Issue 18

Byways: Three Artists on
Brooklyn’s Black Waterfront

by dinghy by canoe by schiff by sailboat 
by freighter by way of Trinidad 
Barbados St Lucia by way of Bahamas 
and Jamaica and Haiti by countless 
departures and fewer arrivals by 
way of danger by way of courage by 
way of mettle across many a lake 
and manners ponds by seas and 
by way of the ocean by way of 
the Atlantic and its gateway between what 
the world was and what it’s come to now

from “Energy” by Bernard Ferguson 

In their poem “Energy,” Brooklyn-based poet Bernard Ferguson traces the migratory routes that have carried Black people—as well as ships, birds, train lines, and the force of imperial violence—over land and water for centuries. These departures, crossings, and arrivals echo and reverberate in New York City, which likely has the highest population of Caribbean people outside of the Caribbean, as Ferguson recently shared with us. Ferguson’s own migration, from the Bahamas to the United States, informs their interest in Black mobilities and how waters shape the modern city. Ferguson is one of three artists we invited to contribute to this issue, along with fiction writer Mateo Askaripour and visual artist Whit Harris. Commissioned in partnership with Brooklyn College’s Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and The Center for the Study of Brooklyn, their works critically engage the histories and futures of the Black diaspora along Brooklyn’s waterfront. 

Mateo Askaripour’s “A Harp in the Head,” a propulsive, novelistic story set in Coney Island Creek, centers on father and son mudlarkers who discover an 1897 pocket watch among the Creek’s detritus. Seeking to restore the watch to its original owner, the son embarks on his own journey of loss and reclamation. Askaripour skillfully weaves this family’s story within the histories of Coney Island Creek, other local waterways, and a multigenerational Black middle class. The story examines recurring patterns of anti-Blackness in America, which the narrator addresses with sly humor and a firm insistence on his own authorial point of view. In choosing to set the story in Coney Island Creek, which Askaripour had never heard of before beginning work on his story for this issue, the author seeks to impart “a feeling of discovery” to even life-long New Yorkers. 

Brooklyn-born Whit Harris also found inspiration in Coney Island’s waterfront. Her painting “Among the Pilings,” set under the Steeplechase Pier, invokes Coney Island’s layered history, mystery, and identity as a popular site of leisure. The painting’s accumulated, overlapping brush strokes conjure the historical Pier—vanished into the water at the turn of the century; its successor destroyed and repaired after Hurricane Sandy—and the imagined world of a mermaid. Growing up in New York City, Harris recalls submerging in her bathtub like a mermaid, a figure she now sees as “non-normative,” able to “undermine shame.” Harris brings these realms together in the painting, suggesting the “tumbled, churning” experience of living in New York, where, as she puts it, “things are constantly…washing in and out.” The blues and greens in her painting similarly swirl, undulate, and move, beckoning the viewer’s eye to follow, immersing us in her mermaid’s undersea New York. There is a push and pull in her painting, an ebb and flow, accomplished with a limited palette that is rich in shade and tone, creating depth, light, and movement. There is an oceanic fluidity and spontaneity to her composition. 

Following the tangled swoops and swells of Harris’s marks, there are surprises: an unexpected pop of purple, an encounter with a fish’s eye, a near-glowing luminous stripe right at the bottom edge. These little jolts bring a sense of play to the painting, recalling how Coney Island has served, and still serves, as a place of communal delight. Often a break in routine for New Yorkers, visiting the piers and boardwalks of Coney Island can be synonymous with pleasure. Harris has memories of enjoying Steeplechase Pier with her family both as a child and as an adult. She references the “simultaneity of experience,” a collapsing or recombining of time in the layers of her work. The painting blends research, pop culture, personal history and iconography, and fantasy, inviting the viewer to think of the lives of the objects and beings—the mermaid, but also fish, a bell, a skull, and the ocean itself—beneath the surface of the water, while at the same time considering what is above: Steeplechase Pier. A public pier, suggests Harris, offers a broad view not only of what’s “out there,” but a place to stand and look back at where you came from. 

Ferguson’s poem “Energy” widens the map of waters beyond New York City, spanning centuries of Black migration across oceans and continents. Like Harris’s painting, the poem is allusive and layered with the energy of exploited laborers and the power of a people to self-liberate. The poem’s cadence evokes the driving force and sustained momentum of large-scale movement; it also suggests Ferguson’s upbringing in the Bahamas, where the family’s stories had a legendary quality, according to the poet. The work’s oracular rhythm is also rooted in slam poetry, which the poet first encountered and embraced in Minnesota, where they emigrated as an undergraduate student. Their interest in slam poetry—and its potential for critique—serves many of the themes the poet addresses in their work, including the climate crisis and mass displacement. “Built into the practice of slam spaces is this ability to root out violence,” Ferguson says. In Ferguson’s poetry, this practice offers itself as a tool for addressing the forms of precarity and peril that may govern the movement of Black people. 

These works are accompanied by oral history interviews with the artists, conducted by UNY founding editor Nicki Pombier. With Pombier, the artists reflect on their early lives, their memories of water, the transmission of family stories, and other sites of creativity. The oral histories document Brooklyn’s material history through the lived knowledge of its people, joining the objects we catalog on our site as an important locus of memory.

Together, these works and the adjacent interviews trace the circulations of language, memory, and visual cues along a watery path. The artists’ research-based methods reveal overlapping histories of leisure, labor, forced movement, and a Black middle-class. They illuminate points of passage that are secluded, obscure, or unfrequented—ways that bend, collide, or return to recover what’s lost.