LUCIA ZEZZA | DATE 10/25/2025

Artbook at MoMA PS1 presents Matthew López-Jensen, Marie Lorenz and Eugenie Tsai on 'The Work and the Water'

Saturday, October 25, from 4–5:30 PM, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore presents a conversation to celebrate the book launch of artist Matthew López-Jensen’s The Work and the Water: Labor and Landscape Along the Erie Canal. López-Jensen will appear in conversation with artist Marie Lorenz and curator Eugenie Tsai.

Event livestreamed on Instagram at @artbookps1.

Please RSVP for the event and pre-order a copy here.

The Work and the Water: Labor and Landscape Along the Erie Canal, by Matthew López-Jensen, is a work of environmental social practice centering the sites of unseen labor required to keep the Erie Canal, a 524-mile inland waterway in upstate New York, operational. In addition to a contextualizing essay by art historian Kim Beil, over 40 photographs are accompanied by commentary from the 400+ employees who work on the canal year-round, often out of view, and in hazardous conditions. As the first artist-in-residence with the canal in its 200-year history, López-Jensen visited every lock in the system from Buffalo to Albany, from Whitehall to Seneca Falls. The archive of images he created helps communicate the potentials of the canal as a site for environmental restoration while also conveying the scale of this colossal piece of infrastructure that transformed the region in ways that are still felt today. Design by Ella Gold.

Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based artist whose projects combine social practice, landscape advocacy, photography, and research. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in photography and his site-specific landscape projects have twice been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, among other institutions. López-Jensen teaches environmental art and photography at Fordham University and Parsons School of Design. He was the 2023 artist-in-residence with the Erie Canal and has also participated in residency programs at MacDowell, New York City Urban Field Station, Guild Hall, the Queens Museum, Wave Hill, L.M.C.C., among others. His first book Park Wonder (Paper Crown Press) was published in 2017. He earned a BA from Rice University and MFA from the University of Connecticut.

Marie Lorenz is a visual artist whose work combines sculpture, printmaking, and environmental fieldwork. Since 2005, she has operated The Tide and Current Taxi, an ongoing project navigating New York Harbor in handmade boats propelled by the tide. Solo exhibitions include Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2024), the Centre for Contemporary Art, Montbéliard, France (2024). Major group exhibitions include Shifting Shorelines: Art, Politics, and the Environment (Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2024) and Women Reframe the American Landscape (Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 2023). Lorenz has received numerous fellowships and awards, including Creative Capital (2021), the National Endowment for the Arts (2022), and the Rome Prize (2008). She earned a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art.In 2016, Lorenz paddled 520 miles down the Erie Canal from Buffalo to New York City in a boat she designed and built specifically for the journey. The project, along with an accompanying exhibition—an extension of her investigations of inland waterways—was commissioned by the Everson Museum of Art and Syracuse’s Light Work residency and supported by High Line Art and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Eugenie Tsai is a curator and writer based in New York. Over the years, she has held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as working independently. She’s organized numerous monographic exhibitions, including Robert Smithson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Kehinde Wiley, KAWS, Oscar yi Hou, and Guadalupe Maravilla, as well as group exhibitions, including Crossing Brooklyn and The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time. Recent exhibitions include the Platform section at The Armory Show, and Imelda Cajipe Endaya at Silverlens Gallery, NYC. Eugenie received her doctorate in Art History from Columbia University and was a founding member of the collective Godzilla: Asian American Art Network.

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore
Matthew López-Jensen, Marie Lorenz and Eugenie Tsai on 'The Work and the Water'
Saturday, October 25, 4–5:30 PM
22-25 Jackson Ave (at 46th Ave.)
Long Island City, NY 11101
(718) 433-1088
RSVP and pre-order a book here.