Starting within the Adirondack Mountains and flowing south into New York Harbor, the enduring Hudson River stretches 315 miles by way of scenic valleys and artistic cities. It’s additionally a migration route for quite a few species of fish, from sturgeon and bass to herring and eels, which head upstream yearly to spawn. Contending with habitat destruction resulting from air pollution and the consequences of the local weather disaster, the survival of those fish is more and more imperiled. Fortuitously, artwork and activism have a approach of bringing these pressing points to gentle whereas additionally bridging native communities.
Final weekend marked the inaugural Fish Migration Celebration organized by Riverkeeper, an outfit dedicated to defending and advocating for the well being of the Hudson River watershed. Unmissable amid the festivities had been a sequence of large-scale puppets by artist Greg Corbino, a part of his ongoing sculpture-meets-performance sequence, Murmurations.
Corbino designed a larger-than-life gold sturgeon to adorn a crusing ship that led a flotilla from Chelsea Pier in New York Metropolis as much as Croton-on-Hudson, residence of Hudson River Music Competition. Corbino’s papier-mâché marine creatures, starting from oysters and sturgeon to a seahorse and a whale, carried out their very own migration, parading alongside the riverbank in each areas.
The artist describes the collective efficiency as a “puppet poem of city and sea” and creates every work from plastic trash he removes from New York Metropolis waterways and seashores. By means of partnerships with occasions just like the Fish Migration Celebration and New York Metropolis’s River to River Competition, he goals to spotlight the impacts of local weather change and lift consciousness of accelerating plastic air pollution in our oceans.
See extra of Corbino’s work on his web site.
