African American Performance Art Archive

Maren Hassinger writes of “The River” that, “The installation conforms to the limits of the space. The installation consists of debris that might be washed ashore during a flood.”

A reviewer described Hassinger’s installation at School 33 Art Center: “The first floor’s ceiling is covered with a thicket of branches and plastic bags and a great beard of dirty, knotted newspaper cascading down like a waterfall of trash, as if the viewer is some mud-dwelling croaker looking up from the bottom of a polluted river. That’s fitting, considering artist Maren Hassinger uses the metaphor of a flowing river sweeping debris downstream to illustrate how trouble travels through families. Her installation, titled simply ‘The River,’ includes a projected video of Hassinger’s interview with a long-lost uncle who unskeins their family’s tangled, incestuous genealogy: Hassinger’s troubled grandmother was the offspring of a white woman and her nephew, the son of her father’s Cherokee mistress.”

See Violet Glaze, “The River, New Work, Ex Libris: Rethinking the Library,” Baltimore City Paper (July 27, 2005).