Governors Island -
Summer 2026
Noo Arts House on Governors Island
We are beyond excited to announce that Noo Arts is joining the prestigious Governors Island Arts program for the very first time in 2026, opening a new seasonal art house at 404A Colonels Row on Governors Island. From May through October 2026, our house becomes a vibrant gathering place for art, experimentation, ecology, performance, and community.
Set inside one of the Island’s historic houses, the Noo Arts space will host multidisciplinary exhibitions, artist residencies, performances, music, installations, workshops, and spontaneous encounters throughout the summer season. As a satellite platform for WE ARE NATURE: Transformation Stories (2026), we invite visitors to experience art as a living, evolving dialogue between people, place, and planet.
Open Every Weekend
Our house is open to the public every Saturday and Sunday from 11 AM to 5 PM throughout the season, May – October 2026.
Come explore open studios, meet resident artists, discover works in progress, and spend the day immersed in creative energy on Governors Island.
Monthly Open House Events
Every third Saturday of the month, Noo Arts presents a special Open House celebration from 11 AM to 5 PM, featuring:
Exhibition openings
Live performances
Experimental music and sound art
Artist talks
Workshops
Installations and interdisciplinary happenings
Community and unexpected encounters
These monthly gatherings are designed as immersive cultural afternoons where artists, audiences, and the Island itself come together in an atmosphere of curiosity, exchange, and celebration.
Join Us
Whether you are making the trek to the island for the joy of a ferry ride, a day in nature, or a deep dive into New York’s contemporary art scene, we warmly invite you to step into the world of Noo Arts on Governors Island this summer!
Season runs from May to October 2026.
Open all weekends from 11am to 5pm.
Monthly Open House events every third Saturday, 11am to 5pm.
Contact
For program inquiries, collaborations, artistic research projects, press, artist participation and public programming at re Noo Arts House, please contact Program Director Elena Greta Falcini. Elena is a visual artist and curator whose interdisciplinary practice bridges sculpture, science, and contemporary art, bringing a dynamic and visionary approach to the 2026 Governors Island season. elena.falcini@nooarts.org
Artist in residence at Noo Arts House on Governors Island –
Phase II : August – October
Louis DeVaughn Nelson (DeVo)
Louis DeVaughn Nelson (DeVo) is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, writer, director/choreographer, and dramaturg with over 20 years of experience spanning theatre, dance, film, and new media. He is the recipient of the 2024 NYFA Queens Arts Fund Grant and the 2022 Carlo Annoni International LGBT Playwriting Prize. His work has been recognized globally, including a top prize at the CIANT Festival of Film and New Media Art in Prague and being named "Best New Choreographer" by the Philadelphia City Paper. His work exploits the underbelly of American culture and the turbulence and triumphs of surviving the modern world as a Black Gay Man.
DeVo has collaborated with and presented work at institutions including Domino Park, Center for Performance Research, School of Contemporary Dance & Thought, HAU Berlin, Harlem 9, Dixon Place, The Tank, Flushing Town Hall, The English Theatre Berlin, and Musical Theatre Factory. He is also the founder of Hokum Arts (est. 2006), a project collective dedicated to centering marginalized voices. His writing is published in Obsidian, HowlRound, and anthologies by Smith & Kraus and more.
Website: https://linktr.ee/hokumarts
Sabrina Herbosa Reyes
As a Filipina-American architect, sculptor, and movement artist, my practice engages the relationship between spirit and matter, the interplay of natural and built environments, sacred site and materiality as a vehicle for cultural memory. I create environments that invite connection with natural, ancestral, and cosmic presences, evoking reverence through an attention to how spirit moves across space, body, subconscious, and cosmos—spanning the present, memory, daydream, and imagined futures. This approach is shaped by my diasporic experience and grounded in Filipinx cosmologies such as “kapwa” and “loob,” which convey existence as relational, interconnected, and shared. Materiality, centered within her work, also reflects this. She uses various materials as a way to reflect the people and places that inhabit them, creating connections between transpacific and coastal geographies.
Website: https://sabrinaherbosa.com/
Christina Massey
Christina Massey is a visual artist whose work transforms repurposed consumer materials, most notably discarded craft beer cans, into woven sculptural forms, paintings, and installations. Through processes rooted in cutting, weaving, layering, and accumulation, her practice explores how material transformation can make environmental systems and experiences of uncertainty tangible through abstraction.
Massey has received numerous awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Brooklyn Arts Fund Grants, the FST StudioProject Fund Grant, and a SIP Fellowship at the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Recent solo exhibitions include Uncharted Growth at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Changing the Course of Time at UrbanGlass, and Regenerative Nature at Montefiore Einstein’s Gallery for ARTFul Medicine.
