Melissa McGill

Great News!
December 2025

I am overjoyed, honored and elated to announce that I was selected by The Rockefeller Foundation as a Bellagio Center Resident! This prestigious program has hosted thousands of artists, policymakers, scholars, authors, practitioners, and scientists from all over the world across every discipline, including Maya Angelou, Dikgang Moseneke, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mary Robinson, and more. I am humbled to be in their esteemed company… over the moon!
New Exhibition is Opening at TOTAH in NYC
October 2025

I am happy to announce that my upcoming exhibition, Ripple, is opening at TOTAH, (183 Stanton Street, New York) on Wednesday, November 12 from 6-8pm.

If you are in NY, I’d love to see you there!

In these works, I am exploring the re-mapping of watersheds to celebrate water’s own expression while deepening our collective attunement to its language. This project grows from a longstanding exploration of water as both living material and metaphor, and from my conviction that we, as human beings, are not separate from water but are ourselves bodies of water; one body resonating with another. These maps function as sensorial records of water’s movements and voices.

Two large-scale watercolors, Ebb and Flow (7th dimension), employ a grid as framework, inviting water to mediate the natural pigments, creating tides of color that reveal their shifting relationships. I made these works after returning to my studio, reflecting on A Lake Story which took place last month in Lake Ontario in Toronto.
A Lake Story

A procession of over one hundred canoes moves in unison across Toronto’s eastern Waterfront on September 27/28, each carrying colour field paintings made with pigments sourced from the lake/shoreline and activated by the wind. A Lake Story will articulate Lake Ontario’s colour story across the sky and water, amplifying the lake’s own voices of vibrancy, ecosystem, and community.

A Lake Story
By Melissa McGill
Commissioned and presented by The Bentway

A Lake Story, a new commission by artist Melissa McGill, takes the form of a large-scale canoe procession that will write Lake Ontario’s story through colour, across the sky and water. Featuring 400+ local canoers and paddlers joining us for this memorable performance, participants will paddle in a coordinated, slow-moving procession. An epic celebration of Lake Ontario along the Toronto Waterfront, Melissa McGill’s project maps Toronto’s harbour and waterfront biosphere with the lake’s own vocabulary expressed through its natural colour palette. By giving visual voice to the interconnected relationships above and below the waters, the project invites us to shift our perspective to participate in and learn from nature’s wisdom and creativity.

McGill has developed this site-specific natural colour story in collaboration with Jason Logan of the Toronto Ink Company. Together, McGill and Logan gathered and worked with natural and found material from the waters and shoreline to collaborate with the creative expression of the lake itself. Featuring materials such as goldenrod, clay, algae, red brick, and wild grape sourced from Leslie Street Spit, Gibraltar Point, and the re-naturalized Don River among others, these colours have been used to create vibrant wind-activated colour field paintings that will dance above the canoe procession to communicate Lake Ontario’s vibrant resilience both above and below its waters. Together water, colour, wind, and paddlers find and speak the lake’s language and tell its vital story.

Watch the short film here!

For more information, please click here.
Quei de la Corte Nova
April 2025
On April 11, 2025, Melissa McGill returned to Venice to collaborate with Massimiliano Smerghetto and the residents of Corte Nova in the Castello neighborhood of Venice to bring an event to life that celebrates memory, identity and neighborhood connection.

The title Quei de la Corte Nova is in Venetian dialect and translates to Those of Corte Nova. Corte Nova is located in the sestiere of Castello between Via Garibaldi and Arsenale (the neighborhood where the Biennale takes place). This artistic intervention was presented last week, taking form of community collaboration with Massimiliano Smerghetto and the residents of Corte Nova in the Castello neighborhood of Venice, a creative intervention life that celebrates memory, identity and neighborhood connection.

