Art Exhibitions in Providence, RI (3/12/2022)

Saturday, March 12, 2022

A rainy day in Rhode Island!

At 19-months Adaline is certainly exploring
and experimenting with her world, including
pinching her face with plastic tongs!

We went to the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University's List Art Center for the installation titled: Lisa Reihana: in Pursuit of Venus [infected].

On one wall was a double-wide screen showing a backdrop
of Tahiti based on the French wallpaper, Les Sauvages de la
Mer Pacifique/The Native Peoples of the Pacific Ocean
(1804-1805, by Joseph Dufour & Cie), which originally
depicted scenes from Captain James Cook's voyages (KSS)

The other half of the screen - the landscape continued to scroll
to the left to show vignettes of various indigenous peoples
in their own dress performing their own ceremonies, and
interacting with Europeans in a more realistic manner
(whereas the Dufour wallpaper had the indigenous people
dressed in classical Greco-Roman clothing and romanticized
the interactions they had with Europeans) (KSS)

We did not stay for the entire program, which consisted of two 32-minute loops. It is hard to fathom the technology that has gone into this "live tapestry" with its hand-painted hackground, super-imposed live-actor vignettes, and a soundtrack of several Pacific language-dialogs and indigenous instruments with the occasional bits of a harpsichord version of Bach's The Art of the Fugue. Why the title? Apparently Captain Cook's first voyage was to track the transit of the planet Venus (Roman goddess of love) across the sun in 1769. Also, Tahiti was given the name New Cythera; Cythera being the birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love in Greek mythology.

Lisa Reihana is a New Zealander of Māori descent.

Next down the hill to the RISD/Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

BED (2004, by Dawn Clements, a former RISD professor)
seems to reveal multiple lines of thought

A BED closeup shows different
techniques, though with great detail

We headed down to the RISD Gelman Student Exhibitions Gallery for the student-curated The Black Biennial; an effort to exhibit works by Blacks, yet not be curated and interpreted by Whites.

Juneteenth (2022 by Amadi Williams)

Cigar Box Krar (a five-or-six stringed bowl
shaped lyre from Ethiopia and Eritrea)
(undated, by Cassius Rich)

Archival costume (2021, from the activist
dance opera The Historical Fantasy of Esek
Hopkins: The Bamama Empire performed
by The Haus of Glitter) in Malian style

Bear Witness (2021, by Bob Dilworth)
required a second look to realize it was
a painting of a painting