Bloodtide
April 2022 - April 2023
Public Sculpture Project Takes Up Residence at PPL.
Bloodtide, a forever incomplete public sculpture project led by artist Eli Nixon, transformed recyclables into a menagerie of organisms in an effort to grok (and make more visible) the vastness of the horseshoe crab’s time on Earth, as well as the relative recentness of human existence. From April 2022 - January 2023, Eli worked with participants (ages nine weeks to 83 years) to sculpt and paper mache dozens of lifeforms, through an asynchronous yet collaborative process, in which each organism was created by multiple people.
Both the process and the product were an attempt to decentralize colonized notions of time and ownership, upset linearity, revel in impossibility, and reckon with our enmeshment with the more-than-human world. This project was part of activating Eli’s illustrated proposal for a new holiday in homage to horseshoe crabs, Bloodtide, which is available for check-out at the Library.
The project culminated in a public “Organism Extravaganza” on April 15, 2023 when, in a raucous and thoughtful alternative to Tax Day, participants celebrated 450 million years of flora and fauna built by the hands of hundreds of Modern Humans with an afternoon of organism appreciation, land acknowledgment, poetry, music, ‘crabaoke,’ and crafting in homage to the enduring horseshoe crab and their primordial friends. The installation throughout PPL’s three-story atrium stairway is viewable every day when PPL is open – the exhibition will remain through 2024. Many groups and organizations contributed to making this venture possible, including funding and support from the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism and First Works.
Enjoy this glimpse of the April 15, 2023 Organism Extravaganza at PPL.
Picturing the Pandemic
March - June 2023
Images from the Pandemic Journaling Project and the Rhode Island COVID-19 Archive.
3/2020: Municipalities around the U.S. go into lockdown due to COVID-19. The Pandemic Journaling Project was founded by anthropologists from Brown University and the University of Connecticut to virtually collect documentation of pandemic life from people around the globe.
In Rhode Island, PPL and the RI Historical Society partnered to create the RI COVID-19 Archive, encouraging residents to document and contribute their experiences of COVID to this virtual public archive.
Both projects were created with the belief that every person has something valuable to contribute to the documented history of the pandemic, even those who might not be reflected in news media accounts, medical statistics, or other governmental data, and that the very practice of documenting personal experiences can strengthen the voices of individual contributors as well as those of their communities.
Picturing the Pandemic brought together contributions from both projects, and asked: how can images – making them, looking at them, thinking with them – expand our capacity for self-recognition, empathy, and communal care? During the exhibition opening at PPL, activities included a conversation with founders of both archival projects, along with on-site opportunities for attendees to personally explore, reflect upon, and document their own experiences of the past three years, how those have brought them to the present, and/or how they are thinking about the future. Visitors to the exhibition were asked to consider:
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What is your first memory of COVID, and what makes it a “COVID” memory?
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Is there a word or phrase that describes your journey from that moment to now?
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Has the pandemic affected your sense of connection to others? If so, how?
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What’s one pandemic experience you would want to relive, and why?
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What are you most worried that people - including you - will forget about this time?
