Constellation's 10 year Anniversary

Reflecting on my first large scale public project

Photo by Rob Penner

It’s Constellation’s 10 year anniversary!

I can’t believe it…what a leap of faith that project was! Constellation was my first large-scale intervention and it took 3 1/2 years of against all odds perseverance and dedication to be brought to fruition, with the support of an incredible team of organizations and collaborators and contributors. I am grateful to them all to this day.

If you experienced Constellation, I invite you to post a comment and share your memories below. I’d love to hear from you!

Constellation was installed around the ruins of Bannerman’s Castle on Pollepel Island in the section of the Muhheakantuck/Hudson River that passes through the Hudson Highlands State Park. Muhheakantuck is the river’s Lenape name, “river that flows both ways”.

As the sun went down every evening from June 2015 to October 2017, starry lights emerged one by one with the stars of the night sky, creating a new constellation connecting past and present, light and dark, heaven and earth. Constellation references a belief of the Lenape, the indigenous people of this area, of Opi Temakan, the “White Road” or “Milky Way” connecting our world with the spirit world.

There were 17 stars in Constellation, each a solar powered LED installed on the top of a metal pole ranging in height from 40 to 80 feet, giving the appearance of the stars floating seamlessly in the night sky. During the day, the vertical rhythm of poles connected the island to the sky, reflecting and disappearing, in response to the ambient light.

Constellation had many varied vantage points including unprecedented evening boat and kayak tours, commuter trains, hiking trails, and roads on both sides of the river. Special programming and tours were offered in collaboration with Lenape Center, whose mission is continuing Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland through community, culture, and the arts. Constellation offered a more complete history and a longer view than that which was being widely presented and initiated collaborations within the community that continue today. It was widely celebrated and brought many thousands of new visitors to the site, many of whom had never been on a boat in the Hudson River before. It offered new perspectives and new connections in celebrating the enduring life force of the Hudson River. I was honored to collaborate with many respected environmental organizations throughout the project including New York State Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation, Scenic Hudson, Riverkeeper, Hudson Highlands Land Trust, Audubon, The Hudson River Sloop Clearwater and Lenape Center and others Importantly, significant alliances formed via Constellation and continue to this day.

One of the memorable and unexpected honors experienced with this work was the complete hush that fell over the entire audience as the stars “lit” on the public boat tours each and every time. A sacred shared space of experiencing the work together opened up. The project actively engaged the waters, the stars, the planets, the moon, the landscape and the weather as collaborators, and the experience was distinctly different each evening.

Constellation remains one of my proudest accomplishments. This was a highly ambitious work considering that it was my first public art work and it was non-profit, created independently (without institutional support). I oversaw all of the production and programming, raised the funding (predominantly through local crowd-sourcing, local family foundation grants, in-kind donations and revenue from Constellation tours organized in collaboration with The Bannerman Castle Trust). I was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Art Works Grant for Constellation in 2015.

Read the wonderful New York Times feature by Ted Loos here.

Catching someone on the subway reading about Constellation on the front page of The Arts section of the New York Times.

Here is a short video that tells the story of Constellation featuring the voices of some of my wonderful collaborators:

An audio guide and a publication contain contributions from Lenape Center’s Joe Baker and Hadrien Coumans, The New York Times Magazine staff writer Sam Anderson, 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry and 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019, Tracy K. Smith, the fifth inaugural poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco, poet and artist Edwin Torres, and New Directions editor and poet Jeffrey Yang. The Constellation book was designed in collaboration with William van Roden. The project’s dedicated website is here.

Constellation’s book cover

A very early rendering that I made to map the original structure with the one that was current at the time. Constellation connected past and present in this mapping.

A page from my sketchbook from 2013.

Sam Anderson, Thom Johnson and I walking around at low tide exploring the traces left under water.

My husband, Mike, took these photos of our family on February 22, 2014 when the river froze so completely that it allowed us to walk all the way to the island.

Thank you for being here with me. Please share your Constellation memories in a comment in celebration of this anniversary!

With love for the waters and the stars,

MM