Named president in the spring of 2017, the journalist, creative entrepreneur, and world traveler Laura Freid is in her first full semester at the helm of Portland’s Maine College of Art, the state’s sole accredited visual arts institution. The former publisher of Harvard Magazine, who last year ended a 12-year run as CEO of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silkroad project where she traveled for 4,280 days with a troupe of 30 classical musicians, artists, and production staff performing through the U.S., Europe, and Asia, Freid has lived a lot of lives.

As she charts the next path for the private arts institution in the heart of the fast-growing port city, we spoke with her about empathy, political responsibility, and how to get artists and businesspeople to play together.

Take: You have a degree in philosophy of aesthetics, you wrote the narrative for Silkroad’s The Music of Strangers documentary, and you traveled for 12 years with a touring troupe of classical musicians. Do you think of yourself as an academic or an artist?

Laura Freid: I like to illustrate without words what cultural harmony would look like. I feel like once people get attached to something, like an idea, they can’t see another person’s point of view—particularly when using words. Through art or music is how to get people’s hearts engaged. I feel like I’m still a storyteller. I’m very visual, but I have a standard of excellence that’s higher than my mind-hand coordination. Growing up, I was always asking, Why is that? Why does it inspire us? Why is it something that gives us hope? We all need hope. It’s an existential quest.

T: Can you walk us through how you first connected with Yo-Yo Ma?
LF: I wrote an article about Yo-Yo and other thought leaders for Bostonia Magazine. At the end of the interview, I asked, ‘What do you really want to do beyond being the best cellist in the world?’ He said, ‘Y’know, I really want to unite the world through music.’

He had studied anthropology at Harvard and is fascinated by people and cultures. Years later, he called and asked, ‘So, do you wanna do that thing?’ A friend who is an art historian had described the idea as a kind of Silk Road, where people a thousand years ago couldn’t speak the same language but they’d share or trade art along the road. That’s what this is really all about.

So I became the CEO. I’m not a musician; he didn’t need another musician. I worked on the story—what happens when strangers meet, when we look for something in common. We think of classical music as starting in Italy in the 1700s, but in China, Persia, and India, classical music started thousands of years ago. Nobody remembers who the kings were or what the politics were at the time. You remember Beethoven or Mick Jagger or DaVinci. Art is the through-line that connects our cultures.

T: What was it that attracted you to MECA?
LF: The musicians we worked with who were in their twenties when we started were now in their forties, many of them with children of their own now. I realized that I really like that 18-to 24-year-old time period where everything comes together and you become this person you are today. I wanted to get back to student creativity and help artists in this crazy world where the economy doesn’t support creative art makers very well. I started asking, couldn’t we have some creative entrepreneurship? Couldn’t we encourage people who have money and people who are creative to start working together in their twenties and not in their sixties? There were patrons of the arts years ago. And up until recently there was a lot of government support. In our country, art has corporate support, but corporate support started eroding 10 years ago after the financial crisis and it has been a free-for-all since then. I wanted to encourage that creative entrepreneurship.

I got a call about MECA, and I thought their mission statement sounds like mine—artistic excellence, creative entrepreneurship, artists at work. I didn’t even really know about the college. I think people in Maine are really aware that it’s Maine’s only accredited visual arts college, but it would benefit if people beyond Maine knew about it.

I went through orientation with the first-year students. Entering students can decide to take one of six courses. One is “A Field Guide to the New World.” It talks about new ideas and solutions for the changing environment and they read [Rebecca Solnit’s] A Field Guide to Getting Lost. They include fundamental drawing, painting, and bookmaking in their eventual field guide, but start in the environment. Another is called “Slow Fashion: Fibrous Fashion and the Farm.” Just like slow cooking, this is about how to connect fashion close to the fabric and the dyes. Another is “Species of Spaces,” which asks what are the characteristics of the spaces we inhabit? How do our senses affect our experiences with them? Why am I claustrophobic and you’re not? All end results of these courses are drawing and writing and abstract art-making, but it starts with these kinds of essential questions.

Spring Fashion Show at MECA’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), part of the annual MECAmorphosis event celebrating student thesis work. Photo by Kyle Dubay.

T: With Silkroad, you worked on a global scale, forming partnerships with RISD and Harvard Business School. Why?
LF: I really like artist environments. My thought was that we could connect the Harvard campus through the arts. Traditionally, Harvard had not been into the practice of the arts. It’s very theoretical, very academic. It turned out to be a great collaboration, and as I started thinking about the business-art connection, we created a challenge for artists and businesspeople to work together and create new ideas.