Corte Nova is well known for the criss-crossing of its laundry lines and enduring Venetian spirit. This one night open-air photographic exhibition featured images from the 1930s to today hanging on lines strung in the same manner, telling the story of this neighborhood and celebrating Venetian vibrancy resisting the intense pressure of over tourism. Between shared stories and collective memory, this visual interweaving presents the Venetian soul of Castello. The photographs featured range from 1930 to now and were generously provided by the local residents of Corte Nova themselves, La Gondola Photographic Archive in Venice featuring photographs by Etta Lisa Basaldella and Mario Mazziol, the archive of Associazione 3 Agosto, Marcella Ferrari and Melissa McGill.

The intervention was presented via Associazione Water Projects (a non-profit cultural association that I founded which aims to present civic, solidarity via creative community events and interventions) and with the contribution of associations and city institutions including: Associazione 3 Agosto, Lega Spi Cgil Venezia c.s. e Isole, La Gondola Photographic Archive, and the students of the Andrea Barbarigo Professional Institute, who catered the aperitivo for event.

Invitation designed by Beatriz Cifuentes.
Eridanus: The River Constellation opens October 30 in Turin, Italy
October 2024
I am thrilled to announce my upcoming exhibition Mazzoleni in Turin, Italy.

This exhibition connects the stars and the waterways and traces the arc of my entire artistic oeuvre, inviting exploration of perspective, mapping, water storytelling, constellations and connections between past, present and future. In studying and intervening with historical maps (some are found and some are from the State Archives of Turin) I engage with water and natural organic and homemade materials in the same way I have engaged in collaborative interventions in the public realm.

More info here!
Melissa McGill on the The Good Work Hour Podcast Hosted by Micah
May 2024
Listen here!

Hosted by Micah on The Good Work Hour, Radio Kingston.

Joined by Melissa McGill, we talk about art, and it being a practice of Just Transition and what it means to be in right relationship and what Melissa means by the word intervention.

“What is Good Work and how do we do it? What’s the impact on our lives when we focus our love and attention and time in our communities and consciously work towards Just Transition? What is Just Transition anyway? How do we get there?

In The Good Work Hour, we’ll be diving into what Good Work looks like in action, spotlighting people who are showing up, speaking out, and doing the deep work to move us towards Just Transition in the Hudson Valley. Hosted by a rotating duo of team members from the Good Work Institute, you’ll hear from a diversity of guests who will bring their perspectives on how we can create positive change here and now, and how you can get involved.”

-The Good Work Institute
Talking Water: An interview with Kate Bunney
September 2023
I am very happy to share my recent interview with Kate Bunney of Talking Water. You can listen here.

“What I’m trying to do is create projects that bring us together in awe, wonder, and empathy with water, connecting and reanimating the connection with water as a life force and inspiring support for its regeneration.” -Melissa McGill

Talking Water is an offering by Walking Water …Walking Water, born from a vision received in Payahuunadü – “the place where the water flows” on the ancestral homelands of the Paiute-Shoshone people – is a project and a prayer that centers water as teacher, guide, and sacred source. We began as a three-year pilgrimage along the natural and human-made waterways between Mono Lake and Los Angeles, CA, partnering with local and global communities to collectively bear witness to the situation of water in our world. Following the path of water from source to end-user, we witnessed histories and current realities of destruction, violence, harm and extraction. Alongside the stories of grief, we celebrated those of beauty and resilience – possibilities for the healing and regeneration of waters, landscapes, and communities. We continue to listen to the guidance and orientation of water, for how Walking Water might serve as one tributary within a global and intergenerational movement to restore relations with waters, lands and peoples. We move with the question: what world is possible if human beings devote themselves – personally, politically, spiritually – to that which gives life? We understand how essential it is for us to recognize and honor the leadership of Indigenous peoples and communities of color who have been protecting the waters and the lands from extraction and exploitation for hundreds of years -whose life ways, languages and cultures offer profound teachings for how to grow into right relationship. A commitment to healing waters asks each of us to find our role in movements that struggle to dismantle oppressive systems that commodify waters, lands and peoples in pursuit of power and profit. And as we carry the dream of justice for waters and peoples alike, we strive to uplift and support those individuals and communities who are “acupuncture points” of healing and possibility, actively living towards that more beautiful and liberated world.
“Sea Saga” is featured on the cover of Tracy K. Smith’s “To Free the Captives”
May 2023
I’m honored that my recent work, Sea Saga, is featured on the cover of Tracy K. Smith’s new book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, published by Alfred A. Knopf on November 7, 2023.

