Santina Amato

New York State Council on the Arts

 2023 Individual Artist grant


Santina Amato is proud to announce she is the recipient of the 2023 New York State Council on the Arts, Individual Artist Grant. Her plan is to create new portraits as part of her ongoing photographic series, Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough.

New York Foundation for the Arts

Brooklyn, NY

Santina Amato has been invited to participate as a Mentor in the New York Foundation for the Arts, Immigrant Artist Program, 2023. The program pairs emerging foreign-born artists with artists who have received a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship and/or past participants of the program. The mentors interact with their mentees one-on-one, guiding them to achieve specific goals and providing them with broader access to urban cultural centers through an exchange of ideas, resources, and experiences.


Untitled Art Fair

 Miami Beach, FL

Untitled (Self Portrait), 2015 has been curated into the Lonely Rocks booth at the Untitled Art Fair, Miami Beach, Florida.

November 29th – December 3rd, 2022

Schedule a Studio Visit

Ridgewood, Queens, NYC

Studio View

Santina Amato is currently scheduling one-on-one studio visits until the end of November, 2022. In person studio visits will be at her current studio in Ridgewood, Queens, NY. Virtual studio visits are also available via zoom. Please send a direct message to santinaamatoatgmaildotcom with your availability.


Bronx Museum of Art

1040 Grand Concourse, The Bronx, NY, 10456

AIM Fellowship 2022

AIM FELLOWSHIP 2022


Santina Amato is a 2022 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum, NY.


Since 1980, the Bronx Museum of the Arts has supported New York’s artist community through the AIM Fellowship, the museum’s flagship artist development program offering career management resources to guide emerging artists through the opaque professional practices of the art world.

 

Mentored by a distinguished faculty of industry experts, AIM Fellows engage in a nine-month long series of intensive seminars and activities covering a wide range of topics including finance, law, media management, and writing, among others, that aid artists in building sustainable studio practices while expanding peer and professional networks. Since its founding, the AIM Fellowship has provided pivotal career support to a diverse roster of over 1,200 of New York's most promising artists.


2022 AIM FELLOWS


Aika Akhmetova

Santina Amato

Miguel Braceli

Ivana Brenner

Nicki Cherry

Jennifer Chia-ling Ho

Christina Freeman

Ronen Gamil

Judy Giera

Christian Hincapie

Woomin Kim

Katherine Miranda

Sagarika Sundaram

Freddy Villalobos

4Heads Portal House

Exhibition of Session I Artist In Residence

August 5th – August 7th, 2022

Colonels Row, Governors Island, NYC

4Heads Portal 2022 Session I Artist In Residence will be showcasing the work created over the summer on Governors Island, NYC.


August 5th-7th

12-9pm

408A Colonels Row, 

Governors Island


Participating Artists:

Santina Amato

Amy Butowicz

Gigi Chen

Valerie Hallier

Jean Foos

Jody MacDonald

Christina Massey

Anne Muntges


Open Studios, 4Heads Portal

June 24th – June 26th, 2022

Colonels Row, Governors Island, NYC

4Heads Portal 2022 Session I Artist In Residence will be opening their studio doors to the public.


June 24th-26th

12-5pm

408A Colonels Row, 

Governors Island


Participating Artists:

Santina Amato

Amy Butowicz

Gigi Chen

Valerie Hallier

Jean Foos

Jody MacDonald

Christina Massey

Anne Muntges


Artist In Residence, 4Heads Portal

May 1st – August 19th, 2022

Colonels Row, Governors Island, NYC

Santina Amato has been invited back to Governors Island for Session I of 4Heads Portal 2022 Artist In Residence program. Amato plans to continue the work in sculpture she started last year and develop the work into a site specific sculpture, set in the kitchen of the old Colonels home.


Participating Artists:

Santina Amato

Amy Butowicz

Gigi Chen

Valerie Hallier

Jean Foos

Jody MacDonald

Christina Massey

Anne Muntges



Around The Table; Stories of The Food We Love

June 5th – September 11th, 2022

New York Botanical Gardens, NYC

Santina Amato has received a commission for the Around the Table; Stories of the Food We Love exhibition at the New York Botanical Gardens, Bronx, NYC. The exhibition will be on view June 5th – September 11th, 2022


Placed throughout the Garden, tables designed by artists living or working in the Bronx bring to life stories about the exhibition’s featured plants and other notable foods. Each one-of-a-kind table will celebrate the cultural and historical significance of crops and plant-based food traditions—and encourage sitting, sharing, and storytelling.


Dedicated to Amato's mother with her in mind as audience, Per La Mamma Mia is a table using universal symbols such as the checkered tablecloth to reference the importance of food within Italian culture. Amato states "My table is a dedication to Italians, like my mother, who migrated pre and post WWI and WWII to multicultural societies like America, and brought with them their cultural practices. It's for the Italian immigrants who not only brought their culture to new lands, but also the hand skills passed on by all those before them.


