Bristol Art Museum Presents Blue Sky Flooding, an Exhibit Exploring the Devastating Human Impact on the Environment
On View
Friday May 6 – Thursday July 14, 2022
Artist Reception Thursday May 12th, 5:30 -7:30pm
Friday May 6 – Thursday July 14, 2022
Artist Reception Thursday May 12th, 5:30 -7:30pm
|
Blue Sky Flooding is an exhibition displaying work by artists who are expressing their concerns about the relationship humans have with the natural world, environmental justice, climate grief and the future of the planet. Their artwork raises questions about the human influence on the health of the planet through imagery that portrays disasters as beautiful, the use of sound installation and nontraditional materials as a way of questioning our daily activities. This exhibition brings attention to environmental changes, whether obvious, ignored or unnoticed, all having an impact on our lives.
|
|
*Funding provided in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and private funders.
|
|
|
The Bristol Art Museum announces its next exhibition of artworks by artists who explore and question the devastating impact that human activity has on the environment. The exhibit features an impressive list of local, regional, and nationally-renown artists and an image of a wampum from the Rhode Island State Archives.
|
The artists featured in this exhibit include Jesse Burke, Susan Greer Emmerson, Anela Ming-Yue Oh, Andy Pepper, Duke Riley, Evelyn Rydz, and William Schaff. The exhibit opens on Friday, May 6, and concludes on Sunday, July 10. An Artist Reception is scheduled for Thursday, May 12 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Museum.
“Blue Sky Flooding is an exhibition displaying work by artists who are expressing their concerns about the relationship humans have with the natural world, environmental justice, climate grief, and the future of the planet,” said Exhibition Curator Mary Dondero. “Their artwork raises questions about the human influence on the health of the planet through imagery that portrays disasters as beautiful, the use of sound installation, and nontraditional materials as a way of questioning our daily activities. This exhibition brings attention to environmental changes, whether obvious, ignored or unnoticed, all having an impact on our lives.”
Meet Some of the Artists
Photographer Jesse Burke has 12 photos featured in the Blue Sky Flooding exhibit. Burke spent his childhood exploring the wilds of New England and traveling from New York City to Maine skateboarding with his friends. This migratory lifestyle instilled in him a sense of wonder for whomever he meets, making friends everywhere he goes. He is always on the lookout for a deeper connection to the places he travels, documenting along the way.
Burke divides his time between personal projects and commissions. His photography and film work often deals with themes related to human's complicated relationship with nature. He is widely known for his project, Wild & Precious, which documents road trips to introduce his three daughters to the natural world. The viewer can follow along on the never-ending adventures with his wife and kids, where you may also catch a glimpse into their home life on Sweet Bean Farm in Rhode Island, where they raise honeybees, hens, and Flemish giant bunnies and Juliana mini pigs.
Burke earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the US and abroad and is held in many private and public collections including the MoCP: Chicago, MFA: Boston, MFA: Houston, the Princeton University Art Museum, the George Eastman Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art and the RISD Museum. Burke was named by Time Magazine as a top 50 US photographer to follow on Instagram and by T: The New York Times Style Magazine as a top 5 to follow on Instagram.
The exhibit also features artist collaborations such as one between William Chambers and Ann Barrett whose “Listen to the Whales” auditory experience was contributed to the exhibit. The space will surround Ann Barrett’s abstract paintings that evoke the depths of the ocean, a symphony of sound, and contemplation of our cosmic interconnectedness. William Chambers’s whale listening device allows participants to sit on cushions and listen to the beautiful songs of whales.
Chambers and Barrett’s friendship grew from a shared concern for the environment and the desire to create change in the world. This exhibit is an opportunity for their vastly different art-making practices to come together for deeper understanding. Barrett’s reverence and love for the earth inspired her to spend years working on environmental preservation and painting in her solitary studio. Chambers uses theater and spectacle to create a conversation around deep subject matter and often creates work in public places. Together, they offer this exhibit a gift to foster understanding and to see what can happen as a result.
“We use auditory and visual elements to create a meditation on whales as metaphors for the need to preserve the diversity of life on our planet,” the artists shared in a joint statement. “Interspecies relations can be more than conquest and destruction. We imagine an alternate scenario where maritime species are not used to create human dominance, but instead for understanding whales and the ocean ecosystem.”
