art at the kite

At the Kite, you will find artist Nina Nichols' paintings of Manhattan after humans disappear. Native trees thrive and spirits inhabit this space. The far left canvas depicts a rocky peak in the Catskills in the dead of winter with the spirit of the living stump. Next to it, the fall owls, wild horse, and the disembodied hand. In the central canvas, Annie Sprinkle (the embodiment of ecological and corporeal freedom) and the Naked Bear (an early spirit described by the Iroquois) burn down the Merchant’s house, the oldest structure in Manhattan. To their right, the summer fawn and the giant cannibalistic head emerge from lush springtime woods. To the far right is the mummified arm of Antietam, an old spirit discovered on a battlefield in Maryland, amid the summer foliage and the spring wood stork. Manhattan is bursting with underground rivers, shifting limestone, wild birds and creeping forest dripping, germinating and spawning in rapid succession all around and underneath us in perpetuity.