Opening May 10, 2012 - ongoing
Opening Reception: 6pm, May 10, 2012
Meet the Curators: May 25, 2012, 1-5pm
Carriage House Galleries at the JNBC
357 Benefit Street, Rear entrance, Providence, RI
This student-curated exhibition of vibrant Guatemalan textiles highlights weaving as a form of storytelling, both past and present. The exhibition juxtaposes newly-acquired pieces from the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology with modern-day weavings by Oxib’ B’atz’ (Three Threads), a cooperative of Guatemalan weavers based in New Bedford, Massachusetts. It also features a brief documentary and garments designed in collaboration between Oxib' B'atz' and Alexander Crane, a Brown undergraduate. Spanning borders and time, these weavings tell stories as old as colonization and as new as U.S. deportation of undocumented immigrants. We invite you to engage with the textiles, the weavers, and the stories they tell.
On May 25, from 1-5pm, drop in for a Gallery and Exhibit Open House and meet two of the curators: Alexander Crane and Anna Ghublikian
April 28, 2012 - June 22, 2012
Opening Reception: May 3, 2012, 5 - 7pm
Providence City Hall Gallery
25 Dorrance Street, 2nd floor, Providence, RI
After 150 years, some might assume that the history of the Civil War is a closed book. The exhibit Rhode Island in the Civil War: Myth, Memory, and (Mis)Information reopens a chapter of this story to reveal the deeper complexities of Rhode Island’s Civil War experience. Curated by students in Brown University’s Methods in Public Humanities class in collaboration with the Rhode Island Civil War Sesquicentennial Commemoration Commission, the exhibit examines the history and legacy of Rhode Island’s involvement in the Civil War, using items from local archives and libraries. The exhibit will be on view at the City Hall Gallery from April 28 through June 22, with an opening reception on May 3.
A period-uniformed brass band playing music of the Civil War will kick off the opening reception at 5 p.m. on the steps of City Hall, accompanied by a uniformed color guard of teenage Civil War reenactors from the Met School. At 5:30 a brief speaker’s program will include remarks from Keith Stokes, Executive Director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Commission, Chairman of the Rhode Island Sesquicentennial Commission Frank Williams, City Archivist Paul Campbell, and Brown University Professor Anne Valk, whose students researched, planned, and installed the exhibit. The opening is free and opento the public. Refreshments will be provided.
About the Gallery at City Hall:
Offering space to artists and organizations that might not have a permanent gallery, the Gallery at City Hall exhibits an eclectic array of work that highlights the artistic and cultural diversity found in the Providence community. It is open to the public during City Hall business hours: Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 4:30 p.m. and is located on the second floor. City Hall is located at 25 Dorrance Street.
April 20, 2012 - Ongoing
Opening Reception May 7, 2012, 6 - 7pm
John Nicholas Brown Center
357 Benefit Street, Rear entrance, Providence, RI
Providence is filled with street art on the walls, signs, and sidewalks. Often overlooked as the background details of the landscape, these marks are fragments of the rich visual culture of the city.
“Stickerframe” is a cultural heritage project produced by members of the Cultural Heritage, Curation, and Creativity class. In an attempt to blur the boundaries between framed picture and street art, between artwork and site, we have distributed stickers of framed graffitti and stickers across the city (see locations on the map). We invite you to keep an eye out for neon pouches, and redistribute the stickers in them where-ever you like. By de-contextualizing and relocating the street art in this form, we hope to inspire new ways of seeing the streets, and new ways of thinking about art, place, and participation.
Happy stickering!
March 13-17 2012
Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Living Room Galleries
154 Angell Street, Providence, RI
The American Dance Legacy Initiative, in collaboration with Brown and community partners, presents PERSPECTIVES IN DANCE: BEYOND THE STAGE, three installations in the Granoff Center's Living Room Galleries, March 13-17. These works showcase how dance goes beyond mere performance to offer unique moments of exchange and connection, fostering creative exploration of personal and community identities.
CONNECTING EMOTIONS
A multimedia exploration of emotions, communication, and community in dance, created by Central Falls High School's Spring 2012 Dance Technique Class in collaboration with Master's in Public Humanities students Emily McCartan (M.A. 2013) and Erendina Delgadillo (M.A. 2013)
FLEETING MOMENTS REVISITED
Interpreting the works of Merce Cunningham through the Bryson Dance Collection, donated in 2010 to the Brown University Library by Thomas and Antonia Bryson (classes of ‘72 and ‘74), curated by Elizabeth Wolfson (PhD student, American Studies) in collaboration with the Brown University Library and the Rhode Island School of Design apparel design program.
AN ARCADE PROJECT, INSTALLED
A re-imagining of "An Arcade Project" - a place-based dance project developed in 2011-through the mediating lens of new spaces and media, created by Elise Nuding (B.A. 2011) in collaboration with Adj Marshall (M.A. 2013), Seung Chan Lim, and Sam Holland
Questions: info@adli.us.
