NEW YORK, NY.- Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side, at the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the artist’s current series of works, connected by her interest in death, transitions, thresholds, kinship, legacy, and queer life, with intimacy, humor, and direct address. This four-part presentation by multidisciplinary artist Every Ocean Hughes, formerly known as Emily Roysdon, consists of an in-gallery installation of the artist’s photographic series The Piers Untitled (2009–23); a screening of the film One Big Bag (2021), presented both in-person and online; two live performances of Help the Dead (2019); and the live premiere of the Whitney’s newly commissioned performance, River (2023). Hughes, who trained as a death doula pre-pandemic in 2019, centers self-determination, social interrelation, and the promises of community and collaboration through various mediums, including performance, photography, film, music, text, and set design.

This presentation will run from January 14 through April 2, 2023, and is organized by Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with CJ Salapare, Curatorial Assistant.

“I have long admired Every’s inquisitive and imaginative approach to artmaking, which has brought forth urgent and necessary propositions about living and dying in our time,” said Edwards. “For over two decades, she has been at the forefront of shaping an aesthetics of care, collaboration, and community through her artistic practice. I am delighted that the Whitney is featuring Every’s range of ideas through its four-part presentation, a mix of previously made works, revisited series, and the Museum’s newest performance commission.”




A selection of works from the series The Piers Untitled (2009–23) is on view in the Museum’s third-floor gallery from Saturday, January 14, through Sunday, April 2. As the artist describes, “The piers on the West Side of Manhattan are a remnant of the city’s industrial past and an important landscape in the cultural life of New York City. From the 1970s through the 2000s, the piers were a gathering spot for underground culture, artists, and queer life. In 2009, amid rapid gentrification, I photographed the piers with these histories in mind, thinking about the pilings themselves as unmarked memorials to the AIDS crisis and a cultural milieu that once occupied this unregulated waterfront.” Hughes, who moved to New York City in 1999, began contemplating the ghostly remnants of the piers as unmarked memorials or found monuments. For over a decade, as the city changed and her artwork developed, she revisited more than a hundred photographic negatives she had captured from the Hudson River. These images symbolize the evolving uses of public space at the intersection of cultural and geographical margins, alongside the relationship between personal and city cycles. This installation in Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Side features photographs, collaged images, and wallpaper-sized photographic reproductions.

Help the Dead (2019) is a live sixty-minute performance presented from Friday, January 27, to Sunday, January 29, in the Museum’s Susan and John Hess Family Theater. Part concert and part theater, Help the Dead mimes the form of a workshop. Inspired by her death doula training, Hughes weaves song, script, movement, and audience participation to approach the politics of dying and living in our times. The stage is set with glass sculptures and custom-made textiles around which performers Geo Wyex and Colin Self deliver salient passages like: “On this spectrum of alive and dead / dead is not the opposite of alive / It’s not a binary /or a simple biological fact / It’s a complex social choice / What is dead? / What do we let die? / Who do we let die? / Who do we actively harm? / What do we actively extinguish?”

One Big Bag (2021), a forty-minute film that will screen continuously from Friday, February 17, to Monday, February 20, in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater, reckons with end-of-life care for the newly deceased and those who love them. In the film, a death doula, performed by Lindsay Rico, guides viewers through a mobile toolkit of everyday items used to clean and care for corpses. Instructive and forcefully delivered, the doula’s monologue reveals how these objects, like cotton swabs, textiles, feminine hygiene products, medicines, and combs, are repurposed to practical and often profound ends. In the immersive installation, the objects featured in the film are also suspended in the theater among the audience at heights corresponding to their use and relation to the body. Together, the projected film and everyday items convey the complex realities and communal possibilities of caring for the dead while highlighting important debates around end-of-life practices, including the high costs of funerals, a death industry that curtails individual agency, and inequalities in medical care. Following the in-person screening, One Big Bag will be available to stream online at whitney.org from February 21 to April 2.

River (2023), a newly commissioned performance that will debut at the Whitney, is the most recent installment of Hughes’s multidisciplinary series inspired by death care, this work addresses the closely entwined themes of legacy, loss, and inheritance. The performance will be presented from Friday, March 24, to Sunday, March 26, in the Susan and John Hess Family Theater. In this performance, Hughes reimagines mythological crossings to other worlds through song, text, choreographed movement, and set design. The artist merges the trope of descending into the underworld—a recurring motif in ancient mythologies—with the porous, transcultural frame of the “crossing.” She emphasizes the term’s dual meanings, which denote the ability to travel between one world and another, along with the thresholds that permit entry and return. This performance draws references from the piers that lined the West Side of Manhattan, which are depicted in the photo installation of The Piers Untitled.

“I’m very excited to return to New York City and the Whitney to share this new series of works that explore ‘alive time’ in the light of death and dying, alongside my 2009 photographs of the piers.” Hughes said about the exhibition. These works have been some of the most meaningful of my career, and it’s an honor to present them in what feels in many ways like a hometown show.”