Opening with the artist: Saturday Nov. 8, 2-7pm
Artist talk: 6pm, followed by reception
Visiting hours: Saturdays, 2-7pm, or by appointment
Netting, bottles, rope, and wrappers: presenting Undertow, Marie Lorenz’s first Chicago solo exhibition, a smorgasbord of printed debris and shoreline discoveries.
For twenty years, Marie Lorenz has traced New York Harbor’s tidal patterns, serving as captain, host, and documenter in her trusted watercraft—a hand-built rowboat taxi. The voyages serve as a wellspring for artmaking and community building, constituting her ongoing project Tide and Current Taxi.
Aligning departures with strong tidal currents, Lorenz has guided over two hundred passengers on excursions through the harbor. Records of these journeys are kept through printmaking, map charts, sculpture, video, and an ongoing archival weblog.
“When asked what has changed most in my twenty years of working on the water, I often answer that the harbor is much cleaner than when I started. It’s not uncommon in the past few years to see dolphins, seals, and even whales in the New York Harbor. This is the legacy of the 1972 Clean Water Act, proof that decades of sustained effort can reverse the damage of industrial pollution. I worry that we are now at another turning point, and the delicate progress might be slipping back beneath the surface. The exhibition title, Undertow, is about that current.”
Lorenz’s dedication to observing and sharing the waterways of her home is an appeal for communities to consider personal stakes in and responsibility to the health and happenings of our home environments.
Artist Bio
Marie Lorenz is a Brooklyn-based multi-media artist. Since 2002, Lorenz has been traveling various urban waterways in boats she designs and builds, collecting the tidal debris that accumulates in the harbor. From these floating vantage points, the artist cultivates new perspectives of otherwise familiar landscapes. Lorenz makes videos and installations that document and respond to the debris and discarded objects she encounters. Through printing, casting, or videotaping, Lorenz attempts “to un-know the metropolis by continually exploring it.” The resulting works act as a visual equivalent of beach-combing and tell the story of the artist’s explorations in “collaboration” with the tide, as well as the connections she forges with her passengers. Lorenz received the American Academy in Rome fellowship and a Creative Capital and National Endowment for the Arts award. She has a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. from Yale University. Lorenz currently serves as an Associate Professor at the Cooper Union.
Curator Bio
Chava Krivchenia is a curator and writer, and serves as the Assistant Curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI). With a professional and academic background in biology and art history, her research and curatorial practices stem from the fields of ecology, discard studies, material studies, and natural histories. She prioritizes working with contemporary artists to support the sharing of new and experimental bodies of work, focusing on assemblage, site-specific, environmental, and installation art. She has curated the exhibitions Ashwini Bhat: Reverberating Self (2025); Willie Cole: Home Assembly (2024); Bea Fremderman: Weeds Compared to Flowers (2023); Patricia Piccinini: encounters of another plot (2023); among others. Krivchenia earned her MA in Contemporary and Modern Art History from the School of the Art Institute Chicago (2020).