Riis Beach: In Reverberation by Heather Renée Russ at Powerhouse Arts

project overview

As a recipient of the 2026 Powerhouse Artists Subsidy Program, Heather Renée Russ collaborated with Powerhouse Arts' Digital Print Lab to fabricate four artworks for Riis Beach: In Reverberation, a solo exhibition by NARS alum Heather Renée Russ (Season II & III, 2024), on view at NARS Project Space from May 29–June 26, 2026.

‍Riis Beach: In Reverberation centers the historically queer People’s Beach in New York City, increasingly threatened by climate change and development. Through experimental photography, installation, and refracted light projection, Russ traces overlaps between queer precarity and ecological vulnerability. Fragmented imagery echoes the complexity of queer experience and celebrates the rainbowed spaces queers create, spaces like the People’s Beach, that often exist outside the understanding of the machine.

Project Team Members (Powerhouse Arts Staff): Dennis Hrehowsik and Alondra Acevedo

Echoes of Care, 2026
UV cured ink on aluminum honeycomb
45 x 15 x 2 in.

‍Soaring Seaweed and Wig Hair, 2026
UV cured ink on aluminum honeycomb
45 x 15 x 2 inches

Falling Upward, Together, 2026
UV cured ink on aluminum honeycomb
45 x 15 x 2 inches

Tender Arc, Bracing, 2026
UV cured ink on aluminum honeycomb
45 x 15 x 2 inches

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Powerhouse Arts is grateful to the Arts and Letters Foundation, Jockey Hollow Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Wolf Kahn Foundation for generously supporting the Artist Subsidy Program.

For more information on Powerhouse Arts' Artist Subsidy Program, please visit:
‍https://powerhousearts.org/fabrication/artist-subsidy-program

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No items found.

KC Crow Maddux, Chromatic Studio NYC @ArtDocNYC

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artist biography

Heather Renée Russ (she/they) works across photography, installation and bio-art. They blend organic marine materials with queer femme signifiers, like wig hair and false eyelashes. Their work engages with themes of displacement while celebrating the vibrant communities queers have historically created in cities by the sea. They utilize scanner photography to create detailed imagery incorporating glitch. They also build live algae bioreactors in femme signifying vessels that take in carbon and produce oxygen. Russ’s work is influenced by queer ecology and speaks to the fragmentation many queers feel as spaces of gathering, including queer beaches, are under threat from climate change and gentrification. Russ’s work draws from a rich history of stewarding underground queer art spaces.

Heather Renée Russ exhibited at NADA Miami with Paradice Palase during Miami Art Week 2023. She also participated in SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC in 2023 She has shown at SomoS in Berlin, IMT Gallery in London and Satellite Art Fair in Miami. In New York, she has also shown at Flux Factory, ChaShaMa and with Paradice Palase at the Other Art Fair. She has completed residencies at MASS MoCA, ChaShaMa North, Vermont Studio Center, and TransBorder Art on Governors Island. Russ will show with NYC-based apexart in spring 2024. Russ comes from a history of stewarding queer spaces. She co-produced Club Feral, a raucous queer nightclub in San Francisco and the collaborative space in Brooklyn known as Lair Fera.
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https://www.heatherreneeruss.com/