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On Liberty: A Summoning is a site-responsive exhibition and performance project by Marianne Vitale rooted in the layered social and cultural history of 818 Liberty Avenue. Over the twentieth century, the building housed a succession of influential nightlife and performance venues, including The Liberty Theater, The Staircase Lounge, Villa Madrid, and Lenny Litman’s Copa, which functioned as radically open spaces for music, performance, queer nightlife, and gathering. Vitale reanimates this history through sculpture, performance, film, and printed matter, creating a project that operates simultaneously as a formal exhibition and a series of live, time-based activations. Installed within a bar-and-stage framework referencing the site’s former nightclub configurations, the exhibition remains open daily as a sculptural environment and transforms into a functioning club during five consecutive Final Fridays between May and October.

At the core of the project is a body of sculpture fabricated from decommissioned American locomotives. Working with steel plating and industrial components once central to the nation’s railroad infrastructure, Vitale cuts and reconfigures these materials into modular and architectural forms that frame the exhibition and engage questions of endurance, transformation, and industrial legacies. Additional works—including paintings, images, flyers, zines, coasters, posters and other ephemera—circulate throughout the space, combining imagery drawn from Vitale’s engagement with locomotives and archival material related to the building’s storied past. The graphic works function not only as exhibition components but also as materials that move through the city, extending the project beyond the gallery walls.

PHOTO CREDIT: Marianne Vitale, Cubes, 2025. Courtesy the artist.