A Storm King Companion by Amy Beecher

Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY

Workshops August 2 and 29, 2015

Podcast ongoing throughout August, 2015

Amy Beecher's A Storm King Companion acts as an alternative audio guide to the North Woods section of Storm King Art Center. Collected as a series of downloadable podcasts, each episode of A Storm King Companion corresponds to a different sculpture on the grounds. Subverting our expectations of a typical audio guide, (didactic, authoritative), Beecher's Companion offers a web of entangled narratives and observations, a mixture of fictitious storytelling and improvisation exploring themes of abjection, Woman vs. Nature, domestic spaces, and memory. The podcasts are narrated by Beecher, her mother, artist Mary Reid Kelly, and three of Beecher's middle school art students from the South Bronx.

On August 2 and 29 Beecher will hold creative writing workshops for teens and adults using the sculptures as inspiration. Writers will have the opportunity to record their story onsite with her.

This program is presented with Storm King Art Center as part of their ongoing Wanderings and Wonderings series. Initiated in 2013 by the Storm King Art Center, Wanderings and Wonderings invites visitors to engage with artists in creative and unexpected ways. Participating artists have created tours, maps, performances, poetry and movement workshops, new media, and deeply thoughtful conversations. Since 2015, Wanderings and Wonderings has been co-presented with Shandaken: Storm King, and features select alumni and their collaborators.

Amy Beecher, a 2014 resident of Shandaken: Storm King, is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work combines digital imaging, installation, and recorded texts and interviews. Her work will be featured in an upcoming solo exhibition at PC Galleries at Providence College at the end of 2015. She has exhibited her work and completed projects in collaboration with 7 Dunham Place, Independent Curators International, Garden Party Arts, Primetime, The Philadelphia Photo Art Center, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Marlborough Gallery. She received her MFA from Yale in 2010 and has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Shandaken Project. Her book The Sublime Is Now Folks, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art's library.