Artist Statement

This project explores Dennings Point, a 64-acre site on the Hudson River, as an economic, social, and political landscape. The project includes photographs I have made at Dennings Point over the last year and digital studies for new historical markers that would give visitors broader context for understanding the site.

I began the project after discovering a brick in my yard marked “DPBW,” which, I learned, meant it was produced at Dennings Point Brick Works, one of the largest Hudson Valley brick makers at the turn of the 20th century. DPBW bricks were widely used, including for monumental civic projects such as the Empire State Building. In researching the site, I came to understand that Dennings Point, now a state park, has a complicated—and distinctly American—history, marked by racial and class conflict, unbridled industrialism, environmental degradation, and shifting boundaries between public and private use.

In the 350 years since prominent enslavers took possession of Dennings Point from the Wappinger people  as part of the 85,000-acre Rombout Patent, the area has been the site of lavish estates, reported sojourns by Revolutionary War figures, an archaeological dig in the 1880s that unearthed Native American remains, the massive brick factory (which instituted a "whites-only" hiring policy in 1925), a railway project that clear-cut the forest, a public swimming beach, and a short-lived environmental center, from which the sponsoring university withdrew just last year.

Some chapters in this history are well-documented, others often elided, especially in signage at the site. As I continue this project, I hope it offers a more holistic, inclusive, and complex understanding of the site as deeply contested, one whose full meaning is embedded in the power structures that have shaped it and that lie at the core of U.S. history.

Factory Floor, 2026, archival pigment print, 20 in. x 24 in.