A Quirky Design Fair Finds a New Home: Governors Island

Most art and design fairs geared toward young people encourage them to create something to take home. The Inventgenuity Festival does that, too, but it emphasizes a rarer and possibly more resonant principle: creating something to leave behind.

That’s exactly what visitors will do on Saturday and Sunday during the festival’s 11th edition and its first to be held outdoors, on Governors Island. Presented by Beam Center, an educational nonprofit based in Brooklyn, the free event invites participants, ages 6 to 18, to enroll in workshops devoted to craft, technology, music, science, even sports. The central activity, however, will be to complete “Constellation,” a public-art project and sound installation by the interdisciplinary artist Ye Qin Zhu that will remain on the island at least through mid-October.

“I want to show that during the pandemic, even though we’re all separated, or we may feel that we’re separated, we’re inextricably still linked,” Zhu said during a tour of Beam Camp City, the center’s new Governors Island outpost.

That idea has fueled the design of “Constellation,” which comprises six separate treelike structures, or “stars.” Each consists of three vertical, 10-foot-tall steel rods set into a fiberglass base shaped like a body part. (One sculpture sprouts from an eye; another from a foot.) More steel tubes branch out from the top of the rods in an interlinked canopy that is hung with dozens of differently shaped and patterned ceramic bells, each with a copper clapper. When one of the sculptures sways in the breeze, or someone shakes it — yes, Zhu really wants you to do that — the vibrant bells ring. This weekend, festivalgoers are invited to cast, decorate and hang their own bells.

“Not only are we layered under the constellations, and under the constellations of experiences,” said Zhu, but the constellations themselves also have layers. He was partly inspired by asteroseismology, a scientific discipline that measures the seismic waves within stars. Researchers say that if those frequencies were translated into auditory rhythms, they would sound like ringing bells.

Inventgenuity is itself the product of myriad connections. Now a New York institution, it traces its roots to Beam Camp, a still-flourishing summer sleep-away program in Strafford, N.H., that Brian Cohen and Danny Kahn, former executives at Elektra Records, started in 2004. Beam, whose name refers variously to illumination, smiles and structural support, was established partly to respond to the so-called maker movement, a push for do-it-yourself craft and problem-solving that reminded adults of the value of creativity.

That approach aimed “to serve primarily white men who made things,” Cohen said. Although the movement has since diversified, at first it “got me very angry,” he added, “because the kinds of projects they were doing were exactly the kinds of projects that needed to be in classrooms, that needed to be in playgrounds.”

The New Hampshire Beam Camp was founded to bring that hands-on learning — invention plus ingenuity — to youth of all backgrounds, and the Inventgenuity Festival, which Cohen and Kahn established in Brooklyn in 2010, became a way to open that experience to the public. Like the summer camp, each festival revolves around collaboratively completing a major work of art and engineering. (Beam Center sends an open call to artists every year.)

Previous projects have included the kinetic sculptor Andrew Brehm’s “Mechanical Marsh,” a three-tiered stage set filled with motorized wooden birds that flapped their wings, and “FlipNYC,” animation that consisted of giant, illustrated books featuring solar-powered lighting and cranks that turned the pages. Conceived by the architect Chee-Kit Lai and the artist Ebony Bolt, those machines were exhibited in Dumbo, Brooklyn, in 2019. (Inventgenuity was not held in 2020 because of the pandemic.)

But the festival offers smaller projects, too. This weekend, for instance, in multiple sessions of its 10 workshops, attendees can make clay pendants evoking their favorite sense, build Calderesque mobiles inspired by Zhu’s sculptures and create postcards using the cyanotype process, a printing method involving sunlight. (The staff will even mail them afterward.)

The annual festival is also responsible for the founding of Beam Center itself, which, since 2012, has offered in-school and after-school public education programs in New York City. But Cohen, the center’s executive director, is especially excited about Beam Camp City, which helps make up a revitalized arts hub on Governors Island, just a brief ferry ride from Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.