T: Did the cross-pollination of artists and businesspeople take off immediately?
LF: Y’know, there’s some natural antipathy toward suits [among artists]. There’s a creative versus business, church-and-state feeling. From business too. I think with any cross-cultural navigation, you have to develop trust. The musicians did some instant concerts, where Silkroad musicians including a bagpiper from Galicia, Spain, a drummer from India, and a sheng player from China would perform on campus, and then we’d have a conversation about it. Turns out a lot of students at the Harvard Business School come from different cultures and were really excited for that conversation. First you have to establish trust, and then have some fun together, get to know each other, and then you can start working together.

T: How do you see MECA students integrating into the community post-graduation?
LF: I think we’re lucky that Jessica Tomlinson and the Artists at Work office here encourages internships and experiences. I’ve been to some campuses that are beautiful, but [students] aren’t near any cities—they’re in a cocoon. That can be a great way to learn, but if you’re an artist learning in an urban environment, you’re interning, you’re performing, you’re doing public art, you’re speaking at the museum.

When I interviewed here, I stayed at the Press Hotel. Erin Hutton [class of ’98; artist and director of special projects at the ICA at MECA] did the typewriter display there. Have you seen it?

T: That’s the most memorable thing about that place!
LF: I used to use one of those typewriters. I wish I still had it. I love to look at edits on old manuscripts and rare books. I miss looking at old drafts in the digital age.

T: I know, there’s just a flattening of experience with computers.
LF: Yeah, the texture of creativity is gone.

T: Yeah. I find that it’s hard to recall information that I process through a computer because I’m always in the same position when I’m consuming it.
LF: There’s some research I just read about that. I googled it, and there’s definitely less retention of information if you’re taking notes on a computer. My first articles were all written by hand in coffee shops. I think it’s a romantic notion, but it actually helps retention, too.

T: I read a distressing thing about how humans are losing their facial empathetic response instinct. Before, when we learned something shocking we’d often be in dialogue with somebody, so we’d have this natural facial reaction to convey that. Now, I’ll read horrifying tweets or something, but there’s nobody I’m expressing anything with my face to, so I’m learning to feel shock while having a blank face.
LF: One of the reasons I love the arts is that our culture has an empathy deficit. Art brings us back to that home button. You see something and immediately feel the empathy you should have felt when you might have felt it [in real time]. I hope more and more students consider a visual arts education, because I don’t know what society is going to look like when you can’t see expressions of empathy. Or facial expressions of any kind.

T: You posted a response to President Trump’s DACA repeal in September. You don’t see a lot of institutional heads doing that.
LF: Well, my first response was that a college is a community. I just wanted people to know that we care about them. I have to say that I’m shocked [in these days] that I have to speak out against things like racism. But once you realize you do, then you must. The students, they’re 18-22; they’re vulnerable. These people were kids during 9/11, then there was an economic crash—it’s already not the sort of world where you can feel very secure. Then you have political power threatening your existence and the existence of your friends. There are things we can do, and what we have to do is note it and stand together.

Laura Freid – president, Maine College of Art
Portland, Maine
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Top image: Laura Freid. Photo by Kyle Dubay.

The post Take Q&A: Laura Freid, MECA President 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
Website
Facebook

Top image: Flextime installation. Photo by Nick Lemoyne

The post Clay Time appeared first on Take Magazine.

Even though we at Take get to look at art made by different New England artists all day long, we are still regularly, pleasantly surprised by the work of someone new—or several someones, as you’ll see here in our third annual listing of artists to watch.

We asked curators from esteemed galleries and museums to tell us about artists they’ve been especially impressed by lately who deserve a wider audience, and were thrilled to get input from Trevor Smith, curator of the Present Tense, and Lydia Gordon, assistant curator for exhibitions and research, both at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; Elizabeth Spavento, visual arts programmer at SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine; Lindsey Stapleton, codirector of GRIN in Providence, Rhode Island; Suzette McAvoy, executive director and chief curator at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine; Will K. Wilkins, executive director of Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut; and Alan Chong, director and CEO of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire.

With such an illustrious panel, we know you’ll want to keep an eye on these artists in the coming year—and beyond.

Nicole Duennebier

Nicole Duennebier, Still Life with Meat Pile, 2017, acrylic on panel, 24 × 30 in. Photo by Christian Skorik

A bona fide New Englander, Duennebier was born in Hartford, went to college in Maine, and now lives in Boston. “Riffing off the formal tradition of Dutch still lifes, Duennebier is obsessed with excess and growing, throbbing masses,” says Gordon. “Yet, she spends a great amount of time on delicate surface treatments, complete with glimmers of gold and super fine detail. They’re repellant and beautiful at the same time.”

