Join us on Thursday November 5th at 7pm at the Melville Gallery at the South Street Seaport Museum to celebrate the launch of Oceanic New York, a collection of essays engaging with New York City and its waterways, edited by Steve Mentz. There will be readings, Dark 'n' Stormies, and celebration!
Join UNY at the newly launched Brooklyn Barge Bar for an evening of drinks for the thirsty, views (and food) for the hungry, and music for the lonely, in love, and everywhere between.
October is our birthday month, and in our 7th year we want to hear you sing. We're kicking off a year of music with a casual party on the barge, where we'll screen SEA ELEGY, an original song composed, performed, and set to film by Bobby Gagnon. Inspired by one of UNY's most evocative underwater objects, the giraffe, Bobby's short film is not to be missed.
Join us aboard this gorgeous barge in Greenpoint, and we'll toast the end of the outdoor event season and the beginning of a year of underwater music.
Wednesday, October 14
7 pm - late
Brooklyn Barge Bar
3 Milton Street, Greenpoint
Underwater New York is thrilled to partner with A.I.R. Gallery for a day of history, art and poetry on Saturday September 12th in the exhibition, If These Walls...
A.I.R. Gallery, which has been advocating for women in the visual arts since 1972, is transforming 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 will be the Underwater New York Project Room, where seven A.I.R. Gallery artists will be exhibiting work based on the NYC waterways.
On September 12th, at 3pm, UNY has invited three poets--Hossannah Asuncion, Morgan Parker and Katy Lederer--to read new work inspired by the visual art of Melissa Murray, Erica Stoller and Maxine Henryson. The reading will coincide with the Gallery's reception for the exhibition, as well as other exciting programming we'll announce soon.
Please mark your calendars for September 12th, 3pm, on Governor's Island! More details to come. Read more about the exhibition here.
For the fourth year, Underwater New York participated in Atlas Obscura's Obscura Day, an international day of exploration. Team UNY met up with a group of adventurous New Yorkers in a Floyd Bennett Field parking lot, then set out across a picturesque path through high grasses and dunes, eventually emerging on Dead Horse Bay. After sharing a brief history of the place, which was once known as Barren Island, as well as several archival photographs culled from the Brooklyn Public Library and New York Public Library's amazing digitized archives, the group dispersed across the bottle, glass and horse bone-littered shores. Here are a few photographs of the day!
Photos from Underwater New York at Winter Shack + audio from Dead Horse Bay
Photo by Adel Souto
Saturday, January 24th, 7pm
Classon Ful-Gate Community Garden
Closest subways: C to Franklin Ave or G to Classon Ave.
Underwater New York curates an evening of work inspired by Dead Horse Bay, including new fiction from UNY editors Nicole Haroutunian and Nicki Pombier Berger, a dramatic reading of the outrageous 1886 New York Times article, "A Barren Island Mystery," performed by actor David Townsend, and a participatory literary activity involving horse bones, doll parts, and other evocative flotsam from the shores of Dead Horse Bay.
David Townsend, a self-proclaimed "huge NYC history nerd," is an actor whose television credits include: The Knick (upcoming), Gotham (FOX), Unforgettable (CBS), and Boardwalk Empire (HBO). Select theater credits include last season's The Library at the Public Theater, A Midsummer Night's Dream at Syracuse Stage, and Frost/Nixon with Portland Center Stage.
Winter Shack is a temporary exhibition space designed by Alex Branch and Nicole Antebi, who curate a series of site-specific installations/readings/exhibitions that encourage audiences to engage with one another's work and to build community in the darkest hours of the year. In 2015, Winter Shack is partnering with The Brooklyn-Queens Land Trust at the Classon Ful-gate Community Garden, located on the edge of Bed-Stuy and Clinton Hill. Originally established forty four years ago and maintained by many of its original members, the block association has generously invited the Winter Shack to activate the space during the winter months when the garden lies dormant.
UNY is pleased to curate one event in a series of compelling work, including the work of artist Lauren Canon, who will be converting the Shack into a CineSauna (cinematic sauna), screenings of short works by video artists during the month of February, a reading series curated by writer Allison Devers, and the conversion of the shack into a reparative refuge for seasonal affective disorder.
