades. The New York City waterfront also figures prominently in Naima’s artwork, as do bridges spanning the waterways. While hitching rides on tugboats and exploring the harbor, Naima developed an interest in painting waterfront construction sites, and has recorded the progress of several projects, including the rebuilding of the North Channel Bridge in Jamaica Bay, Queens. Her work is in private, corporate and public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution, National Air & Space Museum, American Merchant Marine Museum, Farnsworth Museum, Pfizer, and the Bank of America. She also lectures, teaches, and curates art exhibits.

Carolina Salguero, an award-winning documentary photographer, is the founder of the maritime nonprofit PortSide NewYork, which connects New Yorkers to their waterfront and works to make maritime activity central to waterfront revitalization. PortSide programming, on and off their historic oil tanker MARY A. WHALEN, includes programs for youth, adults and the general public in education, culture, job training, plus the e-museum Red Hook WaterStories. PortSide earned honors from the White House and NYS Senate for Sandy recovery work. Salguero learned to sail thanks to the scene around her uncle’s shipyard on Martha’s Vineyard. With PortSide, she is trying to make NYC’s waterfront more like a traditional New England one with an active mix of working waterfront, pleasure boats and historic vessels.

Jasmine Benitez was born and raised in the Bronx, and was first introduced to Rocking the Boat when her high school participated in an On-Water Classroom program in 2009. Jasmine participated in Rocking the Boat's On-Water Program until she graduated then went on to pursue her Bachelor's degree in Psychology (with a minor in Environmental Studies) at St. John's University. She returned to work at Rocking the Boat as a Program Assistant while attending college, during which she also served as an Assistant Instructor/Student Mentor with the National Hispanic Environmental Council (NHEC), participating in workshops as distant as New Mexico. After earning her degree, Jasmine began working as the Volunteer Coordinator at the Bronx River Alliance, and Rocking the Boat is now thrilled to have her back!

Capt. Cait Field grew up sailing small boats on the south shore of Long Island, where she spent her summers working as a sailing instructor. She briefly worked on historic vessels in San Francisco Bay before returning to New York and starting at Classic Harbor Line in 2007. Cait is a USCG 100 ton Master captain of sail and motor passenger vessels, including the Schooners Adirondack and America 2.0. In her non-sailing time, she is a scientist for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, serving as the Freshkills Park Manager for Science and Research Development. Cait holds a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center for which her research examined communication in fishes.

Wed, May 1, 2019
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM EDT

City Lore
56 East 1st Street
New York, NY 10003

Temporary art events were created with the local community to focus attention on watersheds along the continental divide that were threatened with resource extraction. The events and the resulting images created media attention that supported the community effort to see these waters protected by legislation. This was part of a 40 year effort sustained by the local community that culminated in the Castle Provincial Park in Southern Alberta in 2015.

Visit Barbara Amos website.

An article in Hyperallergic by Sarah Rose Sharp.

Though science is a go-to discipline for facts and figures, sometimes art is required to really drive a point home in tangible terms. Lines (57° 59´N, 7° 16´W), an outdoor installation in coastal Lochmaddy, Scotland by artists Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta, uses sensors to detect high tide, which then activates three synchronized light lines illuminating the projected high tide of the future if climate change progresses at its current pace.

“The installation explores the catastrophic impact of our relationship with nature and its long term effects,” the artists said in a statement provided to Hyperallergic. “The work provokes a dialogue on how the rising sea levels will affect coastal areas, its inhabitants and land usage in the future.”

Though rising sea levels are a condition that threatens to affect human society in many ways and locations, it is particularly relevant to low-lying islands, such as the archipelago of Uist in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, where the installation is located. The Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre in Lochmaddy, which hosts the work, can no longer develop on its existing site due to predicted storm surge sea levels, and its clear that the facility will be mostly submerged by the rising tide in the coming years, unless society collectively finds a way to reduce the environmental impact of human existence on the planet.

“During our research we went through various articles and papers on the topic of the global warming and sea level rise,” Aho and Niittyvirta wrote in an email to Hyperallergic. “IPCC being the most relevant perhaps. Since projections varies between the studies, there are not exact height or time we are referring to. The artwork visualizes the possible highest storm surge levels combined with the high tide (hence the interactivity with the high tide), in not so distant future.”

Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta’s Lines (57° 59´N, 7° 16´W), curated by Andy Mackinnon, continues on display at the Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre in Lochmaddy, Scotland through August 31.

Read the full article at Hyperallergic.

An article in Taos News by Dena Miller

Agua es vida. Aside from quenching our own thirst, our water quenches the thirst of our crops, our livestock and of the many other things upon which our human existence depends. Water is indeed life.

Here in Taos -- nestled in the often dusty, dry valley -- the arrival of spring means welcomed snowmelt and the annual ritual of cleaning and maintaining the many acequias that nourish us with the gift of those surface waters. Our aquifers are replenished and our rivers run high. To Máye Torres, owner of the gallery Studio 107B, it seemed timely to celebrate the delicate relationship between this precious commodity and ourselves.

"Acequias and Holy Water," the gallery's latest show, opened Saturday (April 13) and will be on view through May 31. It features the work of 50 invited artists whose submissions highlight the dance of nature.

"Our water is truly holy to us," Torres said. But while in the planning stages for the exhibit, "Acequias and Holy Water" also took a turn toward the political. "At first this exhibit was appropriate to the season," Torres said, "but to many of the artists who chose to participate it took on even more significance with the recent events that have drawn attention to our complicated relationship with water."

Torres was referring to the mid-March Guardians of Taos Water protest in which Buck Johnston, a Native American member of GOT, was arrested after spending four days atop a water well drilling rig. "He was protesting the Abeyta Water Rights Adjudication, a thoroughly convoluted settlement between the federal government, Taos Pueblo, the state, and local water districts," she explained. "So the political, cultural and socioeconomic discord of water rights, never far away, came back to the forefront of our conversation."

Read more at Taos News.