Tracy K. Smith, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States writes:

“I’m overjoyed to share the book jacket of TO FREE THE CAPTIVES: A PLEA FOR THE AMERICAN SOUL, featuring the beautiful and enthralling indigo diptych Sea Saga by Melissa McGill .

This is a book about what it has long felt like to live with and within America’s official and unofficial institutions: universities, the military, Jim Crow, and especially the collective American imagination. It’s also an ode to the ingenious resourcefulness of Black Love, which insists, in the face of so many annihilating forces, upon its-and our-continuance.”
Upcoming Solo Exhibition at TOTAH, titled CURRENTS
September 2022

Opening September 8th, from 6-8pm

TOTAH presents CURRENTS, an exhibition of recent works by artist Melissa McGill, on view from September 8th, 2022 through October 15th, 2022. This is McGill’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Melissa McGill’s understanding of our symbiotic relationship with water and the environment runs through her collaborative public art works: Constellation, Red Regatta, and In the Waves. In the more intimate works on view in CURRENTS, water is as much a vital substance as an expressive language—be this articulated through wind, waves, shifting light and shadow, or the flow of time itself.

Throughout CURRENTS, water’s various gestures are expressed using a range of materials. McGill draws us into water’s inclinations, engaging them by way of sight, sound, reflections, and movement. Her sculptural glass installation transmutes a series of 2-dimensional, photographic surfaces into an immersive environment, where the subtle play of light and translucency recalls the changing yet constant nature of the tides. Similarly, McGill’s Box of Waves series transmits movements in time across different elements, expressing our ongoing dialogue with nature. To open the box is like opening a portal into a moment-in-process—one marked by the perpetual reciprocity of wind and water.

McGill describes the world on its own terms, showing how the water inside us speaks to the water surrounding us. The calligraphic evidence she observes in nature reminds us how our primordial mode of being is without “edges,” without definite separateness between things, but exists in a non-linear, circular time that pervades the planet. Inviting us to become more porous—to move within and like water—McGill recreates an environing script that doesn’t rely on traditional language so much as it ciphers the essence of translation, conversation, collaboration, and symbiosis.
Vogue Magazine features In The Waves
August 2021
In Newport, an Entrancing Performance Piece Responds to the Rising Seas

Read the article by Marley Marius in Vogue.
The New York Times features In The Waves
August 2021
A Performance Piece That Pairs Painted Waves Alongside Real Ones

On view in Newport, R.I., Melissa McGill’s latest is an ode to nature and a reminder of our debt to it.

Read the article by Kate Guadagnino in the New York Times.
In The Waves
August 2021
In The Waves by Melissa McGill is an admission-free public art project curated by Dodie Kazanjian created with an ensemble of local community members led by the artist and choreographer Davalois Fearon and Melanie George, dramaturg and producer.
Meaningful community engagement is at the heart of this vibrant movement based public art work, aiming to spark conversations and raise awareness about our relationship to water, sea level rise and our changing climate.

Performances are Aug 18-21 and 24-28 at 3pm and 4pm. Visitors are invited to interact with the artist, choreographer and ensemble between performances.

In the Waves is presented by Art&Newport and the Newport Restoration Foundation.

Registration not required but suggested at Newport Restoration’s website.

