On a frigid day in February 2021, Marion Wilson was out on a walk when she came across a “for sale” sign on a small houseboat floating in the calm, shallow waters of Lagoon Pond in Vineyard Haven. Intrigued, she climbed the icy gangplank, peeked into a window, and saw a fully functioning woodshop. Wilson, an artist, immediately envisioned it as a studio space. 

After purchasing the twenty-by-forty-foot houseboat from Rick Brown, an Island master boatbuilder and carpenter, she set to work with standard maintenance as well as getting a boat inspection. At the time, it was the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. And while Wilson typically spent the off-season in New York City teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, she was now hunkered down on the Island full-time with her partner and able to focus her attention on this latest endeavor. 

Once the houseboat was studio ready, including the addition of portable rolling walls for exhibits, Wilson began the process of bringing her artistic practice – social sculpture – to the Island. Social sculpture challenges the traditional way of thinking about art – which can be interpreted as a solitary undertaking – by focusing on a collaborative creative experience rather than concentrating on a final completed work of art. Joseph Beuys, who coined the term in the 1970s, “was an artist and a scientist who believed that art can be an experience,” Wilson explained. “Social sculpture is a living experience and involves relationships with other people.” 

In the past, Wilson’s artistic practices with the art form included working with students, friends, neighbors, and other artists on projects that could make a difference in the community. With her new studio space secured, she was ready to reach out to Vineyarders to see if she could do the same here.

She found the perfect person to collaborate with in Danielle Ewart, Tisbury’s shellfish constable and one of her first Island connections. What started as Wilson giving Ewart watercolor lessons and Ewart in turn teaching Wilson how to harvest shellfish soon evolved into the pair working on a project dedicated to the waters of Martha’s Vineyard. In the summer of 2023, they showcased the work at an exhibit titled She Speaks with the Ocean at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in Vineyard Haven. 

Wilson’s photography and watercolors were part of the presentation, but the two also partnered with the shellfish hatchery and brought living shellfish into the museum for the exhibit. “It was very democratic, and it was an example of social sculpture,” Wilson said. The show also focused on the sounds and sights of water and included a makeshift lab showing algae growth as well as visualized maps of the Island’s great ponds and the marine life that inhabits them.  

While she enjoyed using the houseboat as a studio at first, in the summer of 2022 Wilson began to transition the space into a public art gallery as well, naturally dubbed The Floating Gallery, to share “a socially engaged art practice” with the Island community through her own artwork and that of others. The venue – a houseboat on the Lagoon – was an ideal setting. 

“The boat could’ve just been my studio, but instead, I thought, ‘This is a place to congregate on the water and talk about whatever issues are important to the Island.’”

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Becoming a social sculpture artist wasn’t a conscious decision that Wilson made when she was younger, but more of an evolution. She had always found interacting and collaborating with others a way of life, she said. 

Wilson was born in New York City in the early 1960s. Her late father, Jerome Wilson, was an attorney and a Democratic state senator who represented Manhattan’s east side. Her mother, Frances Roberts, had a master’s degree in political science and was responsible for developing the platform for Wilson’s father’s campaigns as a Social Democrat. At just five years old, Wilson campaigned with her father on the streets of New York. It was an early introduction to making social and community connections, she recalled. 

Wilson moved with her family to Teaneck, New Jersey, when she was eight years old. Five years prior, in 1964, Teaneck had become the first community in the United States where a white majority voted to desegregate its schools, putting the policy in place without a court order.

“It was very diverse and integrated, but also divided,” Wilson remembered. “We were raised when there was busing.... We moved from New York City out to this town and, unbeknownst to us, we lived on the side of the tracks which were less desirable. My parents didn’t care about things like that – that we lived integrated – and I was bussed across town.”

She attended a small alternative high school where there was an emphasis on student governance and classes that included community service. After graduating, she earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art with a minor in political science from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. She moved back to New York and began teaching art at a high school while also attending Columbia University at night to earn a degree in art education. From there, she went to graduate school at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and earned an MFA in painting. 

In the early 2000s, with funding from the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City’s Bowery neighborhood, Wilson created a ten-week social sculpture art initiative involving people in the neighborhood, with an emphasis on the unhoused population that stayed at the Bowery Mission shelter. The project included barters and exchanges, creating products, and selling them from a pushcart on the sidewalk. 

