Santina Amato is showing a special exhibition as part of the Rockella Artist Studio Program she is Facilitating at Rockella Space. On view until September 24th, 2023.
RASP EXHIBITION
@ One Eyed Studios
1639 Centre St, Queens
NY, 11385
Exhibition Hours:
FRIDAYS, SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS
1-6PM
Closing Event:
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 24th, 1-4pm
This project is supported by @qnsarts Queens Arts New Work grant.
Thank you to @nyfacurrent and @nyculture for supporting arts in Queens.
Documentation by @flaneurshan.studio
#qaf2023 #newwork #workinprogress #workinprogressart #sculpture #nycartist #queensartsfund #queensartsfundgrantee #nyfagrants #nyfagrantee #brooklynartist #contemporarysculpture #sitespecificinstallation #queensgrant #nysca #nyfa
Two of Santina Amato's 2019 Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough will be on show at Springbreak in New York City, curated by Katya Grokhovsky.
Santina Amato Announced as Program Facilitator of RASP
June 26th, 2023
Santina Amato will be the Program Facilitator of a Pilot Summer Residency Program in New York City at Rockella Space. To find out more and apply as an artist, follow this link. Deadline to apply is July 16th.
OPEN CALL: Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough
Deadline, May 21st, 2023
"I want to feel the weight of the dough and be engulfed in its mass. I see myself in the dough. The dough is slippery, grotesque, expansive, and suffocating, yet undeniably sexy—it’s sublime and I can’t get enough of it. The material reflects how I feel existing in my own body. I love the way the material expands and crawls outward.
The dough takes up space in a way I aspire to, in a way that is usually deemed unacceptable for women because it is un-contained and boundary-breaking.
I’m also drawn to this project because of the title—“Portraits of Women With Their Weight in Dough”. I’ve always had a contentious relationship with womanhood. I’m a queer non-binary dyke, and although femme, my female-coded body never felt quite right. Yet I hold desperately to womanhood—a womanhood that exists and is expressed in a non-female body.
I cannot let go of the long history of women in my family, and I love being identified in relation to them. My mother is a free-spirited, silly, and creative woman, who experienced years of abuse and gaslighting. My baba who fled war, gave birth in a displaced persons camp, and raised nine children in a country not her own. These women are so precious to me and their stories are my lifeblood.
They taught me how to survive and connect me to my womanhood. Following their example, I am trying to bake challah every Friday (it is the woman’s job to bake the challah.) It’s a traditional role, one that was performed by the women in my family for as long as I can trace back. Yet in an age of industrial food and commercially prepared bread, kneading dough every week feels revolutionary. It doesn’t feel like a domestic chore, but rather a ritual connecting me to my ancestors."
With the support of an Individual Artist Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, fiscally sponsored by 4HEADS, NYC-based artist Santina Amato is calling for Sitters and Dough Makers to create new portraits in her ongoing series Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough. Sitters and Dough Makers must identify as women and because the funds have been received from the State of New York, all portraits must be created in New York, which means all that apply must reside in New York City. Five sitters from the applicant pool will be chosen based on many factors, with their written responses to the project given the highest consideration. Each Sitter will receive a small, unframed printed photograph. Dough Workers will receive $200 per shoot. Shoots are scheduled consecutively from March 31st, through June 4th, 2023.
Further details can be found in the links below.
- Please fill out this form if you would like to be considered to have your portrait taken with your weight in dough.
- Please fill out this form if you want to be a Dough Worker.
More Is Never Enough Curated by Triton Mobley, Field Projects
April 20-May 13, 2023
Field Projects is pleased to present our summer open call exhibition, more is never enough, curated by Triton Mobley. In this astute curation, Mobley has selected an outstanding group of artists, whose work asserts a materiality of desire often communicated through the tactility of raw or distressed materials.
“Far beyond the discourse of economization and industrialization of creativity in the conventional sense, it is now no longer a matter of the becoming-commodity of culture, but rather of economies of desire, of a subservient modulating of our desires and their disciplining modularization.”
