sTo Len, Renewal, multi-medium installation, Newtown Creek, NY / Potomac River, VA 2018-2025
Works on Water 2025 Triennial
August 28 - October 26 2025
Nora Almeida / iki nakagawa, Frank Bloem, Monica Jahan Bose, Donald Hài Phú Daedalus, Jeremy Dennis, Sherese Francis, Jana Harper, Perrin Ireland, Art Jones, Marie Lorenz, sTo Len, Stacy Levy, Mare Liberum, Mary Mattingly, Wes Modes, Lize Mogel, Eve Mosher, Nancy Nowacek, Jean Shin, Sarah Cameron Sunde, Sunk Shore (Carolyn Hall and Clarinda Mac Low), Elizabeth Velazquez, and Marina Zurkow
Lower Manhattan Cultural Center ’s The Arts Center at Governors Island
The Works on Water 2025 Triennial is a multi-sited exhibition and series of public art interventions made on, in, and with bodies of water, created in response to the global climate crisis. The exhibition, curated by Emily Blumenfeld and Kendal Henry with the Works on Water team, frames the growing genre of Water Art as a defining environmental art form of the 21st century, exploring themes of access, exploitation, conservation, remediation, and care. Now in its third edition, this dynamic triennial invites New Yorkers to experience and reimagine the edges of the city through site-specific, participatory, and time-based works, in partnership with Wildlife Conservation Society/NY Aquarium, South Street Seaport, and North Brooklyn Boat Club. The Works on Water 2025 Triennial exhibition will be on view in the Upper and Lower Galleries of The Arts Center, August 28 through October 26, open to the public on Fridays, 3-7pm, and Saturdays & Sundays, 12-6pm. Join us for Opening Night on Thursday, August 28, 5-9pm with remarks at 7pm.
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.
Impressions for Coastal Constellation Alignment : Potomac River, Virginia, gomitaku mono print on fabric, sumi ink, 5’ x 30’, 2020
Coastal Clean Up Collection for Gomitaku Constellation : Potomac River, 2019-2020
Photos from AlexRenew Wastewater Facility, 2019-2021
Catch the Wave, dye sublimation print on aluminum, 24” x 36”, 2020
Newtown Creek Prints, 37” x 25”, water, detritus, pollutants, tsunaminagashi mono print on paper, 2015-2019
Newtown Creek (Bayside Fuel), 37” x 25”, water, detritus, pollutants, tsunaminagashi mono print on paper, 2016
Tsunaminagashi printing the Newtown Creek, Queens, NY, 2015, dye, sublimation print on metal, 18" x 12", 2023
sTo Len, Renewal, Potomac River/Newtown Creek
Renewal, a multi-media installation by sTo Len, a New York-based cross-disciplinary artist and part of the Works on Water team, brings visibility to environmental destruction and asks visitors to contemplate their own relationships to water and waste. In 2019, Len became the first artist in residence at the AlexRenew Wastewater Treatment facility in Alexandria, Virginia. These works, and collected detritus, come from that experience, as well as his earlier engagement, beginning around 2015, with the polluted waters of Newtown Creek in Queens. Having grown up along the Potomac River, the artist has deep connections to both bodies of water.
Len’s printmaking work updates traditional Japanese techniques of Suminagashi (floating ink) and Gyotaku (fish impression) into an experimental collaboration with nature and site of ecological discourse and activism. Employing Newtown Creek water, the artist’s “Tsunaminagashi” prints are shaped by the petroleum products, chlorinated solvents, and oil residues on its surface–in effect, revealing “an imprint of the human imprint on the body of water.” Gomitaku, or “trash impression,” Len’s adaptation of Gyotaku, used by 19th-century fisherman to record and honor their catch, instead captures an expression of discarded Styrofoam and other detritus fished from the Potomac River. Hung vertically, the long printed scroll suggest the downward movement and eventual crashing of waterfalls, allowing visitors to feel the enormity of pollution in our waters. Other sublimation prints on metal, made during the AlexRenew project, transform the aesthetic of waste materials from a settling tank into strikingly beautiful abstractions.