Duennebier has been experimenting with making clay models to help her visualize specific forms and textures in her paintings. The results of this process, including a brighter color palette, will be on display in a solo show at 13FOREST Gallery in Arlington, Massachusetts, in May.

Heather McPherson

Heather McPherson, Bupropion, 2016, painted chiffon, cast epoxy, drawing pad, 36 × 20 in. Photo by Karen Philippe

Although she freely incorporates colorful sheets of chiffon, puddles of clear epoxy, and plexiglass sheets into her work, “Heather is a painter inside and out, whether she’s making traditional paintings or animating a video—it doesn’t seem to matter,” says Stapleton. “Her language is recognizable as her own, full of history and self-reference.”

McPherson, who is based in Providence, makes decisions through the physical, experimental process of making, but that’s not to imply her work is only about mixing materials. In the pieces she’s currently creating, she’s exploring the ways art has been used throughout history as a spiritual tool.

“Last time we were in her studio, she had an enviable pile of massive primed canvases on her wall,” Stapleton says. “Something astounding is going to be on those bad boys next time we’re there, I just know it.”

Dell M. Hamilton

Dell M. Hamilton, To Haunt Is To Love: Reina #6, from Fallen Angels: Making Sense Out of Nothing, 2014–present, color film and unique digital scan on paper, 25 × 37 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

A true interdisciplinarian, Boston-based Hamilton has been tackling topics as diverse as the United States’ influence on Honduras and the history of desegregation in Boston through performance, writing, installation, curation, and more. Gordon recalls, “I had the pleasure of witnessing Hamilton perform at Boston University’s 808 Gallery. Sharing a contemporary response to historical narratives steeped in collective trauma and memory, her gestural performance involved thinking, making, and doing at the service of imagining a better future. It was really a transformative viewing experience.”

At press time, Hamilton was in the middle of producing a body of two-dimensional work called Punta: Pregunta (translated as Point: Question). She’s exploring the intricate tangles of family identity, trauma, and personal neuroses through large-scale, flat, mixed-media artwork, though she isn’t sure how two-dimensional they will stay.

Sarah Tortora

Sarah Tortora, Last Bastion of the Loser, 2016, steel, felt, cotton, hardware, 54 × 46 × 72 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

Vermont-based Tortora “is a machine, and her sculptures are the real deal,” Stapleton says. “Her craft and execution is always impeccable. She was making pretty massive work last year, but we’ve seen some small, intimate pieces on her social media that look outstanding.” (Look for her on Instagram.)

Past work includes painted wood wall pieces that resemble letter forms from an unknown language, and full-size abstractions that hint at marching soldiers or classical architecture. “One of my favorite things about her process is how she titles her work,” Stapleton continues. Titles such as Septum, Pallbearers, and Power Bottom “really solidify each sculpture’s identity in a way I haven’t experienced,” she explains. For 2018, she’s developing a new series of sculptures titled Witness Mark, which will reference the way museums illustrate geological time.

Belleau + Churchill

Belleau + Churchill, The Red Ghost, part of Fantasia Colorado, 2016, mixed media, 18 x 132 x 72 in. Photo by Caleb Churchill

This artist pair from Providence was nominated by two members of our panel. Raina Belleau and Caleb Churchill “make interesting work about history and the environment. They are sweet individuals and masterful craftspeople,” says Spavento.

“We are really into how their projects are visually interesting and accessible while ultimately being heavily research-based,” adds Stapleton. “The work is fun, but still challenging.” For a 2016 installation titled Fantasia Colorado, the pair created memorabilia such as “vintage” postcards, handmade rugs, and historic portrait busts to re-create and commemorate an odd piece of American history: a failed attempt by the U.S. Army to use camels as pack animals in the Civil War; the ultimate release of the animals into the wild; and the terrifying, truth-stretching stories of camel–human encounters that ensued.

“2017 has been a lot of residency and research work, and we’re really excited to see what comes out of that time spent in development,” Stapleton says. Indeed; as of press time, the two were planning to study the concept of utopias—and learn Esperanto, a language created in the 1800s in the optimistic hope of unifying the world—at the Wassaic Artist Residency in Wassaic, New York, in October. 2018 will see their second solo exhibition at GRIN in Providence.

Hong Hong

Hong Hong, Passage II, 2017, cellophane, wood, steel, 8 x 228 x 144 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

Born in China, Hong immigrated to the United States at the age of nine and now calls Hartford home. Working with materials as humble as mulberry fiber, mylar, Scotch tape, and fishing line, Hong creates large-scale pieces that suggest, interact with, and (when made with mylar) literally reflect their environment. She’s been making massive sheets of paper—as tall as 12 feet—using buckets and water pistols to manipulate pulp on homemade screens. Far from being precious about her finished pieces, Hong has no qualms about taking work that’s been shown and resoaking it, turning the paper back into a slurry of fiber that can be reused and remade. The work becomes cyclical, self-feeding. Wilkins says, “Hong Hong delves into the mysteries of deep time, even as her work is imbued with the sensuous presence of here and now.”

Hong had a solo show at Real Art Ways that ran from August through October, and she has an ongoing relationship with the Hartford arts organization. “We are commissioning a new work titled Everlasting Ephemera, which she will be working on during the coming year,” says Wilkins. The piece is a yearlong investigation of the temporal nature of human perception, and how those parameters affect our environment and our culture.

Farzaneh and Bahareh Safarani

Farzaneh and Bahareh Safarani, a still from Cocoon, performed at the Boston Center for the Arts, 2015. Photo by Hannah Bates

Having trained as painters at the University of Tehran, twin sisters Farzaneh and Bahareh have been branching out into video and performance while they continue their studies in Boston. The Safaranis use their twin-ness to full advantage, acting as each other’s mirrors or as dual selves on stage. “In their melding of meticulous realistic painting, extraordinary performative discipline, and the most exquisitely subtle use of video, the Safarani sisters create an uncanny sense of intimacy,” says Smith.

And it is truly a melding. The two decide which form their art takes—painting, live performance, both—by determining which will explain their idea better. They’re now hard at work on a series of paintings that each act as a paragraph in a larger story, but performance will certainly be a part of their future. In 2018, you can see their internationally recognized work in Los Angeles, Berlin, Armenia, and Iran.

Emilie Stark-Menneg

Emilie Stark-Menneg, Big Kitty Picture Show!, 2016, acrylic, oil, house paint, and sand on canvas, 70 x 105 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

Stark-Menneg was enthusiastically chosen by two of our curators. Spavento says, “Her paintings are delightful, expressive and totally singular in their vision and content. I would recommend her for everything—I’m so in love with her work.” McAvoy agrees, “Stark-Menneg is one of the freshest and most exciting young painters I’ve encountered in a while. Her work is smart, sassy, inventive, and skillful all at once, plus it is a hell of a lot of fun.”

A Massachusetts native, Stark-Menneg was based in Brunswick, Maine, until recently, when she relocated to Providence to enter an MFA program at RISD. At school, she plans to continue to explore ways to depict the shared energy found between people and places, and to examine how technology distorts and relocates our physical bodies.

Wang Yefeng (Frank)

Wang Yefeng, a screenshot from Drifting Stages, 2016, dimensions variable

Wang is a digital media artist whose surreal, disorienting animation should really be seen in motion to be fully appreciated. In one of his video pieces, generic, vaguely Asian MIDI music backs a tableau of Hooters waitresses with C-3PO heads holding meat grinders that cascade blood onto a plastic toy figure of a man in a suit, who’s lying in a bathtub with pigs’ feet, and . . . well, it’s better to visit his website and see it for yourself.

As a Rhode Island–based digital media artist with a sculptural background, Wang has been recently rediscovering his love of working with physical materials, including 3D-printed objects. Over the coming year, he plans to experiment further with mixing multiple disciplines to discover the best ways to make his ideas real.

“He’s making work unlike what we typically see in New England, probably in part because he splits his time between the United States and China,” Stapleton says. “There’s always a narrative—usually a surprising, semi-autobiographical one—behind his work, but it never gets too personal. There’s reservation in his lavishness, and now that he’s back in the States for a while, we’re looking forward to what he will come up with.”

Vivian Beer

Vivian Beer, Forth Bench, 2011, stainless steel, pure pigment, ferrocement, 96 x 48 x 48 in. Photo by Alison Swiatocha

While not unknown to us—Take profiled Beer last December, following her win on Ellen’s Design Challenge, a furniture designers’ competition à la Project Runway—Beer’s work isn’t as well known as it should be. “Vivian Beer is an exciting local artist who is pushing the boundaries of furniture making,” says Chong. “Inspired by various forms, from airplanes to high heels, her industrial chic work is both strong and beautiful.”

The streamlined, retro-industrial shapes in Beer’s work are clearly informed by her 2014 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum—a fitting place for an artist working primarily in materials such as steel, cement, and automotive paint. “Her inventive and stylish forms have crossover appeal between functional furniture and sculptural works of art,” continues Chong.