In this collection of works the artists don’t shy away from the excesses of material, production, or spent energy — all surfacing — all unravelling at the seams of discernible tactility. Tufted fibers, undulating clay additions, and the repurposing of lossy images packaged and interwoven all in service of functional spectacle and a refutation to our aesthetic desire. It is within the reaches of this untethering that draws my fascination of how makers craft, build, and simply make their art objects — dotting creative spaces with cultivations of their own aesthetic desires. Within these excesses of material usage the question becomes, how do you determine when the art production stops?
OPENING: Thurs, April 20, 6-8pm
526 W 26th Street, #807
NY, NY 1001
Exhibition: April 20-May 13
Hours: Thurs-Sat, 12-6pm
Featuring:
Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez + Santina Amato + Hannah Berger + Katina Bitsicas & Rachel Strickland + Adam Chapman + Kate Donoghue + Jessika Edgar + Ghislaine & Lando Fremaux-Valdez + Jia Jia + Sujin Lim + Edgardo Moza + Cora Nimtz + Nicolas Vionnet + Lexa Walsh + Adam Gabriel Winnie
Sugar Rush, Not Real Art
May 2023
Angeliki, from Amato's ongoing series Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough, has been curated by Morgan Laurens, Editor-In-Chief at Not Real Art into an online exhibition titled Sugar Rush.
"During the pop art era, food became a metaphor for excess, industrialization, and consumption under global capitalism. In the West, bright packages and advertisements turned food into cheap entertainment, ready to eat in seconds and available for pennies. Feminist artists like Judy Chicago used food to challenge oppressive gender roles in the 1970s, while other artists experimented with cheese, chocolate, and butter as material for their work. In the 21st century, as new technologies laid the groundwork for round-the-clock surveillance and omnipresent screens, artists resisted alienation by tapping into the communal aspects of food prep and shared meals." Morgan Laurens
Art Breath: Storied Made In Art
Feature April 20th, 2023
Amato's work featured in Stories Made In Art on Art Breath.
"Santina Amato takes everyday materials and infuses them into her art. Flour, toilet paper, bedsheets, or furniture become tools in the quest to explore questions relating to identity, cultural traditions, norms, and the body. Through the artist’s work and live performances the concept of labour comes into perspective, as the artist looks to break down gender stereotypes with the aid of the materials found within a domestic environment, as well as evoke the notion of memory in relation to what those materials have meant, and what they can mean." Nour Saleh, founder of Art Breath.
Read more here
New Work Grant, Queens Arts Fund
2023
Santina Amato is the recipient of a 2023 Queens Arts Fund, New Work Grant. She will be working in her studio at Rockella Space over the summer and plans to develop her sculpture series Blurring Boundaries, born in the midst of the pandemic and while AIR at 4HEADS. The work will be exhibited in the Fall of 2023.
Performance Art: Education and Practice is an introduction to performance art through activities and practice prompts that are framed by seminal moments in the history of the medium as well as the current theoretical discussions surrounding performance.
The book begins by introducing the terminology related to performance art and its early history. The basic elements of performance, including the body, objects, space, the public, and the public sphere are approached through thematic and conceptual correlations such as objects as autobiography, body as an expression of gendered identity, performance, and the everyday, the augmented body, the archive of performance, and public space as space for intervention. Case studies analyzed in each chapter are accompanied by reflective questions and discussion topics. The book proposes a wide range of exercises and comprehensive practice prompts that aim to enhance performance skills, promote experimentation, and encourage an experiential understanding of the theory, history, and concepts relating to performance art.
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Performance Art: Education and Practice is addressed to students of Fine Arts and Performance Studies from beginner to intermediate level, performance and visual artists who are interested in expanding their knowledge base and creative range, and artist-teachers who are interested in developing their own curriculum and workshop content.
About the Author
Angeliki Avgitidou is an artist working in performance and public space. She studied as an architect (BArch Hons, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and as an artist (MA, PhD, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design). Her work has been shown at occasions that include the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, its Performance Festival, the International Biennial of Performance Deformes, the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, and the 15th International Exhibition of Architecture of the Biennale of Venice. Angeliki is the author of Performance Art: The Basics. A Beginner’s Course Guide (2020). She is Associate Professor at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Western Macedonia. Angeliki has taught postgraduate courses at the University of Western Macedonia, the Hellenic Open University, and the Transart Institute.
To purchase a copy of this book, follow this link
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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