Funded in its initial phase an Original Work Grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, The Forgotten History of Staten Island, was/is an interdisciplinary, conceptual, public arts project. Its subject is the unreliability and mutability of history.

In the piece, the history of Staten Island, a location which is (oxymoronically) famous for its obscurity, became a metaphor for the ambiguous nature of history itself. The project took the form of a celebration of real and imagined historical events told through the eyes of the mythical, Dr. D. I. Kniebocker (Staten Island’s self-described “greatest" and most controversial historian), in a series of on-site installations, a pamphlet, a website, and a live performance at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center (A Smithsonian affiliate institution) on Staten Island September 17th, 2011. Onsite installations were maintained on the streets of Staten Island, from that point, until the end of the year, 2011. There was an additional chapter (Alice Austen) that was introduced at The Wonderland Show at the Staten Island Museum – Dec 10, 2011. The Forgotten History continues to live on as a blog and a free downloadable PDF. Future physical manifestations of the project can never be ruled out.

What I was trying to do with the Forgotten History, was to find an entertaining way of making a serious point: That history is malleable, unreliable and should be read as such. “Fact” and, (sometimes) bizarre, fiction are interwoven in the the Forgotten History in order to provoke the viewer to question what is "real" and what isn't.

It seemed to work. I regularly visited the installations and engaged people I found reading the text, and (after finding out I was the creator) they were eager to know what parts I had made up.  I was more than happy to go, point by point, and tell them. But I also pointed out that -- the information I had garnered from historical sources might also have been simply invented by someone, and that much of it was contradictory and/or counterfactual.  Although, I thought this was kind of a complicated idea, it seemed to be easily understood and appreciated by the woman/man in the street -- literally, as my installations were on the streets of Staten Island. 

I feel that, now, in the current era of  'fake news,' the Forgotten History of Staten Island has even more resonance.  For more details, visit its website.