2026 Exhibitions

BREECH: LOGBOOK 26 | CONVERGENCE

BREACH: Logbook 26 | Convergence brings the work of nationally recognized Shinnecock artist Courtney M. Leonard to the East End Seaport Museum in a major new site-specific exhibition centering Indigenous perspectives on water, place, and continuity.

Part of Leonard's ongoing BREACH series — conceived on the model of 19th-century whaling ship logbooks, in which each installation records a year of the artist's engagement with environmental fragility and cultural resilience — Convergence takes its name from the oceanographic phenomenon of currents meeting: a zone where distinct forces, histories, and knowledge systems flow together and transform.

For this iteration, Leonard turns her lens to the waters immediately surrounding Greenport: the Peconic River, Gardiner's Bay, and the harbor's own edge. New site-specific video work explores Bug Light, Greenport's deep history as a whaling port, and the former Oki-Do Oyster Factory — threading together Indigenous relationships to these waterways with the layered industrial and ecological histories that have shaped them. Ceramic and hanging works are installed in dialogue with the museum's rare Fresnel lens collection, bringing Leonard's material language of shell, whale, and sea into conversation with the navigational objects that once guided vessels through these same waters.

Stories from Our Working Waterfront: A Map of Micro-Histories

Stories from Our Working Waterfront is a floor-to-ceiling wall map of the East End — an immersive, landmark installation curated by Paul Kreiling that transforms the museum's main gallery into a living atlas of place and memory.

Spanning the full breadth of the gallery wall, the map layers the micro-histories woven into this region's maritime landscape: the people, trades, communities, and moments that rarely appear in official histories but define the true character of the East End's working waterfront. Drawn from deep local knowledge, each detail invites visitors to look at a familiar coastline and discover it anew — to find their own town, their own harbor, their own story embedded in a much longer and richer one.

At once documentary and poetic, the installation offers every visitor — lifelong resident and first-time guest alike — a new way of understanding where they live and what the sea has meant to the people who have worked it, depended on it, and loved it across generations.

All Hands on Deck: Children’s Discovery Area

The Children's Discovery Area is a hands-on space designed to bring the museum alive for young visitors — connecting them to the sea, the sciences, and the living traditions of maritime craft that have shaped life on the East End for centuries.

At its heart is the museum's remarkable saltwater aquarium, home to 850 native species drawn from the very waters outside our doors — the Peconic River, Gardiner's Bay, and the Long Island Sound. From there, children can peer through microscopes at local flora and fauna specimens, learn the ropes and knots that have held vessels together across generations, and experience the restored glow of a classic boat helm light.

The Discovery Area offers something different: the weight of a real knot, the lens of a real microscope, the light of a real lamp — and 850 living neighbors just beyond the glass.