Join Us!

Providence Art Windows is pleased to announce that its next exhibit will be on view from June 18-September 11, 2009. The art and art installations presented in nine downtown windows are by Rachel Cohn, Jennifer Daltry, Ani Ghajanian, Not About the Buildings, The Hive Archive with New Urban Arts students, Roger Lemelin, Benton Moss and Alyssa Spry, Alison Owen and Lisa Perez, and Amy Wynne-Derry. Please join us for the opening reception at Design Within Reach (210 Westminster Street, Providence, RI 02903) on June 18, from 5:30-7:30 PM. Come and meet the artists, go on a walking tour with a map and visit beautiful Downtown Providence.
A downloadable map is available above, and a paper one at the reception.

Most artwork and installations are for sale. Please contact PAW Director Rebecca Siemering at 401.566.8260 if you are interested in any of the artists.

1. 191 Westminster Street

Amy Wynne-Derry
Infinite Menagerie
Materials: mirrors, wood, paint


About the Work
The silhouetted animals reference animal identification books and museum display boards. I have been inspired by the Victorian Age of collection and Natural History museums for years. The effect of the painted image is meant to be altar-like and the infinite repetition of the image speaks to the illusion of plenty when in fact the species are in danger of depletion/extinction. Perhaps a remembrance. This installation gives me a chance to interact with the motion of the pedestrian and give the viewer the chance to experience visual impermanence.

About the Artist
Amy Wynne-Derry is a painter with a studio in an old lace mill Pawtucket, RI. She has been a Full-time Visiting Artist in Painting and Drawing of The School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston since 2001. She also teaches in RISD’s certificate and summer programs. Locally she has shown at 5 Traverse Gallery and The Chazan Gallery. She has also been a “Celebrity Tour Guide” for Gallery Nite Providence. She received her BA from Smith College in Art History and Cultural Anthropology. Her MFA is in Classical Painting Techniques and Anatomy from The New York Academy of Art in NYC. Her work can be found in both private and corporate collections.

Amy Wynne-Derry does site-specific custom wall paintings for both private and corporate interiors. Infinite Menagerie is available for purchase and installation. Any inquiries please contact Providence Art Windows.

2. 191 Westminster Street

Rachel Cohn

The Museum of Supernatural History: The Legend of Mercy Brown
Acrylic on tyvec, assorted fabric, plywood

About the Work
This display from the Museum of Supernatural History intends to present a supplemental history of the state of Rhode Island. The display aims to recreate a naturalistic local habitat of a two distinct groups of supernatural beings native to Rhode Island: ghosts and vampires. To visit the ghosts in their own environment, take a walk down Benefit Street on College Hill, the most haunted street in America.

The Legend of Mercy Brown
In 1892, a young girl named Mercy Brown died from "consumption" in Exeter, Rhode Island. Over the course of several years, other members of her family had also succumbed to “consumption” and when her brother Edwin became sick, the villagers suspected a vampire. They exhumed the corpses in the family crypt and found nothing but mummies and skeletons, except for Mercy; her body remained unchanged and the blood in her heart was still red. She appeared to have moved inside her coffin. Mercy had been buried in January and the coldness of the winter would have preserved her body, but for the villagers of Exeter these signs were a confirmation of the undead. They removed her heart and burned it, mixing the ashes into water as a potion for her brother to drink. Unfortunately the cure didn’t work and Edwin died later in the same year.

Mercy Brown was the last vampire exhumed in the state of Rhode Island. In 1882, scientists had discovered that the disease, tuberculosis, was caused by bacteria, but unfortunately for Mercy that information had reached rural Exeter too late.


About the Artist
Rachel graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005 with a B.F.A in Painting. She has worked in commercial art and design in New York City, painting murals, working on movie sets and most recently working on the design team for Window Display at Bloomingdale’s flagship store in Manhattan. Currently Rachel divides her time between Brattleboro, Vermont and Copenhagen, Denmark.

3. 203 Westminster Street

Ani Ghajanian

Consumed
nickel silver-forged & soldered, maple tree seed pods,
paperclay, thread, mixed media installation

About the Work
The resemblance of maple tree seed pods to wings was the inspiration for the development of this sculpture.Working intuitively, my emotions and experiences at the time informed the creation of the moths and their home inside a ribcage heart. The installation grew from there. In my art I explore themes of where we come from, where we are going, and our relationships with love and loss, fear and dreams. Abstracted forms of the human figure and parts of the body play a frequent role in my work for the presentation of these topics. I find great joy in sculpting clay and wax, casting, metalsmithing and crafting from nature.

