This summer, Washington, D.C.’s Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens has opened “Rich Soil,” an exhibition of life-size wire sculptures installed all over the estate’s 13 acres of formal gardens. The cavorting wire sculptures should feel right at home. Hillwood was the home of General Foods CEO Marjorie Merriweather Post, who had a lifelong love of dance. Her party guests–always notable and famous–were often expected to partake in after-dinner square-dancing. But she was also a serious dance patron of the American Ballet Theater and the Washington Ballet.  So, Hillwood hosting “Rich Soil” seems a highly-appropriate partnership for the dancing wire sculptures.

For artist Kristine Mays, “Rich Soil” is her first outdoor exhibition. She began her career in such crafts as sewing and beadwork before turning to working with industrial-strength wire. With the 29 figures she has created for Hillwood’s gardens, Mays says her purpose is to “capture humanity–revealing strength, perseverance, and resilience.”  In particular, she sees “Rich Soil” as a “celebration of the ancestors, of all whom have toiled the soil before us.”

Mays molds the industrial wire to create figures that “spring forth like spirits rising from the soil,” mingling and dancing among the gardens’s vast array of seasonal plantings. “Both plants and human beings come and go,” Mays believes, “reverberating within the cycles of life.”  In “Rich Soil,” she was also influenced by Alvin Ailey’s well-known work “Revelation,” which inspired her to portray–as Ailey’s choreography does–the faith and hope Blacks felt as they traveled the paths from slavery to freedom.

Mays loops and hooks the hard steel wire into lifesize figures. Each figure takes her about five to eight weeks to complete, and she admits that “they always take on their own life” despite her intentions.  Outdoors, the steel weathers and ages, and the wire’s resulting rust conveys the artist’s message about the impermanence of life. For Mays, the wire figures are the “shells” that evoke “the exterior of a human being” in fleeting moments of pleasure, pain, and gratitude. 

Kristine Mays (right) lives and works in San Francisco.  She hopes to create change with her art, and has raised thousands of dollars for AIDS research by the sale of her work and by collaborating with such organizations as Visual Aid, the San Francisco Alliance Health Project, the De Young Museum, and the Museum of African Diaspora.

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor

“Rich Soil” is the current installation in Hillwood’s ongoing series of collaborations with contemporary artists, such as Vladimir Kanevsky (2021), Bouke de Vries (2019), Philip Haas (2016), and Isabel de Borchgrave (2013).                                     
KRISTINE MAYS: RICH SOIL is at the Hillwood Museum and Gardens through 1/9/22.  www.hillwoodmuseum.org