08/01/2025
LEIMAY is deeply moved by the passing of our dear Honorary Board Member—stage director, designer, visual artist, and founder of The Watermill Center— Robert Wilson.
A message from LEIMAY's Artistic Directors:
"Thank you, dear Bob...
Yesterday, on the morning of July 31, 2025, while in rehearsal, I learned that Bob had passed earlier that day. I was in the midst of making work—movement, poetry, and song filled the room. That felt right. Work held me. And I thought about how Bob always held space for work—how he embraced it, and all of us inside it.
His passing left a piercing absence and reminded me, once again, of the fragility of life. And yet, my heart is full—with gratitude, admiration, and love. The world has lost a magical being—a visionary who could conjure form, sensation, contradiction, and beauty into being. And we lost someone who believed in us.
Bob nurtured our artistic practice. He gave us space, opportunities, and wind. As immigrant artists in New York City, we weren’t part of any institutional pipeline. We had to carve our own way, path by path. We’ve always embraced multiplicity—interdisciplinary forms, cultural opposites, craft, community, the poetry of beauty—but we’ve often felt outside the frame of the NYC art scene, clearing ground with machetes where doors hadn’t opened. Bob saw us—as he so often saw artists. He welcomed Shige and me into his playground. Into his universe.
He let us play. And he allowed us to create our own universe.
Over the last 18 years, we created and incubated many LEIMAY works at The Watermill Center. He commissioned us. He took us—and our work—to Europe. We collaborated on his creations. He performed at our live-work space, CAVE. He showed up at our events. He wrote letters on our behalf. That was Bob to us—magical, generous, unpredictable, present. We connected with his New York of loft stories and underground scenes—maxing out credit cards to fund his first European tour. And also with his grand vision of prosceniums, where scale, form, and imagination pushed the boundaries of the “real.” He did a lot for many artists!
As a teenager growing up in a city shaped by one of the world’s largest international theater festivals, I first encountered Bob’s work from afar. And then, years later, in 2007, we found ourselves inside his world. I was so happy! (Except for having to make a perfectly fitted bed). We built string installations. We danced. We created sculptures and films. Shige even helped design a rooftop. The galas in the Hamptons, in New York, in Berlin—each one, a performance. Always an invitation to a dream.
Though we didn’t get to say goodbye, we had plans to visit him soon. We had hoped to tell him we had finally secured CAVE—something we dreamed of for so long—and to thank him for the wind he gave us.
Through Bob, we met patrons and artists from across generations and continents. He brought people together. Some of them are now our friends, our collaborators, our new winds. He had theater in his bones—he knew how to gather, how to set conditions for magic to emerge. With rigor. With play. With his unmistakable radar for beauty.
Thank you, dear Bob.
Now you may become the light and shadow you understood so well.
Shige loved you deeply.
Gracias, Bob. We continue here, connecting with the invisible, trusting that beauty carries ancient power and opens the way for all possible futures.
With love,
Ximena and Shige"
