Artist Jenny Kendler On Ecology, Oysters and Mounting a Show on Governors Island

A couple of weeks ago artist Jenny Kendler opened “Other of Pearl,” a site-specific public art exhibition at Fort Jay on New York’s Governors Island. The show, which is presented by Governors Island Arts and the Natural Resources Defense Council, uses a variety of creative media to explore our planet’s changing climate. It’s the perfect exhibition to visit with the kids during the next heatwave, and Observer recently caught up with Kendler to hear about this ambitious presentation.

How did this show come about? What made you start thinking about oysters?

I was invited by the Governors Island curatorial team to begin contemplating what a commission on the island would look like back in early 2021, so the exhibition has been in development for quite some time.

Regarding oysters, beach combing, shell collecting and appreciating the diverse forms of marine shellfish in general has been a lifelong passion. The central project of “Other of Pearl,” which takes the form of Greco-Roman sculptures grown inside of oysters, is an idea that probably germinated eight or nine years ago. I think it may have begun with a very rare abalone pearl which sat in a shell on a shelf in my California grandmother’s bathroom. The project sat in the back of my mind… I had no idea how to accomplish this somewhat crazy idea… but when I realized the Billion Oyster Project would be a neighbor to whatever exhibition we choose to produce, I knew that I was going to try to figure it out.

It took two years to know it would work, and during that time I conceived of what seems to me to be the project’s logical conclusion: that these precious artworks would be auctioned after the exhibition and the funds “returned to the bay” as a gesture of both wealth redistribution and ecological restoration—creating a new oyster reef with Billion Oyster Project.

Why are oysters so crucial to the ecology of New York?

New York was once the center of the world’s largest oyster population, which contained upwards of one trillion individuals. These bivalves agglomerated into huge reefs and provided tremendous benefits to the ecosystem—from supporting biodiversity and clean water to feeding first the indigenous Lenape and then white settlers, rich to poor.

The over-harvesting, chemical pollution and dredging of beds destroyed the majority of the estuary’s oyster reefs and has left the city much more vulnerable to flooding—as was seen during Hurricane Sandy. Today, efforts to restore the oysters, such as those by project contributor Billion Oyster Project, aim to re-engage these ecosystem benefits as well as to provide important climate resilience to the city.

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What is your research process like?

I am fortunate enough to have access to the scientific team at NRDC, where I have been artist-in-residence since 2014. The project’s scope and ambition to encompass environmental issues from the human and ecological health aspects of chemical pollution to marine mammal protection to climate change were informed by these early conversations. I also read voraciously, following an idea that interests me, rhizomatically, from source to source. And there’s no substitute for direct observation. I am a passionate naturalist, constantly in awe of the diversity and complexity I find in the natural world.

In terms of materials, this show uses oysters, fossilized whale earbones, whale songs, human tears and whale oil. Were any of these harder to work with than others?

They all presented their own unique challenges, to be sure! As an artist who is deeply concerned with materiality, aesthetic and historical specificity and material histories, I often work with highly unusual materials. The earbones are provided by divers I networked with via the internet, who now contact me when they have a new set of fossils. The antique whale oils took, probably, the full three years to source, through eBay and online auction houses. You can draw your own conclusions about the tears, but as we all know, this is a time of many great sadnesses on our planet. The oysters and the whale recordings were provided by our project contributors, Billion Oyster Project and David Gruber of Project CETI respectively. Rarefied “materials” in themselves, I am deeply grateful to be trusted to work with natural objects and sounds with such rich histories, sources and connotations.

Governor’s Island is a unique place to stage an art show. What are the advantages and disadvantages of working there?

The main disadvantage is also part of what makes it such a special place to show work, which is obviously that it is an island. I hope to soon stop having stress dreams about the traffic backups and getting our van onto the ferry on time each morning. But this is also why this place can provide such a profound experience for visitors. They come to the island hoping to have an adventure, something apart from daily life in the city. We worked hard to really double down on this proposition.

The magazine space under Fort Jay has been transformed with carefully choreographed lighting by our install team from Powerhouse Arts into a magical space for exploration. Here visitors will encounter interactive sound works where they can speak to the whales, bells rung with fossil whale ear bones that I made with my collaborator Andrew Bearnot and a series of intimate treasures to be somatically absorbed. To be able to work in a space and on this island with its palimpsestic history definitely enriched the experience of conceiving and exhibiting the work in immeasurable ways.

Your work is political, but to me feels more obliquely so than a lot of other work that’s being shown today. What’s your attitude about the intermingling of art and politics?

My work as an artist is very political—I’m not shy about that. For example, I am a founding member of Artists Commit, an artist-led group working to raise climate consciousness within the art world. We support the creation of Climate Impact Reports that help artists and institutions understand their impact on the planet and people—I’ll be creating one for this show—and I definitely see this work as an extension of my artistic practice. I believe artists are part of the engine that creates culture—and it is ultimately our culture, and the values we derive from it, that give rise to everything from our government to our economic structures. Art can be important because it can help us approach complex or divisive issues in new ways. I think good political art gets under one’s skin, rather than hitting one upside the head.

What do you hope people get out of your show?

I hope that visitors to the show will have an embodied and emotional experience of the work—and the space itself, which is very mysterious. I’d like them to read the texts that give the conceptual and ecological frameworks for the seven projects and help tell the narrative of the extractive origins of the climate crisis in a new way. Ultimately, I aim to re-enchant and re-awaken people’s relationship with the natural world and with the more-than-humans with whom we share this biodiverse planet.