The Bed-Stuy Aquarium, a community art project in Brooklyn, began in August 2024 when locals turned a hydrant puddle into a goldfish pond. Despite receiving praise, authorities shut it down for various reasons, citing fire hazards and violations of fish welfare regulations.
This small island of autonomous community life fiercely defended itself for a while before finally having to surrender. Could it reopen?
Even this defeat is, in fact, a victory—an opportunity to experience solidarity, beauty, and strengthen practices of resistance.
What if we organize a visual assembly to plan a vision of a sustainable network of self-organized “living corners” with flowers, birds, and fish spread across the city? If a small-scale approach doesn’t work, maybe we should aim for a city-wide movement?
This was a very personal discovery for me: in 1990, I co-created (with Alexander Daymand) a project calls “Living Corners,” a series of artworks composed of fragmented paintings and intricate designs, structured around small enclosures with birds, aquariums, or other pets requiring constant care.
Anyone who acquired one of our art pieces would need to constantly care for it—otherwise, the life within it would perish. It could not simply be locked away in a safe or placed in a distant museum hall to be forgotten. It was a form of perpetually living art, much like the one recently created by the people of Brooklyn.
