Performance: Maria De Victoria: Help Me Hold This
Friday, July 10, 2026
Part of West Side Fest 2026
Gallery:
About the Performance:
At the New York City AIDS Memorial on July 10, artist Maria De Victoria presented Help Me Hold This, a site-specific performance that blurred the line between witness and participant.
From dawn until dusk, De Victoria stood holding a single white sheet. The fabric called to mind the hospital linens once used at St. Vincent's Hospital, on whose former grounds the Memorial now stands, as well as domestic life, burial shrouds, and the collective artmaking of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Visitors were invited to join her through a simple, direct ask: "Help me hold this."
When people chose to participate in the performance, they joined the artist in holding the sheet alongside her for as long as they liked. When they stepped away, De Victoria continued alone. This back-and-forth, between solitary endurance and shared effort, made the ongoing labor of care visible.
Help Me Hold This followed De Victoria's previous 24-hour performance, Singing is a Simple Act, which took place at the New York City AIDS Memorial from June 28—29, 2024. Together, these works honor the grassroots networks that held communities together through the AIDS crisis, and, in particular, the women whose contributions are too often erased: lesbians, mothers, nurses, and others who showed up when institutions didn't.
When government and healthcare systems failed those living with AIDS, many women did what feminist art pioneer Mierle Laderman Ukeles called "maintenance labor"—the exhausting, repetitive, and deeply emotional work of keeping people alive and preserving their dignity. They managed daily survival, provided hands-on care, built mutual aid networks, and led radical political advocacy, often with limited public recognition.
By taking place at the Memorial's platform at the intersection of public memory and private grief, Help Me Hold This reckons with this history and our responsibilities to each other today.
This program was presented as part of West Side Fest, a three-day celebration of arts and culture across Manhattan’s historic West Side from July 10—12, organized by the West Side Cultural Network.
About the Artist:
Maria De Victoria (b. 1980, Lima, Peru, lives and works in New York) is a performance artist whose work examines the social and political structures that shape everyday life. Through durational, site-specific, and participatory works, she uses performance to create the conditions for shared acts of care, remembrance, and collective responsibility. Drawing on her experiences of migration, motherhood, and cultural displacement, her practice considers how we gather, participate, and belong. In 2024, she co-founded Artists & Mothers, a nonprofit organization that supports artist-mothers through childcare grants. She is also the founder of Desnivel Gallery, a project that reimagines where and how contemporary art is encountered by producing site-specific exhibitions in everyday spaces, where repeated encounters invite sustained engagement.
Thanks & Support
Support for public programming at the New York City AIDS Memorial is provided, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Photography by Filip Wolak