Tuesday (Feb. 4) is your last chance to check out The Storyteller at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, a retrospective of NYC-based artist Olivia Beens’ 40-year career.
Beens’ oeuvre includes performance, installation, and sculpture and addresses identity, spirituality, motherhood, and feminism. Born in 1948 in Holland, Beens moved with her mother to Portugal when she was four. The pair moved to Flushing, Queens when Beens was seven after her mother married an American.
The Storyteller: Olivia Beens Through The Decades, on view at El Barrio's Artspace PS 109
She received her BFA in sculpture from Pratt and earned an MFA from Hunter College where she began exploring performance and installation work. While still studying sculpture at Hunter, Beens created Images, Reflections, and Projections, an installation based on her year at a Catholic boarding school in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Exhibited in 1980, the work transformed a gallery into a chapel, with dozens of Polaroid self-portraits lining the walls depicting Beens as an artist, Goddess, mother, etc. A group of nuns’ habits—each stamped with “Warning: This habit contains an irritant”—floated ghostlike in the center of the room. An altar displayed a pair of scissors and braids of the artist’s hair to illustrate the “ritual of becoming a nun,” Beens explained at the gallery on Sunday, “they cut your hair.”
Spread over two floors at El Barrio’s Artspace, the exhibition features photos and video clips of Beens’ earlier installation and performance pieces on the lower level, including Fit and Flab Diaries (1985), a performance in which Beens and a fellow artist built cubicles in the basement of the 22 Wooster Gallery and lived there with their young children on weekends for a month. “After placing real personal ads in the East Village Eye, namely looking to meet a New World Man, Fit (played by Diane Spodarek) and Flab (played by Beens) discover their neighbor, played by Ian Prior, is just who they are looking for,” according to the wall text.
“There was a scripted performance that was about 20 minutes long that we did, I don’t know, every hour, and then the rest of it really was improvised,” Beens recalled. Visitors were invited to watch the performances and observe the two women, the two eight-year-old children, and the “New World Man” go about their day. Fit and Flab focused on “single mothers trying to survive,” Beens explained, “because that’s what we both were.”
Photos of Beens in The Satyr Silenus series (1984) in which she took the identity of the mythological satyr
In The Satyr Silenus, another performance series, Beens “inhabits the identity” of the Greek mythological satyr Silenus, the foster father of Dionysus, complete with animal furs, a phallus, and a tail made from her own hair. Silenus’ Summer Romp was performed in Cummington, Massachusetts where Beens was an artist-in-residence in the mid-1980s. “I involved the community. I cast body parts of community members,” Beens said. The participants traveled from a cemetery into the woods where they played drums then reconstructed the body of Dionysus using the body casts. “It involved everybody, which I wanted to do, and created ritual as performance,” Beens said of the work.
In 1980, Beens separated from her son’s father and she and the young boy moved to Canal Street (at Ludlow). “I moved into an apartment that had been uninhabited for over 40 years,” she said. “The windows were tinned up, the ceilings were falling down. There was rubble all over the place. I found objects that people left behind.”
Among the household items, linens, clothing, and newspapers she discovered was a wedding photo that she enlarged and placed behind window bars from the tenement. Another photo she unearthed features a young boy dressed in a suit and top hat. Beens framed the professionally shot portrait of the boy with curtains left behind by former tenants and painted stars and “symbols of America” on the background. “I would love to know who that little boy is,” Beens said. “He looks so prominent and confident.”
The Life of an Apartment (1983)
The Life of an Apartment (1983)
Beens’ two images from The Life of an Apartment series were included in an exhibit at ABC No Rio called Not for Sale: A Project Against Displacement. “I went to the Buildings Department and I got all of the documents on change and renovation and I wheat-pasted them” onto the walls of the gallery, Beens noted of her project that addresses the city’s ongoing gentrification.
Beens lived in the 800-square-foot Canal Street apartment for 38 years before moving into an apartment at 215 East 99th Street two years ago. The building, where El Barrio’s Artspace is located, was transformed from PS109 into an affordable artist community in 2014 and offers nearly 90 affordable live/work units to artists. Beens noted that her son went to school in the building years ago. “It was hard for me to leave,” Beens says of her longtime residence downtown. “I was basically a Lower East Side artist and moved uptown.”
She loves her new home which is ten blocks away from the Covello Senior Center where she works from and also teaches ceramics. Beens began teaching art in NYC schools in 1982 and officially retired about nine years ago. “I am retired but I’m not retired,” said the active 72-year-old.
In the 1990s, while raising her son and working as an artist and an art teacher, Beens transitioned into “more sculptural work”—art that she “could leave and come back to.” The series, Object Spirit, features assemblages composed using found objects such as animal bones, wood, feathers, and shells. Simplifying her practice and working with nature drew Beens to these organic materials. “I have a really great love of nature. I mean I love the city…but I love being in the woods and by the sea because I feel in harmony with that.”
