“That’s what’s most wonderful about Freshkills; it’s a place to witness change, a giant viewing station for ecological adaptation.”
~ Robert Sullivan, writing in the New York Times.
We are excited to launch Re:generation, an online exhibition and archive that caps a multi-year artistic research project, residency and exhibition program on the site of New York City’s largest reclaimed landfill—Freshkills Park. This exhibition is the second in a series of exhibitions generated by the Freshkills Field R/D program, which was created in 2017, while Mariel Villeré was Manager for Programs, Arts and Grants at Freshkills Park. The work on display in this virtual exhibition reveals relationships between humans and the environment through new practices in art, design, and architecture. The artist projects contribute to contemporary dialogue around public memory, environmental justice, urbanism, ecology, and public architecture’s uses and forms. Field R/D invites the public to experience and inform the park’s evolving landscape design, tethered around its central channels. These artist projects and proposals draw attention to the history, present, future of New York City’s waterways and leftover spaces, and to the role of art and architecture in establishing relationships between communities, natural resources, and the environment. The project in all of its outputs suggests possibility in formerly blighted urban areas and is a catalyst for new models of architectural and artistic production in reconfigured territories. It sets a precedent for this kind of work to continue at Freshkills Park as it is constructed, influencing the park development at this site and artist roles in other large-scale land reclamation projects.
As a component of Freshkills Park’s arts program, Field R/D invited artists, poets, writers, and thinkers to investigate this 2200 acre site as fertile grounds to support new modes of public art. The project also sought to model how artists might enter into dialogue with and create relationships of care for the site, the communities around it, and the intricate web of bureaucracies and agencies (NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, NYC Department of Sanitation, NYC Department of Transportation, NYS Department of Environmental Protection) that maintain and support it. In inviting our first and second cohort of artists-in-residence, we were particularly drawn to these artists’ diverse creative practices that engage with infrastructure, ecology, environmental justice, and placemaking. Through their research work, the group surfaced and uplifted issues stemming from the site’s past as an operating landfill as well as the often overlooked waste ecologies within the city. Their work creates new points of entry, narratives, and collective memories for a place of emergence and what the feminist author Donna Haraway and other environmental writers have come to call “natureculture.”
An initial hypothesis of the project was that through monthly meetings between artists, ecologists, scientists, anthropologists, and city administrators, Field R/D could function not just as a laboratory for public art experimentation, but that it could also transform expectations, processes, and limitations for public art on the site. The project asked: how might a public art exist in a site that—for reasons of engineering, construction, and jurisdiction—is not yet wholly public? How might a sculpture park present socially-engaged and research-based artworks rather than the monumental works of the kind you might imagine in a landscape of this scale. Without a dedicated workspace or open access, the project challenged the very idea of a “residency” program. To be “in residence” with Field R/D at Freshkills was to dedicate thinking and research to a period of time delving into the many layers and associated support structures that undergird and continue to maintain the site. Through the first year of the program, the project proposed novel methodologies for artists to be involved in large-scale urban planning and landscape architecture projects, and new ways for artists to bring artistic research and creative practices into a relationship with those who make city infrastructure—policymakers, city planners, and administrators—and the communities who live their lives in, through, and around it.
As much as the conversation around Freshkills could involve heady topics, often dabbling in areas of policy or logistics that others might find dry, our approach had its own sense of humor, often casual, built around associations and affect and the pleasurable experience of exploring the site together. Our first site visit culminated in an incredible dosa meal at one of Staten Island’s many Sri Lankan restaurants. Our first gathering as a group off-site took place at the Sunview Luncheonette, a stopped-in-time former diner-turned-cooperative community space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. A playful, performative lecture by some of the artist-participants was presented in the historic Panorama of the City of New York at the Queens Museum as a featured panel during Open Engagement. More formal presentations were given as part of the conference Reclaimed Lands, co-organized by the Freshkills Park team along with community, academic, and municipal partners. In any venue, the content of the work of these artist-researchers showed its depth and sensitivity to the many interwoven issues that define the site. Whose land was this? How would the city make best use of this incredible resource? How could human and non-human actors share and co-create this space? How might a legacy of waste and decay lead to a future legacy of preservation and conservation? How might the park itself preserve and present the history of waste to a future public—as a warning, perhaps—while also allowing for new ideas, uses, and energies to map onto the site?
The View from Freshkills Park
To orient you, the viewer, to this unparalleled site: when you arrive, usually by car or in a Parks Department van that retrieves you from the St. George ferry terminal and drives you thirty minutes through a twisting sprawl of industrial, post-industrial, and residential development along the northern coastline of Staten Island, you are asked to sign a waiver to be allowed access to the in-process site. Aside from the regular flow of Sanitation vehicles, the site itself allows for no regular public access. Once you reach the summit of one of the site’s hills, looking out across the city to Manhattan, you can easily forget that the land you are standing on is formed of the accumulated household waste generated by millions of New Yorkers over the half-century period the landfill was in operation. There is a sense here of entering a new wilderness, where engineered grasslands and native and colonizer species of plants and animals are creating new footholds in the emergent ecosystem of the place. At the same time, none of this is accidental, but is the confluence of years of hard-fought campaigns by activists and community groups on Staten Island seeking relief from the environmental injustice playing out in their literal back yards, engineering feats and policymaking at state and local levels. The engineered protective layers and specially designed soil compacts that capped the old landfill mounds and now serve as a foothold for species of grasses, some small trees, and many varieties of birds and mammals allow us to imagine that a trash pile can effectively be sealed off and covered up to generate a landscape—not the marsh that would have once been here, but something altogether new and unprecedented.
