The Dumbo Projection Project
Neighborhood-wide, outdoor video art exhibition projected onto Dumbo’s most iconic infrastructure
Massive video art exhibit projected onto the BQE and bridges of Dumbo.
Where else can you see trucks, taxis and subways passing by atop world class video art! Join us for beauty, whimsy and humanity – on display for all to enjoy.
2025 RUNS FROM MARCH 5 – MAY 25, 2025
Wednesdays – Sundays | Dusk – 11pm
Presented by Team Dumbo, with support from the New York City Department of Transportation and NYC DOT ART, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and Leo Kuelbs Collection.
2025 Exhibits:
Volume 6: Unexpected Delight
MAY 1 – MAY 25, 2025
Presented with Gabriel Barcia-Colombo + Gaduate Students in the NYU ITP Program
Volume Six features a collection of made-for-Dumbo works by a cohort of students in the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), taught by the mixed-media artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo. Students applied to the class Special Outdoor Video Art: Projection in Dumbo, specifically to create content for Volume 6, and were chosen by Gabriel along with Team Dumbo.
Collectively, the works created in 2025 play with the theme of “unexpected delight”, exploring both medium and place in ways that will surprise passersby, encouraging us to once again marvel at the spaces we occupy, and at the infrastructure we share those spaces with.
Artists: Yidan Hu, DJ Kim, Audrey Oh, Josh Sun, Sai Vijapurapu, Timothy Wang, Bethany “B” Wu, Julia Xu, Kyrie Yang, Yilin Ye and Jessie Zhai
Volume 5: Space
APRIL 2 – APRIL 27, 2025
Presented with Smack Mellon and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program
Coinciding with Smack Mellon’s 30th anniversary year, and a decade of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Volume 5 is an exploration of space – what it means to be in a space, to have a space, to be part of a space, and even to be in space.
Visual artist Juan José Cielo performs a series of experiments as artist-in-residence at a Mars Simulation program in the Utah Desert. The Mars Desert Research Station is a full-scale analogue research facility that has received partial research funding from NASA and hosts scientists, investigators and artists. In the short film, “Does it work on Mars?” (2017), a series of objects from Earth are tested to see how they operate on Mars gravity, simulated using high-speed cameras. The experiments performed demonstrate how objects and people are affected by Mars having 38% of the gravity of Earth. In the short film “Runway” (2017), visual artist Juan José Cielo sets up a runway in the desert using blinking portable solar-powered lights to create an illuminated runway on Mars. Then in a space suit, Cielo performs a series of maneuvers using air-marshaling wands to signal a ship to land on the runway.
Visual artist Leonardo Madriz presents an adapted excerpt from his multimedia installation, Letters to Home II (2023). Through a series of vignettes coupled with poetic text, the artist presents a letter to his late father who passed away in early 2020. Considering grief on both an intimate and collective scale, the letter reflects on how places and history link across generations, how memory and loss mark a sense of home, and how leaving is intertwined with belonging.
Volume 4: Wet Nose Pawject
MARCH 5 – MARCH 30, 2025
Presented with Photoville in collaboration with Kholood Eid, Matthew Gilbertson, and Professor.
Volume Four brings the Wet Nose Pawject to Dumbo, showcasing and celebrating the local pups who walk the same sidewalks, ride the same transportation, and sniff the same air as we do. Dogs are as integral to New York City’s culture and community as the people that make up this great city. Whether they are new to the city, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, or born right under the Manhattan Bridge, dogs always find their way to our hearts. Dumbo’s dog community is wonderfully diverse, full of tricks, and always a howling good time – and all are invited to delight in their antics, beauty, and joyful essence on the largest of screens, the BQE and Bridges of Dumbo. “Making dogs happy makes us happy,” says artist Kholood Eid. “We don’t deserve them.”
Artists: Kholood Eid, Matthew Gilbertson, and Professor
Projections presented in these three locations simultaneously:
Happening Wednesdays – Sundays from dusk – 11pm.
Volume 3: Out here
March 21 – April 18, 2024
Volume Three is a collection of works that blend real life, animation and hand drawings into
surreal videos that take the viewer on whimsical and unexpected journeys, all ultimately in the
pursuit of creating one’s home.
Featuring work by Nancy Sepe, aricoco, Jillian McDonald & Eirini Linardaki.
Volume 2: Rhythms of the City
February 15 – March 18, 2024
Volume Two is a delightful reflection on urbanism and what it means to live in a city like New
York. Playing off New Yorkers’ well known love of voyeurism, these works are at once chaotic
and poetic, presenting the rhythm and patterns of everyday life, delving into questions of
anonymity, homemaking, and intersectionality.
