October 9 | 6:30pm | 213 Water Street | Free
Join the Seaport Museum and artists Sarah Cameron Sunde, Carolyn Hall, Clarinda Mac Low, and Nancy Nowaceck, representing Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Works on Water 2025 Triennial, for an evening conversation exploring the intersections of maritime heritage and contemporary “Water Art.”
As part of the discussion, the artists will highlight Walking the Edge—a citywide project that invites New Yorkers to collectively walk all 520 miles of the city’s coastline. Framing walking as a creative act, Walking the Edge encourages participants of all ages and abilities to experience the waterfront with attention, intention, and renewed perspective.
In collaboration with Works on Water, the Seaport Museum has added three contemporary Water Art pieces on view interspersed throughout the Maritime City exhibition as an intervention and reaction to the Museum’s collection. Attendees are invited to view these works beginning at 6pm, before the program starts, or after the conversation until the galleries close at 8pm. The growing genre of Water Art is an environmental art form of the 21st century, exploring themes of access, exploitation, conservation, remediation, and care. Featured artists include Mary Mattingly, Sarah Cameron Sunde, and the Works on Water Art Collective. These works are on loan courtesy of their creators.
A wine reception will follow the program. Preregistration is encouraged. Walk-ups will be accommodated as space allows.
About the Works on Water 2025 Triennial
Works on Water is an experimental organization and triennial exhibition dedicated to artworks, performances, conversations, workshops and site-specific experiences that explore diverse artistic investigation of water in the urban environment. We seek to strengthen and nourish the community of artists working on and with bodies of water and to provide a platform to increase awareness of artists and organizations working on and with the waterways. Made possible with support from the Cultural Development Fund, Invoking the Pause, exhibiting artists, and Works on Water’s partner organizations.
About Maritime City
The Seaport Museum’s latest exhibition Maritime City highlights how New York City, as we know it today, arose from the sea. Throughout the extensive three-floor exhibition, 540 deliberately-selected objects on view underscore how the city’s identity as a global capital of culture and finance is rooted in its origins as a seaport. By sharing the material culture of New York and its people, the exhibition highlights stories of the working class people employed by ships, shipping lines, and other local industries throughout history, as well as the emigrant workers and immigrant families that came through the port as their first stop in America.
About the Speakers
Sarah Cameron Sunde is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York at the intersection of performance, video, and public art. She investigates scale and duration in relationship to the human body, water, ecological crisis, and deep time. Her performances and video works are exhibited nationally and internationally. She was awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her series, 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, 2013-2022. Other honors include two MAP Fund Grants, NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship, Yaddo, and LMCC Workspace Resident. She is co-founder of Works on Water, a Cultural Leader with the World Economic Forum, and a current Artist-in-Residence with the Erie Canal. One of her works, documenting a chapter of 36.5 in the New York Estuary, Turtle Island, is on view in Maritime City, from September 24, 2025 through January 2026.
Carolyn Hall is a Brooklyn, NY-based award winning freelance dancer/performer, historical marine ecologist, and communication instructor. Hall specializes in science communication but loves working with and learning about all areas of expertise. In dance, Hall has had a rich career collaborating with numerous choreographers and companies both nationally and internationally, and is involved in projects with Carrie Ahern, Maho Ogawa, and Clarinda Mac Low. As a freelance ecologist Hall focuses on the impacts humans have had on shoreline ecosystems and the creatures within them. NYC and it’s deep water-based history is their archive. Hall is also the research assistant and fact checker for best-selling author Paul Greenberg. Their ecology and art intersect in new ways all the time, but most notably the experiential climate change sensing project Sunk Shore, with the art-eco collective Works on Water, and as the Co-Creative Programs Coordinator at Genspace. Find me talking communication with the American Fisheries Society’s Climate Ambassadors Program and with Exact Communication.
Clarinda Mac Low was brought up in the avant-garde arts scene that flourished in NYC during the 1960s and ‘70s. She began performing with her father Jackson Mac Low and with Meredith Monk at the age of 5. Mac Low started out working in dance and molecular biology in the late 1980s and now works in performance and installation, creating participatory installations and events that investigate social constructs and corporeal experience. Mac Low is co-founder and Executive Director of Culture Push, an experimental organization that links artistic practice and civic engagement, and co-curator of Works on Water, a triennial that supports art that works on, in or with water and waterways. From 2022-2024, she was part of the Creatives Rebuild New York Artists Employment Program, embedded at Genspace, a community biology laboratory in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and she continues to act as co-lead of the Artist-in-Residence program she started there, in collaboration with Carolyn Hall and the Genspace staff. Her work has appeared at Open Source Gallery, The Old Stone House, Panoply Performance Laboratory, the EFA Project Space, P.S. 122 (now PSNY), the Kitchen, X-Initiative, and many other places and spaces around New York City and elsewhere in the world, including the Manifesta Biennial in Spain (2010) and Art Prospect in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Nancy Nowacek is an artist, designer and educator. Her work focuses on the habits and practices of daily life as they relate to the natural and built environment, and the systems that produce and are produced in them. Her practice encompasses a wide spectrum of research: climate change, land use, the history of labor, aging and ageism, and mental health. Nowacek is co-founder of Works on Water, an art collective and community catalyst around urban waterways and the urgency of the climate crisis. She has been a fellow at Eyebeam, an international new media organization, as well as a resident in the prestigious Sharp-Walentas residency program, Recess, Pioneer Works, and Montalvo. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Jerome Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Council, and Two Trees Cultural Programs. She has shown work in the United States, Canada, China, the Netherlands, and Venezuela. She teaches at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Nowacek holds an MFA in Social Practice from California College of the Arts, an MFA in Visual Communication from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Photography and Design from University of Michigan.
Enjoy More That the Museum Offers
Access to the Maritime City exhibition in A.A. Thomson & Co. located at 213 Water Street is included with this event. Access to the historic ships and introduction galleries at the Seaport Museum is not included with this event. If you would like to explore more that the Museum has to offer, book in advance or ask Museum staff about admission tickets, available Wednesday through Sunday from 11am to 5pm when you check in.
Museum admission tickets grant access to the 1885 tall ship Wavertree and 1908 lightship Ambrose at Pier 16 as well as all current exhibitions on view in the introduction galleries inside Schermerhorn Row located at 12 Fulton Street.