6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Orien McNeill, Artist Who Made Mischief on the Water, Dies at 46
Orien McNeill, an artist and impresario of New York City's DIY and participatory art community, whose work was experiential, theatrical and ephemeral and took place mostly on the water — think 'Burning Man, but with the possibility of drowning,' as one friend put it — died on May 15 at his home, a 52-foot-long ferryboat docked on a Brooklyn creek. He was 46.
His mother, Val Van Cleve, confirmed his death, which was not widely reported at the time. No cause was given.
Mr. McNeill was an early pioneer of New York's fetid waterways. He was among the first artists to homestead on the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site in Brooklyn, which he did two decades ago in a 1953 Chris-Craft boat that he christened the Meth Lab. (It was not a meth lab.)
Soon, a cohort of street artists and Dumpster-diving freegans — the anti-consumerist foragers of the late aughts — who might otherwise have been squatting in Brooklyn warehouses, were drawn to the same lawless territory, a last frontier and haven in the ever-gentrifying New York City boroughs. They made art from scavenged materials and held events that harked back to the Happenings of their 1960s predecessors, although the events were intended for no audience but themselves.
No critics were summoned, and not much was documented. Mr. McNeill was their pied piper, guru and pirate prankster, who hatched extravagant, loosely organized adventures involving costumes, flotillas of handmade rafts and, once, a pop-up bar on a sinking tugboat.
When Caledonia Curry, otherwise known as the artist Swoon, began to conceptualize 'Swimming Cities' — winsome floating contraptions built from salvaged materials that she launched on the Hudson River in 2008 — Mr. McNeill, her classmate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, was an inspiration, project architect and co-pilot.
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