Where We Stand: An Incomplete Soundtrack

On View:

July 1 – October 31, 2026

Open Hours:

Thursdays – Sundays, 11am to 5pm

Location:

The Bridgehampton Jail, 2368 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton, NY 11932

 A sound installation in the historic 1907 Bridgehampton Jail

Bridgehampton Museum by Philippe Cheng

This installation gathers eighteen pieces, songs, speeches, poems, into one small room. Four channels run simultaneously, so no single voice ever stands alone: they cross, compete, harmonize, interrupt. Between some of them, brief moments of quiet open up, pauses that are as deliberate as anything spoken or sung. And within that quiet, another voice persists: birdsong, chirping in and out, indifferent to anniversaries, holding the room the way it would hold any room. What you hear, and what you hear in the silence, depends on where you stand.

The occasion is the 250th anniversary of the United States. But this is not a soundtrack to a single story of that anniversary, it is a soundtrack to the moment of it, to standing inside a quarter-millennium and hearing what’s actually being said, by whom, in how many forms and registers at once. Folk song sits beside protest chant, gospel beside elegy, a poem beside a speech, a bird beside all of it, a register that was here before the country and will be here after it.

The voices span generations and intentions, made to commemorate, to mourn, to refuse, and everything between, speaking to the complex of emotions this anniversary actually holds, not the simpler one we’re handed. The list is not definitive and was never meant to be. Eighteen pieces is a fraction, a personal selection, incomplete by design and open to revision, the way any honest account of a country’s anniversary should remain open. This is a soundtrack still being made.

The room itself is part of the piece. A jail is a place built to hold people and to decide, on the country’s behalf, who belongs where. To fill it instead with overlapping voices, speech, song, silence, birdsong, that could not be contained by a single channel, let alone a single cell, is its own kind of statement, made without a word of didactic text.

Stand still here. Let the channels overlap. You will not hear all eighteen voices clearly at once, and you will not hear all of the silences either. That is the point. No one ever has.

 The installation includes the following pieces

The Hill We Climb Amanda Gorman The Gentleman

Written by Amanda Gorman

A Everything In Its Place Radiohead

Written by Thom Yorke

This Land Is Your Land Sarah Jones & Dap Kings

Written by Woody Gurthie

Higher Ground Stevie Wonder

Written by Stevie Wonder

Real Real Love Nancy Atlas with Winston Irie

Written by Nancy Atlas

A Seasons Of Love Cast of Rent

Written and composed by Jonathan Larson

Both Sides Now Joni Mitchell

Written by Joni Mitchell

A War With Time Brandi Carlile

Written by Brandi Carlile

Wake Up Everyone Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes

Written by John Whitehead, Gene McFadden and Victor Carstarphen

A I Can’t Breathe H.E.R.

Written by by H.E.R., D’Mile and Tiara Thomas

Talkin’ Bout A Revolution Tracy Chapman

Written by Tracy Chapman

A Fight the Power Isley Brothers

Written by Ernie Isley

I Have Dream Martin Luther King with The Gentleman

Written by Martin Luther King

A Circassian 1876 Thunderbird Sisters

Written by The Thunderbird Sisters

Ownership a haibun Kathy Engel

Written by Kathy Engel

 What is Life George Harrison

Written by George Harrison

Indefinable Mysterious Power Mahatma Gandhi

Written by Mahatma Gandhi

Say Her Name ( Hell you Tambour ) Janelle Monet with Beyoncé Knowles, Alicia Keys, Tierra Whack, Zoë Kravitz, Brittany Howard and Chloe x Halle

Written by Janelle Monáe and the members of her Wondaland artist collective, including Deep Cotton, George 2.0, Jidenna, Roman GianArthur, and St. Beauty

Source: https://www.bridgehamptonmuseum.org/exhibits/wherewestand

“On Call: June Jordan, Palestine & The Black Radical Tradition at Stony Brook,” filmed and edited by Ruhama Mumin. To watch go to: https://youtu.be/KDCt3z4ZYBw?si=J7JYnoSu7W5kQcU8

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DcwJG5qR44T/?igsi=eWZ4MjlqYXlzc2Uw

July 15, 2026

The Poems Will Not Stop: An Interview with Kathy Engel by Tyler Barton

APP Professor Kathy Engel has been nominated for the 2026 David Payne-Carter Teaching Award.

The David Payne-Carter award is presented to Tisch School of the Arts faculty members whom students have selected as best at instilling a deepening comprehension and enthusiasm for the arts as well as a desire to seek further knowledge.