Chambers is a socially engaged artist who holds an M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, an M.Ed. from Antioch University, and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. He has been teaching students of all ages for more than 20 years. He was an artist in residence at Clark University in fall 2017 and is the Visual Arts Chair at the Bancroft School. His work has been exhibited internationally in art museums, galleries, and street corners and is held in private collections. His performance pieces have been featured at the ICA, the Mattress Factory, and the American Visionary Art Museum to name a few. Chambers dissects complex issues in his interactive installations. The audience becomes his partner on a journey of discovery.
Barrett is an artist and ecological restoration advocate whose artwork explores the life-giving functions of our Earth. She is known for her paintings and collages that pair color harmonies with shifting patterns. With roots in observational drawing, her imagery has fluctuated between figuration and abstraction, finding a balance of color, space, and representation. Barrett has been inspired by whales since she saw her first gray whale off the Oregon coast as they migrated down to their wintering area in Baja California. Later, Barrett lived on Maui, where the North Pacific Humpback Whales sing and give birth to their calves. Now a central Massachusetts resident, Barrett supports conservation of the North Atlantic Right Whale, of which there are only 336 remaining. Barrett holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Susan Greer Emmerson has five pieces in Blue Sky Flooding - ink, charcoal, and gouache on paper – and has exhibited throughout the Midwest and Boston area. She has served as a juror and curator on several occasions and done residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (five times) and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Originally from the Midwest where she practiced for 17 years as a surgeon, Greer Emerson received her BFA in Painting from Illinois State University and her MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design in Boston. Her work is found in the permanent collections of the Grove Hall Public Library in Boston and the Bloomington-Normal Transportation Center and City Hall in Illinois. She is a full member of the Kingston Gallery and an associate member at Fountain Street Gallery, both in Boston.
“These past two years have, for most of us, profoundly changed our relationship with physical space, especially the formerly safe space of home,” said Greer Emerson. “Homes for some have become unbearably confining, for some uncertain or nonexistent, and for others a desolate empty place to grieve. Natural and man-made disasters have destroyed others, leaving the inhabitants only sad scraps and distorted debris. My work considers this emotional and physical devastation created by the loss of home.”
Three overbeaten abaca with linen pulp painting, sewing thread, and short cotton blowouts created by Anela Oh of Brooklyn, New York, will also be featured in Blue Sky Flooding. The Inflorescence series, the title of her work in the exhibit, is the first to incorporate imagery from both sides of her mixed-race heritage. These works use the Malaysian batik-inspired blowout forms found in some of her previous work. They also include okra plants stenciled in pulp paint, to honor her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother who were sharecroppers in South Carolina.
Oh is a multidisciplinary artist with a passion for curry and the ocean. She holds a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and serves on the board of Hand Papermaking, Inc. Her art practice is grounded in a sense of community and sharing her skills with others through playful experimentation and collaboration. Oh uses materials that have a life of their own such as clay, paper, and fiber to feed her studio practice and create environments full of color and texture. As a mixed-race artist of Malaysian Chinese descent, she utilizes imagery, colors, textures, and smells from her cultural heritage to pay homage to the work of her ancestors as she builds new worlds and futures. Oh’s work seeks to inspire a sense of hope and proposes visions of a future that includes marginalized voices by choosing to take a joyful and playful approach while discussing immigrant histories. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Sonoma Ceramics, and a Teaching Artist-in-Residence at the Oxbow School. Currently, she is the West Bay View Fellow at Dieu Donné Papermill.
“In my artworks, I utilize natural imagery from my Malaysian Chinese cultural heritage to l connect where I come from and who I will become,” said Oh. "As someone who comes from a history of displacement, I draw upon these cultural and environmental markers to give me a sense of place and situate me where I am: home. I come from the strongest of women, and these works signify the reservoirs of strength that I can draw upon from spiritual realms as I imagine and construct new futures. Those we have lost—their labor, and their love—are resources that are always available to us, long after we are seemingly separated, as we navigate this world.”
Boxford-based artist Andy Pepper’s work Colony (Acadia) is featured in Blue Sky Flooding, a mixed media piece, taxidermy form, salvaged seine net, inkjet on cotton fabric, wire, wool, and acrylic yarn.
Pepper is a multidisciplinary artist working in installation, sculpture, photography, and audio. His work is shaped by his education in journalism, as a horticulturist, and his upbringing in the rural American South. Pepper received an M.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute; a B.A. in Journalism from The University of Memphis; and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. He is also the author of two books on sustainable gardening and teaches at Maine College of Art & Design.
“My work is bearing witness to a natural world in flux and my place in it,” said Pepper “I imagine my body as a cursor drawing lines through wild places and given three-dimensional form, these routes describe the kinship between wild places and the queer body, where both body and place represent an uncanny other. My intention is to draw on the familiar to characterize how we use land and space. I find that recontextualizing the ordinary to animate to my work generates dioramas of a queer ecology that feels both lived in and mystical.”
Duke Riley has two screen prints and one woodblock on color plan paper in the exhibit.
Riley earned a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. from the Pratt Institute. He is fascinated by maritime history and events around urban waterways. With a signature style that interweaves historical and contemporary events with elements of fiction and myth to create allegorical histories, Riley’s reimagined narratives comment on a range of issues from the cultural impact of overdevelopment and environmental destruction of waterfront communities to contradictions within political ideologies and the role of the artist in society.
“My work addresses the tension between individual and collective behavior, independent spaces within all-encompassing societies, and the conflict with institutional power,” shared Riley. “I examine transgression zones and their inhabitants through drawing, printmaking, mosaic, sculpture, performative interventions, infiltrations, and video structured as complex multimedia installations. Throughout my projects, I profile the space where water meets the land, traditionally marking the periphery of urban society, what lies beyond rigid moral constructs, a sense of danger and possibility.”
Evelyn Rydz has contributed three prints to the Blue Sky Flooding exhibit, titled Floating Artifacts #6, #35, and #37. These pieces focus on the life cycles of ocean debris – from ancient organisms to fossil fuel at the base of the ocean, to quickly manufactured plastic toys and tools on land, and back to the ocean as floating fragments of our contemporary lives. As an ongoing project, Rydz conducts field studies, collecting tiny samples of debris that have washed ashore. She magnifies and documents her findings under a microscope to create large-scale portrait photographs. Together the images amplify the material properties of these samples and explore connections between the ocean, circulation, global economies, everyday individual actions, and their lasting cumulative public impacts.
For over a decade, Rydz has studied, collected, documented, and drawn from bodies of water across the Americas including rivers in the Boston area where she currently lives and works, to the coast of Miami where she was raised, to the coasts of Cuba and Colombia. From local rivers to global ocean currents, Rydz explores the vulnerability and resiliency of coastal ecosystems, the communities they impact, and our entangled relationships with interconnected bodies of water.
Rydz creates work through the slow intimate processes of close attention and relationship building across drawing, photography, site-responsive installations, and participatory community projects. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, U.S. Latinx Art Forum Charla Fund, Brother Thomas Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, SMFA Traveling Fellowship, Artist Resource Trust Grant, and a Visual Arts Finalist of the Cintas Knight Foundation. Her projects have been featured at the LIST Visual Arts Center at MI; Palacio de Justicia in Matanzas, Cuba; ICA Watershed; Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami; Urbano Project, Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University; USC Fisher Museum in Los Angeles; University of Massachusetts; Galeria Ponce + Robles in Madrid, Spain; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston among others.
Rydz’s artwork has been reviewed in Boston Art Review, Time Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Boston Globe, WGBH, WBUR, and Edible Boston among others.
Her work is part of collections including the Federal Reserve Bank, Barr Foundation, Tufts University Art Galleries, Fitchburg Art Museum, DeCordova Museum, and Fidelity Investments. Rydz is currently a Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
The work of Warren-based artist William Schaff in this exhibit includes mixed media on paper, scratchboard, and a ballpoint pen on paper works.
Schaff has been a working artist for over two decades. Known primarily for his mastery of album artwork, (Okkervil River, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, etc.) Schaff is also the founder of Warren Rhode Island's "Fort Foreclosure." The building, lovingly named without the least bit of irony, serves as Schaff's home and studio as well as home and meeting place for other artists. Schaff, recognizing the importance of art in this world, expanded his community to the West Coast, where he started The Outpost, in Oakland, California. There, he filled his days creating works of art for private commissions, bands, exhibitions, and his examinations of human interaction. He has since returned to Rhode Island and can be found, daily, doing the same at the Fort.
“My only statement is that I am fortunate to find a way, each and every day, to continue to create,” shared Schaff. “Without being able to do so, I think this world would drive me batty. What you see here today are some of my thoughts from what I see around me each day.”
Reflecting on the rich history of Rhode Island and its original inhabitants, the also exhibit features the photo of wampum that was donated to the State Archives in 2005. The wampum was created by daughters of the Red-Tail Hawk descendant of Chief Strong Horse, Sachem of the Algonquins. This item is a whale-shaped wampum (shell) based on an ancient tribal (Narragansett) design.
