Rockaway!

Rockaway! is a free public arts festival sponsored by the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy (JBRPC) to celebrate the reopening of Fort Tilden and recognize the ongoing recovery of the Rockaway peninsula.

Invited by the Rockaway Artists Alliance (RAA), an association of artists based in and around the Rockaways, and the JBRPC, MoMA PS1 has assisted and supported the conception of this festival. Hosted by the National Park Service (NPS), which owns and manages Fort Tilden, Rockaway! showcases the natural
and historical beauty of Fort Tilden, in which RAA has had a public gallery for the past 19 years. Rockaway! was conceived by MoMA PS1’s Director, Klaus Biesenbach, in close collaboration with Patti Smith. There will be an additional group show in the Rockaway Beach Surf Club, organized in collaboration with the Honolulu Biennial.

The acclaimed international artist, writer, and musician Patti Smith – a Rockaway resident – conceived a large-scale installation, photography exhibition, and site-specific outdoor installation (The Resilience of the Dreamer) specially for Rockaway! Having witnessed personal belongings of Rockaway residents being destroyed and washed away during Sandy, Smith will install a gilded four-post bed with pure white linens in a long-abandoned building that lacks windows and parts of its roof. The bed will wear down physically, yet remain in place, a symbol of courage and resilience.

In the RAA galleries, an exhibition of photographs taken by Smith over the last several years focuses on objects that were dear to their owners: Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers, Robert Graves's hat, Virginia Woolf’s bed, Frida Kahlo’s corset, and William Burroughs's bandana, among others. The adjoining gallery is dedicated to Walt Whitman and includes books of his poetry that visitors are invited to read. Smith has also placed five granite stones engraved with verses from Whitman’s poetry along the trails of Fort Tilden to mark the far ends of this scenic urban park on the ocean.

In addition, the Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas will present a selection of small sculptures made from unfired clay and straw, inspired by the nests of the tiny Argentinian birds known as horneros. Installed in several locations throughout Fort Tilden, these nests invite local birds to inhabit them, offering a
temporary home in this beautiful and fragile environment. These nests – a number of which can be found along the impressive hills and former batteries – also highlight the military history of Fort Tilden, which was built to provide protection against a potential enemy invasion from the ocean.

Thanks to a loan from The Museum of Modern Art, Fort Tilden’s military chapel – which was damaged by Sandy and is now being restored – will showcase one of the highlights from the MoMA collection: The Forty Piece Motet by Janet Cardiff, a spatialized adaptation of a sacred 16th-century motet created by recording each member of a choir individually and giving each voice its own speaker. The final component of the festival is a group exhibition organized in collaboration with the Honolulu Biennial on the grounds of the newly restored Rockaway Beach Surf Club on Beach 87th Street in Rockaway Beach. Following Hurricane Sandy, the Surf Club was the one of the largest relief centers on the peninsula; their organization facilitated and directed over 5,000 volunteers, with major contributions from MoMA PS1. The exhibition celebrates the efforts of the Rockaway community of surfers and artists in rebuilding their neighborhood.

Rockaway!
June 29 – September 1, 2014
Fort Tilden and Rockaway Beach, New York