Going Nowhere: Alumni Artists in Providence Opening Reception and Performance
The David Winton Bell Gallery is excited to present Going Nowhere: Alumni Artists in Providence. The exhibition features six alumni artists who have chosen to live and work in Providence since graduating from Brown University. Notable for their commitment to the city’s distinctive creative community and for their social connectedness to each other, the artists featured in this exhibition make aesthetically diverse work rooted in experimentation and play. For Going Nowhere, Peter Glantz ’98, Kevin Hooyman ’98, Xander Marro ’98, Jenny Nichols ’01, David Udris ’90, and Tatyana Yanishevsky ’04 have each produced new works in practices that range from performance to printmaking. In this exhibition, narratives of the simple and fantastic are complicated by tensions between wildness and structure, density and ephemerality, and specificity and largeness.
At 7pm Peter Glantz will lead an abbreviated version of the interpretative tour he has developed for Going Nowhere: Alumni Artists in Providence. Longer performances are scheduled for June 14 and June 15, 2014.
Providence has played a critical role in fostering an embrace of the liminal for the artists in Going Nowhere. On the margins of New York, the capital of the art world, it is precisely Providence’s peripheral status that, in the words of Glantz, enables artists to “work inexpensively and experiment outside of the typical demands of high capital.” The city’s abundance of abandoned and affordable live/work spaces has encouraged the emergence of collectives such as the feminist Dirt Palace, which Marro co-founded in 2000 in an abandoned library in Olneyville, and multi-disciplinary spaces such as Building 16, where Yanishevsky lived until the building’s inhabitants were evicted in 2013. As Glantz notes, the city attracts “people who are focused more on creating a culture and community through art and performance than their own individual careers.” The work produced for Going Nowhere demonstrates the generative potential of this communal artistic environment.
