SAMANTHA  HOLMES

FEMINIST ARTISTS CELEBRATE WOMEN IN A MULTIDISCIPLINARY EVENT

ON UPPER WEST SIDE

 

RESTLESS

An open-air dance performance created by

 Colleen Thomas 

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In connection with 

Mundillo (Little World)

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A public art sculpture by 

Samantha Holmes

Sunday, October 24

1:00-3:00 pm
Performances at 1:00, 1:30, 2, and 2:30

 West 97th Street and Amsterdam Avenue

 

Presented by the New York City Department of Transportation’s Art program in partnership with the Columbus Amsterdam Business Improvement District and the DOT Public Space Unit’s Open Boulevards initiative.

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For high-resolution photos, click here

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Visual artist Samantha Holmes, known for her large-scale metal and stone works and public art projects (including Hell Gate Cairns, an installation in NYC’s Randall’s Island and Riverside Park) and dancer-choreographer Colleen Thomas, whose recent work Light and Desire was praised for delivering “an implicit answer for how to get around the forces that silence women” by The New York Times, join forces for a free public event featuring RESTLESS, a dance performance on and around the newly-relocated sculpture Mundillo (Little World) in a celebration of women and their work. The event, free and open to the public, will take place on Sunday, October 24*, 1:00-3:00 pm (with performances every 30 minutes starting at 1pm) at the northeast corner of West 97th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, where Holmes’ monumental steel sculpture was recently installed. 

 

*Rain date: Sunday, October 31, 1:00pm

 

Conceived of in collaboration between choreographer Colleen Thomas and visual artist Samantha Holmes, Restless is a structured dance improvisation performed by a feminist collective exploring the spaces in which women are anonymous or celebrated, seen or ignored. The dancers seek to highlight the physical labor and beauty of women's work and to explore notions of fragility and strength, femininity and masculinity, private and public value. The performance is an artistic conversation with Mundillo (Little World), a monumental installation, originally displayed in West Farms Square in the Bronx and recently relocated to Manhattan Valley, where it will remain until the end of 2022. A monument to women’s work and the cultural dynamism of NYC, Holmes’ sculpture translates lacework patterns – inspired by Puerto Rican bobbin lace, or mundillo – from the intimacy of the home to the visibility of the city square, from the softness of cotton to the resilience of steel. As the dancers move around the artwork, the colors and forms of their bodies seem to fill the openings in the sculptural surface, at once framed and fragmented.

 

Holmes and Thomas, who first met at the workshop Art & Science: Insights into Consciousness at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, share passion for feminism and belief in the power of creative collaboration at the intersection of various disciplines. “My contact improvisational practice and Samantha's sculptural sway and suspended fall was an interesting connection between us and our mediums,” explains Thomas. “As feminist artists, we have wanted to ignite each others work for years. With this joint project, we seek to explore the strength and contributions of innumerable unnamed women to our society – especially now, in the wake of the COVID pandemic, when recognizing and appreciating women’s work becomes especially vital.” 

 

Holmes adds: “It’s shocking to realize how few statues of women exist in NYC’ s public art landscape: as of 2018, there were just five. While I am honored to be among the artists commissioned by the city’s government to create new works of art that will enter into this public discourse, I want to speak to female identity and female contributions in a more contemporary way, rather than creating an explicit representation of a historical female figure. Mundillo takes a craft tradition we associate with femininity, with the home, with the older generations of women in our families, and places it in a public space to assert the strength behind that softness. In the days I spent installing this piece onsite, passersby began telling me about cousins, mothers, grandmothers who make lace, who knit, who sew. In these interactions, in the memories it stirs, the work becomes a monument not to a single famous woman, but to all those who raised us and clothed us and supported us, whose hands are always restless in acts of (uncelebrated) care.”