‘between tides’ makes skill temporarily useless
Down at New York City’s Rockaway Beach, six ping-pong tables rise directly from the sand, though each one interferes with the game it appears ready to host. A tentacle blocks a clean serve, while circular holes swallow the ball. Between Tides, a Public Art Fund exhibition curated by Gabriela López Dena, begins with a form almost anyone can recognize, then removes the comfort of knowing exactly what to do with it.
The familiar dimensions remain visible across the commissions by Moko Fukuyama, Ilana Harris-Babou, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Carlos H. Matos, Amalia Pica, and SUPERFLEX. Yet technique travels poorly from one sculpture to the next. By making expertise temporarily useless, the tables turn competition into a collective exercise in experimentation.
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Ilana Harris-Babou: for those of us who live at the shoreline
Brooklyn-born artist Ilana Harris-Babou makes this loss of competence explicit in for those of us who live at the shoreline. Everyday beach objects cast in ceramic sit across a sparkly terrazzo surface, blocking the direct paths that experienced players usually rely on. A smooth rally becomes difficult for everyone, which leaves space for hesitant serves and strange rebounds. Other uses of the table can emerge beyond scoring points.
Nearby seating extends the work beyond the match, giving players and passersby somewhere to pause between turns. Harris-Babou developed the installation through ideas of free play and drawings made by beachgoers during workshops along the Rockaway boardwalk. The table creates a loose social zone where a person can compete, watch, rest, or improvise another activity entirely.
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Moko Fukuyama: Old School
Japanese filmmaker and miltidisciplinary artist Moko Fukuyama introduces a more theatrical interruption with Old School, which collides a 1958 aluminum boat with a wooden ping-pong table gripped by a brightly painted sea creature. The salvaged boat came from Marina 59 in the Rockaways, while the tentacles were carved from reclaimed walnut and finished in glossy automotive paint. One thick limb pushes through the playing surface at the exact place a player might expect to send the ball.
By placing the obstruction directly in the path of play, Fukuyama gives chance a physical form. A strong serve can strike the sculpture and change direction, while the capsized boat turns the whole game into a scene of maritime confusion. Fukuyama draws from sea folklore and her own connection to fishing in the Rockaways, using the table to suggest how quickly familiar systems can be disrupted by forces beyond anyone’s control.
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Las Hermanas Iglesias: DiMeLo
Las Hermanas Iglesias builds unpredictability into the sound of DiMeLo, a stainless-steel table embedded with musical instruments. A glockenspiel spans part of the surface, while percussion pieces occupy the opposing side. The ball can strike a tom drum or glance off a cymbal, producing tones that depend on the pace and direction of each rally.
The Queens-born sisters draw from childhood games and their habit of using table tennis to work through ideas together. Here, competition gives way to an accidental composition made by two players, or by anyone who decides to tap the instruments directly. Each match sounds different, and skill at returning the ball offers little control over the music being produced.
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Amalia Pica: Fair Play
The standard two-person setup is expanded by Amalia Pica through Fair Play, a zigzagging formation of eight tabletops that can accommodate up to ten people. Colorful maritime signal symbols spell out the work’s title across the surfaces, while fabric flags overhead issue a direct invitation: COME PLAY. The configuration makes it difficult to identify a single opponent or follow one clean line of exchange.
Players have to decide where a rally begins and who joins, while the length of each point can shift as the crowd changes. Pica draws from the communal ping-pong games of her childhood in Argentina, where groups circled a table and passed paddles from one person to the next. At Rockaway, the sculpture turns a face-to-face duel into a shifting crowd game shaped by whoever steps in.
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Carlos H. Matos: Tlachco
Combining a contemporary ping-pong surface with the sloping walls and hoops of an Ulama court, Carlos H. Matos folds another ball-game history into Tlachco. The ancient Mesoamerican game used a rubber ball struck with the body, and its exact forms varied across place and time. The Mexican artist reduces its architecture to table scale, using aluminum and volcanic stone to create a compact court with several possible targets.
A player can use the sloped side walls as rebounds or aim through a hoop before familiar scoring falls away altogether. The sculpture keeps the historical reference open enough for invention, allowing the game to be imagined through movement instead of reconstructed as a fixed lesson. Each rally becomes a small attempt to decipher how the court wants to be used.
SUPERFLEX: Fish Ping-Pong
Creative collective SUPERFLEX takes the exhibition’s waterfront setting most literally with Fish Ping-Pong, a pink Cantera stone structure punctured by openings across its base and playing surface. Its blocky form refers to modernist housing along the Rockaway shoreline, though the architecture has been designed with future marine inhabitants in mind. If submerged, the cavities could shelter algae and other ocean life.
Two large holes also sit directly in the path of the ball, turning absences in the table into possible targets. One player faces the city while the other looks toward the Atlantic, placing every match between urban construction and the water that continually reshapes the peninsula. The sculpture asks players to adapt to a court imagined for human recreation and another species’ habitat at once.
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public art without a script
Artists have used ping-pong for decades because its basic exchange is easy to recognize and easy to disturb. Between Tides continues that history through sculptures that need bodies, balls, missed shots, and invented agreements to become fully active. The beach strengthens this open structure. People arrive in changing groups, drift between swimming and resting, then join a game without needing to enter a gallery or understand an artist’s instructions first.
Open from June 27th to September 13th, 2026, the exhibition offers free paddles and balls from Friday through Sunday, while visitors can bring their own equipment whenever the beach is open. The strongest moments begin when the intended game breaks down. A ball hits a ceramic obstacle or disappears through a hole. A metallic note travels across the sand, and the players have to decide together what happens next.
project info:
project: Between Tides
artists: Ilana Harris-Babou, Moko Fukuyama, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Amalia Pica, Carlos H. Matos, SUPERFLEX
location: Rockaway Beach, Beach 67, Queens, New York
organizer: Public Art Fund
curator: Gabriela López Dena
dates: June 27th — September 13th, 2026
The post artist-designed ping-pong tables make everyone a beginner at rockaway beach appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.
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