She has participated in residencies including PS122, Art Cake and Governors Island (4Heads). Her work is held in public and private collections including the U.S. Department of State Art Bank Collection, Bank of America, UBS, and the Janet Turner Museum.
Website: https://www.cmasseyart.com/
Katharine Wyatt
A visual artist, floral designer, and farmer working primarily across textiles and painting, Katharine’s practice brings together language and an assembly of varied mediums to explore the intersection of the natural and the material. Her work is rooted in a close observation of seasonal change, organic forms, and the tactile qualities of materials, often drawing from the rhythms of cultivation, growth, and decay. Through textiles, painting, and botanical elements, she creates layered works that move between the intimate and the expansive, considering how nature is translated, remembered, and reimagined through material and language.
Website: https://katharinewyatt.com/
Further guest artists and projects involved:
Jonah King
Honey Fungus, 9-minute interactive VR experience led by a queer mycelial guide (permanent installation season long)
Guided by a queer, sentient mycelial entity, users navigate interactive vignettes where sensory actions shape the environment and AI-generated poetic spores reveal the Earth’s hidden vitality. Rooted in queer ecology and post-humanist thought, the project challenges boundaries between human and non-human life, exploring intimacy, identity, and ecological responsibility. Through VR embodiment, participants shrink through fungal layers, merging with the environment in a radical meditation on relationality, resilience, and stewardship.
Honey Fungus Website: www.honeyfungusvr.com
Jonah King Website: jonahking.com
Michael McLoughlin
Welcome to the Island; Well Done, Everyone, Site-specific, spatial audio artwork
Welcome to the Island; Well Done, Everyone is a site-specific, spatial audio artwork developed in situ. The piece integrates sound, drawing, and social interaction, exploring migration cycles and connectivity across continents. Through a compelling analogy between the journeys of migratory birds and migrant people, the work raises urgent environmental and socio-political questions while inviting visitors to reflect on the interconnectedness of all systems—flora, fauna, and humans alike. Michael’s installation is on view for one month, offering visitors an ongoing experience of interaction, observation, and contemplation.
Website: mmcloughlin.org
Federica Patera, Andrea Sbra Perego, Jacopo Arrighi, Florence Benichou
After Black:
After Black is a multi-part performance combining live-generated video, live music, and dance. It traces the emergence of a new screen environment — one without color. The visual and sonic environments are both created live, unfolding in real time in dialogue with the performer's presence and movement.
The only element that remains outside this environment is a human presence: a three-dimensional figure of whom we perceive only the shadow, and who seeks to enter and interact with this world, gradually coming to believe it can inhabit— and ultimately govern - it.
This impulse becomes so strong that the figure begins to generate other versions of itself, which accumulate across the screen like puppets. It continues to believe in this interaction until no space remains within what appears dimensionless, and the new environment ultimately collapses in on it, ready to begin again alone, as nature does.
The work unfolds as both a condemnation of the human drive for control and a eulogy to life's capacity for regeneration. In this sense, the performance becomes a meditation on self-recreation - physical, spiritual, and intellectual - echoing the artist's own process of continual transformation and rebirth.
Websites: pateraperego.com | yugenpunk.cargo.site
Willow Gatewood
Biosonificaton sound performance
Willow is an environmental scientist, interdisciplinary artist, and storyteller from the US. New media, sound, and performance weave science, gender and social issues with an autobiographical exploration of nature, and it is their passion to inspire reverence for the more-than-human realm. Their research practice explores relational technologies, ecologicizing AI, and living systems as models forconstructed environments and regenerative societies.
Willow's work has been featured in publications including Ambient Receiver | Journal of Creative Ecologies, Grand | The Journal of One Grand Books, and the Rachel Carson Council's website, among othersand they have performed at festivals including Earth Celebrations Ecological City, NYC, Scranton Fringe, Deep Water Literary Festival ('22,'23, and '24), and at the MonViso Institute in Ostana, Italy. As educator-in-residence with Global Writes, they teach new media and sound through the lens of the more-than-human to fourth grade, and independently lead workshops in environmental art and biological imagination.
Notes on Biosonificaton:
Biosonification involves turning biological processes within organisms into music or sound. Electrodes and a midi-data biosonification device convert changes in micro-conductivity in plants and fungi to midi notes, which "play" digital instruments. Willow's interest in biosonification lies both in producing rich sonic landscapes that intrigue and connect viewers to the world around them and as a novel method for researching processes that influence micro-conductivity, including ion transport, water transport, and electrical activity in the body of the organism.
Alan Long
London born artist Alan has lived and worked in Hamburg, Germany since July 2020.
