NEW YORK, NY.- Artist Duke Riley isn’t exactly sure why he had the idea to turn a plastic tampon applicator into a fishing lure, but he knows one thing for certain: It works.

He put it to the test one summer day on a buddy’s boat in Block Island Sound, and, with his pastel bait bouncing along the ocean floor, pulled up a sizable fluke. It was a keeper — “I definitely ate it,” he said.

The applicator tube had first washed up ashore, part of the many tons of seaborne trash that Riley, a Brooklyn artist known to scavenge New York’s waterways for materials and inspiration, has collected over the years. Putting this spent plastic product to use as fish food — that was some DIY upcycling. Putting it into the Brooklyn Museum of Art: That is Riley’s wild and singular artistic ingenuity.

There’s a film of the fishing endeavor, done in the style of a crusty YouTube tutorial. The lures — displayed on pegboard, as in a real bait shop — join other plastic detritus that Riley has repurposed, including straws, dental floss picks and vape pens, in “Death to the Living: Long Live Trash,” an exhibition opening Friday at the Brooklyn Museum. Across multiple rooms and settings, it confronts the calamitous environmental impact of the plastics industry and the ways in which unchecked consumption, for personal convenience, has polluted waterways.

Its centerpiece is more than 200 works of painstakingly hand-drawn scrimshaw that Riley has spent three years making. Instead of the whale teeth and walrus tusks that 19th-century sailors once etched, he uses a contemporary, dispiritingly abundant, analog: discarded plastics. Lotion tubes, squirt bottles, brushes, a honey bear, solo flip-flops, a Wiffle ball and a legless lawn flamingo now stained bone-white, all provide the canvas for Riley’s patterned mariner drawings in India ink.

As whalers often depicted the leaders and profiteers of their day, Riley portrays the CEOs of chemical companies, plastic industry lobbyists and others he deems responsible for producing the devastating tonnages of single-use plastics that are engulfing our oceans and threatening our ecosystems. It’s a downer, but if you look closely, there’s often a Riley twist of humor, such as the seagull shown relieving itself on the head of a water bottle magnate.

“This is an artist who I always refer to as a modern-day pirate,” said Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum. “He’s not just an aesthete pointing to something passively, he’s working to actively spur change — you have to be in it with an artist like Duke. He’s not going to hold back.”

Calling out corporate titans and politicians — particularly when institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum depend on them for donations and support — comes from a fearless ethic and “a wit that is hilarious and unforgiving.” She added: “I always think of him as the George Carlin of the art world.”

For Riley, who turned 50 on Thursday — he plans to celebrate with a nude-beach cleanup — the exhibition is a serious high point in a career full of winks, awe and mischief.

Best known for “Fly by Night,” a 2016 performance in which 2,000 trained pigeons outfitted with LEDs lit up the New York sky, or for launching his own homemade Revolutionary War submarine into the path of the Queen Mary 2 cruise ship, Riley has mostly succeeded by navigating around the commercial New York art world, although he holds degrees from some of its prestigious feeder institutions (a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Pratt Institute). Celebrated for audacious public works and his sense of spectacle, he has also been perfecting an instantly identifiable, dense yet meticulously fine-lined style of drawing since he could hold a pen.

“Duke is a natural,” said Ernesto Pujol, an artist and former professor at Pratt who has mentored him. “A huge talent.”

“The performativity and social practice have eclipsed the incredible painter and sculptor that he also is,” he added. “He had to fight his way for the art world to see him holistically — he is the kind of artist that is always more than you bargain for. And I think the times have finally caught up with him.”

Riley works in many mediums: The Brooklyn exhibition includes films, decorative installations, mosaics and illustrations, including a vast map of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, encompassing its history from precolonial bounty to Dutch settlers through the polluted Superfund site that in 2007 tested positive for gonorrhea. He once took Henry Rollins, the punk eminence, down there, aboard the Turtle, his replica submarine, and spied shrimp through the porthole windows. “That’s how I knew the canal was getting cleaner,” he said happily.

His mosaics offer one of the biggest wows of the show. Inspired by sailors’ valentines, a nautical souvenir traditionally made of shells, Riley’s are enormous and quite beautiful. Only on close inspection do you notice that the perfect, shiny seashells are interlaid with a rainbow of bottle caps, cigar tips, bits of mechanical pencils, and bread bag clips, all harvested from New York streets and waterfronts.

