By Anne Semmes
Anne Mimi Sammis is a Greenwich native transplanted to the rocky shore of Narragansett, Rhode Island, with a vista that has inspired her artist life for decades. Her front row view of the moonscape she captures on canvas. Her bronze sculptures celebrate peace, hope, love – and her five grandchildren dancing on the rocks, their arms outstretched to the heavens.
Sammis and her art are coming to Greenwich on June 5, for an exhibit (until July 11) at the newly opened Sorokin Gallery on Greenwich Avenue. On view will be a number of her works, paintings and sculpture, including a life-size bronze horse with an exuberant child astride.
So, how has artist Sammis survived the pandemic? She quickly brings up that St Francis prayer. “When you say,
‘Make me an instrument of thy peace’ and love and forgiveness every day, it becomes such a fabric of your being that with the outside that’s going on, you just keep looking for the best…We haven’t had any wars this last year, the air has gotten cleaner, the water’s gotten cleaner…and people have started meditating and spending more time with their families.”
Sammis’s sculpture life has been focused she says on families. “I’ve been doing these wonderful figures, and you’ll see them at the show. They’re dancing families and they are families in joy. Some of them have one child, some have two, or three or four and sometimes just dancing children – that’s what I’ve been working on this past year, the family structure.”
It was a family disaster that led Sammis into her bronze sculpting. Sammis in her married Greenwich life with
two grown children had fallen into art, but in 1979, her husband, Avery Rockefeller, was killed in an automobile accident, she tells, “right on Lake Avenue, and I was devastated.” So, she journeyed to San Miguel Allende in Mexico “to create.”
“To do sculpture was really easy for me. When I put my hands on the wax or the clay, the work just comes through me. I don’t have to think about it…and they had a school down there that actually cast in bronze. And so you learn how to do that – we all sit around a little table… And once you got your wax made, you put a ceramic mold around it, and you put the whole thing in the oven with the wax inside and the ceramic mold. What happens is it bakes the ceramic mold and melts out the wax. And you’ve left a hole at the top of this mold, and in that mold you pour the bronze, and then after it cools you crack the ceramic mold open and there’s the bronze. This is very simplified.”
Sammis chose to work in bronze, “Because bronze is practically indestructible. You have to melt it down to 1500 to 2000 degrees. I wanted something that could not be destroyed easily.”
But alas Sammis would find out differently a decade or so ago. Her 300-pound bronze female sculpture, “Embrace of Life” that graced the Tiverton Four Corners in Rhode Island was stolen away by two thieves. “They
were looking for scrap metal, because they were on oxycontin and heroin, and they were hacking it up into pieces.” Observed doing so by a neighbor, they were reported and arrested. “But we couldn’t find any pieces,” she shares. Soon after she was contacted by the state attorney general asking her, “What do you want to do with these two people?” Her response, “I would really like for them to get clean,” and no, don’t prosecute them. Sammis would reach out to one of the thieves to find him applying himself how to “fix up boats.”
A year later Sammis arranged a press conference, with the installment of Embrace of Life II, “to show that nothing can destroy you. Like Einstein said, ‘Nothing can be destroyed, it can only be transformed.’” Proof positive came with a sudden visit from the boat fixer. “He made amends to me. It was absolutely astounding. That whole thing might have happened just so that guy got straight and has a good life now – who knows.”
That event in Sammis’s life became part of a PBS documentary, “Mimi Sammis: Sculpting Peace” that movingly spells out “how art connects people and deepens self- understanding.” Preceding that documentary Sammis was airing her own weekly television series, “Mimi’s Art Studio” on Rhode Island PBS, with an outreach to 20 states. Her ability to draw the viewer in her creative process had viewers calling her “the Julia Child of painting.”
“I feel this peace with my painting,” says Sammis returning to what drives her creative process. “I paint peace basically, and I sculpt peace.” Her images of peace, of rising figures, outstretched arms, have been on exhibit at shows at the United Nations. Perhaps it was those images that inspired Marnie Dawson Carr, a longtime Greenwich friend to commission Sammis for a sculpture honoring the Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, for his work globally with the Anglican Communion. Carr was serving as president then, in 2002, of the Archbishop of Canterbury Anglican Communion Fund.
The Archbishop chose to unveil Sammis’s sculpture of a globe held by the hand of God with a dancing circle of figures of youth “bringing peace to the world,” on an occasion in the Archbishop’s official residence of Lambeth Palace to honor Queen Elizabeth on her Golden Jubilee. “She loved it,” says Sammis of the Queen’s take on her art. Sammis and Carr were present at the occasion.
Sammis can thank her grandparents for having brought Narragansett into her life. “They had a family house so I would come there for summers. And then after my husband died, my uncle died the same year so his house went up for sale – and I wanted it so badly, and I got it!” And, in that house she hosted for many years an “Artist Circle” gathering of painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, musicians, singers and photographers, there for support of their creative process. “A lot of miraculous things happened doing that,” she says. “People who didn’t think they were artists, became very successful. We had people making videos, writing books. I did it for 21 years, every Monday night, an hour and a half. But it’s time for a younger person to take over.”
One finds on Sammis’s website a brief but apt description of her artist self: “The art created by Anne Mimi Sammis, whose passion for love and peace embody the joy, the dance of love between ourselves and others.” She adds to that for this reporter, “It’s all about the love. If people can’t get that, I say, it’s all about being kind – just be kind. And if you can’t be kind, just be nice.”
Anne Mimi Sammis’s exhibit, “Raise Hope Through Art” opens Saturday, June 5, from 1 to 4 p.m., at the Sorokin Gallery, 96 Greenwich Avenue. For more information call 203-856-9048.
