Caring for ecology starts with understanding your immediate environment, and the East End is a great place to dive deeply into this ethos — whether you are a scientist or an artist or anyone who has ever put two bare feet down on the earth, in the sand or into the waters here.
Pictured Above: Sasha Fishman’s “I want to be wet,” 2024
The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill invited artists working on the East End to explore these themes in its current exhibition, “Regeneration: Long Island’s History of Ecological Art and Care,” on view through June 14.
Four artists in the show were joined by Helen Hsu of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Parrish Curator Scout Hutchinson for an Earth Week discussion April 18 on how ecology shapes their practice.
The term “Regeneration” has joined the lexicon of climate activism in recent years with Paul Hawken’s 2021 book “Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation,” which focuses on practices that mimic the ways natural cycles continuously renew themselves to reverse the damage of climate change.
Robert Rauschenberg, who designed the first Earth Day poster in 1970, is a great example of this ethos — his Combines from the 1960s integrated discarded objects into paintings, while his work in multiple media also mirrors the interdisciplinary approach necessary to solve ecological crises.
Mud Muse
In the conversation, Ms. Hsu talked extensively about Rauschenberg’s “Mud Muse,” a burbling vat of mud produced in collaboration with engineers from the aerospace company Teledyne, which premiered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1971.
“At the time, it was panned as a multimillion dollar boondoggle,” but she said Rauschenberg believed “wasting time and resources was the point — it was an exquisite sabotage that subverted capitalist technocracy.”
The piece ended up serving as a sly criticism of the military industrial complex, she said, while also evoking the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park and the mud of the 1969 Woodstock and Altamont music festivals.
While Rauschenberg’s work was borne out of the tumult of the 1960s, the artists in this show often make more subtle political statements.
Invisibility Is Intentional
Jeremy Dennis, a photographer and member of the Shinnecock Nation, sees his work as a reclamation of the native landscape.
Since 2016, he’s been developing a website and series of photographs of sites here that have been important to native people for thousands of years — “On This Site (nativelongisland.com).”
His works in the Parrish show, from his “Sacredness of Hills” series, depict native people in scenes of Hamptons excess, referencing recent attempts at construction on top of Sugar Loaf Hill, a native burial site in Shinnecock Hills.
“Three thousand years ago, our ancestors didn’t use tombstones or grave markers,” he said. “They knew these hilltops were just naturally preserved. When I look at this body of work, it is all about protecting cemeteries and sacred sites, but it goes hand in hand with ecological protection as well.”
“The three pieces in the Parrish show are dealing with ‘how do depict something that you can’t see or you can’t access?” he said. “You kind of have to believe that it’s there. I do love the idea of indigenous stewardship — letting nature take over without a trace of humanity.”
“It’s trying to take something invisible and render it visible,” he said of his work. “Invisibility is an intentional tool… If non-native people don’t see us, they don’t have an idea of our people as being contemporary, living people. Then, our rights are devalued.”
At Home in Nature
Scott Bluedorn, who is from East Hampton, began his career thinking of himself as “a naturalist in the 19th century sense,” documenting the natural world around him, often in pen and ink drawings. It’s that practice that inspires the Bonac-themed wallpaper beneath his work in the show (which you can also buy in The Parrish’s gift shop).
“I think it’s just a beautiful way to celebrate our local culture,” he said of the wallpaper. “This one is very specific to Springs. There’s very familiar people, places, animals that are very emblematic of our region —fishermen, farmers and ducks, shells, and landmarks — windmills, and Ashwagh Hall.”
Mr. Bluedorn’s recent works, in a variety of media, are informed by his explorations of the natural world surrounding his home, from foraging for wild morel mushrooms to a rare magical stand of white pines to prints of the tunnels southern pine beetles make through the bark of pitch pines as they destroy whole forests. This scourge has particularly devastated Napeague and the Northwest Woods in East Hampton.
“I thought there was actually a very beautiful kind of aesthetic quality to the wood itself. I think of these almost as cartographies or even like a calligraphy — a language of this new silent invader,” he said of the pine beetle pieces. “I see these prints as a recording of not just the activity and the labor of these insects, but maybe a new way to relate to them, especially using all of this wood that is now down on the forest floor. It’s becoming part of the ecosystem, but it’s also a bit hazardous in terms of forest fire risk.”
Details from Sasha Fishman’s “I’m hypersensitive to blue 2024”
Fish and People
Sasha Fishman describes her work as “born from scientific inquiry and the alchemy of material transformation,” experimenting with waste from the seafood industry — from bioplastics made from shrimp skins to tanning discarded salmon skins using egg yolk and olive oil.
“They become these really beautiful transparent and translucent materials,” she said. “The process is something like that of making leather from a mammal skin — it’s an indigenous process that is still practiced in places like Alaska and Scandinavia.”