One of the people she worked with wanted to get a haircut for a job interview he had lined up. Wilson paid for the haircut, and, in return, the man gave her his dreadlocks. They then made them into boutonnieres and sold them. Another individual wanted to honor their grandmother who was an avid knitter, so Wilson provided needlework lessons, and they sold the works. 

In 2007, while teaching at Syracuse University, Wilson created an art curriculum called New Directions in Social Sculpture, hoping to revitalize city spaces through the arts. She explained that then-university chancellor Dr. Nancy Cantor was deeply interested in connecting the university with the community and was supportive of Wilson’s art practice. 

One of her projects to come out of the curriculum involved the complete transformation of a 1,900-square-foot abandoned drug house into a community center for the arts, a bookstore, a teaching garden, and an event space. Another project was the Mobile Literacy Arts Bus – a reimagined 1984 RV purchased with grant funding. Wilson’s college students worked to gut and renovate the vehicle, turning it into a mobile laboratory, poetry library, and community gallery made mostly from recycled materials. Once completed, for three years the RV traveled throughout the city, stopping to offer creative writing and art classes to elementary, middle, and high school students. Later, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Wilson would again work with students to create a 7,500-foot mural and a themed recipe garden at an elementary school.

But it was in Syracuse that Wilson became more interested in the environment. “It was a different kind of landscape than I was used to,” she said. 

The first environmental social sculpture project Wilson embarked on included her colleague and fellow artist, Sarah McCoubrey, a professor at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. Together they created coursework for their students, titled The Lake Project: Social Sculpture and the Urban Landscape, which involved studying and photographing Onondaga Lake – once one of the most polluted lakes in the United States. In 2009, their efforts culminated in an interdisciplinary exhibit that featured their photographs. “After that, I kept returning my attention to local environment,” Wilson said.  

Now settled on the Island during the summer months, Wilson is again focusing on environmental elements and using them in her drawings and watercolors as a way to engage the community.

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It’s not often that visitors walk a gangplank to get to an art gallery, but if they visit The Floating Gallery, that’s exactly what it takes. It was a natural choice, Wilson said, to turn her floating studio into an art gallery to serve as a neutral space where all types of people can come to be on the water and experience art. “Here on the pond, it’s summer people, off-season people, boat owners…there are so many dichotomies here and I’d like this to be a platform that brings the community together,” she said.

While her social sculpture projects on the Island focus on different topics compared to her ventures in the Bowery, Philadelphia, or Syracuse, here Wilson aims to capture the human connection between art, ecology, and life on the water and below its surface. 

During Wilson’s first couple of seasons with The Floating Gallery, she hosted guest speakers for community discussions concerning Native Americans and habitat; plant life; and the intersection of art, science, literature, music, and the environment. She also displayed the work of others at various exhibits, such as a landscape show titled Out of Paradise that highlighted climate change through the eyes of several artists. “It featured painters using the traditional discipline of landscape painting, but they were actually painting superfund sites,” Wilson explained. 

This year, she will continue to use the space for her social sculpture practice, as well as “exhibit artists whose work relates to social concerns,” Wilson said. A portrait show titled Your Face is a Clock, which is “a somewhat political and very diverse show,” will be up through August 10, and a landscape exhibit is tentatively planned for later in the summer. In between, she will work with local scientists to document the ecology that’s directly around the houseboat.

In addition to exhibiting the work of others, Wilson will open her own exhibit with highlights from the summer as well as work from an Island project, the Lagoon Art and Ecology Archive, which combines art and science. She will also bring her ongoing environmental archive – a place-based catalogue of different species – from New York to the Island. For more than twelve years, she has filled drawers in a repurposed slide library with drawings of species she’s studied: ginkgo trees in Brooklyn, seaside goldenrod growing in the inland salt marshes of Syracuse, moss species from North Carolina, and more. This summer she will add elements to the slide library that document ecological life in and around Lagoon Pond.

What started as a simple studio space has evolved into an intentionally curated art gallery. It’s a unique place not only for exhibits, but also for the Island community to gather to share creative ideas. “I’ve turned my studio into a public platform,” said Wilson.