Joiri Minaya is a Tide and Current Taxi VIP because she was on this boat’s maiden voyage in Maine.
I built the boat in 2013, when I was faculty at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Twenty-three students and I took a 2-day trip down the Kennebec River in this boat and in rented canoes. (The next few pictures are from back then.)
We camped at an island along the way, and each of us made projects about the journey.
Here is Chris Meerdo’s great accounting of the trip, and his drawing of our nicknames for the boats.
Joiri was in the “Discovery 69” with Daniel Giles and John Dombroski.
Hanging out today reminded me of another part of the journey—we were on an unexpected portage around a dam in Shawmut, Maine. My flimsy wheel carrier cracked under the weight of the loaded boat, but Joiri fixed it with a ratchet strap.
Up until that point, I’d been so worried about keeping the students safe, and this was the moment that I relaxed—when I knew we’d be okay, that each of them had skills to share, even more than me.
Back in the present, 2025, Labor Day—at first, we wondered where everyone could be. For a holiday weekend, it felt quiet on the water.
But by noon, the East River was buzzing with activity—almost too much.
The tide turned as planned, but the wind was against us coming home, and waves stood up around the bridges.
It never looks like much in pictures, but the waves were big, sometimes at the edge of what the boat could take, with the hull creaking in the troughs.
Joiri, of course, didn’t mind, having saved the boat once so early in its life.
We talked about her upcoming research at the Henry Art Gallery—looking at Indigenous ideas of tropical identity and displacement.
I thought about the forms and interventions she makes—bodies confronting landscape. Some are human scale, like this one from her “Containers” series around 2017,
And some are monumental, like her site-specific installation for the Prospect 6 triennial exhibition in New Orleans. , Fleurs de libération: an ecology of resistance, installed at the Meilleur-Goldthwaite House.
“Like your hat,” said Joiri, and I remembered I was wearing something tropically patterned too. It’s an appropriation so familiar I don’t even see it—until I do.
Someone snapped our picture and texted it to Joiri.
“Does that happen all the time?” she asked.
“It’s never happened,” I said.
Paddling past the Greenpoint waterfront drives me to talk too much about how things used to be—what was here, what is gone.
Sometimes the present feels like an uncomfortable net constricting around the things that I knew.
But I’m going to try to stick to a new rule in the boat, but also in life:
Just let the new be now.
Oh, and one more lesson from the boat for life: Trust the skills of friends.
(Here are all the participants who went on that trip in 2013: Samantha Adler de Oliveira, Luis Alonzo, Trevor Amery, Prerna Bishnoi, John Dombroski, Anastasia Douka, Zachary Fabri, Mauro Giaconi, Daniel Giles, Joshua Haycraft, Shana Hoehn, Mira Hunter, Kristian Blomstrøm Johansson, Nicholas Johnston, Lindsay Lawson, Christopher Meerdo, Harold Mendez, Joiri Minaya, Michaela Murphy, Jordyn Oetken, Omar Rodriguez Graham, Erik Swanson, Seneca Weintraut, May Wilson, and Lindsay Zappas)
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