I chose the classic red and white checked table as a backdrop to my table as it is very much a universal symbol of Italian cuisine and has an interesting history here in America. Throughout the 20th century, the red and white checked tablecloth symbolized an unpretentious restaurant serving “ethnic” food which also included French, German and Mexican food. Italian restaurants in America quickly embraced and owned the symbol for which we all now relate to Italian food."


Amato will be holding a gnocchi demonstration on July 25th, 2022 at her mums table. Gnocchi is the type of pasta her mother taught her how to cook from a very young age.


Open Studio, 4Heads Portal

Sunday 31st October, 2021

12-5pm

407 Colonels Row, Governors Island, NY

Artist in her studio on Governors Island

Occupying the living room of the disused Colonels homes, Amato has been Artist In Residence with 4Heads Portal on Governors Island since April, 2021. On Sunday October 31st, she will be opening her studio door to the public to showcase her current series of large scale sculpture. All welcome. Presenting proof of vaccine and the wearing of masks inside any building on Governors Island, will be mandated.


Particpating Artists

Santina Amato  

Sonya Blesofsky

Ellen Blum

Nora Breen

Miggy Buck

Henry Chung

Rose Deler

Gregg Emery

Tim Fite  

Pablo Garcia-Lopez

Tine Kindermann

Sizhu Li

Kyle Luntz

Ethan Minsker

Shiri Mordechay

Motomichi Nakamura

Matthias Neumann

Lauren Petty & Shaun Irons

Simona Prives

Jiwon Rhie

Margaret Roleke

Nola Romano

Cynthia Ruse

Jonathan Sims

Janice Sloane

Grant Stoops

Sam Sundius

Erin Turner

Debra Zechowski

Michelle Frick

Peter Stankiewicz

Nicole Parcher

Artist and Curator Zoom Conversation

A public conversation between Artist Santina Amato and Curator Lisa Freiman

Link Below

April 21st, 2021

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Santina Amato and Curator Lisa Freiman have a conversation about the artist’s exhibition, Santina Amato:

Convulsive Beauty.


Convulsive Beauty is on view at Bucknell University’s Samek Art Museum's Downtown Gallery from April 14 through June 12, 2021.

Convulsive Beauty

An exhibition of works by Santina Amato, Curated by Lisa Freiman

Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University, Lewisberg, PA

Opening April 14th, 2021

"Beauty will be convulsive or not at all … Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic circumstantial or not at all." 

-- André Breton

 

The exhibition title Convulsive Beauty derives from the irrational and contradictory concept that André Breton introduced in his books Nadja (1928) and Mad Love (1937). Conceived, planned, and installed via Zoom calls and email in the midst of a global pandemic, Convulsive Beauty was literally created as an out-of-body, virtual, nearly-cyborgian experience between the artist and curator. The exhibition includes abstract works – photographs, ceramics, and new digital prints – that touch upon the notion of the psychosexual body as a living organism and a site of desire. The work has an uncanny sensibility: portraits show women in familiar domestic settings covered mysteriously in amorphous, oozing piles of dough that approximate their weight; biomorphic white ceramic vessels with shiny, screaming-red interiors suggest fleshy genitalia and bodily orifices awaiting penetration. The latest work, which has never been exhibited before, is made from digital

line drawings that Amato has populated with film stills from her Amateur Porn series. She then manipulates the resulting contorted abstractions that intertwine and writhe like body parts. While diverse in medium and appearance, these works share a common vocabulary of colors and biomorphic shapes that simultaneously allude to the interior and exterior states of the body.

 

Santina Amato was born in Australia to Italian immigrants and has lived and worked in the USA since 2010. Her practice includes a wide range of mediums and formats from painting to sewn sculptures, installations,

sculptures, video, and photographic works, and live performances. Amato is interested in the physical nature of varying materials that relate to the domestic environment, such as bread dough, bedsheets, fresh produce, as well as the labor processes used when working with these materials. As a material focus, she often uses bread dough in unexpected ways in installations, sculptures, video and photographic works, and in live settings. For Amato, the life cycle of dough is a powerful metaphor for exploring the ideas of birth and decay, bodily processes, sexuality, and the erotic. When yeast is activated by warm water and sugar, the cells of it split and divide similarly to when an egg is fertilized by sperm. There is a peak moment when dough is voluptuous, full, and ripe, just before it begins to 'die.'

 

Lisa Freiman is an internationally recognized curator, museum professional, and professor with over thirty years of experience in the field of contemporary art. Freiman has supported a diverse array of emerging and underrecognized artists throughout the United States and abroad with major exhibitions, commissions, acquisitions, and publications. Throughout her career, she has maintained a steadfast interest in feminist art practices, collaboration, and the contemporary recuperation of historic Surrealism. Freiman currently works as an independent curator and writer with a tenured faculty appointment in Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts in Richmond, Virgina.

Amato Featured In Lenscratch

Polotics of the Kitchen, written by Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman

April 13, 2021

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Amato's work has been published in Lenscratch, an online Photographic publication. The edition focuses on works by artists who work with food.