Over the last year, Beer has been sharing her appealing design skills through teaching residencies and public art commissions across the country. She also moved her furniture studio from Manchester to Pembroke, New Hampshire, where she plans to build out a space for holding design workshops. As for the work itself, Beer will be developing a line of limited-production furniture (all of her previous pieces are one-of-a-kind) in the spring.

top image: L to R: Wang Yefeng, Dell M. Hamilton, Farzaneh Safarani, and Bahareh Safarani. Photo by Izzy Berdan; composite image by Aaron Taylor-Waldman

The post Artists to Watch in 2018 appeared first on Take Magazine.

In the thick heat of an afternoon, Suzanne Volmer emerges from her expansive and well loved studio to greet me. As we enter the space, the all-white room unfolds with high ceilings and windows cascading light. Her work floods every corner: wide steel sculptures, paintings, models of outdoor installations, and her vessels—soft bending porcelain structures—all illuminated in afternoon sun.

Like her work, Volmer exudes an infectious intensity as she floats between bodies of various work. It is hard to not be enamored by every item; even small scraps of paper from various project models beam with creativity. In the furthest corner, her vessels sit quietly but demand attention. “These vessels are fired in an electric kiln,” she says. “Most people do not want their work to move once it goes to fire. But I specifically formulate the chemicals in the porcelain strips to shift. I want them to look like they are breathing.” She notes that while porcelain may appear fragile, her vessels also demonstrate immense strength in form and movement.

Clouds, captured full installation view, approximately 16’w X 14’H X 34’D

Volmer is vested in the scientific processes of working with steel and porcelain, manipulating chemical formulations to disrupt the ways in which porcelain and metal fuse and come undone. “What is fascinating to me is that porcelain and steel ignite at the same temperature,” she says. “Porcelain becomes glassy whereas the layers of steel that have been layered together begin to spring apart.” Her pieces, Metal Wedges and Tepees, for instance, are steel sculptures that have been heated to spring apart the layers, exposing charged edges and flakes of metal that she likes to “paint with.” Their texture is reminiscent of charred bark, seemingly fragile and haunted by fire.

Teepees, steel, 6’W X 3’H X 1’D

Volmer leans into the “essential qualities of her materials” and creates based on the movement of a location. Using the natural lines of a hill or the wide support beams of a gallery space, Volmer creates a symbiotic relationship between material and environment, “reusing anything intrinsic to the space.” “I want to create experiential work that does not have a directly obvious narrative,” says Volmer. “It is important for me for my work to exist naturally within a space, but to also command its attention while letting the person viewing it to map their own experiences and feelings.”

Since graduating from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn “too long ago,” she laughs, Volmer has been deeply immersed in the world of fine arts. From teaching at Rhode Island School of Design to being a guest artist at Massachusetts College of Art, she continues to mentor other artists and writes art criticism for various publications. She enjoys collaborative projects as well, including with seemingly non-art related collaborators such as engineers, metal fabricating companies, and various other specialty fields. “I love working with these people within my community who would not otherwise be involved in fine art,” she says. “They get a tremendous charge from being able to put their skills to use on something creative.”

“I like working with porcelain and various metals because the processes are not fragile. They are incredibly labor intensive and forceful and yet the outcome can be very soft,” Volmer says. “As a female artist I have been drawn to this because it commands a type of skill that enables me to be both technical and creative.”

Suzanne Volmer–artist
Lincoln, Rhode Island
Website

Top image Floating World, maquette for large installation, mixed media with porcelain. All images courtesy of Suzanne Volmer

The post Volmer’s Vessels appeared first on Take Magazine.

Most of us have done it—taken the bubble wrap from a package and popped away. What is it that makes those teeny pops of sounds so damn satisfying? Now glass artist Chris Taylor has taken our fixation to the next level.

What is it: Handmade glass pendant lamp molded from a cylinder of bubble wrap.

Who made it: Chris Taylor, a member of the RISD Glass Department faculty and Fulbright recipient, creates functional art objects intended the home, not the white box. He has exhibited his work across New England and New York, and has done residencies in Washington, China, Japan, and Kenya.

Where it’s made: Taylor’s Rhode Island studio practice, Craft Advisory.

Why we love it: In the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, Taylor assigns bubble wrap new purpose, elevating a simulacrum of a practical object into an artistic product that is as bold and accessible as it is challenging and provocative. (We Can’t Believe It’s Not Plastic!)

Where you can get it: Taylor’s lamps are available alongside drinking glasses, vases, and sculptural ornaments on Craft Advisory’s website.

The post Object: Bubble Wrap Lighting appeared first on Take Magazine.

