Wood, paper, acrylic, ink
2 x 388 x 49 in
5.1 x 985.5 x 124.5 cm
2013

Richard Humann • The Same River Twice • Wood, paper, acrylic, ink • 2 x 388 x 49 in • 2013 — Richard Humann • *The Same River Twice* • Wood, paper, acrylic, ink • 2 x 388 x 49 in • 2013

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
— Heraclitus of Ephesus (530 – 470 BC)

In The Same River Twice, Richard Humann brings together geography, memory, literature, and personal history to examine how places and people are continually transformed by time. The work draws on the artist’s relationship with the Hudson River Valley, where he grew up in Stony Point, New York, and where he has returned to spend part of his time after decades of living in Brooklyn. Although Stony Point lies only about forty miles north of New York City, Humann experienced the city as a distant world during his childhood. His first visit left a lasting impression, inspiring a desire to live there and introducing him to the cultural possibilities that would shape his life.

Books, music, art, film, and theater expanded the horizons of a young person eager to look beyond his immediate surroundings. The literature he encountered—from Dostoevsky and Steinbeck to Vonnegut and Hemingway—became part of his intellectual and imaginative foundation. These works offered ways of understanding human experience beyond the boundaries of his hometown. After graduating from college, Humann moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in 1985, pursuing the urban life that had long drawn him. Decades later, as the Hudson Valley developed into a vibrant center for contemporary art and culture, he found himself returning to the region, dividing his time between Brooklyn and Woodstock. The landscape of his youth had not remained unchanged, and neither had he.

The sculptural installation takes the Hudson River as its central organizing form. A map tracing the river from its headwaters north of Albany to its outlet beyond Manhattan is transposed onto a thirty-two-foot-long, four-foot-wide pedestal resting on the gallery floor. Humann fills the routed outline of the river with words taken from books, poems, screenplays, song lyrics, and other cultural works that influenced him during his formative years. Among these sources are The Brothers Karamazov, The Sirens of Titan, Sweet Thursday, Gulliver’s Travels, and Janson’s History of Art, alongside poems by E. E. Cummings and countless other texts. Each source is cut apart word by word, transforming complete works into fragments that are placed within the shape of the river.

This physical transformation gives form to the way memory operates. The texts that helped shape Humann’s understanding of the world remain present, but they no longer exist in their original narrative order. Their words have been separated from their sources and brought together in a new configuration, much as memories accumulate over a lifetime, detached from their original moments yet continuing to influence the person we become. The river becomes a vessel for these fragments of intellectual and cultural history, linking the landscape of Humann’s childhood to the ideas that carried him beyond it.

The work’s title invokes the ancient observation attributed to Heraclitus: neither the river nor the person entering it remains the same. The Hudson River continues to flow through a landscape that changes over time, while the individual who returns to it carries decades of experience, knowledge, and memory. Humann’s return to the Hudson Valley is therefore not a simple homecoming. The place is familiar, but it is encountered through a different perspective, shaped by a life lived elsewhere. The river connects past and present while making clear that the two can never be identical.

Ultimately, The Same River Twice considers how identity is formed through the continuous exchange between place, experience, and culture. The Hudson River provides the physical structure, while the fragmented texts represent the ideas and influences carried through a lifetime. By bringing these elements together, Humann transforms a geographical map into a portrait of personal history. The river becomes both a route through the landscape and a metaphor for the passage of a life—a reminder that we may return to the places that shaped us, but we always arrive changed.

Photo credits: J.B. Grant / Richard Humann Studio

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