Duke Riley is a Brooklyn-based artist who uses scrimshaw, tattooing, and traditional craft to create work examining working-class maritime history and culture.
Scrimshaw on detergent bottles. Sailor's valentines assembled from syringes and tampon applicators. A replica of a Revolutionary War submarine, piloted into the path of the Queen Mary 2. Duke Riley works in the littoral zone (the contested, trash-strewn boundary where water meets the city) and he has been methodically mapping it for two decades from his studio in a converted submarine factory at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he still keeps pigeons. His practice moves across mosaic, printmaking, drawing, video, and performative infiltration, pulling folk craft traditions into collision with corporate greed and environmental ruin. The question underneath all of it stays consistent: what does power do to the edges: to waterways, to neighborhoods, to the people and birds and debris that wash up there?
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