The Miss Rockaway Armada in The Huffington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer

The Philadelphia Art Alliance's late 2011 exhibition Let Me Tell You About a Dream I Had: The Miss Rockaway Armada, supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, received media attention from The Huffington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Philadelphia Inquirer took a look at the goings-on of the Miss Rockaway Armada, a "loosely defined collective of artists, do-it-yourselfers, dumpster aficionados, and trash repurposers" who built a flotilla to travel on the Schuylkill River. The flotilla trip and two parades in September 2011 were part of the larger funded project, a commission from the Philadelphia Art Alliance, which mounted an exhibition of the Miss Rockaway Armada's flotilla and other pieces.

While "surveying the lot filled with stuff that [was] sculpted into an archipelago of floating islands", Amy S. Rosenberg of the Inquirer spoke to builder, musician, and Miss Rockaway veteran Gabe Meyers, who said "It's totally Philly [...] a lot of architectural salvage, off curbs, Craigslist, construction sites, junk from people who amassed it for 60 years. Hopefully it will reveal something to local people [that] they didn't think possible." Read more >

For The Huffington Post, Philadelphia Art Alliance Chief Curator Sarah Archer wrote: "The Miss Rockaway Armada [will] create something that is part performance, part salvage operation, and part sleight of hand. It demonstrates that the processes of designing and building something can tell a story [...] Their mission is to show us that creativity paves the road to sustainable solutions in the face of the urgent, global problems of resource depletion and wastefulness. And it might be the most patriotic cultural attraction in Philadelphia right now." Read more >