News - Santina Amato

Thresholds: Reimagining Domesticity, Labor, and Identity

On view: September 6 – 28, 2025

Opening Reception & Performance: September 6, 6–8 PM

Artist Talks: September 20, 4–6 PM

Closing Reception: September 28, 3–6 PM

Location: PS122 Gallery, 150 1st Avenue, New York, NY

PS122 Gallery is pleased to announce “Thresholds: Reimagining Domesticity, Labor, and Identity,” a group exhibition featuring multidisciplinary work by Santina Amato, Katya Grokhovsky, Woomin Kim, and Barbara Weissberger. This timely exhibition explores the intersections of domestic labor, material culture, gender, and personal identity through a rich array of sculpture, textile, photography, video, and performance.

In an era defined by economic instability, rising loneliness, and domestic precarity, “Thresholds” brings together four artists whose practices draw from the material and psychological realities of the domestic realm. Whether responding to family structures, labor, housing, or solitude, each artist uses their home as a site of inquiry, mining its messes, rituals, rhythms, and silences.

“Thresholds” invites viewers to consider the home not merely as a private refuge but as a charged site of negotiation, a threshold between visibility and invisibility, care and confinement, tradition and transformation. The artists draw on personal and cultural narratives to subvert the meanings of everyday domestic objects such as bread dough, discarded fabrics, furniture, and household remnants, infusing them with complex emotional and historical weight.

The exhibition opens with a durational performance by Santina Amato on September 6 from 6–8 PM, where the body becomes a tool of labor and reflection. Audiences are also invited to a public Artist Talk on September 20 (4–6 PM), where all four artists will discuss their processes, inspirations, and the political undercurrents of their practices. A Closing Reception on September 28 (3–6 PM) will mark the final opportunity to engage with the work and its themes in person.

Curated with a sensitivity to materiality and the symbolic resonance of domestic labor, “Thresholds” positions the home as a site of both containment and agency. The exhibition amplifies the voices of women artists who confront and reimagine the spaces and materials that shape everyday life. Through meticulous making, embodied action, and radical recontextualization, their works challenge viewers to see the domestic space as a site of confrontation and creation, far from a place of escapism or retreat.

Santina Amato will be showing a collection of her Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough at We Are What exhibition, alongside some video works from 2015.

Intersect Arts Center

3636 Texas Ave, St. Louis, MO 63118

July 10-August 16, 2025

We Are What explores our complex relationship to food from a number of perspectives. The artists in this show share winsome portraits of American farmers, contemplate the weight of domestic food culture and legacy, comment on consumption and preservation in our ecology, and ponder how food is infused into the heart of our stories both secular and sacred.

Food is fuel.

Food is joy.

Food is a struggle.

Food is life.

Food has tremendous power to unify, and tremendous power to divide.

In a globalized world, as much as we would like to believe our food preferences only affect our own personal taste buds, the artists in this exhibition help us unpack our relationship to the rippling effects of food through a deeply interwoven world. We are of course not only what we eat, but the intricate and massive surrounding systems, people, places, beliefs, and behaviors that are part of the fundamental sustenance that sustains us all is in fact what we are.

Curated by Sarah Bernhardt, We Are What features work by:

Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts

435 Ellis Hollow Creek Road

Ithaca, NY 14850

Santina Amato has been invited to participate in the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Artist-in-Residence Program. She will continue her sculptural work using mens belts.

About Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts

The Saltonstall Foundation supports artists and writers of New York State through two main programs held on our property outside Ithaca, NY:

The summer juried residency program (May 30 – October 24, 2025)
Subsidized, do-it-yourself “off-season” retreats (mid-November – late-April each year)

Our two one-week residencies for parents, plus our one-, two-, three-, and four-week residencies are open to year-round residents of New York State. We accept applications in the following disciplines: poetry; fiction & creative nonfiction or playwrighting & screenwriting (rotates by year); photography & filmmaking; and painting, sculpture, and visual arts. Our residencies are competitive, stipend-supported, and inclusive.

Rockella Space

1639 Centre St,

Ridgewood, Queens, 11385

Open: May 17 & 18, 2025, 12-6pm

May 22, 23 & 24, 12-6pm

Opening Reception: May 16, 6-9pm

Curator’s walk-through: Sunday, May 18 at 2 PM.

