Floating Archives

Along the Schuylkill River from Bartram's Garden to Fairmount Water Works

Floating Archives on Schuykill River

Floating Archives – a major floating public art installation by artist Jacob Rivkin in partnership with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities – offers moving, animated projections of historic river images, displayed on a screen suspended between canoes and paddled up the tidal river. On three Saturday evenings in late summer—September 8, 6:30PM – 10:00PM, September 15, 6:00PM – 9:30PM, and September 22, 5:30PM – 9:00PM (rain dates are Sunday 9/9, 9/16, and 9/23)—Floating Archives will journey from the public dock at Bartram’s Garden to the end of the tidal Schuylkill, at the dam near the Fairmount Water Works. From the river’s banks or its bridges, viewers and passersby can observe these floating silent images. They offer traces of the past in vibrant color, and they invite us today to see still other rivers, as they were, as they are, and as they could be, in the words of past Schuylkill interpreter, John Frederick Lewis.