Down For the Day
Down For the Day

The photographs in Down For the Day (2016-present) are made along a fifteen block stretch of Rockaway Beach, Queens. Less than a mile long, this section of beach is among the most utilized in New York City, hosting shoulder-to-shoulder crowds on summer weekends. The project title, Down For the Day, is the local description of day-trippers, frequently called DFDs. This term of derision, often meant to distance visitors from locals, is used here to describe the tangled bodies, cramped encampments, and flimsy tropical umbrellas as attempts at finding not only respite from the city heat, but perhaps a momentary paradise, imperfect but one’s own.

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Issue 16: Governors Island Un-EarthedSusannah RayIssue 16, Art, Atlantic Ocean, Photography
Spooky Action at a Distance: Water Treatment
Spooky Action at a Distance: Water Treatment

Einstein once described quantum mechanics as “spooky action at a distance,” an invisible world of atoms that is composed of even smaller particles that can be moved and affected without being touched. The imperceptible energy exchanges and mysterious movements between these subatomic particles can also be affected in more than one place at one time and can occur thousands of miles apart.

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Issue 16: Governors Island Un-EarthedValerie Sullivan FuchsIssue 16, East River, Art
Rock Park

The scene opens on the Rockaway Park subway station. Upstage, there’s a bench and a transit toolbox-- a rectangular metal container similar to the bench in height and length. In the background, we hear seagulls calling and the sound of waves. The station is just a short walk from Rockaway Beach and the Atlantic Ocean. We hear a train pull into the station and then a voice over a loudspeaker.

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Issue 15: Labor IssueWillie JohnsonAtlantic Ocean, Fiction
Plastic Tide
Plastic Tide

On my first trip to the National Seashore in Cape Cod a few summers ago, I was confronted by plastic: cups, buoys, lobster line, toys, fishing detritus, and all the other polymer bibs and bobs of contemporary life that wash up with the tide. It’s a familiar sight on beaches across the world and most pronounced in Southeast Asia, where plastic tides ripple along coasts, catch in the lowest branches of mangrove trees, and flood yards and roads. That day in Cape Cod, I picked up as much as I could carry and eventually filled two more garbage bags, which I brought back to Brooklyn.

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Issue 15: Labor IssueNancy NowacekArt
Recovery Work
Recovery Work

On the late July day that President Trump called my hometown a “rat and rodent-infested mess” where “no human being would want to live,” I found myself dumping 200 pounds of compost into a vegetable garden across the street from a Baltimore methadone clinic. The compost had been cooking in my backyard for almost a year and included a dozen large Hefty bags of leaves from our silver maple and black cherry trees and all the watermelon rinds, avocado skins, and broccoli stems my family of four had eaten over the last 12 months.

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Issue 15: Labor IssueMcKay JenkinsCheseapeake Bay, Nonfiction
Out of Water

Two days before my due date, I executed a slow roll to get up off the couch where I’d been resting and felt a rush of water dampen my leggings. I’d had the same sensation earlier that morning when climbing out of bed. On the phone with the nurse though, I couldn’t confirm the word “rush,” nor the word “water.” Even so, she said, I’d better come in.

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Issue 15: Labor IssueNicole HaroutunianEast River, Nonfiction
Peddling Papers in the Age of Sail and Steam
Peddling Papers in the Age of Sail and Steam

The American newsboy was born in New York. This was no chance occurrence. With a population of more than 200,000, “Gotham” was the largest city in North America. Its year-round harbor had long made it a bustling port, but the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 transformed it into a continental center of trade, finance, and manufacture.

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Issue 15: Labor IssueVincent DiGirolamoHudson River, East River, New York Harbor, Nonfiction
Escaping Dreamland
Escaping Dreamland

In 1905, a group of indigenous people from the Philippines were displayed at Coney Island’s Luna Park as a spectacle for curious visitors. Truman Hunt, former lieutenant governor of the Bontoc region in the Philippines during the American occupation, recruited native Igorot from the region and offered compensation of $15 a month to showcase their customs and culture to the American public. 

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Issue 15: Labor IssueFrancis EstradaLower New York Bay, Atlantic Ocean, Art
Down for the Day & A Further Shore
Down for the Day & A Further Shore

This selection of photographs is drawn from two distinct bodies of work, “Down For the Day” and “A Further Shore.” Both series are part of larger cycle of projects that look at New York City’s intricate and complicated relationship with its waters: the beaches, bays, and rivers where its diverse citizenry comes in contact with nature and each other. While “Down For the Day” and “A Further Shore” frequently depict people engaging in leisure activities, those who labor on the water are also present, enabling the quest for respite, for a momentary paradise along our urban shorelines and waterways.

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Issue 15: Labor IssueSusannah RayJamaica Bay, Pelham Bay, The Rockaways, Art
Atlas of the Sea
Atlas of the Sea

Elisa Kim’s project Atlas of the Sea is both a cartographic and political inquiry that visualizes a new oceanic spatial order c. 2017–present, including the creation of a new set of geopolitical territories and the delineation of their borders along the ocean floor. These territories are authorized under Article 76 of the 1982 United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea, which grants nation-states sovereign access to the ocean floor for extractive purposes. She spoke with UNY editor Nicole Miller about the work of women in cartography, embodied ways of knowing, and the collective labor required to fathom the deep sea.

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Issue 15: Labor IssueElisa KimThe Sea, Art
First Contact
First Contact

First Contact is an installation and media performance-in-progress. The basis of the piece is the 1759–1769 correspondence between Medford, Massachusetts slave trader Timothy Fitch and the captains who sailed his ships. These letters offer an opportunity to examine the irrevocable point of contact between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, and between British settlers and enslaved Africans, whose contact, collision, and conflict will eventually produce the ‘Americans’.

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Issue 15: Labor IssueArt JonesAtlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, Art