Featuring work by Nicholas Fraser, Kyoung eun Kang, Josh Klatt and Eliana Perez & Tala Schlossberg
Street.
Volume 1: Natural Possibilities
January 18 – February 10, 2024
Volume One is a “catalog of imagined possibilities,” (according to participating artists Jason
Urban & Leslie Mutchler) translating our innermost musings and projected desires into abstract
digitizations. The lush, richly colored images ask viewers to, as participating artist Grant Cutler
notes, “reckon with automated modes of perception,” each distinct in its own abstracted and
evocative way.
Featuring work by Grant Cutler, Jason Urban & Leslie Mutchler, Josh Miller & Angela Fraleigh and Mz.Icar
Steward Park.
Artist Bios & Work images
VOLUME FOUR ARTISTS
Kholood Eid is a documentary photographer, educator and filmmaker based in New York. Regular clients include National Geographic, The New York Times and The New Yorker. In February 2023, Eid—along with husband and fellow photographer/videographer Matthew Gilbertson—launched Wet Nose Pawject as a way to intentionally incorporate more joy and levity in their lives. Their dog Professor, a 14 year old Westie Terrier mix, is LTO—Lead Treats Operator.
Photoville is a New York-based non-profit organization that works to promote a wider understanding and increased access to the art of photography for all. Founded in 2011 in Dumbo, Photoville was built on the principles of addressing cultural equity and inclusion by ensuring that the artists it exhibits are diverse in gender, class, and race. In pursuit of its mission, Photoville produces an annual, city-wide open-air photography festival in New York City, a wide range of free educational community initiatives, and a nationwide program of public art exhibitions.
VOLUME FIVE ARTISTS
Smack Mellon is a nonprofit arts organization located in Dumbo. It was founded in Dumbo in 1995 and moved to its current location on Washington Street in 2005. Smack Mellon’s mission is to nurture and support emerging, under-recognized mid-career, and women artists in the creation and exhibition of new work by providing exhibition opportunities, studio workspace, and access to equipment and technical assistance for the realization of ambitious projects.
Juan José Cielo (b. 1996, Medellin, Colombia) is visual artist working in painting, photography and short films. Cielo’s work invites audiences to rediscover elements of our daily lives by seeing them in the context of space travel and the future. His work combines Latino myth, folklore, and American dreams to create hybrid futuristic scenes, particularly focusing on his Colombian heritage and immigrant family experiences. Cielo was born in Medellín, Colombia, grew up in Miami and is based in New York City. He received his BFA from Cooper Union (2019) New York with studies at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Cielo’s works have been presented in galleries and museums including The Coral Springs Museum
of Art, The Colombian Consulate New York, National Liberty Museum Philadelphia, and The
Leonardo Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah. Select residencies include Macdowell (New Hampshire
2025), Smack Mellon, New York (2024-2025) Fountainhead, Miami (2023) and Piero Atchugarry
Gallery, Garzon, Uruguay (2023). In 2017, Cielo was artist-in-residence with scientists at a full-
scale analogue research facility in Utah simulating living on Mars: the Mars Desert Research
Station. Cielo is the recipient of YoungArts’s $25,000 Jorge Pérez Award 2022. His works have been
featured on Univision, National Geographic Traveler Magazine, and ARTnews.
The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program awards rent-free non-living studio space to 17 visual artists for year-long residencies in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Its mission is to provide working studio space and community for artists. Artists are selected annually based on merit from a competitive pool of applicants by a professional jury comprised of artists and members of the SWSP Artists Advisory Committee.
Leonardo Madriz (b. 1987, Lafayette, Louisiana) is an interdisciplinary artist working across lens-based media, painting, sculpture, installation, and creative writing. Madriz presents short films projected onto minimalist structures and sculptures inspired by home construction, borders, and domestic life. Through layered vignettes and filmic abstraction mapped onto physical objects, he explores the fluid boundaries between objects, space, and narrative to address themes of migration, place as home, the personal as political, and the roles of grief-work and storytelling in the search for belonging.
VOLUME SIX ARTISTS
The NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program is a two-year, full-time graduate program at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where the students explore new forms of communications and expression using interactive media technologies. The program focuses on critical thinking, creative exploration, and the ability to learn how to learn.
Gabriel Barcia-Colombo is a mixed-media artist whose work focuses on collections, memorialization, and the act of leaving one’s digital imprint for the next generation. His work takes the form of video sculptures, immersive performances, large-scale projections, and vending machines that sell human DNA. In all of his projects, Gabe explores and plays with the digitization of memories, our changing relationship to technology in society, and the virtual and physical identities we create across platforms