Leslie Wayne's 'The Unintended Blues' at Governors Island Examines Climate-Vulnerable Coastlines

Key facts

• Leslie Wayne's exhibition 'The Unintended Blues' is on view at the Arts Center at Governors Island in New York from July 24 to September 27, 2026.
• The exhibition is part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's River to River Festival.
• The series began in 2024 on a flight along the East Coast when Wayne photographed the Chesapeake Bay's tributaries.
• The first painting, 'The Unintended Blues' (2024), measures 100 by 234 inches and launched a project documenting vulnerable shorelines on all three coasts of the continental United States.
• Wayne incorporated photographs of melting icebergs near Greenland, taken from a zodiac boat in the Northwest Passage.
• The show includes 'Submerging' (2025–2026), a single-channel UHD video with sound running as a 13-minute continuous loop.
• A sculpture made of used tug lines and 'Message in a Bottle to Congress' (2026), featuring 78 science and climate-based words from over 350 banned by the Federal Administration, are also on view.
• Wayne began as a plein-air painter on the West Coast before moving to New York and turning to abstraction, with landscape and nature as a consistent throughline.