Taking Place

Earth's Eye, 1990. Cast concrete, 40 pieces, each 6 x 22 x 14 inches. Photo: Peter Loppacher. ">

Most events are fleeting and temporary, but not so are the places where they occur and leave their traces, if only in memory. As a child in the sixties touring Boston’s historical sites, that which left the deepest impression was neither a statue nor a church, but a circle of cobblestones, maybe a dozen feet in diameter, set on a traffic island at a busy downtown intersection. A small plaque read: THE BOSTON MASSACRE TOOK PLACE HERE 5 MARCH 1770. The stones were laid in a wheel-like pattern radiating from a center stone engraved with a star. Standing atop them, the mute power of the monument struck me, and I reeled at the thought of people being shot and killed there nearly two centuries before. For relief I tried to picture the spot before Boston was established, before the English and their muskets, just a peaceful patch of woodland.

Such thoughts were my first real exercise in what eventually evolved into my artistic practice. All that had been taken and taken place at that place—its taking from the Massachusettsans by the English, its passage from clearing to cobblestoned street, to the site of a massacre that stoked a revolution, to modern traffic island—constituted the place, not simply what was visible at surface level. Absent was any reference to the racial narrative of Boston’s Puritan founders, an import even more deadly than the diseases carried over in their ships, a narrative that would ultimately rationalize and justify the taking of a continent and the devastation of its Indigenous peoples.

I am Mohawk, or in our language, Kanienkehaka, People of the Place of Flint, one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee, People of the Longhouse, whose territory spanned most of present-day New York state. Embedded in our name is the concept of territory as a communally built and maintained house, as a home land. In waves of warfare and double-dealing, our places were taken from us. But our deep connections to the land transcend such claims. Place is not an abstraction to us, it is fundamental to our identity, ontology, and traditional practices. As clan members—Wolf, Bear, or Turtle—we identify not only with place, but with our non-human relations, some of whom were eradicated from our places along with us. In our culture, being of the land comes with obligations to it and to all of the life it supports.

My first solo site-specific work was Earth’s Eye (1990), an outdoor sculptural installation in a Lower Manhattan park on the former site of the Collect, a pond that fell victim to colonial industry. Once the locus of fresh water, fishing, and feasting by the Lenape, as evidenced by a monumental shell midden on its banks, the deep, spring-fed pond and its marshes supported numerous species of plant and animal life. But after tanneries breweries, and slaughterhouses blighted its banks and poisoned the pond with their foul-smelling waste, the pond was drained and filled in the early nineteenth century.

I had access to a pond on Staten Island, and started taking plaster casts of its muddy shoreline, capturing the tracks of a heron, but also broken glass and other trash. I later cast objects related to the pond’s history, like oyster shells, reeds, deer tracks, corn, antique ice skates, and an anchor. From these molds I cast forty concrete wedges and installed them in the park in the shape of the pond as a memorial.

Invited to create a Queens-focused work for a Queens Museum exhibition in 2001, I decided to explore the shoreline of Newtown Creek, the stream dividing the borough from Brooklyn. Sailing up it in a boat I shot video of its entire three-and-half mile shoreline to create a latter-day moving panorama.

The title of the resulting work, Mespat, (meaning “at the bad water place”) is the Indigenous name of the area and probably refers to its brackishness. In retrospect the word seems prophetic, as the creek may now be the most polluted waterway in the world. Like the Collect, its teeming waters and marshes were sacrificed to industry. After the Civil War, the first modern oil refineries located on its banks, along with other polluting factories, whose waste destroyed the creek and its fresh water tributaries. A multimillion-gallon underground oil spill has leaked into the creek and surrounding soil for decades, and the EPA designated the creek a Superfund Site in 2010.

Mine was an exploration in reverse, an Indigenous inventory of Mespat centuries after its violent seizure by the settlers of Queens. The idea to project on a feather screen stemmed from a dream I had of a white bird, which later materialized in the form of a great egret I surprised while scouting the creek and which appears in the video. Its presence signaled the persistence of Indigenous life, including the fish and crabs which were its diet.

For my 2019 solo exhibition at the Whitney, Wolf Nation, I produced, with artist Steven Fragale, a site-specific augmented reality piece for the lobby entitled Sapponckanikan (Tobacco Field). Accessible on visitors’ smart devices through a free-downloadable app, the work commemorated the Lenape encampment of that name once located nearby. In 1633, New Netherland Governor Wouter Van Twiller established a tobacco plantation there, after violently displacing the Lenape and grabbing their land. Place is fraught when you’re Indigenous, as you face loss at every turn.

For MoMA PS1’s Greater New York 2021 exhibition, I sailed local waterways that were once some of the richest oyster grounds in the world, shot panoramic footage of their shorelines, and projected it onto a thirty-foot-long midden of oyster shells borrowed from the Billion Oyster Project. Indigenous shell middens like the one at Collect Pond once dotted the landscape up and down the east coast, until extracted for shoreline development. Much more than mere trash piles, some contained burials and others were ceremonial structures. They are and were testament not only to the natural bounty of the area, but to the sound ecological practices of Indigenous communities over millennia. A midden unearthed in Dobbs Ferry in 1998 was dated to 6950 BCE. Middens and mounds of the eastern woodlands are the great earthworks of America.

In contrast, land art, like colonization, was a jailbreak culminating in a land heist: for land-hungry colonists, from the confines of the mother country; for the early land artists from the confines of the gallery and studio. In both cases, the acts of liberation and appropriation rested on a foundation of false entitlement to Indigenous land. Like the colonists who preceded them, the land artists expanded and projected onto land without prior right or reference. To both, Turtle Island was terra nullius, “no one’s land,” an empty plot or open-air studio, which it is not. Like settlers, the artists were drawn to land whose physical properties served their purposes, to farm or to mine, or to site colossal sculpture. Compared with Indigenous mounds, communally constructed earthen forms grounded in place knowledge and attuned to cosmic cycles, land art, with its conceits, seems insubstantial despite its massive scale. Its obvious but mostly unacknowledged debt to Indigenous earthworks remains outstanding to this day. Created at a time—the sixties and early seventies—of political upheaval and protest, its stance is surprisingly apolitical and ahistorical. Compelling as it may be, land art elides the violent human history which empowered its artists to manipulate the land in their manner, art with site absent memory.