Columbus Square
Columbus Square (or the site “formerly known as/fka” Columbus Square) is a small park between two busy roads in the Elmwood section of the City. It was previously the home of a controversial Bartholdi Columbus statue, fabricated at the nearby Gorham Manufacturing Company and gifted to the City by local elites at the end of the 19th century.
Performance Event for Indigenous People’s Day
Sunday, October 12, 1pm – 4pm, FKA Columbus Square, 24 Reservoir Ave, Providence, 02907
A performance and intergenerational community event to observe Indigenous Peoples Day, as part of the broader programs in the city that will honor this day. Community blessing ritual and story circle, family-centered activities with the PCL Activity Book, and live performances about Commemoration as Storytelling. Includes a tabling of activities with PCL Activity Book and food/refreshments. This event is a collaboration among all three Columbus Square artists.
Lu Heintz - Pond Lands
Lu Heintz’s “Pond Lands” commemorates the land and the interspecies relational networks that flourished in the waterways surrounding Mashapaug pond. The installation visually reconnects the park to its adjacent lands now separated by roadways and train tracks. The park is less than a thousand feet from the banks of Mashapaug Pond, the largest freshwater body in Providence and part of the Pawtuxet River Watershed leading into the Narragansett bay. The Narragansett people lived among these lands for thousands of years prior to European conquest and some indigenous families have remained into modern times. Mashapaug Pond is the one pond surviving from what was previously an ecosystem of several ponds, known as the pond lands.
At the park, abstracted furniture objects are situated under the canopy of London Plane trees. The trees here provide a beautiful green cover and generous shade in the hotter months. The installation provides seating for individual resting and a circular forum for gathering. The benches and chairs were carved from the remains of an ancient local elm tree that recently passed on nearby Sackett St. The carvings follow the tree’s contours and illuminate the natural grain patterns. With similar intention, the furniture is receptive and supportive to the human body, designed to accommodate embodied needs and interactions. Recesses have been incorporated into the designs which hold plantings reflecting flora from the pond’s edges. The overall effect echoes a forest understory and its cycles of regrowth. While the site is laden with traumatic histories, the past may transmit intergenerational knowledge to nurture healing and promote recovery. The project intends to reconnect the site to its place, and through the land provide a sense of belonging.
Artist, Designer, Fabricator: Lu Heintz
Project Consultant: Keith Yeaw
Lead Chainsaw Operator: John Morra
Installation equipment operator: Jonathan Montalbano
Assistants: Jon Dinetz and An Talatinian
Shey Rí Acu Rivera Ríos - Abre Caminos
Organized with various community partners and culture bearers, Shey Rivera Ríos’s “Abre Caminos” is a series of cultural activations that destroy colonial narratives and use community storytelling and collective ritual as modes of commemorating the future. Shey is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker who uses storytelling across mediums to create immersive worlds of magic and liberation. Through interactive performances and participatory activities, their interventions in this project will open up portals into often unacknowledged indigenous histories, offering new immersive ways of remembering and reconnecting with the people, places and events that make up these stories, thereby forging new relationships with the past.
Shey’s project will feature two main interventions: Museo de las Ancestras, a live community performance that brings to life various historical and artistic women icons who will grace the former Columbus Square with their presence, and Festival de Futuros Ancestrales, a procession from Mashapaug Pond to the former Columbus Square that will also feature poetry, theater and live art performances.
Val Tutson - The Storytelling AncesTree
Valerie Tutson, who creates spaces for people to learn storytelling skills and share stories, will be producing “The Storytelling AncesTree”, a participatory sculptural installation designed to commemorate neighborhood ancestries and stories. Inspired by both the formal and the metaphorical qualities of trees, the piece will allude to the form and structure of a tree, symbolizing a gathering space for the community to come and share their stories. The installation interrogates the significance of trees within the community and how they hold space, shade us, and comfort us. The AncesTree will be installed upon the same pedestal that formerly housed the statue of Christopher Columbus, and its “bark” will be composed of braided fabric strips upon which members of the community will write their names, taking agency in what gets commemorated in this space.
Valerie will also be organizing various related community gatherings and events anchored by the AncesTree — from inviting the community to write their names onto the fabric wrappings, to organizing storytelling sessions and winter giveaway drives.
Artists at this site:
+ Lu Heintz
+ Shey Rí Acu Rivera Ríos
+ Valerie Tutson
Writer at this site:
+Traci Picard
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