A dead giraffe, a fleet of ice cream trucks, the steamship Princess Anne, mysterious white goo—a terrain as gritty and urgent as the visible landscape.
Curious about what else we’ve dug up in the waterways? Explore more objects to find out.
This video features the words and voice of Kamilah Aisha Moon, 1973-2021. Her poem “Net Worth: Sandy Ground’s Harvest,” was written for Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York’s Forgotten Waterfront.
Cover art by Whit Harris
SPRING 2022
This issue features three artists commissioned in partnership with Brooklyn College’s Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and The Center for the Study of Brooklyn to critically engage the histories and futures of the Black diaspora along Brooklyn’s waterfront. The works of poet Bernard Ferguson, fiction writer Mateo Askaripour, and visual artist Whit Harris reveal Brooklyn’s overlapping histories of leisure, labor, forced movement, and a Black middle-class.
Their work is accompanied by oral history interviews 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.
Photo by Yi Xin Tong
This year, amidst the coronavirus pandemic, an ensuing economic disaster, and urgent calls for racial justice around the globe, we’ve reflected on how Underwater New York’s experiential, exploratory, and collaborative methods might catalyze local imagination and resilience. Can an emphasis on collaborative creative practices yield meaningful engagement with the climate crisis? Can the artist’s play with found materials contribute to a non-extractive, de-colonized relationship with our waters? How does looking at an artifact orient us to the present or future? How can playful invention contribute to new systems of knowledge?
Explore this issue →
Photo by Leah Harper
The works in this issue were created by resident artists during the 2019 Works on Water / Underwater New York Artist Residency on Governors Island. A laboratory for diverse investigations of water in the urban environment, the residency brought together artists, writers, designers, scientists, and policy-makers working on, in, and with the water. From May through October 2019, Nolan Park 5B hosted forty artists in residence working collaboratively or independently on a range of publicly-engaged projects. This issue reflects their exploration of historical memory, speculative futures, and the fluidity of these temporalities in urban waters. Created in 2019, these projects now appear as a kind of time capsule, revealing vanishing forms of relational presence during the global pandemic.
Spotted by divers, scientists, detectives, engineers, activists, artists, and citizens, these lively materials spark our curiosity and serve as a prompt for many of the stories we publish or produce.
