Bernard Ferguson (they/them) is a Bahamian poet, essayist and educator whose work has been featured in The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas and elsewhere. Bernard is currently working on a book of nonfiction, The Climate Sirens (Graywolf, 2024), about Hurricane Dorian and the effects of climate change on Small-Island Developing States across the world.
Photo by Bayan Kiwan
Read MoreNew York Times bestselling author Mateo Askaripour aims to empower people of color to seize opportunities for advancement, no matter the obstacle. His first novel, Black Buck, takes on racism in corporate America with humor and wit. Askaripour was chosen as one of Entertainment Weekly’s “10 rising stars to make waves,” and Black Buck was a Read With Jenna Today Show book club pick. He lives in Brooklyn. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter at @AskMateo.
Photo by Andrew Askaripour
Read MoreWhit Harris (b. 1985) makes surreal figurative drawings, paintings, and sculptures in monochromatic or limited color palettes. Her recent exhibitions include “We Were Never Gone” at Hauser & Wirth in New York, and “Flesh and Time and Bread and Friends” at Galerie Christine Mayer in Munich. She was selected as an Artist in Residence at Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut. Whitney earned an MFA from Hunter College and a BA from Stony Brook University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Photo by Camille Breslin
Read MoreYi Xin Tong is an artist and fisherman. He uses multimedia installation, site-specific projects, video, and sound to analyze seemingly disparate social conditions, and our contradictory relationships with ourselves and with other living beings, objects, and cultural entities. His experience living on the outskirts of New York City led him to a long-term multimedia fishing project that challenges the iconic image of the city as the pinnacle of human civilization, and seeks relief, nature, and weird things. Tong’s work has been exhibited at BRIC Biennial, Guangzhou Airport Biennale, UCCA, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, NARS Foundation, MOCA Shanghai, CAFA Art Museum, and chi K11 art museum.
Read MoreSafia Jama was born to a Somali father and an Irish American mother in Queens, New York. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she has published poetry in Ploughshares, RHINO, Cagibi, Boston Review, Spoken Black Girl, and No Dear. Her poetry has also been featured on WNYC’s Morning Edition and CUNY TV’s Shades of US series. Jama is the author of Notes on Resilience, which was selected for the New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set series (Akashic Books 2020).
Read MoreAsiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird (Nightboat Books, 2018), a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. Her other collections include day pulls down the sky/ a filament in gold leaf , written collaboratively with Okwui Okpokwasili (Belladonna/ Danspace, 2019) and Syncope (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019). No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. Asiya teaches poetry to children at Saint Ann’s School and occasionally leads an English conversation group for new immigrants at the Brooklyn Public Library. A member of the Belladonna Collaborative, her work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Brooklyn Poets, Dickinson House, Mount Tremper Arts, and the New York Public Library, among others. Recent work appears in e-flux, BOMB Magazine, Poem-a-Day, Chicago Review, Social Text, FENCE, and elsewhere. Asiya is a 2019-2020 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artist-in-Residence and also currently a writer-in-residence at Danspace Project. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she loves animals.
Read MoreI remember when the cold hit Barren Island. It came from the east, across the open sea, and pressed like a hand at my back as I rode the Friday ferry, hurrying me home for the weekend. It seemed to still the smell, the cold, and hold it in one place. I could have drawn a line around it, or marked where it started and stopped. I suppose that’s what I do when I remember you, too.
Read More36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013–present) is a series of nine site-specific participatory performances and video artworks, taking place in nine different bodies of water around the world. In each, I stand in a tidal area for a full tidal cycle as water slowly engulfs my body and then recedes. The public participates in all aspects of making the work. Each work in the series consists of a live performance event, a long-form cinematic video work, and varied ephemera. The project examines the temporary nature of all things and our contemporary relationship with water in urban environments—as individuals, as communities, and as a species.
Read MoreOur collaboration reflects on the relationships—contemporary, historical, mythical, fictional, poetic—between people and the water that sustains us.
Read More“The Gap” is an aural odyssey, inviting guests on a narrated journey that navigates through intimate experiences of rupture and separation in an attempt to understand the ways we deceive ourselves and enchant through virtual connectivity and its discontents.
Read MorePaper Trail is a mixed-reality experimental climate change fiction project. Inspired by climate change research and sea-level projections, the tour depicts New York City in different future eras as it grapples with rising sea levels—unless we do something more to combat climate change today.
Paper Trail was developed by A.E. Souzis during her WoW/UNY residency in 2019 and was inspired by (and features) drawings of possible NYC futures made by Governors Island visitors during her 2018 WoW/UNY residency with /rive art collective.
