RIVERS UNSETTLED: Opening Reception
On view at El Barrio’s Artspace Foyer Gallery
215 E 99th St., New York, NY
Viewing Hours
Monday-Friday, 10am-6pm
No registration required.
Hi-ARTS is thrilled to partner with Eto Otitigbe on Rivers Unsettled. The river is never still. It meanders, carves, swells, and recedes—an unsettled body of perpetual negotiation. Rivers Unsettled gathers sculptural, mixed media, and installation-based works born from field studies along the Harlem River. This exhibition engages the river, not as a passive subject but as a co-author, rhythms and residues shaping material and meaning alike.
Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of Dialogical Art, Rivers Unsettled rejects singular narratives in favor of polyphonic voices—human, nonhuman, organic, and constructed—coexisting in tension and dialogue. These works do not merely represent the river; they converse with it, absorbing its sedimented past while speaking into its ever-unfolding present. In this case, Eto is a listener and maker, allowing the Harlem River’s textures and shifting borders to articulate their own agency.
Objects in this exhibition emerge to represent the riverbank’s strata; invoking thresholds between land and water, permanence and erosion, presence and disappearance. These works are unfixed, much like the river itself - constantly reshaped by forces both seen and unseen.
In the face of ecological crisis and urban transformation, these works remind us that the river speaks—not in a singular voice, but in a multitude of murmurs, currents, and disruptions, demanding that we listen.
About Eto Otitigbe
Eto Otitigbe is interested in recovering buried narratives and giving form to the unseen. He is a polymedia artist whose interdisciplinary practice includes sculpture, performance, installation, and public art. His public art intersects history, community, and biophilic design by using parametric modeling and generative design to transform historical and cultural references into biomorphic forms and patterns that reference nature. Otitigbe’s public works includes temporary installations in Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY) and Randall’s Island Park (New York, NY). His current large-scale public commissions include: Peaceful Journey (Mt. Vernon, NY, 2022); Cascode (Philadelphia, PA, 2024); Emanativ (Harlem, NY, 2023); Passing Point (Alexandria, VA, 2023). He was a member of the Design Team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA (Charlottesville, VA, 2019) where he contributed to the creative expression on the memorial's exterior surface.
Learn more about Rivers Unsettled and Eto Otitigbe here.