Awilda Sterling-Duprey's Improvisational Inquiries
Awilda Sterling-Duprey’s NXTHVN performance. Photo by John Dennis, courtesy of NXTHVN.
Awilda Sterling-Duprey’s NXTHVN performance. Photo by John Dennis, courtesy of NXTHVN.
In an airy, sun-drenched industrial room with brick walls, two groups of musicians play gently, filling the room with soft jazz. The site is NXTHVN, an artist residency in a former factory in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, and the room we are in contains diverse forms of art that mirror the crowd’s excitement. Everyone is here to see Awilda Sterling-Duprey’s performance. Although I arrive a few minutes late, as I take my seat, I notice the palpable energy in the room. Sterling-Duprey, blindfolded, is washing two black walls adjoined in a V-shaped form with a wet rag. She wears a nondescript uniform reminiscent of manual labor: an all-white workwear jumpsuit, hair tied back, comfortable sneakers. An otherworldly force seems to guide her, as she moves back and forth in a concentrated rhythm. Her all-white outfit honors Obatala, the Yoruba orisha, whose white symbolizes light, purity, and the creation of humanity.
Awilda Sterling-Duprey’s NXTHVN performance. Photos by John Dennis, courtesy of NXTHVN.
Sterling-Duprey is one of the foremost contemporary performance artists of our time. Her work reminds us that instead of being overly didactic, art can make us feel. It is also a lesson about shared affect in a communal space and the collective awareness that can be borne from that experience if allowed to germinate in the first place. Since the 1970s, Sterling has explored radical abstraction through both gestural forms and through movement, collapsing rigid boundaries in contemporary art and illuminating possibilities for connection and collaboration between artists.
Awilda Sterling-Duprey’s NXTHVN performance. Photos by John Dennis, courtesy of NXTHVN.
After a few minutes of instrumental jazz performed by two percussionists (Jesse Hameen II on drums and Nelson Bello on the barril), a bassist (Morris Trent), a cellist (Johnathan Moore), a saxophonist (Stephen Gritz King), and keyboards (Michael Carambello), Sterling-Duprey picks up a metal tray with thick sticks of oil pigment in warm colors. She selects a bright canary yellow—unbeknownst to her due to the blindfold—and begins to mark the black wall in front of her, as if responding to the percussive backbone of the sonic atmosphere we all find ourselves in. On either side of her walls—not visible to Sterling—are the musicians, who appear to be steering in deep synchronicity, communicating nonverbally by sending each other meaningful glances, nods, and smiles. This is Sterling-Duprey’s first time doing a performance within her …blindfolded series that responds to live music, rather than a prerecorded track.
Awilda Sterling-Duprey, #5, Blindfold Series, 2020-2021. Soft pastel on heavyweight paper, 30 x 23 inches. Courtesy of El Kilómetro.
Awilda Sterling-Duprey. Blindfolded (Casa Afro),2020. Charcoal and graphite on white Strathmore printmaking paper, 29 ⅛ x 22 ¾ inches. Photo by José López Serra.
Awilda Sterling-Duprey. #1, Blindfold Series, 2020-2021. Soft pastel on heavyweight paper, 30 x 23 inches. Photo courtesy of El Kilómetro.
Awilda Sterling-Duprey. Blindfold series, 2023. Pastel on paper, 61 x 38 ½ inches. Photo courtesy of El Kilómetro.
Awilda Sterling-Duprey #3, Blindfold Series, 2020-2021. Soft pastel on heavyweight paper, 30 x 23 inches. Photo by José López Serra.
Many describe Sterling-Duprey as a painter and a dance performer, but her practice transcends neat categorization. Instead, her work seems to live between those genre gaps, insisting on more fluid ways of being and creating. Many of her works fuse this contemporary experimentation with a deep engagement with Santería and Afro-Caribbean art forms like salsa. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Sterling’s initial arts education was in painting at the University of Puerto Rico, where she found herself inspired by abstract expressionist artists like Franz Kline and jazz musicians like John Coltrane. Later, while pursuing an MFA at the Pratt Institute in the late 1970s, Sterling-Duprey began to experiment with movement and performance.
