Water Connectors

Water Connectors is a series of six neighborhood-based temporary public art projects that connect NYC communities vulnerable to the effects of climate change with their waterfront, and with each other. From the Rockaways to the Bronx, these six socially-engaged artworks embody our ideals of Resiliency, Equity, and Health in relation to our NYC waterways. Water Connectors is specifically built to encourage meaningful conversations and actions with communities that have been traditionally disconnected from the waterfront, despite their proximity, due to barriers in public access.

Water Connectors is a part of our three-year triennial which started in 2020. A special thank you goes out to Moira Williams for joining our cohort and connecting all of the projects through discussions around accessibility.

Water Connectors is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and Invoking the Pause.

The Water Connector artists are Rodrick Bell, Cody Herrmann, Nora Almeida, Ray Jordan Achan, Kin to the Cove Collective, and Buena Onda Collective.

Stay tuned for more details about the specific project events, dates and locations.

2021 Triennial Exhibition - October 31th (going with the rain date)

2021 Triennial Exhibition - October 31th (going with the rain date)

This installment of Works on Water’s three year triennial turns to concepts of long-term care for our urban waterfront ecology and reconsideration of water time-scales. WoWhaus Resident artists’ and Tending the Edge artists’ projects call attention to marginalized ecological community members, and to water’s cycles of time and being.

2021 Tending The Edge

2021 Tending The Edge

This spring, as the city considers who will become our next mayor and we come face to face with our own future, NYC Department of City Planning (DCP), Culture Push (CP), and Works on Water (WoW), have come together, with the support of the Mayor's Office for Cultural Affairs to consider how we will collectively tend to the edges of our vulnerable coastal archipelago.

2020-2022 Triennial

2020-2022 Triennial

We have adapted our 2020 Triennial into a three year exhibition! Despite the pandemic, we produced virtual projects and exhibitions, and are excited to continue this summer. Tending the Edge, a continuation of Walking the Edge (2020), kicks off our 2021 triennial summer with an incredible group of artists making work through the lens of the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan that invites NYC mayoral candidates and New Yorkers alike to see themselves as island inhabitants and flex their power to affect change.

2020 WoW Video Show

OVERVIEW

In six sessions over the course of three days, the WoW VideoShow gathers short videos by over 15 artists from 11 countries working on, in, and with the water. Water and waterways feature both as a place where the work happens and an essential part of the work—friend, deity, home, and collaborator. Working with water, the artists are immersed in the issues at the base of human life—human and non-human relationships to “nature” and culture; economics, history, nation, and infrastructure; race, class, and access; ritual, desire, and the sensory world.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

We set out to discover the shared ways artists are thinking about and experiencing water around the world. We discovered a series of models and approaches to water and waterways, that through art, and the intersection with other forms that think through being with and for our waterways. Artists Felipe Castelblanco, Tsubasa Kato, Jane Chang Mi, and Subho O Saha create a direct relationship with the water through their own bodies, performing a singular action in or on the waterway partners. Natalie Casagran Lopez, Basia Irland, Sto Len, and Mary Ellen Strom explore water through performance--music-making, storytelling, and ritual come to the water to reveal new perspectives. Neha Choksi, Jon Cohrs, and Alex Monteith, Natalie Robertson and Graeme Atkins relate directly to water as a permeable material that takes many forms, infiltrating all aspects of our existence. James Dawson, Miguel Arzabe, and Jeannette Ehlers use abstraction to animate water histories, economics, and spatial politics. Marie Lorenz, Geneveieve Robertson and Meredith Lackey explore the infrastructures that contain (or don’t contain) water. The histories that grow up around water inform the works of Jacob Rivkin, Ayesha Hadir, and Lydia Hicks. We are excited to share their works with you: join us to watch, think, and feel water, together, online.
Clarinda Mac Low & Nancy Nowacek

2020 Walking the Edge

WALKING THE EDGE - THE PROMPTS

Walking the Edge launched the Works on Water Triennial 20/21. Artists produced weekly prompts (activity suggestions or questions) that invited city residents to explore their water’s edges and engage in imagining changes for those edges - virtually or on solo walks.  Responses from the public will help us think boldly and imaginatively about the future of the waterfront and share ideas that will inform the city’s next Comprehensive Waterfront Plan.  Walking the Edge was initially envisioned as a participatory non-stop relay walk of all 520 miles of New York City shoreline, but due to COVID-19, the physical event has been postponed to 2021.

Walking the Edge uses walking to encounter, reflect upon, and see places anew. This project defines “walking” as moving through space with attention and intention, and embraces all forms of mobility. Walking is a creative act, and WtE is an opportunity for New Yorkers of all abilities and ages, in every borough, to experience and express their waterfront.

Walking the Edge is a collaboration between arts organizations Culture Push and Works on Water with the NYC Department of City Planning. The project is funded by the Mayor’s Grant for Cultural Impact from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. WtE is a key outreach component of the next Comprehensive Waterfront Plan and kicks off Works on Water’s 2020 Triennial Art Exhibition dedicated to art that is made on, in, and with the water.

