As the landscape around the Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley continues to evolve, with its $45m redesign well underway and new saplings taking root on what were once driveways and parking lots, so the sculpture park’s annual single-artist show was transformed into a collaborative performance piece during the Upstate Art Weekend. The monumental, brightly coloured steel sculptures by the New York artist Arlene Shechet, installed at Storm King since May, were reawakened through a ritualistic dance piece by Annie-B Parson that led a crowd of visitors across rolling hills and meadows.
The collaboration was a natural one, Shechet told The Art Newspaper during the sold-out performance on 20 July, when around 150 people turned up to participate. “Sculpture is a choreographer,” she said. “It makes you move around it.” Her lofty sculptures indeed prompt viewers to take up different vantage points to fully appreciate their various forms and textures. Some surfaces, for example, are painted matte while others are glossy, reflecting the surrounding trees and flowers, Shechet explained.
Dancers perform with one of Shechet's monumental steel sculptures at Girl Group Performance: Arlene Shechet x Annie-B Parson Photograph © Helen Stoilas
This amalgamation of finish and material is also seen in the small-scale ceramic sculptures on view inside the museum building, which were made during the pandemic. These are uniquely tactile, many covered in layers and layers of glaze, creating an almost moss-like finish. (It’s no surprise that statements reminding visitors not to touch the sculptures are prevalent.) Over the intervening three years, Shechet grew the “generative seeds” of these ceramic pieces into the towering works on view outside.
Such a post-pandemic burst of creative energy could similarly be felt during the performance, which featured six women dancers, dressed in monochromatic grey costumes, with aprons decorated in constellation-like patterns that are based on the footprints of the sculptures themselves.
The dancers Natalie Green, left, and Kashia Kancey dance with sculpture by Arlene Shechet, to choreography by Annie-B Parson, at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York Photo: Erin Baiano
Like a group of temple priestesses, the women gathered around the sculptures one by one, enacting a specific dance with each piece that sometimes felt narrative and sometimes completely abstract. The crowd, fully engaged by their movements, quietly followed as they processed to the next sculpture. When the wind picked up during one twisting exchange between dancers, it felt like the women were conjuring the weather. Before marching off to the final sculpture located at the far end of the park, the dancers pulled sheets of silver fabric hidden among the long grass at the side of the path, as if by magic, trailing them like reflective trains as they walked off into the distance.
Shechet was thrilled with the performance, noting that each time the dance is staged, the effect is different, depending not just on the weather and the time of year, but also on the audience interactions. “The viewers are ultimately the ones that complete the work,” Shechet says. Organised to coincide with the annual Upstate Art Weekend, the performance will be held again in September, with tickets available in August. Shechet expects that in the autumn, as the now-green trees in Upstate New York turn red and gold, the effect will be completely different.
Dancers trail sheets of silver fabric on their way to the final sculpture in Girl Group Performance: Arlene Shechet x Annie-B Parson, at Storm King Art Center, New York. Photo: Erin Baiano
Shechet added that having her work installed at Storm King was an incredible experience, as was having the opportunity to respond to the traditionally macho field of monumental sculpture with her own joyfully colourful and lively pieces, which carry feminine names like Dawn, Rapunzel, and Maiden May. “It elevates all of us,” she said of having her works shown alongside long-term pieces by Alexander Calder, Mark Di Suvero and others. And creating public sculptures like the ones in Girl Group are especially fulfilling for Shechet. “I’m interested in people coming across my art out of the corner of their eye,” she says.