Fall Pop-up Exhibition Series
October 2023 - January 2024
Addressing a Growing Community Need
Our fall pop-up series in the Joan T. Boghossian Gallery gave us a way to address the growing community need for spaces to show and share creative work of all genres, and to continue our model of community-led curation. With this model, we focused our assets on projects already happening in the community that could use some space, staffing, or other resources to reach a wider audience, realize a next step, or experiment with an initiative or idea that might otherwise be out of reach. The series also emphasized artistic process, not just product, and each of the participating artists/curators created a setting in which their creative works were displayed within a context that allowed viewers to better understand the histories, research questions, and artistic methods that had contributed to the works themselves.
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First up was New Battambang Market, an exhibition of work by artists Dana Heng and Moy Chuong. This inventive, evocative installation, inspired by the Southeast Asian grocery store once owned by Heng’s parents, deftly mixed actual quotidian objects from the store along with recreations of such objects via ceramic sculpture and screen printing, prompting viewers to consider how everyday objects might evoke feelings around “Southeast Asian (dis)identity, immigration, and diaspora.”
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Next the “Pop-Up Langston Hughes Reading Room and Event Series,” curated and produced by the Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading Committee (LHCPR) and blackearth lab, focused on Hughes’ connections to water in his life and work, as reflected in his poetry and his memoir The Big Sea, detailing his years as a merchant marine.
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An emphasis on process was perhaps most apparent in the final exhibition, Entropy & Artistry: A showcase of works from PPL’s Makerspace, curated by Community Partnerships Facilitator Sophia Ellis and PPL's new Maker Education Manager Brenda Adames, who enthusiastically assisted Workshop participants in their creative efforts and encouraged them to submit their work for the showcase. Both worked together to curate an exhibition featuring creative work along with examples of the artmaking material and equipment available for public use in PPL's Workshop, thus giving viewers a better understanding of how those works came to be.
Spring Exhibitions & Programs
Spring brought an incredible array of exhibitions and associated programs.
While these exhibitions came about independently, this is Providence – so cross-pollination was a happy inevitability, and however serendipitously, they shared some creative DNA. Becci Davis and Kei Soares Cobb also worked in PPL’s Nicholson Whaling Collection with Captain William Martin’s logbook for their interactive project/exhibition From Hold to Horizon. For Stand to Sea, printmaker Allison Bianco researched Captain Martin’s logbooks, as well as accounts and images of major hurricanes found in the Rhode Island Collections. Allison, Jacques Bidon, and Dan Wood were among local printmakers who participated in the recent Southern Graphics Council International Conference in Providence, during which Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. was given the Lifetime Achievement Award, and created prints especially for exhibition and distribution within the public libraries of Providence. Fittingly, some of Amos’s work at PPL was put on view in the Updike Room, which houses items from the Updike Collection on the History of Printing; Jacques’s prints were on view just outside the Updike Room. We were fortunate to record a conversation with Amos and Dan, exhibition organizer, during the SGCI Conference for the inaugural episode of PPL’s podcast, THIS, THAT, And ANOTHER!
April - June 2024
From Hold to Horizon – Exhibition with Activations
Created by Kei Soares Cobb and Becci Davis
From Hold to Horizon was an immersive voyage toward Liberation, an inquiry into our complicated relationship with the ocean, sovereignty, and economies of capture. Inside its walls was a space for locating oneself. Journals detailing the nineteenth century whaling voyages of Captain William Martin, one of New England’s most prominent Black whaling-ship captains, will serve as our guide, leading us to explore a number of questions. Who are we? Where are we? What is happening around us? What are we experiencing together?
