Jerry Ehrlich, Insert Finger, Photo by Damian Meneghini; photo courtesy of The Avenue Concept

For a city that has such a large artistic population, Providence has very little that tells their greater story,” says Yarrow Thorne, founder and artistic director of The Avenue Concept, a Providence-based nonprofit. Thorne is determined to change that narrative.

The Avenue Concept is funded largely through public donations, and has helped Thorne bring dozens of public art installations, including large-scale murals and sculptures, to the city.

Brower Hatcher, Cosmic Flower, Photo by Damian Meneghini; photo courtesy of The Avenue Concept

City planners are figuring out how to use public art to get populations to interact with urban environments. Traditionally, public art pieces occupy the same place for years, but Thorne has developed a nimble approach, periodically moving installations around the city to sustain public interest. Public art is especially important in a city like Providence, which has a linear design that traditionally discourages people from walking around, Thorne explains. Public art encourages people to explore the city and engage in conversation—and cities around the world are taking note.

Umberto Crenca, Takes All Types, Photo by Damian Meneghini; photo courtesy of The Avenue Concept

Lionel Smit, Colossal Fragment, Photo by Damian Meneghini; photo courtesy of The Avenue Concept

“When people bump into a work of art on the street and they start talking about it, there’s a sudden connection there,” says Thorne. Case in point: Lionel Smit’s sculpture Colossal Fragment, which shows a woman’s face looking out toward the city. “The reaction was gratifying,” he says. “People are really acknowledging what we are doing here.”

Yarrow Thorne–founder, The Avenue Concept
Providence, Rhode Island
Website

Top image: Bezt, She Never Came, Photo by Damian Meneghini; photo courtesy of The Avenue Concept

The post Quick Takes: Public Art in Providence appeared first on Take Magazine.

The title for Abba Cudney’s group show, Things I Have No Words For, could not be more appropriate. Even before Cudney graduated from the New Hampshire Institute of Art, she had always been keen on exploring the concept of memory, something she quite didn’t have the words for.

The prints that Cudney will include in this show are ones she started in her senior year in Manchester. Most of them are scenes of the interiors of homes and fit the theme of the show really well, says the visual artist who now makes her home in Providence, Rhode Island. “These prints allowed me to think of the theme in a new way and to primarily explore the meaning of memory of a space whether it was lived in or I frequented.”

Suddenly Everything Has Changed, Part One.

In her artist statement Cudney says that she is “attracted to documenting specific moments in time within an interior space. Not only the moments themselves, but also the essence. I am able to decide what is important to me, and what can be left abstractly for the viewer to interpret.” It is important, Cudney says, for all art to have a level of relatability, and she is delighted that her paintings and prints of rooms and interiors resonate with her viewers. “It might be a specific bedroom, but I was glad that people are relating to it in their own way,” Cudney says. “My biggest goal is to focus on memory and to capture the fleeting moment of memory that spaces can bring.”

Cudney says that bathrooms and kitchens especially lend themselves well to juxtapositions, as bathrooms are the most private of places, while kitchens are for communal gatherings. “It really struck me when I moved into my first apartment while I was at school and it was an epicenter where everyone gathered, always a mess,” she says. ‘It’s also this idea of sharing a space that I wanted to explore especially as I am starting to make my own idea of home.”

Calm and Contemplation Part 2

Cudney works as an assistant at the Providence Art Club and also teaches printmaking there. Despite being a recent graduate and a young artist, the concept of nostalgia resonates deeply with her. In her work, Cudney says, “remnants of the under painting and spray paint reveal themselves as if past and present are meeting.” It jives well with the idea of moving into a new place. “I started to think what happens when people repaint a wall or put up their own objects,” she says. “It’s sort of like covering up the past and that idea was spinning in my idea for a while — this concept of past and present and memory and what that all means.”

Abba Cudney
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top image: Craft Night (cropped). All photos courtesy of Abba Cudney.

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Brad Rohrer would rather not rock the boat. His partner in comedy, Chuck Staton, however, admits he won’t even get on boats if they seem like they might remain still. It is only natural then, that their amalgam of a humor/art weekly production, the Chuck and Brad Podcast, is called Agreeing to Disagree.

The podcast is dedicated to covering Rhody artists and also national ones who make it through the local circuit. Who gets covered is mostly a combination of access and timing, Rohrer says. The shows focus on music, movies, books, games and has featured interviews with Rhode Island artists such as Jim Nellis from Rhode Island Food Fights, the owners of Boneheads’ Wing Bar, storyboard artist Jay Mayoh, Disney artist Nick Kole, and bands including The Copacetics, The Down and Outs, and Bad Larry.

