Hazards of Duke:

Hazards of Duke: An Artist Takes Flight in Chelsea

Starting on May 7, 2016, every weekend evening through midsummer saw the artist Duke Riley setting fly two thousand pigeons from atop an old battleship in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

 Fitted with tiny LED lights, they traced graceful illuminated meanders in the gathering night, before a bell rang them back to their coops.

 Fly by Night was one of Riley’s typically ambitious interventions, this one completely legal — a commission by Creative Time — as opposed to, say, the time in 2007 when he immersed a homemade spherical submarine of Revolutionary War–era design in New York Harbor and piloted it within yards of the Queen Mary before an armada of law enforcement fished him out.

“The FBI didn’t think it was so funny,” he remembers of that episode. “They still have some kind of open file on me.” He was eventually able to get the sub back.

Riley, 45, is known for spectacular ventures with elements of poetry and provocation, usually staged in liminal zones where city meets water and sky: a chaotic naval joust between improvised vessels in a reflecting pool in Flushing Meadows Park; a temporary tavern full of drunk revelers built on swampland off the Belt Parkway.

 These enterprises tend to make news, as did, for instance, the time in 2012 when Riley set homing pigeons with Cuban cigars in tiny harnesses to fly from Havana back to their home in Key West.