Visual Arts Alumna Bat-Ami Rivlin ’19 Named 2023 Socrates Artist Fellow
Visual Arts alumna Bat-Ami Rivlin ’19 was recently announced as a recipient of the 2023 Socrates Annual Fellowship.
Presented by the Socrates Sculpture Park, the fellowship is a competitive program that reflects the Park’s commitment to artistic experimentation and nurturing artists’ careers. It provides an important training ground for early career artists and allows the selected fellows to gain experience creating large-scale public art.
Rivlin was selected alongside five other artists from a pool of 250 applicants. As noted in the official press release, this year’s cohort also reflects the diversity of NYC working artists with varied artistic approaches, media, and subject matter.
“We are thrilled to welcome this dynamic group of artists to the Park this summer,” said Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas, Curator and Director of Exhibitions of Socrates Sculpture Park. “This year’s cohort is considering ideas related to material ontology, sustainability, and world-building, while also offering timely reflections on the Park’s current state of structural and environmental transformation. We’re also excited for visitors and our local community to witness the ongoing fabrication process in our unique, open-air studio throughout the summer months.”
As a fellow, Rivlin will receive a production stipend, access to the Park’s outdoor artist studio located in Long Island City, Queens, as well as technical and administrative support.
“My practice explores ‘cheap’ utilitarian objects as ontologically functional,” reads Rivlin’s artist statement. “This conceptual argument allows for seeing these objects as a collection of actions, echoing function even after their utilitarian death. I collage surplus and found objects, home appliances, and other common products; objects designed to create spaces and arrange bodies within them. I explore ways in which the objects perform their ‘practicality’ in space: zip ties grip a deflated kayak, duct tape clamps down onto an LED light. By juxtaposing these objects with each other, they fulfill and nullify their use-value; pushing, demarcating, clamping, binding themselves to and away from each other. The resulting sculptural collages articulate ways that objects change how we place ourselves in social spaces and perceive our built environment; echoing an ableist, capitalist, ever functioning perception of the body.”
The fellowship culminates with The Socrates Annual Exhibition, which will open on September 30, 2023.
Bat-Ami Rivlin is a NYC based sculptor working with found and surplus objects. Her work investigates function as an inherent part of an object's material ontology. Rivlin holds an MFA from Columbia University, NY, and a BFA from School of Visual Arts, NY. Recent notable exhibitions include: COLAPSO, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Spain; EN-SITIO, Museo de la Ciudad, Mexico; whereabouts, Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard; No Can Do (solo), M 2 3, New York; Untitled (inflatable house, zip ties, blower) (solo), A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn; Excess and Surplus, (two- person) Sharp Projects, Copenhagen; In/Between, New York Live Arts, New York; Performing Authorship: 31 Days in March, PS122 Gallery, New York; Battleship Potemkin, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; In Response: Leonard Cohen, The Jewish Museum, New York; It All Trembles (solo), NARS Foundation, Brooklyn. Rivlin’s work has been featured in publications such as Artforum, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, Artnet, PIN-UP Magazine, Office Magazine, The Paris Review, Public Parking, Granta, and more. She is the recipient of the Two Trees BSI fellowship, A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship, NADA House Studio fellowship, NYFA IAP fellowship, and NARS Foundation Residency, among others.