Mary Rubi, Jenny, Suraya, Erika, and Deidre are included in Serendipity Sky, opening April 27th.

Exhibiting artists are Lauren Cohen, Kellianne McCarthy, Katie Ford, Santina Amato, Pin Hsin, Remy Sosa, Martine Kaczynski, Elise Church, & Marianne Peragallo.

Curated by Laurie De Chiara

ArtPort Kingston

The Cornell Steamboat Building, 

108 East Strand, Kingston, NY 12401

Flowers Will Die

A live performance by Artist Santina Amato

Santina Amato is currently calling for perfromers. If you would like to be considered, please send an email with your age and commitment to meet on March 24th at the Bronx Museum for rehearsal and on March 30th for the actual performance, to santinaamatoatgmail.com with Flowers Will Die in the subject line. Deadline March 20th.

Flowers Will Die is a performance using bread dough, a signature material in Amato’s work. Within a live setting, dough creates a visceral experience where the comforting smell of bread dough consumes the audience’s sense of smell. Flowers Will Die sees Amato and six other women make their collective weight in dough. Once the flour, water, and yeast have been laboured over to form the dough, each woman will sit with the dough as the audience watches it activate the sculpture they have created with their bodies, rising and consuming their limbs and bodies over a slow period of an hour and a half. The audience is encouraged to meander the museum while the activation is in process, returning to the room to see the sculpture’s slow morph.

Amato’s work with bread dough stems from a cultural history of women’s labour within the domestic environment passed down through the women before her. Raised in Australia by immigrant poor rural workers from the south of Italy who themselves were raised during the depression era and fascist Italy, Amato was raised to see labour as a way to fully experience the human condition. Being raised in a multicultural society, it was only when Amato entered adulthood, specifically womanhood, she realized the labour women are asked to carry is more than just physical. Her live performances show the physical and psychological labour women are still expected to carry within professional and personal relationships.

Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough is currently on view as part of the Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial at The Bronx Museum of the Arts in the Bronx, NY. The five portraits on view were supported by a New York State Council on teh Arts grant and a Foundation For Contemporary ArtsEmergency Grant. They will be on view from January 27-March 31, 2024.

Santina Amato received a grant from the Foundation For Contemporary Arts to present Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough in Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial at The Bronx Museum of the Arts in the Bronx, NY, on view January 27-March 31, 2024.

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.

Photos by Yi Hsuan Lai

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.

"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."

Olivia, 2019

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.