It was around 2009 that Staton was looking to update the website for his band Senior Discount, with regular content. By this time Rohrer had already met the ex-bassist at Senior Discount through the improv circuit in Newport. “The band had done a lot of online comedy videos to promote our albums and shows, much like a sitcom, and when I saw Brad I knew he’d be hilarious to add to the world we created in our videos,” Staton says.

The weekly podcast was born and has stuck to examining the artist’s life and discussing the art that the two love. The podcast, Rohrer says, gives the duo a reason to talk about anything that interests them “in a real way” every week. “It’s easy to talk about a movie or about feelings, but being introspective about either of those things can get lost in the shuffle,” he says. “By recording what we say and why we say it, we have to examine things in greater detail than we normally would.”

The duo has had many successes including the 2016 Christmas episode, which Staton says was the most memorable because of the spontaneity and memories created. For Halloween this year, the duo did a live comedy show at Providence’s Comedy Connection, which was very well received. Staton is grateful that the Comedy Connection did not rein them in at all. “They let us do whatever we wanted even if that meant electrifying a Jack-o-Lantern on stage in an attempt to shock audience members.”

Sponsorships have helped with production costs but the podcast is also mostly a labor of love. “If there was no sponsorship money covering our server costs, we’d still be doing it every week,” Staton says. “Brad would be selling his plasma to cover them.”

Chuck Staton–musician,podcaster, Agreeing to Disagree
Providence, Rhode Island
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The post Agreeing to Disagree appeared first on Take Magazine.

It was only a matter of time. Newport Storm Brewery head distiller Brent Ryan had been brewing beer since 1999 with his business partner, Derek Luke. Borrowing on Newport’s illustrious history as the Rum Capital of the World in the 18th century, the duo branched out to distilling rums with Thomas Tew Rums, named after a Rhode Island pirate. Their latest venture marries both the beer and rum-making traditions in a way.

“We were already working with malted barley everyday because of the brewery and distilling rum so we decided to work with the two and decided to lend an American twist on the whiskey,” Ryan says. Sea Fog American Whiskey is the parent Newport Distilling Company’s latest production and is made from pale and peat smoked malts.

The best Scotch whiskies come from islands off the west coast of Scotland, Ryan says, and Newport has a similar climate, which makes its way into the spirits brewed here. “There’s a salt-like air element that works into the whiskies as they age,” he says, “and we felt being on Aquidneck Island that a similar process would create the right style of whiskey for us.”

Brent Ryan filling a barrel. 

Ryan says that American whiskey is traditionally made with grains that are turned into mash — a bit of barley or corn or wheat. The material is fermented so the final product has the liquid and the trace of grain husks, Ryan says. But Sea Fog is made following the Scottish tradition of pulling all the liquid off the grain. It’s essentially distilled and then laid down to ferment. “It’s why when the Americans make whiskey, they talk about their fermented material as mash and the Scots refer to their fermented material as beer because the Scottish method more closely follows the process of beer-making,” Ryan says.

The barrel-aging process adds a special twist to the final flavor, imparting notes of vanilla and oak, Ryan adds. Having the beer brewery as a steady source of business has allowed for more creativity and experimentation — and time. Sea Fog has been eight years in the making. And while quite a few craft distillers buy spirits from wholesalers and use that as a canvas, Ryan says, every stage of the spirits are made on site, which also gives more control over the process.

Next up? Newport Distilling Company’s take on Amaro, an Italian liqueur. “We’re really excited about it. It’s going to be on the bitter side, so great for cocktailing,” Ryan says. Particularly important for him is to keep the rich tradition of the city alive in the craft creations. “The authenticity is important for us/ It’s certainly how they would have been doing things here 250 years ago so we always keep that in mind.”

Brent Ryan–head distiller, Sea Fog American Whiskey
Newport, Rhode Island
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Top image: Sea Fog American Whiskey. All photos courtesy of Newport Storm Brewery

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Initially, Invasive Species, a new exhibit by Ed Andrews, was supposed to solely be a commentary about the state of the environment. After all, Andrews, a Kansas native, has been fighting invasive species all his life whether it’s the loss of 12 American elm trees in his childhood home or the European Gypsy moth making quick work of the trees around Andrews’ northern Rhode Island studio.

The installation for Invasive Species at Boston Sculptors Gallery includes a large tree canopy and eight “spiders” that live in it. After a while, Andrews says, it became clear that the spiders looked like little drones so he decided to add cameras to the unit to make them even more invasive. The result is an exhibit that is not just a commentary about contemporary environmental issues but also about government surveillance.

