The Antique Boat Museum in Clayton is for two weeks hosting a group of visiting artists out of New York City who are spending their days building two boats inspired by the museum's art exhibit, Floating Through: Boats and Boating in Contemporary Art. Part of the artists' visit will include time spent at Better Farm through a sponsored artists residency hosted by betterArts.

For the exhibit, the Antique Boat Museum is showcasing recent work from some of the most influential artists working with boats as a subject or medium. The boats employed are traditional, historic, or salvaged, similar to the boats in the museum's own collection. Though the genesis and content of these works can be quite different from one-another, with this common thread they comprise a unique message; a new way of appreciating the continuing activity of boating. In turn, these stories of old boats and unique excursions add unexpected context to traditional narratives of boats and boaters past.

A collective of artists-in-residence will be working in tandem with that exhibit by constructing two boats in the museum's studio space. Of that group, Mare Liberum is a free-form boat-building and waterfront art collective, based in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn, New York. Finding its roots in centuries-old stories of urban water squatters and haphazard watercraft builders, Mare Liberum is a collaborative exploration of what it takes to make viable aquatic craft as an alternative to life on land. The full roster of visiting NYC artists includes:

Jean Barberis, Artistic Director of Flux Factory
Ben Cohen, Director of the Gowanus Studio Space
Dylan Gaulthier and Stephan von Muehlen of Mare Liberum

betterArts has teamed up with the museum to help sponsor the artists, and will be hosting the group at Better Farm for part of the visit as part of the betterArts residency program.

Here are two shots of the studio space in Clayton:

For their first project the artists are crafting a boat out of paper mache and testing its seaworthiness in the St. Lawrence River. For that project, the artists first took a discarded boat from the museum's collection and covered it with plastic. Then, to adhere craft-grade construction paper to it with a glue (similar to Mod Podge) and clamp it: