Artist Talk: Maria Bauman

Please join us at the Athens Cultural Center for an artist talk with Brooklyn, NY-based Bessie-Award winning dance artist and community organizer Maria Bauman. For part of the talk, she will be joined in discussion by Elena Mosley who stewards Operation Unite New York and who is a committed community advocate, organizer and artist in Hudson, NY. This discussion between a local practitioner and an artist based in NYC is not to be missed! And the art talk includes YOU! Maria will lead a bit of low-stakes and accessible practice responding to specific sites and environments to create movement. We’re excited that Maria will lead attendees through a bit of her process; no experience is needed and you can do this from your seat, so no need to be shy!

Among other topics, Maria will discuss her newest artwork, These are the bodies that have not borne. The work is a multi-faceted outdoor ritual performance directed by Maria Bauman and enacted by nine Black, majority queer and transgender creatives to reimagine, heal and celebrate our wombs and the places where our wombs might be. Informed by land art, choreography, movement scores and ritual, the piece is a reckoning and a healing portal, a monument to those of us who are unresolved around not having children through our bodies. These are the bodies... will premiere in Summer 2025, at Feathertail Farm, in Hudson, NY.

Doors: 530pm

Talk: 6pm

About Elena Mosley

Elena Mosley is the award-winning founder and director of Operation Unite Education and Cultural Arts Center, an educational and cultural arts center located at 360 Columbia Street in Hudson, NY as well as being a longtime community organizer and active leader. Mosley moved to Columbia County in 1981 and has consistently served community organizations since then. Mosley is currently a veteran member of the NYS DanceForce supporting NYS artists and companies through residences and performance. Among other roles, she was youth chair and then secretary of the NAACP, part of the Columbia County Arts Council, a Hudson Opera House steering committee member and then board member, and Hudson Boys and Girls Club educator and board member. In 2018 Ms. Mosley was recognized with the Columbia-Greene Community College President’s Award for Community Leadership. In 2022, she was bestowed the People Making a Difference Award by the Zonta Club of the Upper Hudson Valley.

Ms. Mosley’s main community interests are in supporting young people and in the arts. She’s the founder of Kuumba Dance and Drum, an African-influenced music and dance outfit performing in the region and is a long-time member of the New York State DanceForce, which presents New York State artists She has also been a dance teacher for many years, and has connected dance programming with several institutions including the Catskills Community Center and Hudson Boys and Girls and Hudson Black Arts & Culture Festival.

In 1999, Ms. Mosley and team purchased the building for Operation Unite NY. With grassroots community members such as Barbara Walthour, Rudolph Stevenson, Edward Cross, Staley Keith, and Bessie Buie, she developed a mission to benefit the youth of Columbia County and Greene counties by producing well-rounded, progressive youth who will enter adulthood with a sense of direction, self-esteem, and social consciousness, subsequently reinvesting themselves into the community from which they came. They initially began with piano and African percussion instruction as well as an art gallery. Operation Unite NY then expanded programs and exercised the importance of education with tutoring for advancement, college clubs with visits to colleges in a two- hour radius and a mentoring program with Bard College students. They’ve since initiated a sister-campus program with a group in Palissa, Uganda.

About Maria Bauman

Maria Bauman (she/her) is multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL now based in Brooklyn, NY. She’s been recognized with two Bessie Awards, one for her work with The Skeleton Architecture (2017) and another for her choreography as part of The Motherboard Suite directed by Saul Williams and Bill T. Jones (2021). She’s proud to be a recent alum of the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center. She received two Maggie Allessee National Choreographic Center awards/residencies in 2022 and early 2023 to develop her work. Currently, Bauman is the Ailey Artist-in-Residence, a Mertz-Gilmore/NYFA dance award winner and the Queer Exchange Network artist on behalf of BAAD!.

Maria's prior work with Urban Bush Women and with The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) are proud parts of her legacy and influences. Previously, she was a dancer with Urban Bush Women (UBW), and was UBW's Director of Education and Community Engagement before becoming Associate Artistic Director. With PISAB, she has held many roles and is now a core trainer in Understanding & Undoing Racism.

Bauman makes bold and honest artworks for her company MBDance, based on physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and experiments with intimacy. The primary question guiding Bauman's artmaking and her life is "How can we BE Together, Better?" Organizing to undo racism informs her art-making and the two are folded together within her practice. In 2014, she co-founded a grassroots organization, Artists Co-creating Real Equity, which won the 2018 BAX Arts and Artists in Progress Award for working to undo racism in our daily lives. Centering the non-linear stories, bodies and musings of queer people of color, she draws on her studies of English literature, capoeira, improvisation, dancing in nightclubs and concert dance studies to emphasize ancestors, imagination, and Spirit while embodying inter-dependence and equity. One of the premises she creates from is that we are each a collection of ancestors, an archive of spirits and experiences. She is developing a new outdoor artwork and accompanying 'zine called These are the bodies that have not borne.

Host or Publisher Athens Cultural Center