Musings and Meanderings with Sally Hemings
By Marisa Williamson
A part of Wanderings and Wonderings
July 2 and July 3, 2016
Storm King Art Center
On Saturday, July 2 and Sunday, July 3, in celebration of and reflecting upon Independence Day, Shandaken: Storm King alumna Marisa Williamson, performing as Sally Hemings, will lead guided tours from the back of a Storm King tram bus.
Thomas Jefferson's slave and mistress will share observations and insights about the collection, inviting visitors to examine the concept of legacy as it is built through time, space, creative labor, and struggle.
This Wanderings and Wonderings program continues Williamson's ongoing engagement with Hemings, and practice of performing live as this fascinating individual. Williamson has inhabited Hemings' persona while posing questions about identity, history, power, gender, work, self-making, and self-regard at Jefferson's estate Monticello; outside his former home in Paris; and in galleries and public spaces in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York.
Marisa Williamson is an NY-based artist, originally from Philadelphia. She received her B.A. in visual art from Harvard University and earned her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 2013. Her project as an artist is to explore and describe through performance, video, objects, and images the ways that soft technologies—"problem solving tools" like narrative, language, and myth, along with hard technologies like the camera, the digital moving image, and the web—facilitate the rendering and surrendering of the physical and psychological body.
This work is presented with Storm King Art Center as part of their Wanderings and Wonderings series, made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.