Maya Ciarrocchi

CALL’s mission of centering artist’s voices to provide solutions for environmental issues and their openness to ideas and possibilities has been rewarding to me as an artist and as a citizen. Through our work together I have been able to conceive of a public art project that I would not have been able to produce on my own. By listening and connecting to the artists and scientists who are part of CALL’s community, I am learning how to engage more fully with my neighborhood, borough and city while deepening my artistic practice. -Maya Ciarrocchi

Maya Ciarrocchi joined CALL’s team of artists in 2020 to work on public projects as part of  Rescuing Tibbetts Brook program. Ciarrocchi is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working across media in drawing, printmaking, performance, video, installation, and social practice. Through personal narrative, storytelling, and embodied mapmaking her projects excavate disappeared histories and emotional documentation of loss. Her work with CALL expands on cyanotype maps of Tibbetts Brook and the Northwest Bronx she produced during a residency at Wave Hill in 2019. Because of the pandemic, CALL has had to postpone the installation of this new public artwork and the accompanying performance by artist Francheska Alcantara to 2021; Ciarrocchi and Alcantara were nevertheless able to produce a short film “Mosholu” that touches on the project themes of overlapping and diverging relationship to water and water bodies.

Ciarrocchi’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and she has received residencies and fellowships from the Bronx Museum of the Arts (AIM), LABA: a Laboratory for Jewish Culture, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Swing Space), MacDowell, Millay Colony, New York Artists Equity, UCross, and Wave Hill (Winter Workspace). She received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, a Film/Video Grant from The Jerome Foundation and funding from The Puffin Foundation. In addition to her studio practice, Ciarrocchi has created award winning projection design for dance and theater including the TONY award winning Broadway musical “The Band's Visit.” Ciarrocchi is the recipient of a 2021 grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding and 2020 BRIO Award winner from the Bronx Council on the Arts.

Maya Ciarrocchi and Francheska Alcantara share personal reflections on their connection to water and water bodies, in specific relationship to the landscape of Northern Manhattan, the Bronx, and the history of Tibbetts Brook. This work is inspired by Ciarrocchi’s beautiful cyanotype images of Tibbetts Brook, created during a residency at Wave Hill. CALL is working with the pair of artists to create a new piece of work and a public installation of Ciarrocchi’s Tibbetts Brook images.

This work is part of CALL’s larger initiative in the Bronx: Rescuing Tibbetts Brook, a constellation of artist and designer-led projects that raise awareness of and engage the community in plans to remove Tibet’s Brook form the sewer system and restore it as a surface-level naturalized stream connecting from Van Cortlandt Park to the Harlem River.

OTHER WORK