Read MoreI have centuries of data on the history of fish species and the fisheries in New York City waters. I’ve been researching this industry for years and the stories embedded in the data are many, complex, and show patterns of use and abuse, loss and resilience. It’s an overwhelming amount of information that I’ve shared in bits and pieces, but I’ve never released it all to the public. A book seems daunting, an academic paper isn’t enough and doesn’t reach most of the people in New York City that I would like to. As a dancer, I also wanted to make it physical, tangible, spatial, and interactive.
Read MoreOver two seasons in residence on Governors Island, I worked to expand a body of work called TRACES. Rivers are constantly changing course, redistributing energy and carving new paths. Dance pathways are also not fixed, with variations every time movement is performed. This series of choreographic works uses stream dynamics and river morphology as a point of departure that, when performed, create large drawings as an artifact of the dance, mapping the unique signature of each performance and, abstractly, the water body that inspired it.
Read MoreButtermilk Beach Access Plan is a series of two rope ladders designed to be installed along the Governors Island promenade to provide access to Buttermilk Beach during low tide. As described in the Waterfront Alliance Maritime Activation Plan for Governors Island, tidal timing allows Buttermilk Beach, on the east side of the island facing Brooklyn and Buttermilk Channel, to accommodate at least three hours of on-beach public programming per-day for ten out of every fourteen days. Currently, there are no formal public access points allowing visitors to touch the water along the Governors Island coastline, and there is a six-foot drop from the promenade down to Buttermilk Beach.
Read MoreWater, Memory and Ritual is a multi-part meditation on water as a medium for the cyclical forces of death and life. The impetus for this project began with remembering those who have died in bodies of water surrounding New York City and on Pagganuck (Governors Island). Waters bordering the five boroughs hold memories of injustice — starting with the loss of indigenous lives at the arrival of settler colonialists. Contemplating death in water through historical events led to encompassing all lives lost in bodies of water. My work reveals a reverent focus on the sacredness of water and its connection with the cyclical forces of death and life.
Read MoreDuring my Works on Water residency, I explored the use of algae as a new material in my art practice. After researching emerging sustainable applications of algae, I experimented with it as a dynamic color component in light fixtures, as well as a pigment in paint and ink. Using algae milk paint that I created, I filled existing cracks in the walls of my WoW space, as if it was being reclaimed by elements of the sea.
Read MoreThe text within the artist book, "Holding on to Waste," was collected from the public in answer to the question: "What do you enjoy wasting?" The paper in the book is made from recycled magazines, cardboard boxes, a picture book, paper towels, paper scraps, children’s drawings, mint tea bag wrappers, receipts, scavenged berries, old Christmas cards, photographs, algae, a plastic bottle, chestnuts, fabric and thread scraps, a balloon, a cardboard spool, rubber gloves, empty Emergen-C packets, blue tape, packing tape, food wrappers, double-sided tape, and water collected on Governors Island. In a society where consumerism and wasteful living is widespread, this book asks us to consider more deeply how we allocate and spend our resources, often at the risk of the earth and other times at the risk of our own personal fulfillment and satisfaction.
Read MoreWater in the Desert 122°F is a meditation on the past and future of the miles of canals that thread through Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona. The largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in North America, the canals were first engineered 2000 years ago by the ancestral Sonoran Desert people. This Native history was destroyed by the construction of the settler-colonial metropolis. This urban space of asphalt and concrete is ill-prepared for the heat that is coming. The summer now reaches 122°F. At 130°, what happens to the city’s vulnerable people, plants, and animals? Adaptation or abandonment?
Read MoreAdmiral's Row, 1864-2016 evolved out of our artist residency at the Works On Water/Underwater New York project space on Governors Island in July 2019. As part of that residency, we created a video installation titled Shoreline Change with several of our short documentary films about New York's changing waterfront. One of those films documented the decay and destruction at Admiral’s Row, a collection of historic mansions inside the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Although the water was never visible through the forest that had grown up around Admiral’s Row during its years of abandonment, the homes there were a unique relic of New York’s nautical history, a history which is also reflected in the cracked walls of the former military houses on Governors Island in which we presented the film.
Read More“SeMutOnge” is a sound poetry piece that came out of my Works on Water/Underwater New York residency project, MuTonges. This piece was an experimentation with anagrams where I took each line of a previously written poem inspired by the enslaved Africans who were thrown overboard at sea during the Atlantic Slave Trade and rearranged the letters in each of the words to create a new language.
Read More