Surveillance has bubbled up as a theme in Andrews’ earlier work as well. In See/Through at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center For the Arts, the gallery space accommodated several real-time viewing stations fitted with surveillance cameras that could be trained on neighboring spaces. “As a citizen artist, I am inherently sensitive to changes that potentially threaten the rights and personal freedoms of the individual over and against any kind of authority,” says Andrews, a professor of sculpture and 3-D fundamentals at Northeastern University in Boston.

Invasive Species installation. Photo by Eric Antoniou

Much of Andrews’ activism on behalf of the environment comes from being steeped in it. His studio in Glocester, Rhode Island, is surrounded by deep woods, which he recently got rezoned as a forest. To achieve that he had to work with a state forester to learn about the woods and how to best manage what he had. “That includes managing invasive species of plants and insects and much of my knowledge of invasive species are a direct result of my forestry management training,” Andrews says.

Andrews started out as a landscape painter and switched to sculpture after seeing friends pursuing it. Growing up in a shop environment with his dad who taught him about tools also helped. Now he describes himself as a landscape sculptor bringing elements such as wind, water, light, sound and movement into his work.

Invasive Species detail during installation. Photo courtesy of Ed Andrews.

What does Andrews want viewers to take away from Invasive Species? “I want them to be both seduced in the space and a bit unnerved as the activity in the canopy increases in rhythm and the sounds become more intense,” he says. “But I also hope to create a memorable experience of a magical kind of environment that they enter fully, that surrounds them with sound and movement and recreates a little of the awe that we all feel when we enter into the woods.”

Ed Andrews–sculptor
Gloucester, Rhode Island
Website

Top image: Detail from Invasive Species. Photo courtesy of Ed Andrews.

The post Every Move You Make appeared first on Take Magazine.

David Katz has had a couple of chairs in his possession for as long as he can remember. They’re family heirlooms, but after 20 years of constant shuffling between his various residences, they had become worn to the point of disrepair. Still, Katz was not ready to part with them. So he decided he would use them as centerpieces of his art, creating installations that use the chairs and unfired clay to make a statement about the fragility of life.

Katz, a faculty member in the ceramics department at the Rhode Island School of Design, has a new exhibit called Flextime showing at 3S Artspace in New Hampshire and it borrows similar themes. Chairs, Katz says, are particularly unique objects in that their physical form implies the body but shown by themselves they also amplify the absence of the human form. By using old chairs—many of which have been rescued from salvage bins—and clay in its purest form in breathtaking installations, Katz presents the exhibit as a marker of time and change.

Unfired clay is an especially good medium to work with as it starts out wet and slowly cracks over time, Katz says. “I think of it as this living stuff and you can get an immediate, tactile reaction in a very visceral way,” he says. “You give the installation life and then you watch it go through this transition where it starts to get covered with cracks. Every crack is a marker of the passage of time, and that’s built into the art.” The fact that the installations are temporary—from a period of days to months—adds to that temporal feeling.

Liminality of Innocence and Loss. Photo by David Katz.

Katz maintains a studio practice in Providence while teaching full-time. As an instructor he believes it’s important to communicate honestly about the work you’re invested in. “I’m really focused on trying to open up pathways for students to find a voice that’s honest and uniquely them,” he says.

Katz shares his love of the medium of clay with his students reminding them about the incredibly rich history behind the material. “I want them to understand the context of its cultural narrative along with art history and contemporary use, to really know the rules, so they can then break them.”

Interstitial Tension. Photo by Nick Lemoyne

Katz applies the same principles to his own art as he explores the juxtapositions in life through found objects and ceramic principles. When he bounds found objects like chairs with clay, he’s swallowing them up and the chairs are simultaneously breaking free, he says. “It appears that this object has agency in that it is being wrapped and consumed but then it’s also cracking and falling apart.”

Every Which Way (scaled). Photo courtesy of David Katz.

In one sense, Flextime might well be a statement about the histories of families, Katz says. After all, they are bound together by blood ties even as each individual tries to carve his or her own unique identity. “I love these in-between places where there’s that constant push and pull, that constant tension.”

David Katz–sculptor
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top image: Flextime installation. Photo by Nick Lemoyne

The post Clay Time appeared first on Take Magazine.

Willa Van Nostrand is not one to knock a basic vodka soda. But the craft cocktail maker and owner of Little Bitte Artisanal Cocktails also loves to go beyond the basics, drawing on her imagination and creativity to produce inspired beverage presentations for events of all sizes. “It’s really set and setting all the way,” admits the Providence, Rhode Island-based mixologist who creates cocktails—complemented with charcuterie—to match a particular setting and theme. For example, a seaside celebration might have her foraging for sea beans as an edible garnish. In the deep winter, Van Nostrand leans heavily on the bitters she concocts herself, which she believes are the essential salt and pepper for every drink.

