Mussel Memory

MUSSEL MEMORY Continues Priscilla Stadler's Creative Exploration of Newtown Creek.

OPENING RECEPTION: April 24, 6 - 9 pm, dance performance at 7:30 pm
ON VIEW: April 24 - May 21, 2026, gallery open 12 pm - 9 pm daily

For MUSSEL MEMORY, her solo exhibition at AlterWork Studios, Priscilla Stadler continues to investigate Newtown Creek, a contaminated river running between Queens and Brooklyn. Stadler focuses on the native mussels returning to the Creek after nearly 200 years of dumping from toxic industrial processes like copper smelting and petroleum processing.

The Creek runs next to Long Island City, Queens, the neighborhood where Stadler has worked for over 20 years, inspiring several bodies of her work. Since 2022, Stadler has used artmaking to investigate the Creek’s history and ecosystems for her SLUDGE project. She draws on multiple forms of research: reading books and articles, accompanying creek researchers in the field, and creatively responding across a variety of media.

SLUDGE includes works that use the Creek's water and trace amounts of sediment to paint and print with, describing history through water sampling, and embroidering creek-themed imagery onto lab coats. With this iteration, she integrates crafting as another facet of engaging creek-related materials.

Mussels are a foundation species at the Creek, meaning they filter NYC sewage, host other organisms on their shells, and have adapted to a contaminated environment and hard shorelines. In the 1920s, the Creek's Mussel Island was dredged, deemed an inconvenience to industrial ship traffic. Stadler calls it a "ghost island." The MUSSEL MEMORY exhibition is an ode to the disappeared island and a tribute to a current multispecies effort of tenacity, resilience, and return to the Creek.

Stadler believes Creek-related community engagement is especially pressing as the EPA dismantles federal regulations designed to control and remediate contaminated water, air, and soil. She offered five community "Crafting the Creek Learnshops", informal crafting events where dozens of participants learned about the Creek, made stenciled mussel prints, and contributed to a collaborative banner to be displayed at the MUSSEL MEMORY exhibition.

Echoing the interdependence of species such as mussels and their symbiotic partners cordgrass, who together can literally shape the creek through sedimentary deposits, Stadler collaborates with Chris Bisram, a water-focused dancer and choreographer whose piece Mussels in Motion, will be performed by Bisram's company Shakun Davi at the exhibition’s opening.

Email/Instagram/Web: priscillastudio@gmail.com, IG:@atreeilove, www.priscillastadler.com/mussel-memory