Miss Rockaway Armada: Let Me Tell You About a Dream I Had

The Miss Rockaway Armada is a group of performers and artists from across the country, including members of other artist collectives such as the Toyshop Collective, Visual Resistance, The Amateurs, The Floating Neutrinos, among many others. In the summer months of 2006 and 2007, the Armada converged in Minneapolis, Minnesota to construct a flotilla of rafts that journeyed down the Mississippi River. With the intent to create a new sustainable mode of travel as well as to present programs regarding arts and environmental issues, the project stopped in towns along the river to present musical performances and vaudeville variety-theater. In 2011, the Miss Rockaway Armada introduced Philadelphia audiences to the sculpture and performances of their collective work Let Me Tell You About a Dream I Had. The Armada artists worked together to construct sculptural flotillas out of scavenged and repurposed materials to demonstrate that art and creativity can flourish within the constraints of sustainability. Along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, the Armada artists staged musical performances, aerial acrobatics, shadow puppetry, and spoken word performances using their sculptures as a floating stage set. The culmination of the project was the exhibition in the Art Alliance galleries. The exhibition comprised sculptural elements from the performance pieces that the Miss Rockaway Armada built and displayed during the summer entirely re-imagined as a compendium of site-specific installations throughout the Art Alliance building. Modeling the improvisational nature of the collective, this publication is an alternative to the standard exhibition catalog format. The catalog box includes a 48-page publication with the inclusion of essays by Melissa Caldwell, Porter Fox, member of Miss Rockaway, Angelique Spanicks, Director and Curator of the MU Gallery in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and Faythe Levine, author of the recent book Handmade Nation. In addition, the box is filled with commissioned prints and photos by the collective presented in the form of flashcards as well as posters. Full documentation of both the outdoor performances and subsequent exhibition are included. This project was supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative and was curated by Melissa Caldwell.