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 As evening fell over the Brooklyn Navy Yard, once home to the
nation's largest naval fleet of carrier pigeons, artist Duke
Riley opened an enormous coop and released the homing pigeons of
his "Fly by Night" project.
At the call of his whistle, the massive flock took off and
circled for 30 minutes late Thursday over the deck of their
temporary home on a decommissioned U.S. Navy ship, following a
bamboo pole waved in the air by Riley.
What resembled air-borne embers swirling from a campfire were
actually LED lights in the birds' leg bands, which historically
were used to carry messages.
"It is a collaborative project between me and the pigeons,"
Riley said. "It's a performance or maybe it's just a drawing
that they are doing in the sky."
The show will be repeated every weekend evening from May 7
through June 12.
Riley's flock includes a variety of specially trained pigeons,
some of which are his own, while others were purchased or
borrowed from pigeon fanciers. After the project ends, Riley
will keep many of them as his pets.
"Fly by Night," which was presented by the non-profit
organization Creative Time, comes three years after Riley's 2013
performance piece "Trading With the Enemy," in which trained
pigeons carried cigars from Havana to Key West, Florida, to
protest the U.S. embargo of Cuba and challenge American spying
capabilities since the birds evade surveillance equipment.
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The New York City project pays homage to pigeon keeping, whether for
sport, service or companionship. Once a popular pastime on city
tenement rooftops, the hobby has dropped off amid escalating real
estate prices.
While dubbed by some New Yorkers as "rats with wings," pigeons have
been revered for thousands of years, dating back to the ancient
Christians of Cappadocia in Turkey, who valued the birds for their
excrement, a rich fertilizer.
Pigeon droppings were also at the top of the minds of wary art
lovers on Thursday, as 2,000 birds flew overhead, threatening to
anoint onlookers with what some superstitions define as good luck.
"It was not a concern of mine at all because most animals, including
humans, usually don't like to defecate while they are exercising,"
Riley said.
Evidence on a reporter's purse, however, proved otherwise.
(Additional reporting by Elly Park and Lucas Jackson; Editing by
Scott Malone and Bernadette Baum)
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