Artists:

Santina Amato, Carly Bodnar, Celine Browning, Maisie Myfawnwy Broome, Jolene Dosa, Julia Forrest, Korissa Frooman, MERCEDES FERNáNDEZ, Savannah Green, Britt Harrison, Erin Juliana, KESH, Coco Ma, Rebecca Matt, Sissy Nunziata, Alejandra Rojas, Francesca Woolson

Please join us for Undercurrent, the next exhibition from under the pale blue, showcasing paintings, sculpture, and photography by seventeen women and non‑binary artists. This expansive exhibition navigates themes of domesticity, the objectified body, mysticism, and abstraction. Exploring materials which span the familiar and the industrial, such as, discarded baby clothes, matted toilet paper, and dripping latex. The work traces how being perceived as female can confine, distort, or empower. Shifting from tenderness through humor to unapologetic ferocity, Undercurrent taps a collective current of experience and invites the viewer to wade in.

Sticking true to our mission, under the pale blue aims to amplify emerging voices and carve out space for the underrepresented creators of the thriving arts community of New York.

One Eyed Studios has graciously welcomed us back to be featured in a vibrant lineup of gallery openings, studio tours, and food specials curated for Ridgewood Open Studios 2025. Throughout the weekend, you’ll be free to roam the hallways—weaving from the gallery into artists’ intimate workspaces for a behind-the-scenes look at their creative process.

A.I.R. Gallery

155 Plymouth Street

Brooklyn NY 11201

(212) 255-6651

info@airgallery.org

Wed–Sun, 12–6pm January 11 – February 9, 2025

Opening reception: Saturday, January 11, from 6–8pm

AG, Santina Amato, Soeun Bae, Emilie Baltz (and) Klasien van de Zandschulp, effie bowen, Cynthia Cruz, Kayla Delacerda, Vivienne Dick, Orlando Estrada, Yessica Gispert, Katya Grokhovsky, H.A. Halpert, Harmony Honig, Miranda July, LIZN’BOW, Susan Rostow, Jocelyn Tsui

Curated by Patricia Margarita Hernández

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce its 16th Biennial, I woke up dreaming., curated by Patricia Margarita Hernández. Beginning with the democratic exercise of an open call, the exhibition asks artists to reflect on the nebulous boundary between performance and daily life in the hallucinatory media landscape that defines our present moment.

Borrowing its title from a 1978 song by Lydia Lunch’s band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, I woke up dreaming. uses the dream state as a metaphor for exploring the disorientation many of us feel as we find ourselves caught between digital entanglements and analogue experiences, between moments of authentic connection and curated self-presentation. Each artist in the exhibition engages with dreaming—not necessarily as a literal act, but as a process of envisioning, questioning, and reshaping reality. The familiar becomes unsettling, the mundane is illuminated with strange light, and the boundaries of possibility are stretched. To dream is to experience emotions in their most exaggerated and raw forms. The works on view reflect this emotional landscape, invoking a sense of the weird, the eerie, and the unexpectedly sublime.

The exhibition brings together works by seventeen artists working across a diverse array of mediums, including video, sculpture, performance, painting, and printmaking. Installed alongside works solicited from the open call process are two archival films by Vivienne Dick and Miranda July, which serve as a sort of spectral interlocutor for the exhibition’s more contemporary moments. For each artist in I woke up dreaming., the dream state is a liminal space where conventional binaries—between natural and artificial intelligence, humanity and its environment, past and present, or margin and periphery—can be called into question. Through dreams, they probe how bodies have been mechanized and upturn the disciplinary structures that enforce control in our waking lives. They embrace the absurdity of the everyday, exult in failure, and reconfigure despair into hope, mirroring the regenerative arc of a dream that first unsettles, and then heals.

I woke up dreaming. asks viewers to embrace the dream’s contradictions: its capacity for joy and terror, peace and chaos, fantasy and truth. In a world that often demands clarity and resolution, this exhibition celebrates the ambiguity and richness of dreaming, where the impossible becomes not just imaginable, but inevitable.

This exhibition is made possible by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

1708 Gallery

319 W Broad St,

Richmond, VA 23220

Santina Amato is the first Artist-in-Residence at 1708 Gallery's Pilot Program. She will be producing a new series of photographic works staged in the living room that has been transformed into a studio for the residency program. The room faces the tree tops of Broad St where the gallery is located.

