Samuel Nigro

Art — endurance — and the education of attention.


A stone, a break — then a place.


A path and memory, meandering together.


Written, walked, or run — embodied all.

Portrait of Samuel Nigro wearing a red hat and gray shirt, standing in front of a green industrial door, sculptor and process-based artist interested in granite and public sculpture.

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.

Video still of Samuel Nigro’s hand pressing on a granite stone during a performance-based sculpture process, exploring material interaction, movement, and public art.

My sculptural work is rooted in physical encounter.

Granite sculpture by Samuel Nigro showcasing cut, fractured, and drilled surfaces. The piece reveals the internal structure of the stone, highlighting process-based techniques and the potential for large-scale public sculpture.

I break and place granite — often monumentally.
Not as object, but as an act of attention: to location and to definitions of 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.

Since then, my work has become a meditation on gesture, fracture, and placement — and what force reveals from underneath.

Digitally constructed abstract image with blue and green horizontal bands and three translucent spherical forms on the right. Artwork by Samuel Nigro exploring digital environments and abstract space.
Minimalist digital artwork by Samuel Nigro with a grayscale horizon and a dark lower field, evoking abstract landscapes and conceptual boundaries.

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 behaves more like architecture of mind.

It moves through fragments — character, memo, monologue, timeline.
A current made of breaks and flow.

Not a story you follow, but a structure you fall into.
Recursive. Symbolic. Mythic.

Digitally constructed abstract image by Samuel Nigro with blue and green horizontal bands and multiple translucent spheres of varying sizes, exploring layered digital space and visual flow.

It does not ask to be decoded.
It wants to be inhabited.

What emerges is not a world, but a pressure.
Opposites held. Thresholds crossed. Echoes left behind.

Digital composition by Samuel Nigro combining hand-drawn lines and a distorted video still of a male face. Experimental layering explores identity and perception.

A learning device:
Built to flow like stone.
To move like memory.
To prepare you for what already has begun.

Samuel Nigro in his studio holding a large carved granite block, wearing work gloves, with granite sculptures visible in the background. The image captures the physical process of sculpting stone and the scale of the material.
Performance video still by Samuel Nigro showing the sequence of breaking stones with a hammer, a blurred stone, a superimposed portrait, and fragments of wall and stone, exploring physical force, transformation, and material memory.

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.

Not for record. Not for spectacle. Not even for accuracy.

Samuel Nigro writing memorized digits of the irrational number phi on a sheet of paper as part of a performance-based memorization exercise.

Each digit becomes a form: person, action, object.
Each form placed within an inner architecture.

Close-up view of Samuel Nigro’s hand writing digits of phi from memory, showing crossed-out errors and numeric progression on the paper.
Detailed image of Samuel Nigro’s hand writing memorized digits of phi, emphasizing the focused gesture and partial sequence of numbers.

What emerges is not a list.
It is a structure of attention.
A discipline of image.

Digital composition of photographs taken while riding a bike on an airport runway, arranged over a blue background. Images show runway textures, bike shadows, and motion traces.

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.

Digital composition of photographs taken while riding a bike on an airport runway, arranged over a red-tinted industrial background. Images highlight movement patterns, bike shadows, and surface textures.
Samuel Nigro blindfolded, writing memorized digits of √2 in a performance.

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.

These are not extracurricular.
They are the work.

Samuel Nigro at the start of the Burning River 100 ultramarathon, completed as a 50-mile race. Early morning starting line with other runners in the background.

The trail — like the page, or a stone — is a surface.
A surface through which I study change, memory, knowledge, and transformation.

Samuel Nigro running around mile 40 of the JFK 50 ultramarathon, wearing a hydration vest and beanie, focused expression during the race.

Eventually, my journey on the PCT will become a memory structure –
a mapped performance, layered with steps, recall, and encoded experience.

Samuel Nigro's dusty, swollen feet resting in trail-worn shoes after a long day of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.

It will include a dual system:

Samuel Nigro's shadow cast on rocky terrain while hiking through the High Sierra along the Pacific Crest Trail, with snow-dusted peaks in the background.

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.

Samuel Nigro looking into the camera with a finishers' medal after completing his first ultramarathon, his foot partially covering the lens.

Across all these forms, I investigate the shape of persistence, the limits of perception, and the ritual of encounter.

I’m not interested in novelty.
I’m interested in depth — in geologic depth.
In slow processes that echo tectonic shifts.
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.

Graphite rubbing by Samuel Nigro capturing the textured surfaces and fragmented edges of a stone sculpture.

I am seeking a place to root this work:


A studio for granite and writing.
A home base for performance and recovery.
A site where all layers — material, linguistic, bodily, speculative — can be integrated at scale.

This is not a multidisciplinary practice.
It is one act, seen through many lenses.

My medium is threshold.
My subject is change.
The tools are becoming.
The current is flowing.

Graphite rubbing by Samuel Nigro capturing the granular texture and fracture lines of a granite surface.

TL;DR


I shape stone with force and attention
I shape language with myth and precision
I shape memory with symbolism and structure
I shape terrain with my body in motion

I am seeking a place to root this work

To connect and inquire:

Another pulse:

TNOI — the thrum of that which moves

Samuel Nigro taking a self-portrait at approximately 12,500 feet in the High Sierra, with blue sky and wispy clouds in the background.