Standing atop the 200 foot tall mounds of Freshkills Park, looking out over the city with its glass towers in the distance, is to be confronted by the scale of New York City, the ongoing struggle to manage waste, and to meet head on with what geologists and science-humanities writers have termed “the Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene is generally agreed to define a period of about the last 250 years, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, or by some markers the last 10,000 years, since the advent of modern agricultural practices, in which the human hand can be seen in the very geologic record of the Earth. It is a crucial name for our time, in which we are faced with the planetary scale of a crisis that none have previously seen, but also one of a scale that earlier generations would simply not have comprehended. Earth is, in a sense, ours to lose. Anthropocene signals that responsibility for the care of this planet rests squarely on our shoulders as a species and a civilization. Freshkills, built of 53 years of New York City’s residential waste, is what the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles has termed the greatest social sculpture in the world. It is an archive and an artifact, and a reflection of the excesses of our age. Landfills are, perhaps, as old as human settlements themselves, but the scale and magnitude of the landfill that Robert Moses planned in 1948 to fill in “wasteland” marsh on the western shore of Staten Island exceeded all previous landfills and points to a culture obsessed with the cheap, the disposable, and the quickly forgotten. The artists included in Re:generation present alternatives to these too-familiar histories of neglect, propose new readings and new legacies for this complex and conflicted site, and center the role of artistic research in finding a way into and through this emergent landscape.
About the Exhibition
The projects, proposals, documentation, and interactive works on view as part of this virtual exhibition draw on contributions by the two Field R/D cohorts, along with a portfolio of images by photographer Natalie Conn that adds depth, texture, and context to the documentation of these ephemeral and temporary artist projects. Works by Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder, Billy Dufala, Markley Boyer, Lize Mogel, Mary Mattingly, the collective Mare Liberum (thefreeseas.org), and Nancy Nowacek, who participated in the project’s first cohort/year are complemented by new works shared by sTo Len, Jen Liu, and Antonio Serna, who make up the project’s second cohort/year. An on-water exploration with artist Marie Lorenz, shared on her website Tide and Current Taxi earlier in the summer of 2021 served as a capstone for the project’s research. Included as well are links to video from Confluence, an on-water public tour of New York’s harbor led by the curators and featuring presentations by artists Lize Mogel, Mary Mattingly, and Nancy Nowacek. Finally, we are thrilled to include a new essay by Cait Field, Manager for Science & Research Development at Freshkills Park, about the links between art and research and what it means to do research about an emergent site in an urban context.
How To Use This Website
Re:generation presents works and proposals by artists and collaborators participating in the Field R/D program at Freshkills Park. Artist projects are linked through individual artist pages for each participating artist or collective, or through the Exhibitions landing page. The website includes image description where possible and some artist projects include captions and/or audio descriptions when available.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the support of so many over the past five years since this project was originally proposed, having coffee one morning at a café in Lower Manhattan and musing over what a residency program could look like at Freshkills. This project could not have taken place, or found a foothold in the complex landscape of interrelated municipal bureaucracies, without the vision and trust of Eloise Hirsh, Administrator of Freshkills Park and the President of the Freshkills Park Alliance, and all the staff (present and past) of the Freshkills Park team: Laura Truettner, Cait Field, and Terrance Caviness of the NYC Parks Freshkills Park Development Team, Rachel Aronson of the Freshkills Park Alliance, as well as Lindsay Campbell and Bram Gunther of the New York City Urban Field Station. A special note of gratitude to Parks Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver and Sanitation Commissioner Edward Grayson and former Commissioner Kathryn Garcia for their shared support of the project. We are humbled by the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose long term engagement with Freshkills made our artists engaging with this site possible, and to visionary public artists, public art curators, and arts writers who made the way for art to take hold in such non-traditional exhibition venues as a former landfill. A heartfelt thanks to Sara Reisman, William Furio, George Bolster, and the staff of the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation and to the Foundation for their support of the project from its inception. Lastly, to the artists, thinkers, writers, and collaborators who thought through the generative problem of a residency program with us over these past several years: Markley Boyer, Gabri Christa, Billy & Steven Dufala (Dufala Brothers), Torkwase Dyson, Sto Len, Jen Liu, Mary Mattingly, Lize Mogel, Nancy Nowacek, the other members of Mare Liberum (Jean Barberis, Ben Cohen, Stephan von Muehlen, Sunita Prasad, Kendra Sullivan), Joe Riley, Antonio Serna, Audrey Snyder, Kendra Sullivan; to photographer Natalie Conn for documenting the ins and outs of the residency and the artists in their respective studios; to Louis Bury for teasing out the subtleties of the project for BOMB; to the organizers of NADA and Open Engagement for their support; to Seb Choe for designing a vision for our first exhibition; to Unyimeabasi Udoh for designing this virtual exhibition; and to Robin Nagle, Anthropologist-in-Residence at the Department of Sanitation, who visited us early in the residency for a public talk, and whose research and thinking on the history of New York City’s complicated relationship with waste inspired many of the artists’ projects presented herein.
~ Dylan Gauthier and Mariel Villeré, Curators, Freshkills Park Field R/D