Who's Web? (1999)
Safiya's Song (1995), Beens made this piece for her late friend, the poet Safiya Henderson-Holmes
Cave Dweller (1998) was inspired by the altars Beens saw in Chinatown shops and restaurants when she lived on Canal Street
The first work in the series, Spirit Ladder (1991), composed of bones, wood, pieces of glass, and wire, was made during a trip to Long Island. “I spent some summers out on Long Island and I would see these pieces of driftwood and bones along the beach and thought, ‘These have such a wonderful inherent quality to them.’ I wanted other people, and myself, to see and appreciate it. Then I thought I can assemble them to make really ritualistic pieces, so they come out of performance work in a way, and in a certain kind of spirituality that is self-identified. It’s not Catholic. It’s not Buddhist. It’s shamanistic, if anything.”
Spirit Ladder, 1991
Self-Composing Mandala, 2001
Her Icons series incorporate natural materials, hair, and bones, with copper “as a conductor of universal forces, situating the works in a unique devotional context,” according the wall text. Celebrating femininity, the works were inspired by Beens’ “interest in feminism and fertility figures. Women giving life, preserving civilization and passing it on to subsequent generations,” the artist says in the exhibition catalogue.
(L-R): Icons - A Hair's Tale (2008) and Alone Again (2010)
In the early 2000s, Beens took a trip to Prague to visit her mother’s sister who was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The artist was overcome with emotion at the meeting. “When I saw my aunt, I just started crying,” she recalled. "It was an emotional response…. In Turkey there is this cistern and there are these columns that they call Column of Tears.” Beens associated her experience with the structures at the Basilica Cistern and began creating ceramic teardrops. Her series features column-like structures composed of dozens of dangling drops representing teardrops as well as rain, blood, and oil.
(L-R): Column of Tears - Magnolia (2010) and Lija's Tears (2013)
The shape of the teardrops that Beens constantly formed led the artist to create sculptures of small heads. “Those are little heads that I work on kind of endlessly,” she said. “They’re all made individually and I work with them starting with simple pinch pot method and I develop a relationship, something strikes me, it reminds me of somebody, or a certain expression develops,” she continued. “I love making the hair—it’s all fun—but the hair becomes this abstract kind of thing.”
Frozen in Time (2013-present), a selection of Beens' glazed ceramic heads
A closer look at Frozen in Time
More sculptural heads
Dakini's Dance (2017)
Olympiad (2017)
The heads feature meditative or knowing expressions, mischievous grins, and vivacious swirls of hair. A series of larger, more recent head sculptures feature multiple faces, adding to their mystery. Influenced by Asian art, Beens says the many faces that encircle the sculptures or poke out of a subject’s hair illustrate “how a being encompasses other beings and other lives that came before it and may go after it.”
These recent sculptures were created while Beens worked on the centerpiece of the exhibition, Baroque Passages (2012-2019) a group of ceramic busts and wall pieces which the artist created following the death of her mother. “She comes from Prague,” Beens said of her mom. “It’s a very Baroque city."
Baroque Passages (2012-2019) on the back wall. (Foreground L-R): Dakini's Dance (2017); Concerto in Bronze and Gold (2017); Bodhisattva for Yvonnne (2013)
The death mask in Baroque Passages
A closer look at Baroque Passages
Beens began the homage by creating a symbolic death mask. The artist says she “thought about churches and what’s on the ceiling and the way that the afterlife is depicted. These are fragmentary items that have to do with sky and angels,” she explained. Beens gets emotional when discussing the work, which is being shown in its entirety for the first time. The meditative, multifaceted work, featuring faces and religious icons on a warm mauve background, is moving tribute to her mother.
The Storyteller (2018)
The title of the exhibit was taken from The Storyteller, a sculpture Beens created in 2018. A torso, which “harkens back to either the Venus de Milo or the Victory of Samothrace,” rests above a skirt of netting, dotted with fragments of glass, that envelopes a group of small ceramic heads. “That came to me actually riding in a taxi cab, in the rain, seeing the reflections and what was going on inside and outside and around,” Beens explained. “She’s protecting or harboring other entities, other lives, or stories.”
Beens and her Shih-Poo Marwan stand in front of Baroque Passages
“I realized as we were putting the show together, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been telling stories,” Beens noted. Incorporating influences from classical art, primitivism, and different religions and cultures, the artist’s diverse body of work tells fascinating stories of a New Yorker’s personal experiences as a woman, mother, activist, and artist.
The Storyteller| Olivia Beens Through the Decades
El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, 215 East 99th Street (between 2nd & 3rd Avenues), NYC
Exhibition on view January 10 through February 4