About 1708

One of the longest-running nonprofit arts spaces in the US, 1708 was founded in 1978 by faculty members from Virginia Commonwealth University at 1708 East Main Street to present artists and projects that reflected their commitment to provocative contemporary art. Today, 1708 is located on Broad Street in the city’s Arts District and is a crucial member of Richmond’s art ecosystem, a leading organization in the region in providing significant resources to artists who are working in a noncommercial capacity, and an accessible platform for the community to experience contemporary art.

Santina Amato will be showing a new sculpture with 4HEADS at the Rockaway Artist Alliance sTudio 7 in Fort Tilden.

Opening Reception: September 28th, 12-7pm

sTudio 7 Gallery, Rockaway Artist Alliance

Fort Tilden, Gateway National Recreation Area, Far Rockaway, NY 11695

The exhibition is open every weekend until October 13th, 12-5pm

Following in the footsteps of iconic artists like Yayoi Kusama and Patti Smith, who have created something extraordinary in this sliver of NYC, we are thrilled to announce that 34 remarkable artists will be showcasing their work at Studio 7 at the Rockaway Artist Alliance, brought to you by 4Heads NYC! This dynamic exhibition features painting, drawing, installation, indoor and outdoor sculpture, and performance, offering an unforgettable journey through contemporary art.

From bold, boundary-pushing works to immersive installations and live performances, this show highlights the incredible talent of both emerging and established artists. Don’t miss the opportunity to experience this extraordinary collection in one of NYC’s most inspiring cultural spaces!

Exhibiting Artists:

Santina Amato, Kumasi Barnett, Z Behl, Miggy Buck, Maximus Clarke, Marianne DeAngelis, Andréa DeFelice George Dielman, Gregg Emery, Shiraz Fazli, Tanda Francis, Joseph Fucigna, York Griffith, Sam Horowitz, Katherine Jackson, Marie Koo, Tara Kopp, Carin Kulb Dangot, Kerry Lessard, Doreen McCarthy, Tricia McLaughlin, Christy E O’Connor, Emily O’Leary, Randy Polumbo, Jessica Reisch, Sarah Sagarin, Robert Sinclair, Marcos Smyth, Grant Stoops, Megan Suttles, Elizabeth Tomasetti, Rosa Valao, Stephanie Wenzel.

Westbeth

55 Bethune St,

New York, NY 10014

There is a crack in everything

Curated by Valérie Hallier

*Located within Westbeth’s former Synagogue space

There is a crack in everything regroups contemporary artists working in installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and video art. The show stages the duality of existence, with some artwork emerging from darkness while others bask in the glow of light. The title, inspired by Leonard Cohen's lyrics, serves as a metaphor for the inherent imperfections and vulnerabilities within our reality as well as within the previously dormant space the show populates and brings back to life.

The vast space still shows its defects as the artists imprint their own realities and dreamscapes onto its rough edges and surfaces, but there is transformation, instability, there is expectation. We undulate between chaos and order, soft and hard, organic and artificial, light and darkness. Nothing is fine, but you are.

Exhibiting artists include: Santina Amato, Amy Butowicz, CHiKA, Claudia Cortinez, Jean Foos,

Tom Fruin, Tessa Grundon, Valérie Hallier, Leslie Kerby & Lianne Arnold, Christina Massey,

Joseph Morris, Anne Muntges, Aston Philip, Matthew Schlanger, and Etty Yaniv.

Jenny, 2023

Mary Rubi, Jenny, Suraya, Erika, and Deidre curated 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

Video Still.

How Soft You Want It, Curated by Kexun Zhang

Artists in the exhibition include Santina Amato, Verónica Peña, Kate Stone, Barb Smith, and Fernando Monroy.

“How Soft You Want It” offers an exploration of the quality of softness in different human registers—emotional, physical and societal—and the resilience it manifests in a time when power and plunder thrive. Featuring five artists whose diverse practices span sculpture, installation, performance and moving images, “How Soft You Want It” weaves a collective narrative that highlights the courage to accept vulnerability as crucial to our humanity and to confront suffering, while celebrating our capacity to endure, adapt and transform ourselves and the world that around us.

The exhibition is opens April 18th, Monday-Sunday 11am-6pm by appointment through May 1st, 2024.

Pfizer Building

630 Flushing Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11206

To schedule an appointment to view the exhibition, contact kzhang21@sva.edu.

