The Artists Paddling 350 Miles Up the Erie Canal
As part of “Mule’s Passage,” artists Z Behl and Kim Moloney are paddling six hours a day and camping for five weeks.
WATERFORD, NY — The scene in Waterford, Upstate New York, in early August: A group of kind elders sing with gusto under wilted American flags. Excited supporters hover over artist duo Z Behl and Kim Moloney — together, called “BALONEY STEEL” — as they prepare to embark on what they call the “Mule’s Passage,” and paddle 350 miles (~563 km) to Buffalo.
After brief speeches and an emotional spoken-word piece by playwright Judy Tate, founder of the American Slavery Project, Behl and Maloney boarded their canoe at the end of the dock at the Eastern Gate corridor, the first in a series of locks that lift vessels from the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers into the canal system. The singers walked to the bridge above and were still belting their hearts out as the duo glided underneath — and thus began their journey against the current under a blazing summer sun.
An artistic-cum-anthropological exploration of the Erie Canal, “Mule’s Passage” is a creative reimagining of the woman’s body as both an engine of industry and a narrator of history. With their canoe decorated like a mule, they honor the invisible labor that powered the early towpath canal that transformed the United States and the global economy as we know it. “Mule’s Passage” involves six hours of daily paddling and five weeks of camping for the duo, ending this Friday, September 5, when they are to land in Buffalo after traversing each of the counties along the waterway, also home to six territories of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
While retracing the old towpaths in a living study of work and folklore, “Mule’s Passage” also highlights the Erie Canal as a mechanism of Indigenous displacement: the development of the waterway carved through Native American lands, wrecking stewardship protocols and breaking contracts with Indigenous populations. The artists' expedition is punctuated by interviews with ecologists, historians, activists, and residents along the canal to foster conversations about the ecological impact of the manmade waterway.
The project is supported by the Erie Canal Museum Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program and the New York State Canal Corporation, plus other sponsors including Bixpy (who supplied the electric outboard solar-charging motor for the canoe) and Camp Chow (who donated homemade dehydrated meals). The AIR program offers artists an opportunity to engage creatively with the iconic waterway “by blending art with storytelling to illuminate its cultural, environmental, and historical significance,” as its website puts it. Other project partners for the paddle include the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, which will host an exhibition of the “Mule’s Passage” documentation in spring 2027.