Kevin Broccoli might be the busiest person in New England. The 33-year-old Rhode Island native writes, acts, directs, and works as artistic director of the ambitiously titled Epic Theatre Company.

“Epic is a small—very small—company that focuses on work that is story-driven,” says Broccoli. (Yes, his name is pronounced like the vegetable.) With minimal sets and barely any costume budget, Epic is about to kick off its sixth full season, one that features a whopping ten shows over ten months.

Kevin Broccoli, image courtesy of the actor

The season includes Red Speedo, Lucas Hnath’s 2013 drama about Olympic hopefuls and performance enhancing drugs. Set at an actual swimming pool, the play will be performed poolside at the Pawtucket Boys & Girls Club. Another highlight is season closer Wolf Hall, based on Hilary Mantel’s historical epic, which will be staged in a large warehouse with a cast of 35 actors.

“People are disillusioned with theatre right now,” Broccoli says. “People like Netflix. I can’t blame them, I like Netflix too.” That’s why he selects plays that will make people sit up and pay attention, plays he hopes will provoke strong reactions.

Broccoli also acts and writes, in addition to working days in his hometown public library. “I usually start writing at midnight and go until 3 a.m. I revise during the day, but I write late at night. If a first draft takes longer than a week I’m not going to finish it.” Epic just wrapped up a world premiere run of Dorothy, Rose, Sophia and Blanche, a comedy about four women who wake up to find themselves cast in a reboot of The Golden Girls. “People thought we were just doing scenes from The Golden Girls,” he says.

Broccoli’s summer has been dominated by a legal kerfuffle related to another of his plays. James Franco and Me is a two-man show where a character named Kevin Broccoli meets the actor James Franco in a hospital waiting room as Broccoli’s father lies dying nearby. It premiered last fall in a predictably quirky way: Broccoli played himself and a different actor played Franco every night.

James Franco and Me was successful enough that it a second staging was scheduled in New York, now with two actors playing Broccoli and two others playing Franco. “We planned a three-performance run, and it was all good to go until the venue got a cease-and-desist letter from Franco’s lawyers,” Broccoli says. The venue bailed, so Broccoli wrote a strongly worded press release. Within days, the news was featured everywhere from Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly to People.com and the New York Times.

The biggest surprise to Broccoli is that the letter didn’t come earlier. “We did the show 30 times in Rhode Island,” he says. “They didn’t care; they thought it didn’t matter. Judging by the letter, they only cared because we were bringing it to New York.”

Broccoli says he reached out to Franco’s agent, publicist, and even an ex-girlfriend, but hasn’t yet reached the actor himself. How could Franco, a RISD graduate, disapprove of the show when so much of his own work mines the same material?

Earlier this month Broccoli performed a reworked, redacted version of the show in Rhode Island for one night only. _______ and Me removed all references to the actor. “Who knows,” Broccoli said before the altered show debuted. “It might be funnier that way.”

Kevin Broccoli–actor/writer/artistic director, Epic Theatre Company
Providence, Rhode Island
Website
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram

Top image from Dorothy, Rose, Sophia and Blanche, image courtesy of Kevin Broccoli

The post Watch Your Broccoli appeared first on Take Magazine.

Two years ago, fueled by curiosity, Adam Anderson developed an interest in sunflowers. The landscape architect, owner of the Design Under Sky Studio in Providence, Rhode Island, decided he would plant 1,000 seeds along the river in Providence and see what would happen: “Is the soil good enough? If they do grow, will maintenance crews eventually just mow them down? If they bloom, will people just pluck them out of the ground?”

Happy enough with the initial results, Anderson, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, looked across the street and noticed two vacant lots where Highway 195 used to cut through. He wondered if he could grow a field of sunflowers there and sent an unsolicited proposal to the local highway commission. The commission accepted and he launched a Kickstarter project, “10,000 Suns: Highway to Park Project” to plant 10,000 sunflower seeds over two acres, tend to the plants, and watch them grow over the season.

This year will be the second year for the public installation project, and Anderson’s plans are more ambitious. He is planting wildflowers, in addition to the sunflowers, in another patch for a “river of flowers.” The site is located in two parcels between S. Main Street/South Water Street/Wickenden Street near downtown Providence and the Providence River. Last year, drought and unexpected expenses complicated things a little, but the project saw fruition with the help of a few dedicated volunteers including Anderson’s girlfriend, Sasha Azbel. The Kickstarter project is in place again and the installation is fueled by more volunteers and donations of material such as compost from Smithfield Peat and also from the city of Providence.

