Marea by Melissa McGill – Photography is by Marta Mancuso | CIRCUIT.

Art, Design. During this year’s Venice Art Biennale, American artist Melissa McGill joined forces with local residents and university students to transform Corte Nova — one of the city’s most photographed alleyways, sitting between the Arsenale and Giardini venues — into an open-air gallery, stringing roughly 100 original paintings across the laundry lines that have criss-crossed the street for generations.

• RELATED STORIES: Read more about Venice Art Biennale on Archipanic.

The result is Marea, a participatory installation that feels genuinely at home in its surroundings, rooted in neighbourhood life rather than the imported spectacle that defines much of the Biennale. The project thoughtfully engages with the twin pressures of overtourism and climate change reshaping the city, while holding close to the rhythms of everyday Venetian life. “The sight of laundry hanging out to dry has always given me hope: it is a sign of life and resiliency,” McGill told Archipanic.

“I began to think about ways that I could use my work as an artist to activate, celebrate, and demonstrate the vitality of the Venetian community, and also inspire more global conversation around the challenges confronting not only Venice but cities around the world,” she adds.

Stretching the full length of Corte Nova, the paintings evoke the movement of the Venetian Lagoon. Rendered in a studied palette of greens and blues drawn from McGill’s colour studies of the lagoon, loose brushstrokes spread across bedsheets of varying dimensions. Together, they shift and breathe in the breeze, forming an immersive canopy that speaks warmly to the city’s deep relationship with water.

The title carries a double meaning that sits at the heart of the work. In Italian, marea means tide — applicable equally to the sea’s rise and, pointedly, to the seasonal flood of visitors that surges through these same streets. It is a metaphor that lands without needing to be spelt out.

Filling the length of the street, the paintings recall the waves of the Venetian Lagoon and the lives and traditions of the residents who inhabit this street, a powerful metaphor for our interconnection with water. In Italian, marea means tide, and it is used for both sea rising and tourist flooding.

At a moment when Venice holds the full attention of the global art world, the installation offers something more grounded than spectacle: a considered, human reflection on urban resilience, community identity, and the fragile future of one of the world’s most pressured cities.

Photography is by Marta Mancuso, CIRCUIT.

Melissa McGill at her Marea art installation.