Ken Weeks & Bradley Pitts

Teaches at Hudson River Maritime Museum

Ken Weeks, who has built an average of a traditional birch-bark canoe each year since 2000, builds canoes in the indigenous way, harvesting birch bark from the forest and lashing bark and frame together with spruce roots. He pursues all aspects of birch-bark canoe technology with anthropological reverence. Trekking the Northern woods he hand harvests and prepares materials to build these magnificent craft. Weeks has designed and is in the process of constructing a 42-foot ceremonial long-canoe, with a six-foot beam, in the Passamaquoddy style.

Bradley Pitts is a Brooklyn-based sculptor who spent childhood summers learning to canoe on the lakes and whitewater rivers of the Southeastern United States. He has completed several multiple-week canoeing expeditions down the Grand Canyon and other major rivers in the US, and in 2002 he tried out for the US Olympic Team in Whitewater Canoe Freestyle. Educated at MIT, the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (NL), and Columbia University, Pitts’ artwork has been shown at the Jewish Museum (US), University of California in Riverside (US), the Netherlands Institute for Media Art (NL), and Kunsthalle Bern (CH), among other venues.

In 2021 Pitts had the opportunity to paddle one of Weeks’ canoes and the two have been working together ever since.