Our biennial Hatch is a celebration of creative incubation and community, featuring large-scale bird puppets, a 14-foot egg, storytelling, live music, and public exuberance. For every Hatch, the public is invited to construct bird costumes and to join disparate community members to hatch out of a giant egg and march joyously through Frenchtown.
In September 2016, ArtYard announced its presence by hatching a flock of giant bird puppets out of a 14-foot-tall welded-steel egg perched on the edge of a derelict former egg hatchery located at the foot of the Frenchtown Bridge. The act of hatching was a nod to Frenchtown’s past as a 20th-century hub of egg incubation, and to its future as an incubator of creative artistic enterprise.
The first Hatch began with a series of puppet-building workshops and was heralded by a lone saxophone player, “Sweet” Lee Odom. Odom led the parade of white birds to the opening of ArtYard’s first exhibition, an installation of mirrored pillars by Canadian artist Bruno Bilio, and Murmuration, a collaborative project by ArtYard’s Elsa Mora and Jill Kearney.
ArtYard’s second Hatch engaged Italian composer Camilla Uboldi to create an original score for a homemade collection of marching toy pianos, typewriters, xylophones, and drums. The Hatch culminated in raucous impromptu dancing inside the soon to be demolished building at 13 Front Street.
Since construction had commenced at 13 Front Street, ArtYard’s third Hatch took place at the foot of the Frenchtown Bridge in Sunbeam Lenape Park. Accompanied by Brooklyn’s Hungry March Band, a flock of puppet birds, chickens, and vultures marched to the new ArtYard site, where Sister Cities Girl Choir sang to the assembled crowd.
Due to the COVID 19 pandemic, ArtYard’s fourth Hatch in the spring of 2020 transpired as a crowdsourced virtual event with participants sending in hatch-at-home videos.
ArtYard’s fifth Hatch returned as an in-person event following a pandemic hiatus on Saturday, June 25, 2022. The procession was led by Ocean Avenue Stompers, a New Orleans-influenced brass band. Artist Laura Bernstein and collaborators unfurled their Miracle Tapestry Project — panels of 12-foot-tall, hand-sewn fabrics chronicling the first 12 months of Covid-19 in the artist’s life. Bernstein and the artists read a collective poem written in embrace for finding joy in the natural world despite its perilous future.
At 2 PM on Saturday, May 17, 2025 a flock of human birds will hatch out of an enormous egg at ArtYard and begin a celebratory parade through Frenchtown. The sixth biennial Hatch is a raucous, joyful conjuring of hope, transformation, and transcendence. Flocks of birds will dance and parade alongside musicians, dancers, and birds of all shapes and sizes in an act of creative rebirth.
In the lead-up to the festival, we have transformed our Laboratory Gallery into The Hatch Workshop, featuring a maker’s workspace dedicated to the creation of costumes and puppets for the event.
Please join us on May 17 as we leap over our walls of solitude, rub shoulders with strangers, make a flock of birds with our neighbors and friends, and bring to life Emily Dickenson’s dictum at this fractured, vulnerable moment that,
“Hope is the thing with feathers.”