Alan’s artistic journey is characterised by a dynamic exploration of form and medium, where each piece is meticulously crafted to encapsulate its conceptual essence. Through experimentation and adaptation, he seamlessly transitions between mediums, ensuring that his work remains true to its foundational solidity while evolving in captivating newdirections. Confident in his embrace of simplicity, Alan deftly navigates intangible themes such as emotions, feelings, and relationships, imbuing his creations with unexpected depth and resonance. His approachinvolves a delicate balance of reduction and removal, where techniques of subtraction unveil layers of meaning beneath the surface. By eschewing traditional methods of layering and addition, Alan uncoversbeauty and hidden significance, emphasising depth and richness in his work.
His artistic repertoire spans a diverse array of mediums, each offering a unique avenue to explore abstract forms. As boundaries blur between the physical and digital realms, he embraces emerging technologies, incorporating augmented reality to augment and elevate his artistic vision. With an inherent curiosity for the intersection of art and technology, Alan explores the intriguing possibilities of digital expression while remaining rooted in the tangible allure of traditional artistry.
Website: alanlong.art
Nathaniel and Janelle Roots - T.V.C
Tribe and Vibe Collection is a community-centered organization focused on sustainability education, indoor food production, and environmental engagement through hands-on learning experiences.
From now through October, Tribe and Vibe Collection’s Indoor Sustainable Food Growing Program will partner with Noo Arts at Governors Island to transform a rustic kitchen space into an interactive educational hub for indoor gardening. Utilizing hydroponic growing techniques, the space will feature indoor food-growing systems, workshops, and harvesting events, all designed to empower and reconnect people with food and sustainability.
Throughout the season, visitors will have the opportunity to participate in hands-on hydroponic gardening workshops and learn how to grow vegetables, herbs, and flowers indoors. The project blends sustainability, education, art, and community engagement into a living growing space designed to inspire curiosity, creativity, and knowledge.
Join the Tribe @tribeandvibecollection
OPEN CALL
Studio Residency 2026
Submission deadline: March 16, 2026 | All applicants notified by early April
OPEN CALL | WE ARE NATURE
Transformation Stories
Artist Residency 2026 – Noo Arts @ Governors Island, NYC
Opportunity Type: Call for Entry / Open Call
Disciplines: Interdisciplinary/Hybrid, Visual Arts, Performance, Sound, Installation, Social Practice
Description
Noosphere Arts, aka Noo Arts, invites NYC-based artists to apply for a rent-free studio residency as part of WE ARE NATURE: Transformation Stories taking place May-October 2026 at our art house on Governors Island.
WE ARE NATURE is our annual summer series of multidisciplinary experiences at the intersection of arts and eco-awareness. For 2026, we expand from our Brooklyn rooftops to Governors Island: across performances, exhibitions, workshops, and residencies, we explore transformation as an ecological process, urban shift, social change, and artistic evolution.
Selected artists receive a private studio workspace in this unique historical site for three months. The residency is designed as a working studio program supporting research, experimentation, and production, as well as monthly open studios/public presentations.
The program is divided into two phases:
Phase 1 (May–July 2026):
Subtopics: Nature, Material Composites, and Metamorphoses, with an emphasis on artistic research. For this phase, we encourage proposals that investigate ecological processes, hybrid materials, and states of transition, foregrounding experimentation, process-based inquiry, and material exploration as central components of the work.
Phase 2 (August–October 2026):
Subtopics: Rooted in Governors Island’s past as a military base, the theme Monuments, Nature, and Transformation asks what a monument means today and what function it serves in a time shaped by ecological change, shifting power, and evolving collective memory. What do we choose to honor, and what remains as social, cultural, and ecological values shift over time?
Every third Saturday (May 16, June 20, July 17, August 15, September 19, October 17), we host public events, including open studios, performances, installations, lectures, and experimental formats.
Resident Artists Must:
Be NYC-based (during the time of residency)
Actively use their studio
Be present 10am–6pm every third Saturday for public engagement
Please note: Studios have no running water; nearby communal facilities are available. Overnight stays are not permitted.
We expect artists to engage openly and respectfully with the residency community and environment on Governors Island, working mindfully across race, gender, class, and ecology, and fostering a collegial, self-directed, and collaborative spirit grounded in mutual respect.
How to Apply
~To apply for free studio space, submit one PDF (max. 10 MB) including:
Contact data, preferred phase (1 or 2), and optional demographic info (race, gender, age, social background)
Artist Statement (max. 300 words)
Motivation (max. 300 words)
Project Proposal (max. 500 words)
Portfolio (5–10 works)
CV/Artist Bio (max. 2 pages)
~We also welcome proposals from artists seeking to present during public events without studio space. For such presentations, applicants only need to submit 1) Artist Bio with Contact Info, and 2) Project Proposal with links and available dates.
Please name your PDF in the following format:
~ For studio residencies:
STUDIO PHASE [followed by 1 or 2 for your desired period]_ Your Last Name_First Name_WAN26
~ For Open House presentations only:
PRESENTATION_Your Last Name_Your First Name_WAN26