Friday, Jul 18, 2025
Harry S. Parker III Visiting Artist Program : Duke Riley
About
The Harry S. Parker III Visiting Artist Lecture is a newly endowed initiative that brings distinguished voices in contemporary art and literature to Fishers Island. Created in honor of Lighthouse Works’ founding board member and esteemed museum director Harry S. Parker III, the program reflects his lifelong commitment to art education and public engagement.
Presented in partnership with the McCance Foundation, the program invites a leading artist or writer to Lighthouse Works each year for a long weekend of dialogue, studio visits, and public presentation. The lecture anchors the visit, offering the Fishers Island community an opportunity to encounter contemporary creative practice through an evening of ideas, conversation, and reflection.
The inaugural lecture will feature artist Duke Riley, whose genre-defying work merges history, craft, and maritime culture to explore the eccentricities of American life. Known for ambitious public art projects that blend myth, performance, and installation, Riley will present his work and join Lighthouse Works’ Fellows and island residents in a weekend of creative exchange.
Artist
Bio
Duke Riley is fascinated by maritime history and events around urban waterways. His signature style interweaves historical and contemporary events with elements of fiction and myth to create allegorical histories. His re-imagined narratives comment on a range of issues from the cultural impact of over development and environmental destruction of waterfront communities to contradictions within political ideologies and the role of the artist in society.
Riley has had solo exhibitions at Magnan Metz Gallery, New York City; the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; and the Havana Biennial (2009 and 2015), among other venues. He has received numerous awards and commissions, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the U.S. State Department’s SmARTpower Program in China and the MTA Arts For Transit commission for the Beach 98th Street Station renovation. In spring of 2016, Riley partnered with Creative Time and the Brooklyn Navy Yard to produce the public art sensation, ‘Fly By Night’, which was again produced in 2018 by 1418 Now and the London International Festival of Theater. Born in Boston, he received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, before moving to New York, settling in Brooklyn, and earning his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute.
