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Object Play

This year, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, an ensuing economic disaster, and urgent calls for racial justice around the globe, we’ve reflected on how Underwater New York’s experiential, exploratory, and collaborative methods might catalyze local imagination and resilience. Can an emphasis on collaborative creative practices yield meaningful engagement with the climate crisis? Can the artist’s play with found materials contribute to a non-extractive, de-colonized relationship with our waters? How does looking at an artifact orient us to the present or future? How can playful invention contribute to new systems of knowledge?

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The Labor Issue

The Labor Issue brings into focus forms of work made possible and compelled by our waterways, from the production of laborers in the holds of slave ships, to the circulation of commodities and information, to the labor of ecological recovery and repair. This issue, which marks Underwater New York’s ten-year anniversary, reflects the diverse artistic practices and relationships we’ve cultivated over a decade.

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Coney Island &
Coney Island Creek

Coney Island, today both a residential neighborhood and a beachside tourist attraction for out-of-towners and city dwellers alike, was once the site of magical amusement parks like Dreamland, which collapsed into the ocean following a 1911 fire and was only recently rediscovered beneath the waves.

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Gowanus Canal

The Gowanus Canal—home to a substance referred to as black mayonnaise, to syphilis and gonorrhea, to a mysterious white goo, immune to disease—is so polluted that it’s been designated a Superfund site. That pollution, though, swirls its surface such that it’s earned the lovely nickname Lavender Lake. Animals like a shark, a whale, and a seal named Gowanda have passed through it, items like birdcages have been pulled from it; read on to see what’s been imagined into it.

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Hurricane Sandy

In the days following October 29th, 2012, Underwater New York put out a call for responses to Hurricane Sandy and its devastation. Collected below are works of poetry, memoir, documentary, and art reflecting on the storm and its aftermath.

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New York : LA

For the first six months of 2014, Underwater New York and Los Angeles-based magazine Trop cross-published Waterfronts, a bi-weekly series of personal essays engaging with the waterways of New York City and Los Angeles. Below, they are published by left and right coast.

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Ritual

Just as water has its rituals—tides, waves, temperatures—we often come to its shores with our own.

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Significant Objects

Each day from February 8-12, 2010, Underwater New York and Significant Objects cross-published flash fiction inventing stories around five objects we pulled from Dead Horse Bay. These objects and stories (curled into bottles from Dead Horse Bay) were then auctioned off on Ebay to benefit the nonprofit 826 National. The stories were eventually included in the book Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things (Fantagraphics), edited by Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn.

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Water, Water Everywhere

New York’s first indigenous inhabitants knew that water was everywhere here. So did the city’s early shipbuilders, immigrants, longshoremen, and ferry commuters. Then, for a time, as highways and the flight of the shipping industry closed the hearts of the city off from its shores, we forgot. Now, new parks bring us back to the water just as climate change brings the water back ever closer to us. Collected below you’ll find stories of floods, of migration, and of family, as well as images of our history, our ghosts, and the swirling, beautiful, terrible refuse of our city.

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Governors Island Un-Earthed

The works in this issue were created by resident artists during the 2019 Works on Water / Underwater New York Artist Residency on Governors Island. A laboratory for diverse investigations of water in the urban environment, the residency brought together artists, writers, designers, scientists, and policy-makers working on, in, and with the water.

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Governors Island

This work was created by resident artists during the 2018 Works on Water / Underwater New York Artist Residency on Governors Island. The residency was a laboratory for diverse investigations of water in the urban environment.

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Dead Horse Bay

Dead Horse Bay marks the site of what once was Barren Island, where for decades the city’s trash and daily animal dead were rendered into profitable byproducts. Today, the area that was once a marshland is now Floyd Bennett Field, bordered by Dead Horse Bay, where bits of trash from the past century continually wash ashore and provide fodder for collectors, explorers, writers, and artists.

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The Hudson River

The brackish Hudson River is one of our most well-known waterways. Here, artists and writers tackle its famous history and myths, yes, but also its worms, its currents, its secrets, its crabs, and the way it can pool in an ear.

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If These Walls

In the summer of 2010, A.I.R. Gallery, which has been advocating for women in the visual arts since 1972, transformed one of the 19th century houses in Governor's Island's Nolan Park with a series of site-specific works including painting, sculpture, photography, works on paper and more. Alongside their annual group exhibition was the Underwater New York Project Room, where seven A.I.R. Gallery artists exhibited work based on the NYC waterways.

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Menagerie: Animals and the Waterways

From the expected—blue crabs, fish like the alewife and eels—to the extremely unexpected—a giraffe, deer with their legs bound, a seal with a Japanese fan club—New York City’s underwater and waterside menagerie is rife for exploration, adoration, and inspiration.

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Shipwrecked

To keep treasure-hunters at bay, the officials in New York City are mum on the exact locations of our many, many shipwrecks. We do know some basics, though. Somewhere in the depths of Arthur Kill, Staten Island, there are 1600 bars of silver worth 26 million dollars, sunk with their barge back in 1903.

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Siren, Song

What calls us to the water? A beguiling mermaid or irresistible view, the skyline’s reflection, the chance to start anew? A death wish? A twinkling, tinkling, ice cream tune? A song everyone can hear or no one but you?

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