Oyster Shoreline at ‘Greater New York’ Has a Pearl of a Message
The New York Times
Alan Michelson, a Mohawk artist, explores long-ignored aspects of American history and exploitation of Indigenous landscapes. His work at MoMA PS1 fuses modern media and Native song.
To get to Newtown Creek, a severely polluted New York City waterway and Superfund site once teeming with oyster beds, the Mohawk artist Alan Michelson wended his way past the detritus of industrial Queens — the garbage haulers, the taco truck parking lots, the Mount Everests of scrap metal and building debris being clawed by construction cranes.
Before centuries of colonization, this tidal estuary between Brooklyn and Queens was home ground to the Lenape peoples, whose nurturing connection to the land and water and the life they support can provide a template for addressing woes of the present day, Michelson suggests, in his new multimedia installation at MoMA PS1.
The artwork, “Midden,” is a centerpiece of “Greater New York,” the museum’s once-every-five-year survey of artists in the New York area, opening Oct. 7. This year’s exhibition features 47 artists and collectives, and the boundaries extend to the Haudenosaunee, the confederacy of Native American nations that encompasses what is now New York State.