Although he has long worked with found objects — he was painting on, and with, garbage in art school — recently, Riley said, “the environmental focus has been more intense,” as he has watched the shorelines breached by more, and ever tinier, junk.

“As artists, we’re going to have to start thinking differently about the materials that we use,” he said, a few days before the exhibition opened. We were sitting in his studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a pair of female pigeons, Tofu and Asta, rustling in a cage nearby. It’s a cleanish space, stacked with neatly bagged, color-coordinated trash. A trailer outside was filled with more refuse.




Some of it came from Fishers Island, the exclusive enclave in Long Island Sound, where Riley had a residency in 2019, and where he met a woman whose full-time job is to rid its beaches, the summer home of families such as the DuPonts, of plastic rubbish.

“The exhibition is so much about holding people accountable, and the little acts that people can take to solve this problem,” said Liz St. George, the show’s curator. That includes museum administrators; in the course of working with Riley, they changed cafeteria suppliers to minimize plastic, and reconfigured water fountains to accommodate reusable bottles.

The museum has also allowed Riley access to two historical buildings, located in its fourth-floor galleries, including a 17th-century home, cleared in 1950 to free waterfront land for industrial development. He re-imagined these period rooms as the Poly S. Tyrene Maritime Museum, juxtaposing scrimshaw plastics with antique tableware and spindle-leg furniture.

No detail was too small: In a wooden-shingled house that was once on the marshlands of Brooklyn, he installed a surprisingly elegant chandelier fashioned out of empty plastic nip bottles. “There are two different types of people that drink Fireball,” Riley said. “There’s the ones that throw the bottle in the ocean and the ones that screw the cap back on first.”

Riley is quick to admit that he’s not a plastic teetotaler. Many of the mechanical pencils in the mosaics were his. Putting them in the work, he said, “can alleviate some of my guilt.”

He did the scrimshaw in solitude aboard his boat, now docked on Rhode Island. A Massachusetts native who worked on the fish docks and grew up visiting places such as the New Bedford Whaling Museum, he has always been attracted to a New England nautical aesthetic. Cape Cod folk artists Ralph and Martha Cahoon, who painted seaside and naturalist scenes, loom large in his visual memory.

This week, Riley is also debuting a mosaic in Boston’s central library. It is one of only a few pieces of contemporary art purchased for permanent installation in the landmark 1895 building, since a circa-1900s John Singer Sargent mural. Riley’s work is partly inspired by the Great Molasses Flood of 1919, an urban disaster caused when a storage tank exploded, releasing millions of gallons of the sticky stuff. It destroyed neighborhoods in the North End, a community of Italian immigrants, probably including the artisans whose mosaics decorate the library’s ceiling. Those connections will be highlighted through Riley’s installation, said Kristin Parker, the library’s lead curator of the arts. “He’s such a story keeper, and he uplifts these hidden histories,” she said.

Riley also had a personal link to the building, especially its exterior steps. “That was where all my friends met, where I was in multiple brawls,” he said. “That library was definitely one of the central points of my juvenile delinquency.”

He was lifted out of a wayward life by drawing and tattooing; he has owned a Brooklyn tattoo parlor since 2000, and it kept him afloat throughout his art career. “The tattoo shop allowed me to not make any bad decisions,” he said, meaning making bad art for good money.

Pasternak, the museum director, has known him since her days leading Creative Time, a public art organization. “He would propose ideas constantly that were just way too ambitious or absolutely illegal,” she said. (Just after her tenure ended, Creative Time presented “Fly by Night.”)

In a new monograph for Rizzoli, Riley documents some of his high jinks: the speakeasies he built and the time he may or may not have infested a presidential-affiliated hotel with bedbugs. For his core group of collaborators, no project is too brazen or too labor-intensive. “We always pull it off,” said Nicholas Schneider, a New York City firefighter and a longtime member of Riley’s crew. Through all the fun, “there is always a somber or very serious component that I think he’s always been the most focused on and proud of.”

For Riley, the effort is the point. If you want people to give a damn about what you’re saying, at least make them feel like you busted your butt for the message, he said (though in much saltier terms).

Still, the fact that he filled an august museum with garbage — that visitors will now pay to see — is not lost on him. It may even be the most gratifying part, he said.

“I knew, when I was a kid, that I either wanted to be a garbage man, an artist or a thief,” he said. “And I think I became all three.”

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‘Death to the Living: Long Live Trash’

Runs Friday through April 23; Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 718-638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.