Samuel Nigro
Art · endurance · and the education of attention.
A stone, a break, a place.
A path and memory, meandering together.
Run, walked, or written — embodied all.
Samuel Nigro is a New York-based sculptor and endurance-performance artist.
I work at the intersection of stone, story, memory, and motion; across sculpture, speculative fiction, ritual performance, and long-distance endurance.
My sculptural work is rooted in physical encounter.
I break and place granite. The scale, approach, and form vary.
It is an act of attention,
to material and intent,
to location and use.
Breaking is recognition. A meeting. One of many moves.
The first time I struck stone with a hammer, I knew: this was older than language … and I continued.
My work has become a meditation on fracture, placement, and their consequences; and what the gesture reveals
from beyond, from below,
from within.
Alongside this, I’ve been developing The Stream —
a speculative fiction cycle exploring human evolution,
ecological collapse, and the reshaping of perception.
It began as fiction.
Now it moves like architecture — of memory, of mind.
It fractures into characters,
shards of understanding,
displacements
of time.
a current of break and flow.
Perhaps a story to follow,
but truly
a structure
to inhabit,
to prepare for,
to overcome.
Recursive. Symbolic. Mythic.
Disrupting. Grounding. Returning.
again … and again … and again.
It pushes up against the frontiers of knowing
and takes a step beyond … then another … and maybe another.
To understand is to embody.
What emerges is a pressure:
opposites held,
thresholds crossed,
echoes left behind.
A learning device.
To flow like stone.
To move like memory.
To prepare for what already has begun.
My performance work carries the inquiry into the body.
I memorize — and will recite, blindfolded — thousands of digits of irrational numbers: π, φ, e, √2.
For body. For brain. For the shape of sustained attention.
Toward object.
Toward the infinite.
Toward the what-cannot-be-held.
Each digit becomes a form: person, action, object.
Each form placed within an inner architecture.
What emerges is an exercise of orientation.
A structure of attention.
A discipline for the living.
These are rituals; where number becomes symbol, and symbol becomes space.
Where cognition takes shape in the hand.
The drawing is the instantiation.
The number, a key.
The body, the lock.
Movement is essential.
In 2022, I solo-thru-hiked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail with a 10-pound base weight.
In 2024, I ran four 50-milers in four months.
Now, I train for a 100-mile ultra.
A sculptural logic, extended through terrain.
The trail — like the page, or a stone — is a surface.
A surface through which I study change, memory, knowledge, and transformation.
Eventually, my journey on the PCT will become a memory structure –
a mapped performance, layered with steps, recall, and encoded experience.
It will include a dual system:
One structure to remember the trail’s practical realities: resupply points, mileage, terrain.
The other: a set of image-based devices that tell a parallel journey —
strange and symbolic, mythic and oblique.
An inner world, running in tandem with the physical trail.
And someday, the Appalachian Trail will follow.
Across all these forms, I investigate the shape of persistence, the limits of perception, and the ritual of encounter.
I’m interested in depth
In contact that tests how we know what we know.
Whether splitting granite, writing speculative myth, or running toward cognitive exhaustion —
my work honors endurance, attention, and the quiet force of change.