Please email inthewavesnewport@gmail.com with questions.
Announcing Red Regatta’s book launch and celebratory sailing event in Venice on June 20, dedicated to Giorgio Righetti
June 2021
The Brooklyn Rail on Red Regatta: riflessi by Mengna Da
February 2020
Melissa McGill at Artissima with Mazzoleni
December 2019
Artissima 2019

Oval Lingotto Fiere | Booth Purple 13 Green 14
Via Giacomo Mattè Trucco, 70
Turin, Italy

Mazzoleni is pleased to announce its participation at Artissima 2019 with an exhibition entirely dedicated to Melissa McGill and her public art project Red Regatta. This solo project will be displayed in the Main Section of the fair.

The monographic show presented by Mazzoleni will display works by the artist created during three phases of the project’s timeline: artist renderings, red colour studies for the hand-painted sails, and photographs taken by the artist of the red sails reflected in the lagoon waters during the Red Regatta performances.

Red Regatta, an unprecedented series of four large-scale site-specific performances, activated Venice’s lagoon and waterways between May and September 2019. Fifty-two traditional vela al terzo boats sailed in unison in choreographed regattas, each with sails hand-painted in distinct shades of red, developed by McGill. The public artwork united Venetians and visitors to celebrate the cultural and maritime history of the city and call attention to the forces of climate change and mass tourism that threaten its future.

Melissa McGill will also take part in a talk titled Make a Better World Now! with fellow American artist Christian Holstad and Vittorio Calabrese (director of Magazzino Italian Art), which will take place on Friday 1st November at 2.30pm at the Meeting Point of the Oval. The discussion will be dedicated to the relationship between art and environmental sustainability as well as their Venetian projects.

Red Regatta by Melissa McGill was presented in collaboration with Associazione Vela al Terzo Venezia, co-organized by Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, and curated by Chiara Spangaro with project management by Marcella Ferrari

For more information and press links, please click here
Campo Box (Santa Maria Nova) on view at Totah
April 2019
Melissa McGill’s Campo Box (Santa Maria Nova), a sound installation, is on view at Totah, 183 Stanton Street, NYC, through April 21st, 2019.

The Campi is a sculptural sound project that invokes the Venetian Campo: an open, irregularly shaped public square that is the historic heart of the neighborhood. The architectural footprints of five different campi are translated precisely into three dimensions, taking the form of a series of elegant black lacquered wooden boxes, reminiscent of music boxes. When closed, each box murmurs softly until the viewer lifts the lid to release a world of everyday ambient sounds recorded in that particular campo, capturing the imagination as it conjures up the rich environments of these centers of Venetian living architecture. The sense of sound transports the listener, evoking both aural and visual memory.

THE CAMPI, Venice, Italy, was first exhibited on May 8, 2017 coinciding with the opening week of La Biennale di Venezia – 57th International Art Exhibition.

Image above: Melissa McGill, Mapping Campo Santa Maria Nova, 2017, digital rendering
Constellation Book Launch Cruise & Reading October 17, 2015
September 2015
Very happy to announce that the Constellation book, published byPrinceton Architectural Press is coming out in October! Join us for a special event to celebrate under the stars, presented by the Sunset Reading Series! (space is limited- book early!)

Vist artful.ly for tickets
via Art In America Magazine: Destination Art: Melissa McGill’s Hudson River Constellation
August 2015
Click Here For The Art In America Magazine Article
Seventeen Stars Added To The Multitudes: Melissa McGill’s “Constellation”‘
July 2015
Follow this link to hear the interview recorded on location with Sarah LaDuke and WAMC: http://wamc.org/post/seventeen-stars-added-multitudes-melissa-mcgills-constellation
via VOGUE.com: Artist Melissa McGill’s Constellation Brings the Stars Down to Earth
July 2015
Click here to read Vogue’s article on CONSTELLATION!

Listen here!

“What I’m trying to do is create projects that bring us together in awe, wonder, and empathy with water, connecting and reanimating the connection with water as a life force and inspiring support for its regeneration.” -Melissa McGill

Artissima 2019