About the Artist
Ani Ghajanian is a sculptor living and working in RI. She earned a BFA in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design in 1996. As a freelance artist, she has 10 years experience sculpting products for the toy industry.Her career since graduating also includes work as a jewelry designer in RI, a handbag designer in NY, and an art teacher for children at Manhattan’s 92nd St. Y Art Center and Providence City Arts. In November 2008, Ani completed a one-month artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Recently, she received a scholarship to study glass at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. In August she will be part of a 4-person show at Tugboat gallery in Omaha, Nebraska.

4. Two Brothers Beauty Supply, Eddy and Westminster Sts.

The Hive Archive with New Urban Arts Students

Hexacomb
Mixed Media

About the Work
Six women artists from The Hive Archive partnered with six young women artists from New Urban Arts to design and fabricate
a sculptural installation that celebrates the creative voices of women and girls in Rhode Island. The Hive artists began by exploring inner narratives of empowerment and inspiration with their partners. Together each pair created a collaborative piece for a series of
six collaborative pieces that define a story, a physical space, or
an artistic process that provokes each artist to make art. Each individual piece utilizes the hexagon of a honeycomb and this repetition ties the individual pieces together in order to form a central narrative. The Hive Archive believes that the sum of a whole is greater than the individual parts and that people sharing ideas, skills and resources will always lead to actions greater than those of any individual. This theme is central to Hexacomb, in which twelve individual voices come together to inspire a greater movement of women in the arts in Rhode Island.

The Hive Archive was founded in 2001 as a non-profit,
women-run feminist arts organization, focused not just on art
making and empowerment through creative expression, but also
on civic involvement and social change. We are a multi-faceted organization that strives to dismantle obstacles that limit women in reaching their full creative potential. The Hive Archive seeks to provide programming to support creative women and girls — including access to art studios, career learning opportunities, and skills expansion — to advance an accessible and safe environment for collaboration, learning, and activism.
Visit us at www.hivearchive.org

New Urban Arts is a nationally recognized interdisciplinary arts studio for high school students and emerging artists. Our mission is
to build a vital community that empowers young people to develop a creative practice they can sustain throughout their lives. We provide studio, exhibition space, and mentoring for young artists who explore the visual, performing, and literary arts through yearlong free out-of-school programs.

Visit us at www.newurbanarts.org
Hive Artists New Urban Arts Artists
Deb DeMarco Amanda Abreu
Heather Guidero Ginger Avila
Jori Ketten Alyce Brown
Kirsten Lamb Ava Ginsburg
Monica Shinn Kelsea Ricard
Alyssa Holland Short Sara Tolbert

5. Two Brothers Beauty Supply, Eddy and Westminster Sts.

Benton Moss and Alyssa Spry

bric-a-brac

mixed media sculpture

About the Work

How do we relate to the objects in our lives? How have we come to define ourselves by our Stuff? How do objects-- the sale of objects, the advertisement of objects, the accumulation of objects-- contribute to a collision of public and private space? We are a culture of excess. The check out line of your local CVS is all the proof you need: Pez dispensers, commemorative coins, erasers shaped like cartoon characters, exfoliating shower gloves, chips clips…excessive stuff, excessive waste, excessive unnecessity. The myriad knick-knacks and mildly useful paraphernalia that crowd our public landscape are constantly finding their way into our kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms. Our private spaces become a collection of objects, the objects themselves becoming an integral part of the architecture of our lives. And as advertisers manipulate and exploit aspects of our intimate, personal lives in an effort to sell us their products, private space (where we keep the objects) is vaulted into the public arena where more objects vie for our attention.

About the Artists

Alyssa Spry and Benton Moss have been distracting each other from more important work since 2001. They have shown work together and separately in Chicago, Memphis, New York, Los Angeles and New Hampshire. Spry has a visual and performing arts background with a BFA in figurative theater from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Moss is currently finishing a fine arts degree at the University of Memphis.

6. Fulton Street

Alison Owen and Lisa Perez
Site-specific installation

About the Artists

Alison Owen

Each of my installations is created on site over the course of several days in direct response to the physical and emotional characteristics of the architecture. Working with simple materials – thread, thumbtacks, paper, paint, balsawood – I construct installations that subtly alter the space. The resulting works draw upon my impulse to investigate and make sense of my surroundings. I consider my work to be drawing-based, but rather than working in two-dimensions with pencil on paper, I draw in three dimensions with materials both tangible (cut paper, strips of wood, paint) and ethereal (light and shadow). Like drawing, the work results in a series of marks upon the space that reveal the process of intense observation, interpretation and recording. Every detail of the space is explored and carefully considered; the way the electrical conduit doesn’t run quite parallel to the baseboard but rather diverges at a slight upward angle, the manner in which light slides across the surface of a wall, the odd way in which two pieces of drywall meet leaving a raised horizontal ridge on the wall. I draw attention to the peripheral – those aspects of the space that are normally overlooked. A crack in the wall or a conduit becomes not only part of the work but also a locus of attention. The end result is that the experience of the viewer is not solely directed by me, it is also influenced by the original architect as well as every individual (whether electrician, carpenter, or previous artist) that has left a mark upon the space. Each installation is a conversation with all of these past mark-makers.