Land Acknowledgment
Bristol Art Museum is located on the ancestral homelands of the Pokanoket, Wampanoag, and Narragansett tribal nations whose people have an enduring, reciprocal relationship to this sacred site.
The Museum is also sited on the grounds of Linden Place, which was once a slave-holding estate. Colonial inhabitants of this land benefited politically and economically from the economies of slavery that cultivated Bristol, Rhode Island.
Through this acknowledgment made is 2021, the Bristol Art Museum seeks to recognize the complex cultural and social history of the land upon which the Museum is physically situated, as a way to resist ongoing settler colonial narratives that marginalize Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
This exhibit is made possible in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
“Blue Sky Flooding is an exhibition displaying work by artists who are expressing their concerns about the relationship humans have with the natural world, environmental justice, climate grief, and the future of the planet,” said Exhibition Curator Mary Dondero. “Their artwork raises questions about the human influence on the health of the planet through imagery that portrays disasters as beautiful, the use of sound installation, and nontraditional materials as a way of questioning our daily activities. This exhibition brings attention to environmental changes, whether obvious, ignored or unnoticed, all having an impact on our lives.”
Meet Some of the Artists
Photographer Jesse Burke has 12 photos featured in the Blue Sky Flooding exhibit. Burke spent his childhood exploring the wilds of New England and traveling from New York City to Maine skateboarding with his friends. This migratory lifestyle instilled in him a sense of wonder for whomever he meets, making friends everywhere he goes. He is always on the lookout for a deeper connection to the places he travels, documenting along the way.
Burke divides his time between personal projects and commissions. His photography and film work often deals with themes related to human's complicated relationship with nature. He is widely known for his project, Wild & Precious, which documents road trips to introduce his three daughters to the natural world. The viewer can follow along on the never-ending adventures with his wife and kids, where you may also catch a glimpse into their home life on Sweet Bean Farm in Rhode Island, where they raise honeybees, hens, and Flemish giant bunnies and Juliana mini pigs.
Burke earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the US and abroad and is held in many private and public collections including the MoCP: Chicago, MFA: Boston, MFA: Houston, the Princeton University Art Museum, the George Eastman Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art and the RISD Museum. Burke was named by Time Magazine as a top 50 US photographer to follow on Instagram and by T: The New York Times Style Magazine as a top 5 to follow on Instagram.
The exhibit also features artist collaborations such as one between William Chambers and Ann Barrett whose “Listen to the Whales” auditory experience was contributed to the exhibit. The space will surround Ann Barrett’s abstract paintings that evoke the depths of the ocean, a symphony of sound, and contemplation of our cosmic interconnectedness. William Chambers’s whale listening device allows participants to sit on cushions and listen to the beautiful songs of whales.
Chambers and Barrett’s friendship grew from a shared concern for the environment and the desire to create change in the world. This exhibit is an opportunity for their vastly different art-making practices to come together for deeper understanding. Barrett’s reverence and love for the earth inspired her to spend years working on environmental preservation and painting in her solitary studio. Chambers uses theater and spectacle to create a conversation around deep subject matter and often creates work in public places. Together, they offer this exhibit a gift to foster understanding and to see what can happen as a result.
“We use auditory and visual elements to create a meditation on whales as metaphors for the need to preserve the diversity of life on our planet,” the artists shared in a joint statement. “Interspecies relations can be more than conquest and destruction. We imagine an alternate scenario where maritime species are not used to create human dominance, but instead for understanding whales and the ocean ecosystem.”
Chambers is a socially engaged artist who holds an M.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, an M.Ed. from Antioch University, and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. He has been teaching students of all ages for more than 20 years. He was an artist in residence at Clark University in fall 2017 and is the Visual Arts Chair at the Bancroft School. His work has been exhibited internationally in art museums, galleries, and street corners and is held in private collections. His performance pieces have been featured at the ICA, the Mattress Factory, and the American Visionary Art Museum to name a few. Chambers dissects complex issues in his interactive installations. The audience becomes his partner on a journey of discovery.
