When I first reach out to Rhea Marmentini for an interview, she responds: “I am in Spain feeding my dragon. I’ll be back at the end of February.”
The dragon Marmentini is referring to is the The Dragon of the Calderona, a monumental sculpture-house and land-art project on the slopes of Spain’s Sierra Calderona near Valencia. Begun in the mid-2000s, the project transformed an abandoned quarry into a sprawling dragon-shaped structure that functions simultaneously as architecture, sculpture, and environmental intervention. Marmentini conceived the dragon as a way of “healing” what she saw as a wound in the landscape—using carved stone forms and organic architecture to reclaim a scarred site and reconnect it to the rhythms of nature. The project, which took years to build and now houses exhibition spaces and areas for artistic experimentation, embodies her belief that art can repair damaged environments while creating places for communal creativity and research. She returns regularly to oversee repairs and renovations.
Marmentini’s latest undertaking brings that same philosophy to the Hudson River. The sculpture park she is developing on the former Regal Bag Factory site in Newburgh is being supported by entrepreneur Ted Doering, founder of the Motorcyclepedia Museum and a longtime investor in the city. Over the past decade, Doering has assembled a patchwork of sites around Newburgh, drawn to the city’s overlooked buildings and its stubborn, unfinished potential.
Marmentini is developing a long-term sculpture landscape on the former Regal Bag Factory site on the Newburgh waterfront, where a two-acre stretch of industrial waterfront will become the site of a slowly evolving “living museum” of monumental stone sculptures. The project, still in early stages, is envisioned as a five-year undertaking in which massive carved forms accumulate gradually along the river’s edge, transforming the site into an outdoor sculpture park that invites both contemplation and play.
The opportunity emerged somewhat serendipitously. Marmentini had been invited to exhibit in Newburgh by Shirley Giler Noto, director of the Bank Art Gallery. During that visit, she was shown the riverfront parcel and immediately recognized its potential.
“I said, ‘Wow, that’s perfect for my sculpture project,” Marmentini recalls. “So I presented my living museum project—a place where I can create and showcase monumental sculptures.”
The term “living museum” is key. Unlike a traditional sculpture park with a fixed master plan, Marmentini imagines the site evolving organically over time as new works arrive and new ideas take shape. She currently has about 24 tons of Vermont white marble on site—enough material for several pieces—but intends to bring additional stone each year as the project grows.
“It will accumulate,” she says. “As soon as I finish working one piece, I bring more stone.”
If the logistics of carving and transporting multi-ton marble sculptures seem daunting, Marmentini approaches the process with a kind of old-school physicality. She typically works alone, carving directly into the stone using grinders and diamond cutters.
Her approach runs counter to the increasingly digital workflow common in contemporary sculpture, where artists design forms in software and outsource fabrication to industrial milling machines. Marmentini prefers direct engagement with the material. “There is a relationship between you, the tool, and the stone,” she explains. “The trace you leave with the tool becomes part of your language.”
For her, stone is not just material but time itself—compressed geological history that the sculptor temporarily reshapes. “Stone is like condensed time,” she says. “You can go back into that time and also leave something for the future.”
That sense of deep time animates the mythology she is developing for the Newburgh project. The sculptures will represent fictional creatures emerging from the Hudson River—survivors of ecological upheaval who have been hiding in the river’s coves since the era of industrial pollution.
In Marmentini’s imagined narrative, these beings rise from the river at Newburgh because the water has finally become clean enough for them to return. “The Hudson River is like the spinal cord of the project,” she says. “Newburgh will be the epicenter—where these creatures first come out.”
Artist Rhea Marmentini created this five-page comic, “The Rebellion of the Clearwater Fairies,” as the mythological backstory for her planned Hudson River sculpture landscape. The hand-drawn narrative imagines aquatic beings surviving centuries of ecological upheaval—from colonization to industrial pollution—before emerging again in Newburgh as stone forms. The creatures depicted here will eventually take sculptural shape in marble along the riverfront. 
From there, the mythology expands upriver. Marmentini is also planning a related installation in Athens, where a different group of sculptures—what she calls “Gregorian mutants”—will inhabit another stretch of the Hudson landscape.
The stories surrounding these creatures draw loosely on Indigenous ecological traditions of the region, particularly the long-standing relationship between Native cultures and the river.
“I’m trying to save whatever is savable from the 10 or 20,000 years of ecological culture that existed here,” Marmentini says. “There’s an inertia to that knowledge that I think still exists in the Hudson Valley.”
Her sculptures aim to tap into that inertia—creating archetypal forms that feel ancient and strangely familiar, as if they might have always existed in some parallel reality.
Despite the mythic framing, Marmentini hopes the work functions in practical, everyday ways for the surrounding community. In fact, she believes the most important critics of the sculpture park will not be curators or collectors, but children. “The toughest public is children,” she says with a laugh. “If they like the sculptures—if they climb them and play with them—I’m already very happy.”
Unlike most museum sculpture, these works are meant to be touched. Marble and granite, she notes, are durable materials that can withstand generations of interaction. “You’re not making sculpture just for today,” she says. “You’re making it for today and for 1,000 years, 5,000 years, maybe 10,000 years.”
That long horizon echoes the ambitions of her dragon project in Spain, where art became a vehicle for reimagining a damaged landscape. In Newburgh, the scale may be smaller and the forms less architectural, but the underlying impulse is similar: using sculpture to reconnect place, ecology, and imagination.
Standing on the Hudson waterfront, where industry once dominated the shoreline, Marmentini sees the potential for a new kind of landscape—one shaped slowly by stone, story, and time. “It’s a beautiful spot,” she says. “And it’s waiting for something to happen.”
Marmentini’s work looks amazing! Can’t wait to visit – when will portions be open?
Nancy: Good Q. As Rhea’s just getting started, I don’t imagine there will be much to see until later in the summer. We’ll keep our eye on it for you.