In my wallpaper installations, I create flocked wallpaper using the dirt, dust, and lint that I gather while cleaning the installation site. In this body of work, domestic labor and the installation process have fused into a single project. I create a new environment with the almost invisible detritus of everyday life.

Lisa Perez
Working with various materials and methods, Lisa Perez's art embraces an ambiguity in the definitions and boundaries of sculpture, drawing and installation. Drawing is the starting point of all works from pencil, pen, and paint to paper constructions, installation, and architectural intervention. Her work invites a shift in expectations and engages a recognition of that which often slips into the margins of perception in our hyperspeed culture. Perez received her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley and currently lives and works in Providence, RI. Recent exhibitions of her work were installed at the Drawing Center - NYC, RISD - Woods Gerry Gallery, and 5 Traverse Gallery. Recent projects can be viewed here.

7. RI Housing, 44 Washington Street

Jennifer Daltry

Trees #1 Tree#2
oil paint on canvas

About the Artist and the Work
As an artist that draws much inspiration from nature, I have become very sensitive to the impact that human beings have on the earth and its inhabitants. Even in my own, fairly rural area, there is constant development, and I see how this effects everything around it. It is encouraging to see how well nature adapts and continues to persevere in the midst of these changes. By studying and then drawing my surroundings, I feel more in touch with the earth on a very basic level, and better able to strive toward improvement.
Education: BFA, Rhode Island School of Design

8. URI Library, 80 Washington Street

Not About the Buildings

The Banned Series
Photographs

About the Work
The Banned series of photographs examines the bizarre yet fascinating
concept of book-banning, and examines the inevitable irony about
censorship: when books are publicly challenged for being
inappropriate, they instantly become more alluring than they otherwise
might have been.

The book titles chosen for this series were banned or challenged for a
variety of reasons. All Quiet On The Western Front, for instance, was
banned in Nazi Germany for glorifying pacifism, but it was also banned
in Boston for obscene language, and the American edition was also
censored after the Book of the Month club requested that some of the
more unpleasant passages be removed.

In 1983, the Alabama State Textbook Committee called for the removal
of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl on the grounds that it is "a
real downer." Even today, the book is missing from many school
libraries.

Some books have been challenged on the grounds that they promote a gay
agenda or advocate an anti-Christian lifestyle, and others because
they contain foul language or deal with race issues. Another frequent
explanation for challenges is that books are inappropriate for younger
audiences. Many people believe that rather than reading a difficult
work and discussing its issues, it would be more prudent to ban it
outright. I could not disagree more with this theory of dealing with
social issues, yet the concept nevertheless fascinates me.

About the Artist
Not About The Buildings is an events organization committed to
fostering a vibrant literary community in Providence. It was founded
in 2006 by Matthew Lawrence, a writer who was born and raised in Rhode
Island.

9. Trinity Rep, 201 Washington Street

Roger Lemelin

Paintings on Cardboard

About the Work
As a teacher of elementary age children, I find myself repeatedly giving the same advice;
work with your mistakes, let the paint do what it wants, don’t erase so much. With these paintings I decided to take my own advice and work in a childlike manner, approaching the canvas in a very spontaneous and fluid manner. I envision my paintings as songs or visual poems revealing fragments about the artist and his life; both spiritual, personal and mundane. Each layer of paint and color reacting to the last, visible as a history of the act itself. My aim is to be playful and direct in approach, allowing a dreamlike quality to coalesce. Personal iconography is added from photographs, figures that appear as almost translucent phantoms. Layers of interacting drips and puddles form shapes folding and overlapping into an ambiguous landscape. Ultimately, it is color that guides me, hues blending and creating a kaleidoscope of sorts.


About the Artist
Roger J Lemelin is an artist, musician and teacher living in Seekonk, MA. He currently teaches for the Worcester Public Schools and has received several honors such as Teacher of the Year. Roger holds a BA from Rhode Island College in printmaking, an MAT from RISD and recently received a certificate in Children’s Book Illustration from RISD. As an artist, he has had a solo exhibit at AS220 and displayed at other local venues. Roger is currently seeking a publisher for his children’s book, painting, playing music and planting a big garden in his yard.