Walking down Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, you probably don’t realize that the name marks the original 17th-century East River shoreline of New York City. These piles of oyster shells, he notes, were sometimes as much as four feet deep, sometimes buried in the ground, sometimes piled high. These shell heaps, long ere this, has excited our curiosity and we had proposed all manner of questioning concerning their authors. These questions my father did not and could not satisfactorily answer, and we were consequently unsatisfied, and hence there was a constantly recurring inquiry.” Installation view of of Alan Michelson, "The Oyster" (2026), commissioned by More Art in partnership with Billion Oyster Project and Governors Island Arts (photo Timothy Schenck for Governors Island Arts)That forgetting is at the foundation of Alan Michelson’s “The Oyster” project, which opened this past weekend on Governors Island and will continue until late fall.