In 1979, she returned to Puerto Rico and cofounded Pisotón, the archipelago’s first experimental dance collective. The ‘80s in Puerto Rico was a period of fervent artistic expression in dance performance and movement studies, with artists from the islands and beyond collaborating with their diasporic counterparts.¹ Some of Sterling-Duprey’s performances from this time include Pieza de balcón (Balcony Piece) (1985) and Seis en uno (1989), a collaborative performance including four dancers, one installation artist, and two musicians, held at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in San Juan.
Following this wave of rich cultural production, in the ‘90s, Sterling-Duprey participated in Rompeforma, an experimental performance festival that featured a transnational group of artists interested in pushing the limits of performance, music, and visual arts. She was also a part of the landmark exhibition Paréntesis: ocho artistas negros contemporáneos² (Parenthesis: Eight Black Contemporary Artists), the first survey of Black contemporary artistic production in Puerto Rico.³ She continues to make work to this day, and in 2022, she received recognition with a much-deserved inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, where her work shone in front of new audiences.
Back at NXTHVN, Sterling-Duprey continues drawing and moves onto white pigment, and then a deep crimson that punctuates the juncture of both walls, like a beating heart at the center of the composition. She transitions to an earthen brown and uses the damp rag to smudge away some of the sharpness of her lines, blending colors into each other and diffusing pigmentation. She contrasts her sharp, frenetic movements with elongated pauses and circular gestures, all which leave revealing marks on the matte black void before her. As the percussion picks up with the riffs of the saxophone, her hand moves in short spurts to match their tempo.
In another moment as it slows, her hand slides across the visual plane with unhurried, deliberate precision. Sterling-Duprey’s lines evoke the fervor of this special creative encounter: musicians of different generations and backgrounds meeting up to try something new and improvise, communicating through sound and vibrations, guided by curiosity and desire. Sterling-Duprey’s resulting lines are compositionally clustered like clouds across the two dark panels, expressionistic and life-giving in their spontaneity and stretch. We are witnessing the visual recording of sound back onto a two-dimensional plane, only to be re-resonated back out into the space, into the crowd, reflective in the natural light.
In reference to this phenomena in her previous work, the artist says in an interview with fellow artist Edra Soto, “I was realizing that my body was following the stroke . . . My practice as a visual artist was giving me [a sort of fullness] to inform me of the three-dimensional space [so I could] organize the dimension of the tones and colors among themselves, and how they were weighed. The painting itself told me, “Leave me, ya!”
Aesthetics of dis-order. Photo by Chris Gardner. courtesy of NXTHVN.
Aesthetics of dis-order. Photo by Chris Gardner. courtesy of NXTHVN.
In a nearby exhibition space, works on view trace Awilda Sterling-Duprey’s experimentations from the 1970s to today—including drawings, paintings, and video of previous performance work. Titled Aesthetics of dis-order and curated by Marissa Del Toro and Jasmin Agosto, the presentation surveys a radical, experimental figure who has consistently engaged in abstraction as a truthful, revealing exercise. In the gallery, works on paper bearing similar abstract gestures hang askew, are within a frame of blue painter’s tape, or are simply presented on the floor. In a nearby virtine, ephemera from Sterling-Duprey’s remarkable career includes photo slides and newspaper reviews of her work, cementing the artist’s place as a lifelong remarkable innovator in a culture that largely shies away from the freedom of improvisation and “dis-order.” In the show, some standouts include hanging works from the 1990s titled El colmo de lo obvio, and newer works from 2019–2020 titled ...pobre negrito bembón!!! (Casa Afro) that she made at Casa Afro in Loíza, Puerto Rico, on the 25th anniversary of the legendary Paréntesis exhibition. In these works, the question mark is a potent, repeated signifier, scrawled away in neat lines like a focused exercise in rote memorization.
