Wave Hill, a prominent Bronx estate-turned public garden and cultural center. (Credit: Mia Anzalone)
In a back corner of Glyndor House at the 28-acre Wave Hill estate in the northwest Bronx, sunlight from large, paneled windows pour into two small rooms. In one room, arrows hang in mid-air, and in the next, wires and scrap metal topped with balls of human hair create a maze on the cement floor.
The scenes are features of Caroline Garcia’s Versus Earth and Magdalena Dukiewicz’s Bloom, two art exhibitions on view at Wave Hill’s Glyndor Gallery until Nov. 2. While materially and experientially different, both confront the histories of violence that permeate the lush gardens of the estate’s grounds and the area beyond.
Garcia and Dukiewicz are two of the seven artists featured this season at Wave Hill’s Sunroom Project Space, a program that, since 2007, has given New York-based artists with limited solo show experience the opportunity to develop and exhibit site-specific installations in Glyndor Gallery’s Sunroom and Sun Porch.
Glyndor Gallery, once known as Glyndor House, was home to prominent financier George Walbridge Perkins and his family during the Victorian era. Located up and away from the rest of the Bronx, the estate was a summer escape for guests like Mark Twain and the then-child Theodore Roosevelt.
The exhibits shown in the house today challenge the property’s idealized facade, according to Rachel Gugelberger, Wave Hill’s curator of visual arts. Gugelberger said that when choosing this year’s artists for the Sunroom Project Space, she was intentional about how their works could advance conversations about privilege, nature and activism in relation to Wave Hill.
“These two projects were especially interesting because they tap into aspects of American history, but specific to the Bronx, things that we seem to know very little about,” Gugelberger said.
Garcia’s exhibit in the Sunroom displays 50 pounds of what she calls “reclaimed plastic waste” that she picked up herself around the Bronx, and then reworked to create arrowheads, clubs and spears inspired by weapons of the Munsee Lenape people of New York’s lower Hudson Valley.
Caroline Garcia created arrowheads from 50 pounds of “reclaimed plastic waste” that she collected in the Bronx. In the exhibit, the arrowheads are suspended alongside pieces of ballistic gelatin that Garcia said are used for firearm training among law enforcement officers. (Credit: Mia Anzalone)
The property of Wave Hill, according to its website, sits on top of the ancestral homeland of a Lenape tribe who settled in the region about 6,000 years ago. What now is Glyndor House, was once riverside forests maintained by the Lenape people. Along the nearby Hudson River, surrounding tribes traded oysters, mussels and clams that were gathered in those waters. Following the arrival of Dutch colonists in the 17th century, the Indigenous population had diminished as a result of the introduction of diseases, starvation and violent conflicts, according to The Hudson River Valley Review.
But Garcia’s exhibit focuses on survival. She said she wanted to use materials sourced from the environment that was available to her, similar to the First Americans’ use of stones, bones and other dried material. She teamed up with the nonprofit organization Precious Plastics NYC to shred and melt together abandoned laundry detergent bottles, milk containers and Poland Spring water gallons to insert into 3D-printed molds of the Indigenous weaponry.
Garcia was inspired by the themes of Heather Davis’s book, Plastic Matters, which examines the synthetic material as abandoned and displaced, and said that this sense of desertion connected to the treatment of Indigenous communities around the world.
“There’s this concept that [plastic] has no place, and when something has no place, then nobody cares where it goes or where it comes from and so it can just be dumped anywhere or displaced,” Garcia said. “That kind of violence is inherent environmentally.”
Garcia is from Australia with Indigenous Filipino heritage, and grounds her work in Indigenous Filipino martial arts as a form of self-defense. In Versus Earth, sounds of Garcia blowing a Filipino blow dart called “sumpit” permeate the exhibit. She incorporates elements of her Indigenous heritage connected the diasporic experience to another’s, she said.
In the neighboring Sun Porch, sunlight filters through a sticky red film of a collagen and glycerin mixture plastered on the windows. Reacting to the heat of light, the film crackles and shrinks, popping sounds throughout Dukiewicz’ exhibit.
On the floor, a mimicked garden: Poland Spring jugs are filled with collected rainwater, from which a stem of wires supports petals of handstitched wood eared mushrooms. Their anthers — a flower’s male reproductive organ that produces pollen — are balls wound of Dukiewicz’ hair.
Magdalena Dukiewicz used an assemblage of junkyard scraps and organic materials to comment on air pollution and environmental injustice in the Bronx. (Credit: Mia Anzalone)
The dystopian scene extends Wave Hill’s landscape to create a distinction between nearby neighborhoods in the Bronx, Dukiewicz said. In the Bronx, high asthma rates intersect with high poverty levels that disproportionately affect residents of color. While the county has historically had some of the highest asthma rates in New York City, in 2023, the South Bronx neighborhoods of Mott Haven and Melrose had 250 emergency department visits for asthma for every 10,000 visits — the highest of all community districts in the city. In the Riverdale and Fieldston area, where Wave Hill is located, that number was only 50.
Sound is essential to the immersive experience of the Sun Porch exhibit, she said. Live data from air quality monitors across the city are transmitted through speakers into the gallery as beeps. It’s updated every 30 minutes, Dukiewicz said, and is countered by whispers of her own breathing modulations.
“Data is impersonal, there’s no human connection to it,” Dukiewicz said. “Regular people, they don’t go to the publicly open-sourced website and don’t study the numbers. I felt that this was a visceral and direct way to make them experience something.”
Garcia and Dukiewicz did not know how their works would interact, but Dukiewicz said the two work nicely together — one uses violence as self-defense, the other confronts it.
Both said the exhibitions are open to interpretation. During a recent exhibit visit, Dukiewicz said that she saw a young girl from Toronto tell her mother that the vibrant red room reminded her of the sky light from the Canadian wildfires.
“This little girl, like, she got it,” Dukiewicz said.
About the author(s)
Mia Anzalone is a M.S. Journalism student from Kailua, Hawai'i covering arts, culture, religion and Indigenous affairs.