{"id":2068900,"date":"2026-07-30T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2068900"},"modified":"2026-07-30T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T06:00:00","slug":"alan-michelson-places-a-massive-oyster-installation-on-governors-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2068900","title":{"rendered":"Alan Michelson Places a Massive Oyster Installation on Governors Island"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Alan_Michelson_The_Oyster_2026_01.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\n\tBefore New York became a sprawling metropolis, its rolling hills, deep valleys, and tidal salt marshes were part of a larger estuarine ecosystem that was home to countless flora and fauna. This included fresh bodies of water like Collect Pond in Lower Manhattan and massive oyster beds along the harbor\u2019s more than 500 miles of shoreline, both cared for and relied on by the Indigenous Lenape peoples. This rich, yet often underknown history\u2014quite literally buried beneath New York\u2019s surface\u2014is what Alan Michelson has spent the last 40 years uncovering.<\/p>\n

\n\tThough Michelson began making large-scale abstract nature paintings with mixed materials, he expanded that interest in the late 1980s to site-specific installations and sculpture, directly \u201cexamining sites, not only for their physical qualities, but for their lost temporal qualities; in a way, their histories,\u201d he explained in a video interview from his New York studio.<\/p>\n

\n\tHis latest entry into this way of working is Oyster <\/em>(2026), a massive outdoor installation that goes on view today on the western promenade of Governors Island. Arranged in the shape of the titular mollusk and measuring 40 cubic yards, Oyster <\/em>is made of hundreds of thousands of recycled oyster shells that have been donated by Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit that aims to rebuild New York Harbor by rehabilitating its\u00a0oyster\u00a0reefs.<\/p>\n

\n\tMichelson began working with the organization in 2021 and, in the years since, he became inspired by the communal aspect of the oysters that once brought together the Lenape and others, as well as the shellfish\u2019s luminous quality. But years of overharvesting, human pollution, and dredging had decimated New York\u2019s once populous oyster beds. While the Billion Oyster Project is working toward a pragmatic solution to solving this problem, Michelson has come up with his own artful intervention.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"View<\/div>\n<\/div>
View of Alan Michelson\u2019s The Oyster<\/em> (2026) during its installation.<\/span>Commissioned by More Art in partnership with Billion Oyster Project and Governors Island Arts\/Courtesy the artist<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tOverlooking New York\u2019s harbor, Oyster<\/em> will soon serve as a gathering place for those visiting the island to \u201ccontemplate the harbor before the ships came, before Europeans, and imagine that landscape and the abundance and the bounty that was available to the people there and the life ways that sustained it,\u201d Michelson said, adding that he sees it as an artwork \u201cwhere people can think about whether or not they want this sort of extractive regime to continue.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWith Oyster<\/em>, Michelson offers a sustainable path forward in which he hopes nature-based solutions will \u201cnot only be embraced by Native people, but can bridge some of these cultural differences toward a better collective future.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA significant portion of the donated oysters are likely thousands of years old. \u201cIt points to this much bigger time scale,\u201d said Dylan Gauthier, an associate curator at the nonprofit More Art, which commissioned the project. \u201cIt\u2019s not just pre-European; it\u2019s probably even pre-Lenape\u2014ancestors of the Indigenous groups that we know now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"Archival<\/div>\n<\/div>
Alan Michelson,\u00a0Earth\u2019s Eye<\/em>, 1990.<\/span>Courtesy the artist<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThat connection to history, and those who were here before us, has been a point of interest for Michelson for over 35 years. When working on his first installation project of this kind, Earth\u2019s Eye<\/em> (1990), at Collect Pond, he said of this time, \u201cI discovered that not only was there a big pond there, but there was a huge shell midden left over from countless generations of Lenape and their ancestors fishing and eating shells.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earth\u2019s Eye<\/em> was a collection of 40 concrete markers installed on the site of the now-buried Collect Pond. Michelson arranged them in the body of water\u2019s original shape prior to its pollution by colonial industry and its filling-in at the beginning of the 19th century. Each marker contained a relief cast referencing the natural and social history of the pond.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a member of the Mohawk, one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Michelson said approaching waterways \u201cfrom a perspective of an earlier set of life ways that were attached to the waters\u201d became a central part of his practice as a way to document and resurface traces of Indigenous presence in New York, despite centuries of erasure.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"View<\/div>\n<\/div>
Alan Michelson,\u00a0Mespat<\/em>, 2001.<\/span>Courtesy the artist<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tEager to continue this documentation, Michelson sailed up the heavily polluted Newtown Creek, a three-and-a-half-mile tributary of the East River that forms part of the border between Brooklyn and Queens, to record the once abundant site for his 2001 video installation Mespat<\/em>, or \u201cbad water place\u201d as dubbed by the Lenape, who were displaced from the area by Dutch colonists in 1642. The site later became a dumping ground for raw sewage and industry in the mid-19th century, as well as a 17 million-gallon oil spill in the 1950s, before being designated a Superfund site eligible for a long-term federally funded cleanup in 2010.<\/p>\n