Why sunflowers? In terms of botanical performance, not many other plants can go from a seed to eight feet tall in two months, given the right conditions, Anderson says. Their growth makes for a dramatic transformation. “They are this striking symbol, great pollinators, and provide a lot of food for different species,” Anderson says. “They are also bioaccumulators so they can actually suck up and process organic toxins from the ground,” which is a big deal for city lots.

Sunflowers, Anderson says, act as a symbol of possibility in landscape. The seasonal aspect of the project is also a major part in landscape architecture, he says. They give us a chance to look at open spaces as not just something waiting for development, but as public space that could be critical to a city’s infrastructure. In addition to the sunflowers, of course, Anderson has been delighted by the community involvement and the people he has met through the project. “People come by and they engage with each other,” he says. “This has been a great platform to educate people about landscape architecture, and it’s good fun.”

Adam Anderson–founder, 10,000 Suns: Highway to Park Project
Providence, Rhode Island
Website
Twitter
Facebook

Photos courtesy of Adam Anderson

The post Sunny Side Up appeared first on Take Magazine.

A nondescript warehouse on a side alley in Cranston, Rhode Island, serves as studio for Frank Poor, an alumnus of the Rhode Island School of Design, whose Southern roots serve as inspiration for his sculptural art. The artist, with numerous honors and exhibits to his name, currently has his work on exhibit at Boston’s Barbara Krakow Gallery.

The multimedia artist creates striking architectural forms with photographs of abandoned buildings from the South and wooden frames that serve as scaffolding. While Poor started out using found photographs as inspiration, these days he travels to the South, including to his home state of Georgia, to take pictures that will serve as the base for his art. He loves working with abandoned buildings because they allow him to project his own story onto them. It helps that many of them awaken memories from his childhood in the small town of Woodstock, Georgia. “I don’t specifically have a history with these buildings,” he says, “but they rhyme with the buildings I do have a history with.”

Frank Poor, work in his studio, Poornima Apte photo

Architecture, Poor says, has always served as a powerful visual metaphor. “I guess these abandoned buildings are like cicadas that leave their husks on trees. It is this sort of shell, this evidence of a life that just happened inside.”

Poor moved to Rhode Island in the ’90s for school and after graduating from RISD, decided to set up roots in the Ocean State. The distance from his hometown helped his art. Growing up in a small town of 500-700 people, he had never read the great Southern writers such as Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor, but he did so after settling in Rhode Island. “These are real people. I know these characters and the environments they lived in,” Poor says after reading their work. “I came back to that part of my heritage once I got away.” That same sentiment colors his art. “As I’ve grown as an artist, it’s been important for me to play with that distance–to do the listening there and the telling here.”

Frank Poor at his studio in Cranston, Rhode Island, Poornima Apte photo

His work has been shown in the South as well and the reactions there, as expected, are usually different from the ones he receives here in New England. Typically someone in the South will tell him the houses remind them of their uncle’s or aunt’s houses or that they trigger specific memories, whereas in New England the art is much more of an architectural abstraction, he says. He certainly appreciates both points of view.

Rhode Island has not yet served as muse, but Poor has been teaching at area schools, including as adjunct at his alma mater, RISD. Poor says that the South will continue to fuel his art for a while. “It has culturally been, in some ways, a marginalized part of a larger nation. It remains that way, and for a lot of artists it’s easier to see that if you can hold it out there at a distance.”

Frank Poor–Artist
Cranston, Rhode Island
Website

Photos credit Poornima Apte and Krakow Gallery

The post Southern Comfort appeared first on Take Magazine.

Michelle Holzapfel acknowledges that she has some talent for whittling wood, but she credits as much of her artistic success to sheer chance. “You go along almost following your nose, following some feeling that you can’t even put words to,” she says in the latest episode of the PBS series Craft in America. “And that aspect of things cannot be overlooked. It’s very important to take your chances.”

The new “Nature” episode of the series, which celebrates handcrafted creativity across the country, included Holzapfel among five artists who pull their inspiration, materials, and medium from the natural world. Holzapfel embraces every knot in the pine, every twist of burlwood, every fissure that she works into a design.

Her work is technically astute yet thematically whimsical. Her trompe l’oeil pieces include a remarkable rendition of a knitting basket, detailed down to every wrap of yarn, and book ends that themselves look like stacks of books, one with a Raggedy Ann doll seated atop. Some of her vases and bowls hold intricate carvings of leaves, faces, coiled snakes, and even a “knitted” wooden sweater. In other sculptures, such as an apple with its stem still attached to a branch with leaves, the wood appears as sleek and impenetrable as marble.

Michelle Holzapfel, Vermont Spoons

Holzapfel grew up in rural North Smithfield, Rhode Island, learning to make things by hand—from a fort of branches in the woods to clothing stitched with needle and thread. Her mother made dresses. Her father was a machinist who did carpentry and metal work. “As a kid, as long as I can remember being alive, I loved to manipulate my world,” Holzapfel says. “I just grew up sort of immersed in a culture of fixing things, making things.”

In high school, she tried printmaking, using tools to cut wood for block prints. “I discovered that I really liked the carving part better than the printing part.” For her first commissioned work, she whittled name plaques for neighbors to hang at their front doors.

Her family took regular trips to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence to see shows and the museum. Today, the RISD museum collection includes her work, as does the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; and the Currier Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Michelle Holzapfel, Rage Correctly

Holzapfel came to Vermont to attend Marlboro College, where she met her husband, fellow woodworker David Holzapfel. They started selling their creations at craft shows and to travelers passing on Route 9 in the summer.

After their two sons were born, the Holzapfels realized that sending them to college and providing them health insurance required the financial anchor of a full-time job. David set aside woodworking and became an elementary school art teacher in Marlboro.

By the 1990s, galleries in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Philadelphia had picked up Michelle’s work, fetching her prices upwards of $12,000 for a piece. After 30 years of relentless paring, her pace has slowed now, but she still sells to patrons and picks up commissions.

Yale University recently asked her to create the mace—a ceremonial staff representing each of its colleges—for a new residential college named for civil and women’s rights activist Pauli Murray. And this month, a show of Holzapfel’s work opens at The Gallery at Rhodes Arts Center at Northfield Mount Hermon prep school in Massachusetts.

Michelle Holzaphel–woodworker
Applewood Studio and Gallery
Marlboro, Vermont
Website
Craft in America “Nature” episode featuring Michelle Holzapfel

The post Going With The Grain appeared first on Take Magazine.

It’s been three years since composer James Falzone created the Providence Research Ensemble, but he still has trouble categorizing the group. They’re not classical, he says, because they don’t really play classical music. Experimental doesn’t quite sound right, either, although some of their performances certainly sound that way.

“I write systems-based music,” he says, before jovially launching into specifics about structure, mathematics, and how his compositions are adaptable depending on which players are in the room. “There’s actually something called Systems Music, but that’s really a British thing and we’re not that, either.” He settles on New Music, a term generally applied to the border-pushing fringes of contemporary classical composition.

As the name suggests, Providence Research Ensemble is largely a lab for Falzone to figure out his own work. “What’s wonderful about the group,” he says, “is that it’s friends of mine coming together in an informal, convivial way to perform music that might not otherwise be performed.” He loves the performance side of music, which isn’t the case for many composers.

“It’s so easy to sound overblown,” Falzone says, laughing. “There’s nothing I hate more than the image of the composer that comes from romantic music. I like some of the music, but that tortured genius image…”

In 2016, Falzone was awarded one of the RISD Museum’s inaugural fellowships, a paid honor that allowed him to research museum collections and also perform regularly in its grand European painting gallery. (One memorably odd performance featured cello, trombone, two basses, and Falzone on an electroacoustic instrument called the Cembaphon.)

Hardly tortured, Falzone has reason to be happy. He’s just been accepted into a graduate program. He hasn’t formally accepted yet, but it seems likely that a move might be coming soon. But while Falzone may leave Providence, he’ll remain involved in music around town. The grad program is close enough that he’ll still perform with both Providence Research Ensemble and Ordinary Affects, the Boston-based quartet in which he currently plays vibraphone and keyboards.

Soft-spoken and careful with his speech, Falzone becomes quite animated over any number of suspects, from pentatonic scales to the British art of change ringing, the collective ringing of church bells in a mathematical sequence.

Falzone has already composed eight pieces based around the tenets of change ringing, and his notebooks are full of braided grids of bell ringing patterns. (Here’s one for trivia night: about four hundred years ago, English bell ringers would tug on weighted ropes to practice their craft. The silent—or dumb—bell ringing allowed them to keep in shape for when it was time to climb the tower and ring the actual church bells. And that’s why dumbbells are called dumbbells.)

Infrequent Seams is an experimental music label—that’s their term—that will release the first album from Providence Research Ensemble this June. The album features eight players performing a number of Falzone’s compositions from the past three years. A short tour of the Northeast will follow this summer.

James Falzone – Founder, Providence Research Ensemble
Instagram

Top photo James Falzone, Providence Research Ensemble | Photo by Peter Gumaskas

The post Researching New Music in Rhode Island appeared first on Take Magazine.