Serpentine Sibyls: River Songs and Sea Shanties with Brian Dewan

Artist Brian Dewan will perform sea shanties and river songs in dialogue with Serpentine Sibyls, Daniel Rothbart’s floating sculptural installation at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor. For approximately 40 minutes, he will sing traditional maritime ballads, work songs, and river songs, responding to the installation’s evocations of the enduring relationship between people and waterways. Performed in close proximity to the sculptures, Dewan’s program will create a conversation between sound and form, drawing connections between folk traditions, mythic imagery, and the rhythms of life on the water. This performance will be followed and accompanied by Daniel Rothbart’s Mediation | Mediation project.

Artist Brian Dewan will perform sea shanties and river songs in dialogue with Serpentine Sibyls, Daniel Rothbart’s floating sculptural installation at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor. For approximately 40 minutes, he will sing traditional maritime ballads, work songs, and river songs, responding to the installation’s evocations of the enduring relationship between people and waterways. Performed in close proximity to the sculptures, Dewan’s program will create a conversation between sound and form, drawing connections between folk traditions, mythic imagery, and the rhythms of life on the water.  

This performance will be followed and accompanied by Daniel Rothbart’s Mediation | Mediation project.

When: Saturday, August 22, 2026 | 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Where: The Pond (between P3 and P4) (View Directions and Site Map)
Admission: Free (Registration Required) 

About Mediation | Mediation 

Much of Daniel Rothbart’s work focuses on collaborations with international artists who conceive and realize performance work with his sculptural objects. As part of his Meditation | Mediation project, Rothbart invites artists, poets, musicians, composers, and dancers to collaborate with him on short performances that engage with his vessel sculptures. These works probe boundaries of communication, question cultural stereotypes, and explore reflexive and meditative approaches to artmaking. Performances by invited artists will take place out of doors against the backdrop of the Serpentine Sibyls installation.
 

Brian Dewan Bio  

Brian Dewan is a visual artist and musician. His I-CAN-SEE filmstrips have been screened at Pierogi Gallery, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Modern Art Oxford and The Museum of Jurassic Technology. He is represented by Pierogi Gallery in New York City.  

Published Recordings include Brian Dewan Tells the Story, The Operating Theater, Words of Wisdom, Ringing at the Speed of Prayer and The Hunting of the Snark. He created record jacket art for Neutral Milk Hotel, David Byrne, They Might Be Giants, Julian Koster, Johnny Society and The Boston Typewriter Orchestra. He has scored numerous short films and short segments for Sesame Street, Lynch-Frost productions and MTV. He composed music for Kevin Cunningham’s theatre company Three-Legged Dog in New York, then a part of Richard Foreman’s Ontological Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church.  

He also collects and performs little-known folk and popular songs, songs which illuminate a variety of mental worlds of previous generations. He lives in Catskill, NY.  

Daniel Rothbart Bio
Daniel Rothbart holds a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. He is the author of three books. Jewish Metaphysics as Generative Principle in American Art (1994) explores the relationship between Jewish culture and post-war American abstraction. The Story of the Phoenix (1999) examines American cultural identity, Hollywood, and the transmutation of meaning through digital collages inhabited by his sculpture. Seeing Naples: Reports from the Shadow of Vesuvius (2018) is his latest book.  Rothbart lived in Naples as a Fulbright Scholar in the early 1990s, exploring the city’s diverse monuments, neighborhoods, islands, and hinterland. Through friendships and dialogues with Neapolitans, he gained deeper perspective on the colorful history and culture of this ancient port city. Memories commingle with historical discussions and cultural observations that together draw the city into focus. 

In 2015, Rothbart wrote an essay and four commentaries on the theme of water-based performance as the special lead section of PAJ 111, published by MIT Press. More Fugitive Than Light: Poems of Rome, Venice, Paris, 2016-2017 (2024) is a book of poems by Richard Milazzo in dialogue with collages by Daniel Rothbart. 

Rothbart’s studio projects include RamleAnthropocene, the Pool of the Arches / Center for Contemporary Art Ramle CACR, Ramle, Israel; Water Clocks, Hudson River / The Hudson Eye, Hudson, New York; Flotilla, Oakdale Lake, Hudson, New York; Inscrutable Theologies, Saint Elisabeth Church / KUNSTWECHSEL, Aachen, Germany; STREAMING II (with Milica Lapčević), The Frank Institute @ CR10, Linlithgo, New York; The Rumsey Street Project, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Air de Venise, Venice, Italy; and WATERLINES, Galerie Depardieu, Nice, France. He has exhibited in Ventisette artisti e una rivista, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy; Citydrift, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, New York; But I’m an American, Belgrade Cultural Centre, Belgrade, Serbia; End of Language: Wittgenstein Reimagined, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade MoCAB, Belgrade, Serbia; and Meditation | Mediation, Life is Art Foundation, New Orleans, Louisiana. Rothbart has also exhibited at Andrea Meislin Gallery, Exit Art, WhiteBox Contemporary Art Center, and the LAB Gallery in New York City. Other exhibitions include the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York, and the Artists’ Residence Gallery, Herzliya, Israel. His work can be found in public and private collections, including the Artist’s Book Collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Rothbart was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in Naples, Italy, a New York State Council on the Arts grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, along with residencies at the Artists’ Residence Herzliya, Herzliya, Israel in 2023 and La Napoule Art Foundation, Mandelieu-la-Napoule, France in 2002.  His work is the subject of a monograph by Enrico Pedrini published in 2010 by Ulisse e Calipso of Naples, Italy. 

Snug Harbor visual arts programming is made possible through generous support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation.