The Work and the Water
Labor and Landscape Along the Erie Canal
By Matthew López-Jensen

SIGNED

The Work and the Water: Labor and Landscapes Along the Erie Canal, by Matthew López-Jensen, is a work of environmental social practice centering the sites of unseen labor required to keep the Erie Canal, a 524-mile inland waterway in upstate New York, operational. In addition to a contextualizing essay by art historian Kim Beil, over 40 photographs are accompanied by commentary from the 400+ employees who work on the canal year-round, often out of view, and in hazardous conditions. As the first artist-in-residence with the canal in its 200-year history, López-Jensen visited every lock in the system from Buffalo to Albany, from Whitehall to Seneca Falls. The archive of images he created helps communicate the potentials of the canal as a site for environmental restoration while also conveying the scale of this colossal piece of infrastructure that transformed the region in ways that are still felt today. Design by Ella Gold.

Inventory Press, 2025 | 6.75 × 9 inches | 104 pages | Softcover | $28.00

Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based artist whose projects combine social practice, landscape advocacy, photography, and research. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in photography and his site-specific landscape projects have twice been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, among other institutions. López-Jensen teaches environmental art and photography at Fordham University and Parsons School of Design. He was the 2023 artist-in-residence with the Erie Canal and has also participated in residency programs at MacDowell, New York City Urban Field Station, Guild Hall, the Queens Museum, Wave Hill, L.M.C.C., among others. His first book Park Wonder (Paper Crown Press) was published in 2017. He earned a BA from Rice University and MFA from the University of Connecticut.