Barrett is an artist and ecological restoration advocate whose artwork explores the life-giving functions of our Earth. She is known for her paintings and collages that pair color harmonies with shifting patterns. With roots in observational drawing, her imagery has fluctuated between figuration and abstraction, finding a balance of color, space, and representation. Barrett has been inspired by whales since she saw her first gray whale off the Oregon coast as they migrated down to their wintering area in Baja California. Later, Barrett lived on Maui, where the North Pacific Humpback Whales sing and give birth to their calves. Now a central Massachusetts resident, Barrett supports conservation of the North Atlantic Right Whale, of which there are only 336 remaining. Barrett holds an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Susan Greer Emmerson has five pieces in Blue Sky Flooding - ink, charcoal, and gouache on paper – and has exhibited throughout the Midwest and Boston area. She has served as a juror and curator on several occasions and done residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (five times) and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Originally from the Midwest where she practiced for 17 years as a surgeon, Greer Emerson received her BFA in Painting from Illinois State University and her MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design in Boston. Her work is found in the permanent collections of the Grove Hall Public Library in Boston and the Bloomington-Normal Transportation Center and City Hall in Illinois. She is a full member of the Kingston Gallery and an associate member at Fountain Street Gallery, both in Boston.
“These past two years have, for most of us, profoundly changed our relationship with physical space, especially the formerly safe space of home,” said Greer Emerson. “Homes for some have become unbearably confining, for some uncertain or nonexistent, and for others a desolate empty place to grieve. Natural and man-made disasters have destroyed others, leaving the inhabitants only sad scraps and distorted debris. My work considers this emotional and physical devastation created by the loss of home.”
Three overbeaten abaca with linen pulp painting, sewing thread, and short cotton blowouts created by Anela Oh of Brooklyn, New York, will also be featured in Blue Sky Flooding. The Inflorescence series, the title of her work in the exhibit, is the first to incorporate imagery from both sides of her mixed-race heritage. These works use the Malaysian batik-inspired blowout forms found in some of her previous work. They also include okra plants stenciled in pulp paint, to honor her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother who were sharecroppers in South Carolina.
Oh is a multidisciplinary artist with a passion for curry and the ocean. She holds a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and serves on the board of Hand Papermaking, Inc. Her art practice is grounded in a sense of community and sharing her skills with others through playful experimentation and collaboration. Oh uses materials that have a life of their own such as clay, paper, and fiber to feed her studio practice and create environments full of color and texture. As a mixed-race artist of Malaysian Chinese descent, she utilizes imagery, colors, textures, and smells from her cultural heritage to pay homage to the work of her ancestors as she builds new worlds and futures. Oh’s work seeks to inspire a sense of hope and proposes visions of a future that includes marginalized voices by choosing to take a joyful and playful approach while discussing immigrant histories. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at Sonoma Ceramics, and a Teaching Artist-in-Residence at the Oxbow School. Currently, she is the West Bay View Fellow at Dieu Donné Papermill.
“In my artworks, I utilize natural imagery from my Malaysian Chinese cultural heritage to l connect where I come from and who I will become,” said Oh. "As someone who comes from a history of displacement, I draw upon these cultural and environmental markers to give me a sense of place and situate me where I am: home. I come from the strongest of women, and these works signify the reservoirs of strength that I can draw upon from spiritual realms as I imagine and construct new futures. Those we have lost—their labor, and their love—are resources that are always available to us, long after we are seemingly separated, as we navigate this world.”
Boxford-based artist Andy Pepper’s work Colony (Acadia) is featured in Blue Sky Flooding, a mixed media piece, taxidermy form, salvaged seine net, inkjet on cotton fabric, wire, wool, and acrylic yarn.
Pepper is a multidisciplinary artist working in installation, sculpture, photography, and audio. His work is shaped by his education in journalism, as a horticulturist, and his upbringing in the rural American South. Pepper received an M.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute; a B.A. in Journalism from The University of Memphis; and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. He is also the author of two books on sustainable gardening and teaches at Maine College of Art & Design.
“My work is bearing witness to a natural world in flux and my place in it,” said Pepper “I imagine my body as a cursor drawing lines through wild places and given three-dimensional form, these routes describe the kinship between wild places and the queer body, where both body and place represent an uncanny other. My intention is to draw on the familiar to characterize how we use land and space. I find that recontextualizing the ordinary to animate to my work generates dioramas of a queer ecology that feels both lived in and mystical.”
Duke Riley has two screen prints and one woodblock on color plan paper in the exhibit.
Riley earned a B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. from the Pratt Institute. He is fascinated by maritime history and events around urban waterways. With a signature style that interweaves historical and contemporary events with elements of fiction and myth to create allegorical histories, Riley’s reimagined narratives comment on a range of issues from the cultural impact of overdevelopment and environmental destruction of waterfront communities to contradictions within political ideologies and the role of the artist in society.