2020 WoWHaus Residency

Due the Covid crisis of 2020, we adjusted our offerings to be in line with restrictions. We were pleased that we were able to continue our residency program, even in a much reduced capacity.

Our 2020 Cohort:

The Art of Science and the Science of Art: Working with Water in a Changing World

Climate change creates new risks and exacerbates existing vulnerabilities in communities already facing water challenges. Join us as we explore collective action and consider the following questions: 

  • How do we cope with the cultural and economic losses from climate change?

  • How do we talk about loss that can’t be quantified?

  • Do we build more structural defenses or do we adapt our communities to the “new normal”?

  • Who makes these decisions?

WHO ARE WE and WHY ARE WE DOING THIS? 

We are a group of artists, scientists, community organizers, planners, and engineers who are creating a space for collaboration and action. The climate crisis facing our communities demands that we find new ways of working together.

WHAT’S OUR GOAL?

To collaborate and to spark action! We want to ground the adaptation conversation in culture, people and communities; to focus our efforts on tangible outcomes; and to learn how to be allies in this global struggle.

US-Netherlands Water Management Network 

The US-Netherlands Water Management Network is an informal network of water management researchers, students, and professionals that have conducted research and studied in the Netherlands through a NAF-Fulbright Flood Management Research Fellowship. 

DecadesOut

DecadesOut’s mission is to raise public awareness of the cultural impact between science and the arts as they impact policy and social change through developing and producing projects in the disciplines of theatre, film, visual arts, and digital media. Its most recent project, Head for Highland, is a feature length documentary about community action, creation and collaboration between science and art against the real and increasing threats of climate change. 

Works on Water 

Works on Water (WoW) is dedicated to supporting artists working on, in, and with bodies of water in response to the changing climate, increasing urban density, and public awareness of ecological concerns. WoW hosts a residency program on Governors Island and produces a triennial in order to help define the emerging field of Water Art. WoW’s intergenerational community of artists/curators/researchers/activists expand civic practices and increase public engagement with water by making rigorous, inclusive, site-specific artwork. The next triennial will take place in bodies of water around New York City’s waterways in September 2020. 

Imagine Water Works

We’re reimagining the future through art, science, and human connection. Since 2012 we’ve helped lead the changes in how New Orleans thinks about living with water, working in an intersection of reducing risk from flooding, pollution, and natural hazards. We knew that the best solutions were multidisciplinary, and so we integrated science, history, identity, and art into our work.

2019 WoWHaus & Underwater NY Residency

The Works on Water Studio Residency provides an incubator space for diverse investigations of water in the urban environment. Works on Water, in partnership with Underwater New York, has brought together scientists, policy-makers, and visual, performance-based and literary artists working on, in and with the water since 2018. Through open studios, performances, monthly conversations, and other exhibitions of work in progress, WoW has invited institutions, organizations, and the public into a dialogue about the emerging field of Water Art. Please join us as we work to strengthen the community of artists and practitioners working in water-based planning, science, policy, and art to define the future of our waterways.

Our 2019 Cohort:

2018 Power of Ten

Working creatively with water and waterways is inherently interdisciplinary, and requires creativity and collaboration across many different sectors. Issues related to water cross social, cultural, ecological, and political boundaries.

Power of Ten is an opportunity to intersect with people from different fields who are focused on water, and initiate concrete cross-disciplinary collaborative projects. All thinkers and do-ers are welcome—scientists, social/environmental justice activists, designers, artists, performers, planners, architects, and more. 

The Power of Ten is a path to problem-solving, reimagining, unearthing inequity, finding new approaches and understanding how to become accomplices. In this workshop we will facilitate a process of creative collaboration with the aim of realizing projects on, in, and around the water. 

2018 WoWHaus & Underwater NY Residency

The Works on Water Studio Residency provides an incubator space for diverse investigations of water in the urban environment. Works on Water, in partnership with Underwater New York, has brought together scientists, policy-makers, and visual, performance-based and literary artists working on, in and with the water since 2018. Through open studios, performances, monthly conversations, and other exhibitions of work in progress, WoW has invited institutions, organizations, and the public into a dialogue about the emerging field of Water Art. Please join us as we work to strengthen the community of artists and practitioners working in water-based planning, science, policy, and art to define the future of our waterways.

Our 2018 Cohort:

2017 Theater with New Georges

New Georges with 3LD Art & Technology Center in collaboration with Guerilla Science presented a world premiere immersive theatrical experience

(NOT) WATER
Co-conceived by Sheila Callaghan and Daniella Topol; Written by Sheila Callaghan directed by Daniella Topol; Associate playwright Liza Birkenmeier; General collaborator Susan Bernfield; Science dramaturgy Guerilla Science

Special thanks go to New Georges for their support for
Works on Water.