Artist to create 'living museum' in Newburgh
The first delivery of 24 tons of Vermont marble landed on the Newburgh waterfront earlier this month - the yellow crane and rockpile marking the start of a new sculpture park is visible from Beacon.
Rhea Marmentini, 46, secured a five-year lease to create and curate a 2-acre Marmentini Living Museum just inside the fence at the Regal Bag factory complex. This is the first steppingstone in grand expansion plans envisioned by the artist and Bank Art Gallery, up the hill at Broadway and Liberty Street.
Marmentini wants to place a string of mythical, mystical creatures from Governor's Island in New York Harbor (where she had a residency) upriver to whatever locales are receptive. She also works with granite on the waterfront in Athens, in Greene County.

Newburgh is the concept's nucleus, and when the weather warms up, Marmentini will don ear and eye protection to wield a handheld grinder with artificial-diamond saw blades and shape shards of stone into her quirky works - although 24 tons of marble, the largest load that a flatbed truck can carry, looks larger in the mind's eye.
"We're expecting a lot more deliveries," she says.
Born in Hungary and raised in Spain, Marmentini is an international art rock star; her sculptures dot landscapes worldwide and her magnum opus, "Dragon de la Calderona," near Valencia, Spain, is a huge house built on a former quarry that looks like its namesake and took eight years to build.
Last year, she decided to move to Brooklyn. Shirley Giler Noto, director at Bank Art Gallery, discovered her work on Instagram and began promoting her peculiar paintings, bas-reliefs and sculptures.

No matter the medium, Marmentini's style is instantly recognizable. One marble statue at the gallery, "Flying Gaulkees," includes beasts with gold-leaf eyes that are neither fish nor fowl. In her work, lips often turn down, but the life-size sculpture "Catwoman," also in the gallery's cavernous subterranean space, is smiling and beguiling.
Because Edward Doering owns Bank Art and the Regal Bag property, the deal to create a sculpture museum on the Newburgh waterfront zoomed from idea to reality in months.
Things germinated when a representative from Garner Arts Center in Rockland County reached out to Marmentini and proposed a collaboration. Drawn to the river, she scouted Haverstraw's waterfront.
When Noto heard the story, she had a eureka moment: Why not let Marmentini fill the flat, grassy area just inside the gate at the northern end of Front Street with large-scale sculptures?

The living museum is intended to serve as the catalyst for a planned Hudson River Sculpture Walk that would extend beyond the former bag factory and other buildings, nearly to the Newburgh Yacht Club.
Noto foresees plenty of lease extensions, but if any entity way down the line decides to remove the project, it will have to uproot concrete foundations, stainless steel anchors and the bulky artwork itself.
Marmentini is sketching out a black-and-white sci-fi-style backstory about her future figures on high-end comic book paper, a mythology centered on the river's history and ecology for the last 10,000 years, after the glacier thawed.
Despite being constructed from one of the planet's most resilient materials, the sculptures decay and change over time. "It would be cool if they gathered moss," she says. "Or if kids climb on them and a part gets eroded."
Bank Art Gallery, at 94 Broadway in Newburgh, is open from 4 to 8 p.m. on Friday and noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, or by appointment. See bankartgallery.com.

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