“The question mark is a perfect grammatical marker to encapsulate Sterling-Duprey’s multivalent practice. It communicates the notion of the unfinished: an unraveling where there is no clear end or beginning.”
The question mark is a perfect grammatical marker to encapsulate Sterling-Duprey’s multivalent practice. It communicates the notion of the unfinished: an unraveling where there is no clear end or beginning. Sterling-Duprey’s work lives within the realm of the open session, or the idea that a rehearsal can be more rewarding creatively than the drive to produce a neat, marketable, finalized outcome. This is especially true in artistic collaboration, rather than isolation.
It is significant then that NXTHVN, a home for many artists’ studios working across diverse media, invited Sterling-Duprey to make this work in this space. It is a warm and inviting site, where spontaneous encounters may lead you to studio visits, backyard barbecues, or birthday parties. Unlike a museum, which is static and therefore dead, NXTHVN is a repurposed contemporary arts space that is alive in its constant cycling of people from around the world, fostering intergenerational dialogues (including a teen program), united in the pursuit of creative expression. In Sterling-Duprey’s case, the conversation between elders and younger artists seems so sincere, bathed in mutual respect and genuine curiosity and openness.
At the end of the performance, fluttering between English and Spanish, Sterling-Duprey spontaneously invites her family members to take the stage with her, sharing her celebratory moment with them, NXTHVN staff, and her collaborators. This spirit of openness and shared experience is a notable one, and in this case, guided by an intergenerational generosity.
“Western professionalism can, at times, look down upon improvisation, considering it the language of the unprepared, the distracted, or the unfocused. But Sterling-Duprey demonstrates that improvisation is the utmost method of possibility. ”
One of the most special moments occurs when the musicians speak candidly about their surprise at Awilda’s absence at rehearsal and how instead, she encouraged them to trust their intuitions. Hameen II remarked that in over 50 years as a professional musician, he had never been a part of an experience like this one.
Western professionalism can, at times, look down upon improvisation, considering it the language of the unprepared, the distracted, or the unfocused. But Sterling-Duprey demonstrates that improvisation is the utmost method of possibility, gesturing toward a potentially limitless intuitive intelligence that we often suppress for the sake of order and efficiency. Reflecting on this in an interview with fellow artist Pepe Álvarez-Colón, Sterling-Duprey shares, “Improvisation is a characteristic element of African arts. I have realized that in repetition there is a moment when the pattern changes. This happens with jazz; it happens with sculptures of saints. Fabric design is nourished precisely by this change in the pattern . . . That is what leads me to integrate religious concepts through dance, because history is in the body and in dance. Each step is a story of the deity that has as many levels as the elements of nature it represents . . . My wholeness is visible and expressed within all those contexts of improvisation.”
The truth is, you can never really prepare or predict the outcome of anything. It is possible, though, to hone your intuition and move forth with intention, care, and respect. We can approach each new situation like an opportunity for self (or ideally, community) actualization. We can model the knowledges inherent in the natural world around us, leaving space for organic movement and change. In the artist’s own words, she explains, “Maybe I haven’t been consistent in one line, as we are supposed to be the artists. I have been consistent in conceptualization but also risky in production. But we have to deconstruct, in order to survive. We cannot continue to follow the linear pattern of the West.”
¹ For more context on this rich history, see Susan Homar and nibia pastrana santiago, Inhabiting the Impossible: Dance and Experimentation in Puerto Rico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023).
² Edwin Velázquez Collazo organized the exhibition in 1996. In 2021, he penned an essay on the important legacy of this exhibition on its 25th anniversary.
³ A recent exhibition at El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico titled Puerto Rico Negrx (cocurated by Marina Reyes Franco y María Elena Ortiz) also attempts to rectify the institutional omissions of Black Puerto Rican artists, and includes Sterling-Duprey’s work, among others.
