Wallkill Futures
Wallkill Futures is a series of participatory, experiential public art projects with and for communities along the 88-mile-long Wallkill River in New York’s Hudson Valley. As climate change sparks investment vehicles that extract value based on future scarcity or availability of water, this project is a platform for artist experiments in mobilizing social investment in water futures.
The Wallkill River crosses multiple administrative boundaries and geologies to eventually spill into the Hudson River. It runs past towns, suburbs, farms, infrastructures, and undeveloped land. Its water is used for irrigation, recreation, and habitat. This is not the “charismatic megalandscape” of rivers — that honor goes to the nearby Hudson, or the Colorado, or the Mississippi. It’s a workaday river, one like those that exist all over the US — somewhat loved, mostly disregarded, voiceless. But as the warming planet impacts these “ordinary” rivers, their potential role in climate adaptation multiplies and ripples outward, and intervention becomes critical.
Wallkill Futures is initiated and directed by Lize Mogel in collaboration with artists Matthew Friday, sTo Len, FICTILIS, and Nancy Nowacek, and with partners Unison Arts, the Hudson River Watershed Alliance, the Wallkill River Watershed Alliance, and others. The project is funded by a 2024 Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Wallkill River encounters, events, and workshops will happen between May and August, 2026. An exhibition at Unison Arts in New Paltz, NY opens July 17th and runs through August 22.
UPCOMING EVENTS
UPCOMING EVENTS
Floating Treatment Wetland Workshop
Saturday, May 23rd - 12:00 pm
@Nyquist-Harcourt Wildlife Sanctuary
Dive into the world of floating wetlands and learn how to boost water health with this fun, hands-on activity!
Floating Treatment Wetlands are small raft-like buoyant structures used for mitigating nutrient and chemical pollution in waterways through root and microbial uptake, mitigating algae and harmful bacteria, turning nutrients to usable and sequestrable biomass, as well as providing wildlife habitat and a self-watering growing medium for native sedges, willow, and other species for use in riparian restoration planting.
Power Objects & Impossible Demands Workshop
Saturday, June 13th - 1:00 to 2:30 pm
@Unison Arts
Inspired by ancient ritual and contemporary political unrest, this workshop invites participants to sculpt small clay objects representing an impossible need or a desire for transformative change in kinship with the more-than-human world.
Each sculpture will be molded to create a “power object.”
On July 18, participants may cast a power object into the Wallkill River as a gesture of impossible demand and collective intention—joining the river’s flow to the Rondout, the Hudson, the Atlantic, and beyond.
No prior experience is needed—only a deep desire for change.
Participation in the July 18 event is optional. Sculptures will be available to take home after July 17.
Artist Blurbs
Matthew Friday: Future Waters Commons reimagines rivers as shared ecological commons and sites of collective learning. Using a repurposed boat as a floating research platform and classroom, the project brings students, artists, educators, and community members into direct engagement with the Wallkill river through storytelling, creative practice, and ecological exploration. The boat will serve as a centerpiece for public engagement during the New Paltz Regatta and community events with the Midtown Kingston Arts District. The project responds to increasing urbanization, pollution, and climate instability by reconnecting communities with the rivers that shape their futures through environmental stewardship and collective action. Matthew’s website.
Nancy Nowacek: Inspired by ancient practices and contemporary political discord, Power Objects and Impossible Demands invites participants to sculpt small objects in clay that symbolize a need that seems unmeetable and/or a desire for power to make change in kinship with the more-than-human world. Nancy’s website.
sTo Len: sTo Len has been collecting impressions of the Wallkill River through an embodied research approach that has included walks, paddles, audio field recordings, photographs, drawings, and conversations. Len recently collaborated with Riverkeeper and Climate Smart Gardiner on their 15th Annual Clean Up where participants picked up garbage and helped choose special trash items for sTo that they deemed still had “art potential.” Len will be using these objects for a series of prints and sculptures that give visibility to the trash that winds up in our parks and on our coastlines while celebrating the work of community-led actions that protect the local watershed. sTo’s website.
FICTILIS: Floating Treatments is a series of experiments in community water stewardship that propose novel designs for “floating treatment wetlands”– rafts with plants that help clean water - using sustainable and abundant biomaterials. Through a series of design/build workshops with local residents, farmers, and other river users, followed by installation and monitoring at several sites near the Wallkill River, the project invites inhabitants of this diverse watershed to combine innovative bioengineering techniques with ancient Meso-American methods, and to see the river as a growing medium for the re-cultivation of local aquacultural tradition. FICTILIS’s website.
Lize Mogel: What does the social, environmental, and political ecology of the Wallkill River look like 50 years from now, 100 years from now, 1000 years from now, after climate change? The project invites people to create fantastic scenarios about the future of Wallkill River, and to make short videos enacting those speculative futures in, on, and around the river. Lize’s website.
Selected videos will be shown during the exhibition and in a special screening on August 22. You can make a video on your own, or join a workshop between June and August.
Unison’s programming is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