Perspective in Dance was made possible with support from the Brown University Creative Arts Council, the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, and the Brown University department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies.
Opening February 20, through March 5 2012
Curator's Lecture: March 2, 5pm, Englander Studio
Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Living Room Galleries
154 Angell Street, Providence, RI
Shot in the highlands around Lijiang, Yunnan, China in 2006 and 2007, this composite of video, sound and still images chronicles the encounters of the Manchurian video artist Na Yingyu among the Naxi people in the sandy pines at the foothills of the Himalaya. This area of the world hosts a richness of land, family, music, ritual, and the natural beauty that someone in the video describes as “home”. Entangled in these chapters are the ongoing politics of minority ethnicity and cultural representation in China, the disappearance of traditional knowledge (the old priest He Xun simply says, “the book has been lost”), the stable rhythms of farm work, the loss of a father, the dangers of pyramid marketing, the awkward curiosity of American high school students. Na Yingyu organizes his material into chapters which lie, as he puts it, “on a möbius strip” so they can be seen in any order, or simultaneously. Our Homeland, Gone Just Like That, uses this particular structure, the reveries of sound and image, and various narratives to explore the Lijiang area and its particular crisis in the transmission of knowledge.
Curated by Jay Brown.
This exhibition is primarily supported by Location One, and will be on view there in a different format from March 6th, 2012 www.location1.org.
On Friday, March 2, 5:30 pm, join the curator for a lecture related to the installation: NA Yingyu and Lijiang Studio: Smoke Signals from the Border
About Jay Brown:
In 2004 Jay founded Lijiang Studio, an artist-in-residence program based in a village in southwest China’s Yunnan Province. Since then, Lijiang Studio has facilitated and produced a wide range of residencies and exhibitions in urban, rural, domestic, public, and private settings. Before Lijiang Studio, Jay worked at the Nature Conservancy’s China Program, and worked or interned at various museums. Jay graduated from Princeton University in 2001 with a degree in Art History and a certificate in East Asian Studies. He is pursuing a graduate degree in midwifery from the village of Jixiang village, Lashihai, Yunnan, China.
Opening December 16, through February 2012
JNBC Carriage House Galleries
357 Benefit Street, rear entrance, Providence, RI
In the decade since the 9/11 attacks, many narratives have been created in various media to represent and explan the events of that day. The question of how we, as members of diverse publics remember catastrophic historical events informs the investigations presented in this exhibit and the seminar from which they are derived. Each contribution engages the question of what our responsibilities are to the public memory of events that effect our past, present and future. This exhibit features work produced by members of the American Studies Seminar: Public Memory: Narratives of 9/11, lead by Professor Beverly Haviland in the fall of 2011.
Visit the Facebook Gallery.
One Day Only: December 17, 10am - 1:30 pm
Governer Stephen Hopkins House, 15 Hopkins Street, Providence, RI
In popular imagination, eighteenth century women led simple lives performing uncomplicated tasks, bent over their needlepoint or baking sweet-smelling bread. In fact, the lives of these women were characterized by complex interpersonal relationships, marriage and sexuality, rigid gender roles, issues of race and social status, difficult work, and poor health. This new tour program shows the messier side of eighteenth century daily life from the perspectives of Sarah Hopkins, Anne Hopkins, enslaved Phebe Hopkins and the houseful of adults and children within the Hopkins' home.
This open house is project of the students of AMCV1903Z: Shrine, House, or Home:
Rethinking the House Museum Paradigm.
Co-sponsored by the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and the Rhode Island Chapter of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America.
One Night Only: December 9, 6 - 9 pm
the Mediator, 50 Rounds Avenue, Providence, RI
This exhibit will feature stories and representations of Mashapaug Pond and its surrounding neighborhoods, from members of the community, past and present. This is a project created in in conjunction with the Urban Pond Procession, Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island, students in the Brown University Public Humanities program, and students enrolled in AMCV 1903G: Oral History and Community Memory.
Show and Tell at 7pm and 8pm. Have a story about Mashapaug to share? Any special mementos or objects to share? Sign up at the door for the two show and tell sessions.
For more information, call Holly Ewald at 401 862 4229.
Visit the on-line exhibit!
Opening December 7, 2011 - February 2012
JNBC Carriage House Gallery
357 Benefit Street, rear entrance, Providence, RI
What do a papier-mâché kitchen, a sequined drawing of a childhood room, and a photograph of a manhole cover have in common? Answer: They are all displayed in the John Nicholas Brown Center's Carriage Galleries in a collaborative exhibition, "Place, Memory, Experience: Three Perspectives." Three separate but connected installations explore the act of place-making through memory and experience. Enter a fabricated kitchen made by artist Anne Rogers, delve into the recreated rooms of childhood memory from the students in the course "Shrine, House or Home: Rethinking the House Museum Paradigm," and re-imagine a city archive through JNBC fellow Rainey Tisdale's psychogeography collaboration with students, "You Are Here: Archiving Providence in the Present." Come see what it means to place "Place."
