Melissa McGill

In the Waves

Rough Point, Newport

August 2021

In the Waves, by artist Melissa McGill, was a series of live free public art performances presented at Rough Point in Newport, RI, in August 2021. McGill invited members of the community to activate the landscape and evoke the urgency of rising sea levels and a rapidly changing environment. The ensemble of this movement-based public artwork created a shared meaningful experience about environmental themes. (Melanie George producer and dramaturg / Davalois Fearon choreographer).

The public exhibition of McGill’s performance was organized by Art&Newport in collaboration with Newport Restoration Foundation, and furthers their efforts to raise awareness of the threat posed by sea level rise to cultural heritage. The performance ignited a conversation about the issues of climate change and the subsequent rising tides within the Newport community and beyond, bringing notice to one of the most pressing global issues of our time.

Melissa McGill is an interdisciplinary artist who creates large-scale, site-specific art projects and works in a variety of media, including photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, sound, light, and immersive installation. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, she is most recently known for her work, Red Regatta. The public art project debuted in Venice, Italy, in May 2019 and filled the city’s waterways with 52 traditional vela al terzo sailboats, hoisted with hand-painted red sails. 

McGill’s In the Waves was sited specifically for the large open landscape between the ocean and the built environment, as we imagine the rising sea connecting the two. The project evokes this urgency due to the rapidly changing climate. McGill painted 50 wave paintings, ranging from 25’-45’over the course of two weeks in a temporary studio on site where she was able to observe the ocean each day as well as the changes in light and weather. The paintings were fashioned on a textile made of ocean-recycled-trash, donated to the artist by Parley for the Oceans, an environmental conservation organization dedicated to protecting the oceans. The paintings were then activated by an ensemble of performances from August 18-28th 2021.

A preservation organization at its core, Newport Restoration Foundation also developed the climate change initiative Keeping History Above Water to address the challenges posed to historic buildings and neighborhoods from climate change, coastal erosion, and increasing storm activity.