The Oyster
Public Art
The Oyster
A monumental public sculptural installation reflecting on the parallel erasures of Indigenous lifeways and oyster ecologies in the harbor, while pointing toward the possibility of their restoration and return. The Oyster is designed as an amphitheater—inviting public assembly at the water’s edge as both sculptural environment and gathering space.
When
July 18 – November 30, 2026
Where
Governors Island
Alan Michelson
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About the artist
Rendering of The Oyster by Alan Michelson.
More Art announces the opening of The Oyster, a monumental outdoor sculptural installation by acclaimed Mohawk artist Alan Michelson (Six Nations of the Grand River), on view on Governors Island from July 18 through November 30, 2026.
The Oyster is presented as part of Reframing 1776: Land, Water, and the Work of Repair, More Art’s 2026 program marking the U.S. Semiquincentennial. The initiative brings together three commissions that respond to the nation’s 250th anniversary through projects grounded in Indigenous perspectives and environmental histories. Developed in partnership with the Billion Oyster Project, Michelson’s installation draws on pre-colonial Lenape oyster middens and shell rings—vast accumulations that reflect long histories of habitation and stewardship in the region. Using salvaged shells and steel mesh gabions, the artist builds a structure that operates simultaneously as habitat, monument, and gathering place.
Taking place on the western shore of Governors Island, facing New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty, The Oyster is designed as an amphitheater—inviting public assembly at the water’s edge as both sculptural environment and gathering space. The installation reflects on the parallel erasures of Indigenous lifeways and oyster ecologies in the harbor, while pointing toward the possibility of their restoration and return.
Its form draws from the logic of reef restoration—reimagined here as both monument and memorial. Visitors encounter a landscape shaped by long histories of Indigenous knowledge and ecological interdependence and are invited to consider what restoration—of land, water, and relationships—might look like in the years ahead.
Encircling the sculpture, a large-scale text installation featuring reflections on oyster ecology gathered from the Governors Island community is painted directly onto the ground in purple and white, referencing wampum—the shell beads historically used by the Lenape for exchange, diplomacy, and record-keeping.
Throughout its presentation, The Oyster serves as a platform for public programming, including boat tours, walking performances, conversations, and commissioned works that activate the installation as a site for collective engagement.
The installation is co-presented with Governors Island Arts and Billion Oyster Project.
Click here to read the press release.
Alan Michelson
Alan Michelson is an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, lecturer and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River.
For over twenty-five years, he has been a leading practitioner of a socially engaged, critically aware, site-specific art grounded in local context and informed by the retrieval of repressed histories. Sourcing from both indigenous and western culture, he works in a varied range of media and materials, among them painting, sculpture, photography, sound, video, glass, and stone.
He is the recipient of several awards, including an NEA Visual Artists Fellowship, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship, and the GSA Design Award, Citation in Art. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Canada, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
His practice includes public art, and Mantle, his large-scale monument honoring Virginia’s Indian nations, was recently dedicated on Capitol Square in Richmond. Michelson is co-founder and co-curator, with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, of the Indigenous New York Series.
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Partners
Located on the western shore of Governors Island, the site offers an unobstructed view of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty. This vantage point that reframes familiar national symbols through the lens of Indigenous presence and ecological loss. Michelson’s sculpture bridges pre-colonial history and contemporary environmental practice, positioning the island itself as a site of both reckoning and possibility.
Using the building blocks of oyster habitat restoration, including salvaged shells and gabions of steel mesh, Michelson transforms Governors Island into a meeting ground between Indigenous knowledge, environmental justice, and collective action.
Surrounding the sculpture, a large-scale textual installation featuring reflections on oyster ecology sourced from the Governors Island community is painted directly onto the ground in purple and white, the colors of wampum, the shell beads long used by the Lenape as a medium of exchange, diplomacy, and memory.
Throughout the year, The Oyster will serve as a living stage for public programming, including boat tours, walking performances, conversations with leading thinkers in the field of more-than-human rights, and curated and commissioned performances that activate the sculpture as a gathering place.
About Governors Island Arts
Governors Island Arts, the public arts and cultural program presented by the Trust for Governors Island, creates transformative encounters with art for all New Yorkers, inviting artists and researchers to engage with the issues of our time in the context of the Island’s layered histories, environments, and architecture. Governors Island Arts achieves this mission through temporary and long-term public art installations and exhibitions, an annual Organizations in Residence program in the Island’s historic houses, and the curated multidisciplinary INTERVENTIONS performance series. Learn more at www.govisland.org/arts.
About The Billion Oyster Project
The Billion Oyster Project is a New York City-based nonprofit organization with the goal of engaging one million people in the effort to restore one billion oysters to New York Harbor by 2035. Learn more at www.billionoysterproject.org