\n\tCapturing what was left of the waterway and projecting the footage onto a large screen of sewn white turkey feathers, \u201cturned out to be a very rich vein for me to explore,\u201d Michelson said, \u201cbecause I started with video, photography, and other means that are evidentiary, that are real\u201d and paired it with turkey feathers, \u201cthis symbolic material that\u2019s [not only] associated with Indigenous people, but also with nature, and provides an almost iridescent surface on which to project video.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMichelson\u2019s inclination toward luminosity\u2014a quality revered by the Mohawk for its metaphysical properties\u2014would soon become a mainstay of the artist\u2019s subsequent works, including his return to Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn for the video installation Midden<\/em> (2021), which projected footage of the waterways onto oyster shells.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"A<\/div>\n<\/div>
Installation view of Alan Michelson\u2019s\u00a0Midden<\/em>\u00a0(2021) in Greater New York 2021, at MoMA PS1, New York.<\/span>Photo Noel Woodford\/Courtesy MoMA PS1<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tTwo similarly concerned works by Michelson are currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as part of the institution\u2019s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the US\u2019s founding. The first, Han\u00f6daga:yas (Town Destroyer): Reflect<\/em> (2024), is a continuation of an earlier series featuring a life-size stainless-steel bust of George Washington based on Jean-Antoine Houdon\u2019s 1786 marble version. During the Revolutionary War, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) began calling General Washington han\u00f6daga:yas<\/em>, or the \u201ctown destroyer,\u201d after he ordered the brutal seizure of their homelands, decimating some 60 villages in the process. At the MFA Boston, Han\u00f6daga:yas <\/em>has been installed near Thomas Sully\u2019s massive 1819 painting The Passage of the Delaware<\/em> heroicizing Washington; projected onto Michelson\u2019s bust are the fraught colonial legacies that undergird the nation\u2019s very establishment.<\/p>\n

\n\tAlso at the MFA Boston is The Knowledge Keepers <\/em>(2024), a pair of monumental cast sculptures depicting contemporary Aquinnah Wampanoag artist and activist Julia Marden and Nipmuc artist Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines, Jr. Fabricated in bronze gilded with platinum, they respond to Cyrus Dallin\u2019s 1909 life-size sculpture Appeal to the Great Spirit<\/em>, which depicts a generic, nearly naked Indigenous man on a horse with arms wide open in a moment of surrender. It has stood in the MFA\u2019s entrance plaza since 1912. Taking on the trope of the \u201cvanishing Indian,\u201d The Knowledge Keepers <\/em>presents a counternarrative: the Indigenous peoples of these lands never disappeared.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"Composite<\/div>\n<\/div>
From left, Alan Michelson:\u00a0The Knowledge Keepers: Julia Marden<\/em> (2024) and The Knowledge Keepers: Andr\u00e9 Strongbearheart Gaines<\/em> (2024), installed outside the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.<\/span>Courtesy the artist<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tIn honor of that legacy, Michelson often inserts Indigenous sovereignty into historically fraught public spaces. Interwoven through Oyster<\/em>, for example, is a stencil-painted text in a purple wampum palette that offers a poetic reflection on the oysters that were once there: \u201cIt tasted of seawater \u2026 of brine and flesh \u2026 and somehow \u2026 of the future,\u201d reads a savory quote by Anthony Bourdain. Another explains oysters\u2019 aquatic benefits: \u201cKa mau te wehi! Oysters are incredible, ingenious\u2014the ultimate water filtration system! We get to harness their superpowers. Once they\u2019re in place, then sit back and let nature do its thing. It\u2019s pretty amazing,\u201d said Te Aonehe Nuku, a recent graduate of the New York Harbor School\u2019s ocean engineering department.<\/p>\n

Oyster<\/em> will be further activated with a choral and percussion performance by Oneida and Ojibwe artist Danielle Jagelski over Indigenous Peoples Day weekend in October before it\u2019s dismantled after November 30. But that doesn\u2019t mean the sculpture won\u2019t continue to live on as part of an oyster restoration reef project. Michelson joked that he is \u201ctickled by the idea of doing large-scale submersible public art,\u201d even if that means it\u2019ll be submerged in a different form than how it appeared on land. Gauthier, one of the curators, sees it as creating \u201creciprocity between humans and oysters\u201d with \u201ctwo functions\u201d that translate communal Lenape traditions of fishing and feasting into both an artwork and living marine infrastructure.<\/p>\n

\n\tThroughout it all, Michelson has dedicated himself to thinking about the possibilities of art. \u201cOne thing I\u2019ve come to ask myself over this long career,\u201d he reflected, \u201cis, \u2018What can this artwork be<\/em>? What can it do<\/em>?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/artists\/alan-michelson-governors-island-oyster-installation-1234793802\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Alan_Michelson_The_Oyster_2026_01.jpg?w=1024″] Before New York became a sprawling metropolis, its rolling hills, deep valleys, and tidal salt marshes were part of a larger estuarine ecosystem that was home to countless flora and fauna. This included fresh bodies of water like Collect Pond in Lower Manhattan and massive oyster beds along the harbor\u2019s more than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2068900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2068900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068900\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2068900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2068900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2068900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}