On the Grounds 2021
Joy Curtis, Pam Lins, Christina Tenaglia

River Valley Arts Collective is partnering with the Al Held Foundation to present outdoor sculptural installations by Joy Curtis, Pam Lins and Christina Tenaglia on the land beside Held’s studio complex in upstate New York.

This exhibition is a continuation and expansion of an ongoing collaboration between RVAC and the foundation to provide artists with opportunities to present their work in the architectural and landscape environment that Held created and inhabited from 1965 until his death in 2005.

For this project, Curtis, Lins and Tenaglia have used the context of an artist’s work space to make sculptures that are materially experimental, in collaboration with nature and the elements, and responsive to the location. This singular, intimate setting has allowed them to take risks and push the scale and scope of their practice.

Emerging from the woods at the edge of a field, Celestial Bodies, a textile and steel construction by Joy Curtis, stands over sixteen feet tall and moves with the winds that channel through the Catskills.

Puddles and Wedges by Pam Lins is an accumulation of hand built ceramic forms resting atop stones that surround the perfect oval outline of a now feral swimming pool.

On Untitled (Can’t hold onto it), Christina Tenaglia’s inverted architectural form that cantilevers from a steep hillside, clay forms cling to massive vertical slabs of oak that demark the walls of an implied shelter.

Joy Curtis (b. Valparaiso, IN) received her MFA in sculpture from Ohio University in 2002 and, since then, has lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY. In 2021, she was an artist-in-residence at Stoneleaf Retreat. She is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York, NY, where she has had 5 solo shows. Recent exhibitions include: With Every Fiber, Pelham Art Center; Cult of the Crimson Queen, Ceysson and Bénétière; Found Outside at the Aldrich Museum (CT); Weight Over Time, T.S.A (Brooklyn); The Working Title, The Bronx River Art Center; Tensile Strength, ZieherSmith; Object ‘Hood, Leslie Heller; Eternal Return, Nurture Art; The Finishers, The Wassaic Project (NY); and Greater Brooklyn, CRG. Curtis is the recipient of fellowships from Socrates Sculpture Park and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her work has been reviewed in the New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Artcritical, and Saatchi Online, and featured on Gorky’s Granddaughter and James Kalm’s Rough Cut video blogs.

Pam Lins (b. Chicago, IL) earned an MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY. Her work is represented by Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions over the past twenty years, at venues including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI; White Columns, New York, NY; the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; The Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; The Suburban, Chicago, IL; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; CCS Bard Galleries, Annadale-on-Hudson, NY; Artists Space, New York, NY; and Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY. Her work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Lins is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, including The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, The Anonymous Was A Woman Award, The Brown University Howard Foundation Fellowship, and The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Award. In 2013-2014, she held the David and Roberta Logie Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Lins has held teaching positions at The Cooper Union, The Milton Avery MFA Program at Bard College, and Princeton University and her work is in the permanent collection of the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY.

Christina Tenaglia (b. Philadelphia, PA) received an MFA from Yale School of Art and has received fellowships for residencies at The MacDowell Colony, I-Park, and Catwalk. She is a recipient of the W.K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts, a NJ State Arts Council Fellowship Award for Sculpture, and received a purchase award grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition in 2018. Her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York and elsewhere, including the Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; The Samuel Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, NY, Thomas Park Gallery, New York; Hesse Flatow, New York; Underdonk, Brooklyn; LABspace, Hillsdale, NY, Collar Works, Troy, NY; Opalka Gallery, Albany; NY, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY; Field Projects, NY. Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail and many online and local publications. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

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