Willa Van Nostrand of Little Bitte. Photo by Ian Travis Barnard

Growing up in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, with her bartending minister father and herbalist midwife mother, was an education in cocktail culture for Van Nostrand. She loves presenting things in duality: food/drink, art/artists, drink/garnish. World’s Fair Gallery, her studio and gallery in Providence, brings like-minded artists to showcase their work, and gives her a space to test-drive cocktail creations.

“Bitte,” which means “please” or “you’re welcome” in German, captures the essence of what Van Nostrand is doing—carving a throwback to the golden age of hosting. Her theater arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College has helped Van Nostrand set up similar productions for her bartending and food catering events. “I see this as an extension of my artistic embodiment,” she says. “It’s all a big production.”

Van Nostrand is always up for a challenge. The most outrageous drink she’s ever crafted? A black cocktail for a design firm, made up of gin, aquavit, fresh anise hyssop, black licorice, and . . . squid ink.

The Take cocktail. Photo by Ian Travis Barnard

We asked Van Nostrand to concoct a cold-weather cocktail just for Take. It’s a spin on the Old Fashioned with a warming kick of crystallized ginger and allspice dram in lieu of the traditional Angostura bitters and muddled sugar base. Savor a sip of this handy recipe, and you too will be pirouetting through the season.

The Take

INGREDIENTS

2 oz. bourbon
⅟₄ oz. St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram
Crystallized ginger for muddling
Orange twist
Crystallized sage for garnish*

*Coat both sides of a fresh sage leaf
with citrus juice, and dust with sugar.

PREPARATION

Muddle allspice dram with crystallized ginger in a rocks glass and add ice. Add bourbon and stir for 15 seconds. Garnish with a generous curl of orange zest and crystallized sage.

Willa Van Nostrand–owner, Little Bitte Artisanal Cocktails
Providence, Rhode Island
Website

Photos by Ian Travis Barnard

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Cartooning as medicine? Walker Mettling certainly thinks it can be. The Providence, Rhode Island-based artist believes cartooning has curative powers.

Mettling is the driving force behind the Providence Comics Consortium, a loosely knit collaborative that hosts free cartooning classes in the city’s public library and also publishers the work of children and adult cartoonists. After the 2016 U.S. election, a parent got in touch with Mettling to vent her frustrations about the election of Donald Trump. “Her kid was an artist and was freaked out and was not sure if the family would have to leave the country,” Mettling recalls. His salve? An assignment that would transfer those fears onto paper.

The result of the post-election assignment, Mettling says, was an arresting mishmash of cartoons. “One of them showed Trump’s head on a deer surrounded by hunters. It took this kid’s feelings of powerlessness and projected that through symbols,” Mettling says. “It flipped the power dynamic that way.”

Mettling has worked this same principle in his own life. He remembers that when he had the flu and was groggy from Nyquil, he would use a large brush and cover a large sheet in what he called “blobs.” This series of “Blob Revelations” was not merely therapeutic; it became a series of poster art that was showcased for a while at Providence’s White Electric Coffee.

Blob Revelations #1 (excerpt). Photo courtesy of the artist.

It seems that many of Mettling’s projects have their genesis in serendipity. In 2008, Mettling hosted a series of story events for kids and loosely published a couple of books tied to these events. The Providence public library took notice. When they were looking to broaden their programming for children, they recruited Walker to launch classes that taught comics and cartooning, a project that cannonballed into the Providence Comics Consortium.

The city’s Ada Books often hosts the artists and showcases their work. When a pipe burst at the store and many books got wet, Mettling and friends took some of the old Providence Sunday Journals and hung them out to dry. The large-format medium was the basis for another series, the Providence Sunday Wipeout, where kids used a larger canvas for their creations.

Walker Mettling, PCC Showcase. Photo courtesy of the artist.

In addition to work for the PCC, Mettling is a recipient of a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts for his work and a 2017 Artist Fellow at The Rhode Island School of Design. While his own personal projects have been cooking, he says he remains consistently blown away by the cartooning skills in the children he teaches. Case in point: a girl used the library’s special collections on whaling artifacts to create a mangia-inspired script where all the animal characters had scrimshaw teeth.

PCC Giant Book of Visionary Sketchbook Games (excerpt). Photo courtesy of the artist.

“One of the ways these classes have shaken out is that there are a lot of generative improv elements in play,” Mettling says. How so? Teams of kids work in groups and comics are being created in the moment according to different individual interpretations of a common thread. “It’s very cathartic like that,” he adds.

Walker Mettling–cartoonist
Providence, Rhode Island
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Photos courtesy of Walker Mettling

The post Cartooning as Catharsis appeared first on Take Magazine.

Of the many arresting photographs in Shadowbox World, a photography exhibit on display at the AS220 Project Space Gallery in Providence, is Attic Window, a picture of a woman’s torso positioned in front of an attic window with other visual elements such as a cracked window pane competing for attention. It’s part of what photographer Maria Scaglione labels her conceptual documentary style, a process by which she crafts images based on ideas.

Working out of her studio in Westerly, Rhode Island, Scaglione would notice the Pawcatuck River and imagine old sailing boats with figureheads of women for protection against the elements. It is that image that she looks to recreate through this picture. The Shadowbox of the exhibit’s title emphasizes Scaglione’s interest in light; she often uses only a single source. “Limited (natural) lighting gives me very little time to work, which helps me become aware of the passing of time and how time becomes a memory,” she says. “The limited lighting also helps me focus less on the person and more on the story.”

Attic Window. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Scaglione’s own story is rooted in her native Italy. Her family immigrated from rural Calabria to Westerly when she was 12, and the move was, understandably, of dramatic consequence. “With a plane ride, I moved from native to stranger, from insider to outsider,” she says. “I looked at the inside as I was looking through a peephole, not really part of my community, a bit isolated. That psychology shaped the way I looked at the world around me. When I photograph, the camera helps me see the world the same way I was psychologically seeing—an outsider looking in.”

The Prayer. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Incidentally it was when Scaglione traveled back to Italy for college that she honed her artistic career, first experimenting with photography while taking pictures of her extended family. Scaglione also works as a wedding photographer to tell as she describes it, “a beautiful story that will always be remembered through pictures.” She has managed Photo-Op, an organization that is dedicated to promoting local photographers around the country.

If her photography might seem a bit surreal at times, Scaglione says that’s exactly the point. “With each image I want to attain uncomfortable truths, things that we feel but don’t want to know,” she says, “In each one of us there are layers of truth and those layers open little by little.”

The Snow Storm. Photo courtesy of the artist.

“I would like the viewer to ask questions and to tell me what they think about the images,” Scaglione says. “I am honoring my past of miscommunication by trying to [do so] with my photographs. It drives my work because as a child and still as an adult, I am learning how to communicate.”

Maria Scaglione
Westerly, Rhode Island
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Top image: Yellow Room, by Maria Scaglione. All images by Maria Scaglione.

The post Through the Peephole appeared first on Take Magazine.

Visit the Rhode Island seashore, stumble on some Japanese knotweed, and you’ll probably label it as a nuisance. May Babcock sees the invasive species as a source of inspiration. “I have been looking at plant ecologies, and there are a lot of such invasive plants along the shoreline, and I see the fibers,” Babcock says. Fibers for making paper, that is. Babcock, an interdisciplinary artist whose main focus is paper, uses such plants and creates fibers as raw materials. “I have been using what’s available, so it makes sense to use these plants that nobody wants,” she says of the knotweed.

For her work, Shoreline Studies, Babcock, an artist who lives in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, visited the Ocean State’s coastline and made a few preliminary sketches to capture the landscape. The entire series is made of different kinds of paper pulp, including the one derived from the knotweed. Papermaking artists often work with different kinds of colored pulp, and that was the effect Babcock was going for. “There’s no ink involved,” she says. “It’s all a monotype look.”

Lisa Laughy photo

Babcock has a multi-dimensional approach to her art. She uses a variety of printmaking, hand papermaking, sculpture, and book arts techniques to bring a “printerly” outlook to her art. Instead of the printer’s matrix and ink, Babcock uses various kinds of pulp to fill in for ink and create striking visual effects.

Babcock, a Connecticut native, maintains a blog called Paperslurry that focuses on paper arts. She is heavily invested in spreading the word about paper art, recently teaming up with Providence-based Southside Community Land Trust and her local community garden to teach papermaking from plants. Families with children showed up, she says, to learn about the different weeds in the garden that can be used to make paper. “We cut them down and cooked them up. It was a lot of fun hand-beating fibers in the garden,” Babcock says. The class used mugwort and a variety of different weeds, even mint, as part of their experiments.

Little Harbor Beach, Study 4

Babcock made the move to focus solely on her art career after initially working in graphic design and marketing. Rhode Island has informed Babcock’s workshops as well as her art, which, she says, has developed more of an environmental focus. “It’s really taken me a good four or five years to really realize which direction my artwork was going,” she says.

May Babcock–paper artist
Pawtucket, Rhode Island
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Photos courtesy of May Babcock

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