CREATE offsite – Kirsten Bates
Create Offsite Amtrak Gallery
ON VIEW: March 16 – May 15, 2026
Marche’ de Fer (Iron Market)
ARTIST STATEMENT
The Iron Market in Jacmel, Haiti and the Hudson Amtrak station are both examples of late 19 th century Victorian architecture, with typical cast iron columns and girders. Both were built for people come in contact with each other for a purpose. In modern Hudson, goal-oriented people rarely interact. In 1979 Haiti, the marketplace was of necessity a vibrant place of exchange and community for desperately poor people, a lusty gathering place. The illiteracy rate was 97%, and exchange was often barter. Thus, a scribe, a person who knew how to read and write, would set up a desk to offer those services, or someone would offer a tray of simple sweets.
These images were taken at the beginning of my first trip to Haiti, an observer looking in. Toward the end of that trip, people were willing to share more of themselves with me. I was able to do a more participatory series, Cailles Jacmel, of families posed in front of their colorfully painted houses. The resourcefulness of the Haitians I met cannot be overstated. Unsurprisingly, when Haitian immigrants settled in Springfield, Ohio and surrounding communities, they are credited with turning around the local economy and failing manufacturing.
These negatives were recorded in 1979, relocated and printed in 2025. At that time my resources were limited and I was gathering more material than I could have printed. These prints take advantage of updated technology and are pigment on rag paper, much more akin to printmaking that wet darkroom techniques. Concurrent with digitizing my archive, my photography practice continues, with some of it, like these and photographs of ghost houses in Merida, Yucatan, falling under the rubric “Incidents of Travel.”
Kirsten Bates 2026
Special thanks to CPW, Kingston, Alicia Schirrmeister, and CREATE.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Since the 1970s, Kirsten Bates has worked as an artist across many media, including installation, performance, filmmaking, collage, and sculpture. Her earlier lens based work in the 1970s involved projecting images augmented with sound and set pieces. She has shown in New York City venues including 112 Greene Street, the Kitchen, and Ideas Warehouse, part of P.S.1 and has worked with filmmakers and video artists including Amos Poe, Lizzie Borden, and Glenn O’Brien, as well as making her own films. With the theater group Turmoil, she and Allen Frame co-directed David Wojnarowicz’s Sounds in the Distance in New York City and Berlin. The separate film Turmoil in the Garden based on this work was shown at Reina Sofia in Madrid as part of the David Wojnarowicz travelling retrospective.
In the mid-1990s, while continuing to make films, she began working with plants particularly natives. This earth practice expanded in the aughts to larger works involving trees and huge swaths of fern. Her documentary on glass artist Paul Stankard was shown nationally on Public Television. Since moving to the Hudson Valley in 2008, she has been in curated exhibitions at Hudson Hall, the Athens Cultural Center, CREATE, and Café Joust Catskill.
Her work is included in the Avalanche Archive at the Museum of Modern Art as well as the Willoughby Sharp archive at the Getty Research Center. Most recently she was interviewed for the David Wojnarowicz Arthur Rimbaud in New York catalogue.
Hudson Amtrak Station
69 S Front St
Hudson, NY 12534
Free to public