Bowsprite’s People Movers and More

Care for a shot of Melville?  ““Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries–stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

Paraphrase that a bit, take liberties,  and you might come up with:  “When you gallivant, chances are you’ll end up in the water.”  If Melville were around the sixth boro these days, he might add something about the likelihood of seeing folks with digital cameras and–if among those gallivants there’s a bowsprite–inks/charcoal pencils too.

The whale lives

here, 100 miles plus east of the sixth boro’s easternmost reaches and if you go

up these stairs marked by a rendering of the orange ferry John F. Kennedy, you’ll

see this . . . 38 pieces of bowsprit’s art on display.

The exhibit called “Working Girls of New York Harbor” is up now til the end of May.

And if you feel a thirst that water fails to quench, the exhibit is located one floor above stainless steel vats filled with thousands of gallons of fermenting, living brews.

Here’s the front of the exhibit postcard, with evidence that bowsprite has turned her gaze and inked what she saw in increasingly distant waters.

Oh . .  and the opening’s tonight in Greenport.  Gotta run.   More Greenport soon.

All photos here by Will Van Dorp.