Outdoor sculpture park Art Omi had already commissioned a large-scale multimedia work by Puerto Rican artist Chemi Rosado-Seijo for early summer 2020. Little did the arts center know how timely the interactive installation would be.
The pandemic hit in March, forcing the closure of most businesses as well as museums and art galleries. Art Omi, located on 120 acres in Columbia County, and recently named one of the best sculpture parks in the country, could accommodate socially distanced crowds and soon became one of the few open art destinations in the Hudson Valley, drawing art lovers and anyone seeking vast outdoor spaces during quarantine.
Sculpture lover or park aficionado? Didn’t matter. Both came – in droves, the arts center said.
And at a time when isolated masses were searching for community, Art Omi proceeded building Rosado-Seijo’s commissioned work: an enormous immersive installation that would soon bring yet another group to the park — skateboarders.
‘Shooting concrete’
Rosado-Seijo, who was included in the Whitney Biennial in New York City in 2017, had already shown an interest in exploring parallels between skateboarding and contemporary art with his series “History on Wheels” and his 2006 sculpture “La Perla’s Bowl.” That work, built with residents of San Juan’s La Perla community, functioned as both a skateboarding ramp and an actual pool.
At Art Omi, his “Mahican Pearl-Hole (the Mahican Bowl)” installation was envisioned to honor and evoke the batéy, a sacred space where the Caribbean’s indigenous Taíno communities gather, meet, play and perform rituals. “The artist wanted to talk about the ancient history of the stone circle,” said curator Nicole Hayes. “The excavated stones that line the bowl talk about that spiritual side.”
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