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Visitors were invited to experience the space on their own and also to return on scheduled activation days to experience a guided journey of the horizon and journaling as rituals of transformation led by the artists.​
The whaling logs of Captain William Martin are part of PPL’s Nicholson Whaling Collection. This project was made possible, in part, by generous support from the Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading and from the Papitto Opportunity Connection, as well as through funding support from Rhode Island Humanities, an independent state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
March - May 2024
Rhode Island Creatives Show/Carl Yung Series
Prints by Jacques Bidon
For a small city in the smallest state, Rhode Island has produced outsized Black artists in a variety of genres. In the 19th century, artists such as Sissieretta Jones, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, and Christiana Cartreaux Bannister brought music, visual art, and style to the city. The 20th century saw artists such as Mahler B. Ryder and Cheryl Miller further Black art and design here and in the world. After attending Rhode Island School of Design (specifically to work with Ryder), Cheryl Miller went on to become a pioneering Black female graphic designer in the United States. Mahler Ryder, Illustration Professor at RISD, had an illustrious career that included a show at the Whitney Museum. Rhode Island continues to attract and produce artists, musicians, and designers of worldwide acclaim. The legacy that these past artists created lives on in the creative output of Rhode Island artists of all backgrounds today. We all stand on the shoulders of the greatness that came before. — Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D.
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Funded by RISCA and The Department of Art, Culture and Tourism.
April - June 2024
Words From The Library
Prints by Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., created in collaboration with librarians, staff, and patrons of PPL and Community Libraries of Providence
April - June 2024
Stand to Sea
An Exhibition of Prints by Allison Bianco
At the top of the stairs on the third floor, the monumental six-foot copper plate etching imagined watery worlds through the lens of maritime artwork traditions. Bianco was awarded a RISCA Make Art Grant to work with Ben Watkins to create two site-specific frames to wrap around the corners of the Library’s architecture. The rising sea of mythic proportions in the print came in the form of seven waves that travel over hundreds of years, past whales and whaling ships, from the edges of faraway oceans to the Atlantic, where they reach land at the Point Street Bridge in Providence, RI, on September 21, 1938.
Bianco researched at PPL’s Special Collections, blending a myriad of scrapbook references, aerial photographs, whaling log illustrations and sentiments of historic Japanese Kawaraban papers to produce a view of her home state of Rhode Island, with a bright and foreboding atmosphere.
April - May 2024
The Whale Guitar 10th Anniversary Exhibition
An Instrument of Change
As part of the Southern Graphics International Conference in Providence April 2024, Lifetime Achievement Award Honoree Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. chose to create a new series of prints inspired by his love for, and in support of, public libraries. He began by gathering thoughts and experiences from librarians, staff, and patrons of PPL and the Community Libraries of Providence, and translated them into exquisitely layered letterpress prints. These prints then hung throughout PPL and the Community Libraries of Providence, and thanks to Amos Paul Kennedy’s generosity, made available after the conference for patrons of the respective libraries.
The exhibition was organized by Dan Wood, local printer with DWRI Letterpress, Providence, in collaboration with SGCI. Prints are pictured on this report’s cover.
The Whale Guitar — an astonishing, iconic, one-of-a-kind guitar inspired by Herman Melville’s great book Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, dreamed up by toy designer/guitar novice Jen Long and handmade by Rhode Island artisans — made its public debut at PPL on April 24, 2014. In celebration of its 10th anniversary, The Whale Guitar returned to be the centerpiece of an exhibition that also featured artifacts of its creation process and visual influences, including design sketches by artist William Schaff, specimens from PPL’s Nicholson Whaling Collection, and whaling log books and scrimshaw.
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Mementos of The Whale Guitar’s decade-long journey as an Instrument of Change were also exhibited, including event posters, magazine spreads, classroom material, and movie stills. Also on view were photos and signatures of the hundreds of people who have played The Whale Guitar during its mission to reinterpret Melville’s epic tale as a climate warning and call to change — away from climate-heating fossil fuels and plastics, and toward renewable energies and eco-friendly materials. Finally, the exhibit showcased the challenging shift that this Instrument of Change stirred up in the personal life and livelihood of its producer, Jen Long, who had been a successful toy designer creating My Little Ponies and baby playthings from fossil fuel-based plastics – prior to experiencing her extraordinary vision for The Whale Guitar.