Mary Rubi, 2023. Video Still.

Mary Rubi's video premiered on April 4th as part of Constellation: Women's Invitational Small Works Show curated by Ingrid Butterer. The exhibition runs until May 31st.

CONSTELLATION: WOMEN'S INVITATIONAL SMALL WORKS SHOW

Exhibition Dates: April 4 – May 31, 2024

Opening Reception: April 4, 5 – 9pm

Gallery Hours: Saturdays 12 – 9pm and by appointment

SLA ART SPACE

307 West 30th Street

New York, NY 10001

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 was interviewed by Morgan Laurens at Not Real Art about her ongoing series Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough.

Santina Amato is accepting private visits to her sculpture, Soft And Misshapen Awkward Attempts, on view at One Eyed Studios until further notice.

Please send Santina an email at santinaamatoatgmaildot com to book an appointment.

One Eyed Studios

1639 Centre St, Queens

NY, 11385

This project is supported by @qnsarts Queens Arts New Work grant.

Thank you to @nyfacurrent and @nyculture for supporting arts in Queens.

#qaf2023 #newwork #workinprogress #workinprogressart #sculpture #nycartist #queensartsfund #queensartsfundgrantee #nyfagrants #nyfagrantee #brooklynartist #contemporarysculpture #sitespecificinstallation #queensgrant #nysca #nyfa

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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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

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.

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

Jennifer Chia-ling Ho

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

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

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

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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.

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

Lauren Petty & Shaun Irons

Description text underneath an image

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.

"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.

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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.

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

Lauren Petty & Shaun Irons

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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

Thresholds: Reimagining Domesticity, Labor, and Identity

PS122 Gallery

September 6th – 28th, 2025

We Are What, Curated by Sarah Bernhardt

Intersect Arts Center, MO

July 10-August 16, 2025

Artist-In-Residence

Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, New York

Undercurrent, Curated by Britt Harrison

Rockella Space

May 16 – May 24, 2025

AIR 16th Biennial

AIR Gallery

January 11 – February 9, 2025

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE @ 1708 GALLERY

Richmond, VA

September 7th-October 5th, 2024

4HEADS @ ROCKAWAY

sTudio 7

September 28th-October 14th, 2024

There Is A Crack In Everything

Westbeth Gallery

June 20th-July 14th, 2024

Amato's work included in Serendipity Sky

ArtPort Kingston

April 27th-June 2nd, 2024

Amato’s work included in How Soft You Want It

Pfizer Building

April 18th-May 1st, 2024

Amato’s work included Constellation: Women's Invitational Small Works Show

April 4th-May 31st, 2024

Flowers Will Die: A Live Performance At The Bronx Museum

3.30pm March 30th, 2024

Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough at Bronx Museum

January 27th through March 31st, 2024

FCA AWARD

December 1th, 2023

NOT REAL ART: Interview by Morgan Laurens

November 16th, 2023

PRIVATE VIEWINGS AVAILABLE NOW

October 2nd, 2023

RASP EXHIBITION

At Rockella Space until September 24th

The Unbearable Weight Of Expectations

Curated by Katya Grokhovsky

Santina Amato Announced as Program Facilitator of RASP

June 26th, 2023

OPEN CALL: Portraits of Women With Their Weight In Dough

Deadline, May 21st, 2023

More Is Never Enough Curated by Triton Mobley, Field Projects

April 20-May 13, 2023

Sugar Rush, Not Real Art

May 2023

Art Breath: Storied Made In Art

Feature April 20th, 2023

New Work Grant, Queens Arts Fund

2023

Performance Art: Education and Practice

Angeliki Avgitidou

New York State Council on the Arts

2023 Individual Artist grant

New York Foundation for the Arts

Untitled Art Fair

Miami Beach, FL

Schedule a Studio Visit

Bronx Museum of Art

4Heads Portal House

Open Studios, 4Heads Portal

Artist In Residence, 4Heads Portal

Around The Table; Stories of The Food We Love

Open Studio, 4Heads Portal

Artist and Curator Zoom Conversation

A public conversation between Artist Santina Amato and Curator Lisa Freiman

Convulsive Beauty

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

Amato Featured In Lenscratch

Artist In Residence, 4Heads Portal

Seedbed Published in Emergency Index Vol 9

Bethany Arts Community Artist-In_Residence Artist Talk

Artist-In-Residence