Artist In Residence, 4Heads Portal

May 1st – November, 2021

407 Colonels Row, Governors Island, NY

Amato has been selected to participate in an Artist-in-Residence program with 4Heads Portal on Governors Island in New York. Her position will begin April 19th through October 15th, 2021. Amato plans to create large scale sculptures using domestic furniture, and end her residency creating a site specific work for the Open Studios event scheduled in September. Details will follow.


Particpating Artists

Santina Amato  

Sonya Blesofsky

Ellen Blum 

Nora Breen

Miggy Buck

Henry Chung

Rose Deler

Gregg Emery

Tim Fite  

Pablo Garcia-Lopez

Tine Kindermann

Sizhu Li 

Kyle Luntz 

Ethan Minsker 

Shiri Mordechay 

Motomichi Nakamura 

Matthias Neumann

Lauren Petty & Shaun Irons

Simona Prives 

Jiwon Rhie 

Margaret Roleke 

Nola Romano 

Cynthia Ruse 

Jonathan Sims

Janice Sloane

Grant Stoops

Sam Sundius 

Erin Turner 

Debra Zechowski 

Michelle Frick

Peter Stankiewicz

Nicole Parcher

Seedbed Published in Emergency Index Vol 9

December 3rd, 2020

Photo Rob Southard

Amato's performance, Seedbed, 2019 has been included in Emergency INDEX Vol. 9 publication and is now available for pre-order on the link below. Publishing release date is December 15th, 2020.


The pages of Emergency INDEX are open to all who work with performance. In each annual volume, contributors document works made in the previous year. By including performances regardless of their country of origin, genre, aims, or popularity, INDEX reveals the breathtaking variety of practices used in performance work today. Each volume features a comprehensive index of key terms used by contributors in describing and discussing their own work.


Begun in 2011, INDEX is a lens for seeing the field of contemporary performance from the ground up.

INDEX Vol. 9 presents 310 works from 55 countries performed during 2019, documented in the words of their creators.

Bethany Arts Community Artist-In_Residence Artist Talk

October 30th, 2020

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Facebook Live

Artist-in-Residence Santina Amato will be presenting on her work and practice to date, and the work created while AIR at Bethany Arts Community.

Follow link to view recording.

Artist-In-Residence

Bethany Arts Community

October 20th-30th, 2020

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Bethany Arts Community

40 Somerstown Rd,

Ossining, NY

10562, United States


https://bethanyarts.org/

Santina Amato is will be Artist-in-Residence at Bethany Arts Community in Ossining, NY. Amato intends on creating new work using cotton bedsheets sourced from eBay, natural beeswax and pine rosin to create outdoor sculptures that are designed to decompose over time.

Amato’s Work Featured in Create Magazine’s Women Edition

April 1st, 2020


Santina Amato's work will be published in Create! Magazine's upcoming women’s edition of 2020, expected to be released after April 20th, 2020. A special thank you to our guest curator Liezel Strauss for carefully selecting work to feature in this special issue.


Feature Articles:

A Weight on our Shoulders: Santina Amato’s Portaits of Women with their Weight in Dough by Alicia Puig

What Binds Us: Arghavan Khosravi Paints the Tension Within the Female Experience by Christina Nafziger

Charlotte Jansen: Women Writing on Women Writing on Art by Christina Nafziger

Landscapes, Light, and Layering: Interview with Gill Rocca by Alicia Puig

Art as a Guarantee of Sanity: Interview with Holly Ballard Martz by Alicia Puig

‘Surround Yourself With What Makes You Happy!’: A Profile on Artist and Entrepreneur Margalit Romano By Zoë Goetzmann


Artist Talk with MOCA Artist in Residence Santina Amato

University of Arizona

December 18th, 2019

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Wednesday, December 18th

6:00-8:00pm

University of Arizona,

Graduate Gallery,

1231 N Fremont Ave,

Tucson, AZ 85719


Please join us for an artist talk by Santina Amato on her multidisciplanry work. Amato is current Artist-in-Residence at MOCA Tucson’s which is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Screening: Angeliki at MOCA Tucson

Thursday 12th December, 2019

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Screening on the third floor of MOCA Tucson

Museum of Contemporary Art

265 South Church Avenue

Tucson, AZ, 85701

Thursday December 12th, 2019

7pm – 9pm including Q&A.

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Current MOCA Tucson Artist in Residence Santina Amato, is proud to present Angeliki, a durational video portrait of a women with her weight in dough. The durational video is 83 minutes long, capturing dough slowly creeping to consume a woman and her personal space. It is the first time Amato will be presenting one of her full length video works within a public screening setting.

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The creation of this work was partially supported by the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events 2019 Individual Artist Grant and is an ongoing series.

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Amato’s position as AIR at MOCA Tucson is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

MOCA Tucson Artist-In-Residence Artist Talk

December 3rd, 2019

Join us for an evening talk with our newest Artist in Residence, Santina Amato.

December 3rd, 7.30pm – 8.30pm

Museum of Contemporary Art

520.624.5019

265 South Church Avenue

Tucson, AZ, 85701

Admission

Members: Free

Public: $10