As described by her students that submitted her nomination packet: “She encourages students to approach artistic practice as both a personal and collective inquiry, guiding us to ask not only what we create, but why it matters and for whom.”

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DYCn1FtkShR/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

Solidarity, it seems, is among the most important lessons one can bestow. Following the strike authorization vote, author and Tisch professor Kathy Engel composed a poem for CFU-UAW organizers, in which she recalls labor struggles of the past and affirms her commitment to withholding her labor if necessary. In a nod to Gwendolyn Brooks, the poem concludes: “We are each other’s glory/we are each other’s last chance/we are each other’s other.”

Read full article by David Markus & Listen to “Why I will Strike if Called” by Kathy Engel on Hyperallergic.

The Grand Days of Noho Star

for Kathy Engel

Dear Kathy I miss our poetry brunches
at Noho Star
our talks on MFA programs
children spouses mothers finances
manuscripts submission guidelines—
I miss our San Pellegrino flat radish onion and avocado salad

at Noho Star we enjoyed
fried onions in a spicy mango chutney
it was there that I tried Blue Moon beer for the first time
with two orange slices
she gave me not one but two orange slices
and who ever heard of Mexican pizza with raw eggs on top
or fried shrimp with garlic eggplant

on other days a white eight-seater bench
on Lafayette Avenue near the window
held our joy after readings
after classes after book launches
where we sat for hours sipping drinks and laughing loud

then that time the clumsy white boy spilled deep red Chilean wine
on my new suede jacket
on my mother’s beige antique hat
Golda held me back I almost fucked him up
because he refused to give his name
and hid in the kitchen rather than apologize

it was at Noho on that fall Saturday evening
that I fell in love with Kathy Engel and her two beautiful daughters
we set out on a journey of writing poetry and keeping each others secrets
I think of you Kathy and our beloved Noho
every time I order garlic eggplant and curry fries
from the bodega near my corner.

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a poet born in Trinidad and raised in Queens, New York. She is the author of seven collections of poetry which include Mama Phife Represents, a verse memoir about the life of her son, Hip Hop Legend, Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor, which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. Her most recent collection,The Limitless Heart, won the 2024 Firecracker Award for poetry. Cheryl is a graduate The Stonecoast MFA program.

Posted on MER Literary on January 30, 2026.

Poetry in the (Highland Park) Bowl, June 11 – 13

On the closing night of Writers & Books’ Poetry in the Highland Bowl Festival, Kathy Engel read alongside Ralph Black and NY State Poet Laureate Patricia Spears Jones!

A word from Kathy:

“I was honored to be able to read with these wonderful poets and a beautiful musical group, and to begin with words from George Abraham & Noor Hindi’s amazing book, “Heaven Looks Like Us Palestinian Poetry”
from their intro: “We sing like the whole world is at stake. We sing because the whole world is at stake.”

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DLFy3DTuUPZ/

Two lines from my 1982 poem, “Life Support,” from the anthology Kamal Boullatta and I co-edited, We Begin Here, Poems for Palestine and Lebanon (Interlink Books, 2007) appear as graffiti over text in artist Jenny Holzer’s current Guggenheim exhibition Light Line. The list of poets whose words are shown appears on the plaque.

Two stanzas from the same poem appear in the outdoor projection For the Guggenheim which was shown Thursday May 16 through Monday May 20, 2024. The projection may be shown again. Check for updates.

I’m honored that my words appeare[ed] in the company of brilliant poets including Mahmoud Darwish, Seamus Heaney, Anne Carson, Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, Wislawa Szymborska and more.

It was particularly meaningful for me to experience the installation first with my dear friend of 44 years or so, the peace and social justice leader and coalition builder, Leslie Cagan, whose late partner, Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz’s scholarship, political insight, and poetry have taught me so much and who I miss dearly. And it was moving to return again with former students who I cherish and learn with, who care deeply about justice for Palestine.

Let us honor the students everywhere who’ve been steadfastly, bravely and creatively insisting on an end to the genocide in Gaza, as we honor the people who somehow continue in the midst of horror, and the 40,000 plus the uncounted and uncountable who’ve been killed these seven months in Gaza.

I encourage us to read a poem by a Palestinian every day.

My poem, “Life Support,” was written in 1982 at the time of the US-supported Israeli invasion of Lebanon that June, which was followed by the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Kathy Engel’s poem “It would be water” has been featured at the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day. Read the full poem here.

Kathy Engel’s poem “The Gift” is featured in NOW 2, the latest edition of NOW, the online journal of Hobart Festival of Women Writers. The journal can be found here.