"Interior No. 4", by Anne Rogers. Artist Anne Rogers continues her series of re-created domestic spaces and transforms the JNBC Garage Gallery into her childhood kitchen with only one material, plain white paper. Like memory, Rogers is selective in her process and the way she uses the scene to tell her personal narrative. Her meticulous efforts to re-stage a particular scene is an attempt to return home. Rogers plays an active hand, literally, in the way she remembers time and place.
The Room I Lived in: Students' Memories of Home: At the intersection of homes and history lie historic house museums. Visitors to these places, and even the people who work there, sometimes forget that they inhabit a space where people once lived, worked, got sick and died, loved, fought, and raised their children. As a method to remember the qualities that make a house a home, the students in the course "Shrine, House, or Home: Rethinking the House Museum Paradigm" were asked to recall a special room or space from their childhood, write about the qualities that made it memorable, and draw a picture. The results form this exhibition and will inform the final class project, a reinterpretation of the Governor Stephen Hopkins House. The students remembered their homes as places of senses, objects, colors, light, imagination, conflict, change, and emotions such as comfort, fear, excitement, wonder, and loss. As you explore this exhibition, try to remember the special places in your homes and the reasons they are memorable to you.
You Are Here: Archiving Providence in the Present: This fall, a group of public humanists have been re-imagining the City Archive, exploring the various ways in which urban residents experience place, and how those experiences are remembered, preserved, catalogued, and valued. They asked: what everyday things get left off of maps and out of archives? JNBC fellow Rainey Tisdale and her Public Humanities students seek to find and employ new methods of collecting to reveal the uniqueness and significance of everyday urban experiences that traditional city museums, city archives, and city records often overlook. What will you find in the alternative archive? How would you archive your experience in Providence? [Read More/visit the exhibit blog]
Thomas and Antonia Bryson donated the Bryson Dance Collection of over two thousand books, programs, playbills, photos and documents to the Brown University Library system in 2010. The collection forms a record of the international development of theatrical dance, primarily ballet and modern in the 20th century. Curated by ADLI, Capturing Fleeting Moments highlights two branches of early American modern dance illustrated by objects from the collection. The exhibit includes books and programs depicting the ideas and work of Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, and José Limón; as well as video footage of Brown University students performing the works of these choreographers.
Presented by the Brown University Library and the American Dance Legacy Initiative (ADLI). The exhibition opens Saturday, October 15, 2:30pm with a tour by Senior Scholarly Resources Librarian Rosemary Cullen and ADLI co-founder Julie Adams Strandberg, and a dance presentation by Brown University undergraduate dancers.Additional events featuring the Bryson Collection will occur on March 17, 2012 during the American Dance Legacy Initiative Mini-Fest at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts.
[Read More]
October 15 – Ongoing
John D. Rockefeller Library
10 Prospect Street, Providence, RI
Opening Festivities: October 15, 2:30 p.m.
Designed as a flexible organizational framework, Artists in Context (AIC) assembles artists and other creative thinkers across disciplines to conceptualize new ways of representing and acting upon the critical issues of our time. Local coordinators Jori Ketten, Montana Blanco and Micah Salkind, with input and guidance from core advisors, have facilitated several events in Rhode Island in 2011. AIC is currently planning a day-long convening for October 15 called Connected and Consequential: Rhode Island to bring together artists, activists, academics and others wanting or working to bring about social change. It is AIC's intention to devise a framework for the conference that creates space for conversation and connection without being overly prescriptive. [Read More about AIC and the Day-long festivities]
For the Fall 2011 course Art/Place (AMCV 1904I), Betsey Biggs and her students have been working intensively in Providence's Jewelry District, creating public artworks in response to the narrative and aesthetic prompts of this contested space. Included in this presentation is a tour of the artworks and a discussion of the artmaking process and the complexities of the places in our lives. Their work will be featured on October 15, during this day-long conference.Check of the class/event facebook page!
October 15, 2011
The Spot Underground
15 Elbow Street, Providence, RI 02903 (Jewelry District)
Guided tour of the exhibit: 3 - 5 p.m.
WIndshield (2011) is an evocation of one of John Nicholas Brown's earliest and most important modernist commissions, Windshield House, a summer home for the Brown family on Fisher's Island, New York. Designed by the Los Angeles-based and seminal modernist architect Richard Neutra from 1936 to 1938, Windshield House was the first house built by the architect on the East Coast of the United States. Twice destroyed – first by the hurricane of 1938 and second by fire - the house exists now only as archive, memory and an affective absence.
[Read More]
Read the feature article in Brown's daily news.
Opening April 29 – Ongoing
357 Benefit Street (Nightingale Brown House) Gardens
An exhibition tidbit!
Ruth St. Denis giving the pupils a lesson in a dance of religious meditation," from Ruth St. Denis: Pioneer & Prophet (San Francisco: Printed for J. Howell by J.H. Nash, 1920), See the exhibit! October 15, 2011.