Her large-scale pieces in this show include “I want to be wet,” a piece made of varnished ribs of wood that mimic the shell of a boat, connected by preserved fish skins and including screens showing footage of human interactions with the marine world.
In another piece, “I’m hypersensitive to blue,” pools also made from translucent fish skins, include fanciful bowls and what looks like a cross between a rooster and a paddlewheel boat, both mimicking the function of water purification devices.
An Exuberant Ethic
Tucker Marder describes his work as developing “a moving target of an exuberant environmental ethic.”
“I think if it as a way to confront and deal with how depressing our ecological situation is,” he said. “The work done to confront it doesn’t necessarily have to be dour and equally depressing.”
Much of his work has been multidisciplinary, including “For the Birds,” a “narrativeless abstract live bird show” at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, which incorporated the behaviors of birds in the aviary with puppets and costumed actors, scored live by marimba, and “Stampede,” in which he raised 250 crested Indian runner ducks and set them loose in a field filled with large abstract shapes.
His other works paired microbiologists and puppeteers to explore everything from the anatomy of the eye to gut microbes.
Locally, his most lasting work may be the Folly Tree Arboretum in Springs, which is open for tours beginning May 1.
Trees on display there range from a descendent of a Douglas fir whose seeds went to the moon on Apollo 14 to an oak tree given by Adolph Hitler to the gold medalists in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
“The idea is that you can essentially propagate a tree with a story instead of a horticultural valuable tree,” he said. “It’s a cultural archive of trees dedicated to ecological storytelling.”
The Whole Earth & 1776
This line of discussion brought the panelists back around to Robert Rauschenberg, who was a fan of biologist Stewart Brand’s 1960s-era Whole Earth Catalog of practical tools for self-sufficiency.
“The catalog declared a statement of purpose — a quote — “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it,” said Ms. Hsu. “There was a realm of intimate personal powers developing — the power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever’s interested.”
As humanity crawls deeper into the anthropocene — the era in which we are the largest influence on the earth’s natural processes, we seem far from the wild natural world celebrated by the first Earth Day in 1970.
As the Parrish and the U.S. celebrate the 250th anniversary of this country — the museum’s theme this year is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This show focuses primarily on the “life” part of that declaration, said Ms. Hutchinson. She then read a note Mr. Rauschenberg wrote in 1976.
“Artists have always been the first to respond, worldwide, to the needs of others, whether it be earthquakes, starving children, sinking Venice or political atrocities. If the United States does not recognize and support their artists in this role, than the United States has begun, maybe innocently or ignorantly, a form of suppression of the very vehicle that carries this communication and culture of times down through the ages. Art has always been a necessary ally to justice and freedom.”
“This was the year of the bicentennial, and he was selected as the artist to celebrate the bicentennial, and had a retrospective at the American Art Museum in D.C.,” said Ms. Hsu. “This is very much the sentiment that he adhered to. He always acknowledged artists as the class that were the first targeted in an authoritarian regime, precisely because their voices were so unaccountable. They could address issues in this creative way that escaped all expected routes. You see that in his approach to technology, using tools, materials and methods in a ‘wrong way,’ and through that experimentation arriving at new solutions and greater possibilities.”
The artists present wore that mantle hesitantly.
“It’s not necessarily artists’ responsibility to be solution-oriented,” said Mr. Marder. “They’re not scientists. They’re something else.”
“My approach is totally about cross-pollination, combining worlds and weaving things together,” said Mr. Bluedorn. “I wouldn’t say I have answers, but I have ideas.”
Ms. Fishman said she believes it’s important to create spaces for artists to come together so this cross-pollination can happen.
“Artists really look at the world differently, and it’s really about continuing to be able to do that,” she said.
“It’s troublesome to look at the news and politics, art institutions being defunded or censored,” said Mr. Dennis. “I think it is appropriate this 1976 note is putting the question to the same thing we’re asking today, even more urgently.”
“Go back to the founding of this country, and the ideals it was founded on,” he said. “What are we here for? What are we fighting for? As BIPOC or indigenous artists, we do want to make work that celebrates happiness and freedom and our dreams, but it is hard to do that when there is injustice.”
“In our deepening paths of specialization, where people are so entrenched in their little pasture of solving big problems, you miss the bigger picture,” said Ms. Hsu. “By telling the story in a way that’s a little off, it inspires the viewer to say — what is the real history that this moment of artistic fiction is opening up for me? It is the starting point to inspire further research among viewers. You start these larger conversations.”
“Regeneration” is on view through June 14.
Upcoming events include a Panel & Reception with Regeneration artist Randi Renate and Ocean Scientist Juli Berwald on Saturday, May 2 at 2 p.m., and another panel discussion with Regeneration artist Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) and the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers on Sunday, May 24 at 2 p.m. More details can be found at parrishart.org/exhibitions/regeneration
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