“My work addresses the tension between individual and collective behavior, independent spaces within all-encompassing societies, and the conflict with institutional power,” shared Riley. “I examine transgression zones and their inhabitants through drawing, printmaking, mosaic, sculpture, performative interventions, infiltrations, and video structured as complex multimedia installations. Throughout my projects, I profile the space where water meets the land, traditionally marking the periphery of urban society, what lies beyond rigid moral constructs, a sense of danger and possibility.”
Evelyn Rydz has contributed three prints to the Blue Sky Flooding exhibit, titled Floating Artifacts #6, #35, and #37. These pieces focus on the life cycles of ocean debris – from ancient organisms to fossil fuel at the base of the ocean, to quickly manufactured plastic toys and tools on land, and back to the ocean as floating fragments of our contemporary lives. As an ongoing project, Rydz conducts field studies, collecting tiny samples of debris that have washed ashore. She magnifies and documents her findings under a microscope to create large-scale portrait photographs. Together the images amplify the material properties of these samples and explore connections between the ocean, circulation, global economies, everyday individual actions, and their lasting cumulative public impacts.
For over a decade, Rydz has studied, collected, documented, and drawn from bodies of water across the Americas including rivers in the Boston area where she currently lives and works, to the coast of Miami where she was raised, to the coasts of Cuba and Colombia. From local rivers to global ocean currents, Rydz explores the vulnerability and resiliency of coastal ecosystems, the communities they impact, and our entangled relationships with interconnected bodies of water.
Rydz creates work through the slow intimate processes of close attention and relationship building across drawing, photography, site-responsive installations, and participatory community projects. She is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, U.S. Latinx Art Forum Charla Fund, Brother Thomas Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, SMFA Traveling Fellowship, Artist Resource Trust Grant, and a Visual Arts Finalist of the Cintas Knight Foundation. Her projects have been featured at the LIST Visual Arts Center at MI; Palacio de Justicia in Matanzas, Cuba; ICA Watershed; Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami; Urbano Project, Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University; USC Fisher Museum in Los Angeles; University of Massachusetts; Galeria Ponce + Robles in Madrid, Spain; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston among others.
Rydz’s artwork has been reviewed in Boston Art Review, Time Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Boston Globe, WGBH, WBUR, and Edible Boston among others.
Her work is part of collections including the Federal Reserve Bank, Barr Foundation, Tufts University Art Galleries, Fitchburg Art Museum, DeCordova Museum, and Fidelity Investments. Rydz is currently a Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
The work of Warren-based artist William Schaff in this exhibit includes mixed media on paper, scratchboard, and a ballpoint pen on paper works.
Schaff has been a working artist for over two decades. Known primarily for his mastery of album artwork, (Okkervil River, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, etc.) Schaff is also the founder of Warren Rhode Island's "Fort Foreclosure." The building, lovingly named without the least bit of irony, serves as Schaff's home and studio as well as home and meeting place for other artists. Schaff, recognizing the importance of art in this world, expanded his community to the West Coast, where he started The Outpost, in Oakland, California. There, he filled his days creating works of art for private commissions, bands, exhibitions, and his examinations of human interaction. He has since returned to Rhode Island and can be found, daily, doing the same at the Fort.
“My only statement is that I am fortunate to find a way, each and every day, to continue to create,” shared Schaff. “Without being able to do so, I think this world would drive me batty. What you see here today are some of my thoughts from what I see around me each day.”
Reflecting on the rich history of Rhode Island and its original inhabitants, the also exhibit features the photo of wampum that was donated to the State Archives in 2005. The wampum was created by daughters of the Red-Tail Hawk descendant of Chief Strong Horse, Sachem of the Algonquins. This item is a whale-shaped wampum (shell) based on an ancient tribal (Narragansett) design.
Land Acknowledgment
Bristol Art Museum is located on the ancestral homelands of the Pokanoket, Wampanoag, and Narragansett tribal nations whose people have an enduring, reciprocal relationship to this sacred site.
The Museum is also sited on the grounds of Linden Place, which was once a slave-holding estate. Colonial inhabitants of this land benefited politically and economically from the economies of slavery that cultivated Bristol, Rhode Island.
Through this acknowledgment made is 2021, the Bristol Art Museum seeks to recognize the complex cultural and social history of the land upon which the Museum is physically situated, as a way to resist ongoing settler colonial narratives that marginalize Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
This exhibit is made possible in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
