Artscape: Recent Episodes
The Public's Radio
Artscape is our occasional feature on art, music, theatre, dance, performance and more. To let us know about an artist or event, please email arts@thepublicsradio.org
Every year, the James Beard Foundation recognizes exceptional restaurants and chefs throughout the country, one of the highest honors in the culinary field. Earlier this week, they announced this year’s winners. Sky Hanuel Kim, the chef at Gift Horse in Providence, won “Best Chef Northeast.” The win came just a year after Kim was a semifinalist for “best emerging chef.” I visited Sky Kim at her restaurant, Gift Horse, shortly after she was named a semifinalist in 2024.
A local artist poses the question “WTF Can Artists Do During a Fascist Takeover?” - that’s the title of a new web comic by Providence-based artist, educator and organizer Jordan Seaberry. He joined me in the studio to talk about the inspiration of the comic and his advice for artists. Plus: The latest plays on now at Trinity Rep and the Gamm Theatre.
This week on Artscape, producer James Baumgartner and editor Mareva Lindo highlight a few of their favorite festivals coming up this summer, from Providence Porchfest to New Bedford's Roots & Branches Festival.
This year marks the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which protects people with disabilities from discrimination in areas such as employment, education, and public accommodations. A new documentary tells the emotional story of the activists that led the determined effort to achieve equality and accessibility that culminated in the passage of the ADA. It’s called Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act, and it’s being screened today at the Westerly Library. The project was led by Westerly film producer and director Hilary Steinman
This week, we’re highlighting two exhibits in Newport: “Sean Landers: Lost at Sea” at the Newport Art Museum, and “Newport 1775: Whose Side Are You On?” at the Newport Historical Society.
Back in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s in Providence, Leo’s bar and restaurant was an institution and a pioneer in the city’s Jewelry District, known for its support of local artists, and its eclectic clientele, late hours, and great food. And the man behind it all was John Rector. John passed away March 6 at the age of 75. When she heard the news, Artscape editor Mareva Lindo started asking around to see who might want to talk with us about John and the bar. And people came out of the woodwork. So many people wanted to share their memories about John, and that time and place. Now we bring you but a slice of what they all had to say about John Rector and Leo’s.
As we move closer to summer, we edge closer to the first WaterFire lighting ceremony of the year. It will take place at the end of the month. WaterFire Providence is going through some changes. This year they named Mark Allan as the interim Executive Director. We'll talk with him about the future of WaterFire.Plus: ArtWeek SouthCoast runs from May 8th to May 18th and offers more than 50 different experiences all over Bristol County, Massachusetts. We talk with two of the event organizers.
There’s a painting on display right now in the Rhode Island Statehouse that tells an important tale of American history: It’s the story of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment — a military regiment composed mostly of Black enlistees. The painting is called “Brave Men as Ever Fought.” It’s by historical military artist Don Troiani. Morning host Luis Hernandez talked with Ray Rickman, the co-founder of the non-profit Stages of Freedom, which addresses racial inequities in Rhode Island, and Rhode Island Secretary of State Gregg Amore.
On this week’s show: A profile of artist Ian Cozzens. Cozzens moved to Providence in 1999, and quickly started making screen prints for bands, art gallery shows, and community events. He also documented the buildings of Providence, using his architectural training to depict a half-demolished mill in Eagle Square and the three smokestacks of a power station on the Providence River. Since then, he moved on to screen prints depicting a single word, including “dissonance” and “QUEERS!” His latest installation at Angell Street Galleries is called “Reality.” Also, Barnaby Evans and Emily Gray from WaterFire Providence remember the life and work of Rhode Island painter Gretchen Dow Simpson.On this week’s show: A profile of artist Ian Cozzens. Cozzens moved to Providence in 1999, and quickly started making screen prints for bands, art gallery shows, and community events. He also documented the buildings of Providence, using his architectural training to depict a half-demolished mill in Eagle Square and the three smokestacks of a power station on the Providence River. Since then, he moved on to screen prints depicting a single word, including “dissonance” and “QUEERS!” His latest installation at Angell Street Galleries is called “Reality.” Also, Barnaby Evans and Emily Gray from WaterFire Providence remember the life and work of Rhode Island painter Gretchen Dow Simpson.
Kwame Dawes is a poet, actor and musician whose work is shaped by a journey that started in Ghana, where he was born, all the way to Jamaica, where he was raised. Dawes, who joined the staff at Brown University in 2024, was recently named the poet laureate for Jamaica. Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with Dawes about his journey, his poetry, what it means to be a poet laureate, and the current environment on college campuses.
Can you name five women artists? That’s the question posed by Erin L. McCutcheon, as part of a course she teaches as assistant professor of arts of the Americas at University of Rhode Island. In her work as an art historian, researcher and teacher, she aims to raise the profile of women artists. And she was recently appointed to the Committee on Women in the Arts for the College Arts Association.
There are two plays on now in Providence that start with a work of Shakespeare and then take it in a new direction: “Fat Ham” at the Wilbury Theatre Group, and “La Tempestad — The Tempest” at Trinity Rep. Artscape producer James Baumgartner spoke with the plays’ directors for this week’s show.
Every January, Italian American families in Westerly, Rhode Island gather together to start making soupy, a dry-cured pork sausage that’s specific to the town. A new film called “Westerly’s Gold: Sweet, Spicy, and Full of Tradition” documents the process and stories of the families who’ve been making the local delicacy for decades.
In a few minutes, we’ll hear about the new documentary “Secret Mall Apartment” that will be screening at the Providence Place Mall. But first, I recently visited the studio of artist, fishmonger, knifemaker, and North Providence resident Joyce Kutty. Her studio in an old Fall River textile mill has several workbenches filled with neatly arranged tools, a band saw, and a sketchbook. There’s a woodblock print on the wall that has three women hammering an anvil. And in one corner, there’s a large pot, slowly simmering.
This is The Public’s Radio, I’m James Baumgartner. At a time when the longstanding friendship between the US and Canada is fraught with a trade war sparked by the Trump administration, a Rhode Island museum is mounting a celebration of the Ocean State’s ties with French Canadian culture. It’s called “La Francophonie”. In this week’s Artscape segment, reporter David Wright sat down with Anne Conway, Director of the Museum of Work & Culture in Woonsocket.
Brutalism had its heyday 60 years ago, but this polarizing style of architecture is back in the spotlight. At the Oscars, Adrien Brody won Best Actor for his performance of a Brutalist architect. In Washington, President Trump has re-issued an executive order deploring Brutalism. And in southeastern Massachusetts, our reporter Ben Berke brings us this story about a Brutalist college campus designed by a celebrated architect whose buildings are disappearing across the country.
Providence's historic Union Station was once a hub for 14 intercity train tracks, a crucial stop in southern New England that helped the city’s jewelry, textile and machinery industries thrive. In just a few weeks, it’ll be home to Track 15: a food hall and plaza that will feature local chefs offering everything from Indian plates to Mexican fare. Morning host Luis Hernandez met with developer Chris Marsella in January at the construction site behind the building which currently houses our studio and the Rhode Island Foundation. It will soon be the home of Track 15.
Artists throughout Latin America have long used graphic posters as a form of storytelling, cultural celebration, political expression, and resistance. A new exhibit at Waterfire Arts Center features roughly 100 posters from across Latin America, spanning more than 70 years. Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with the curators of the exhibit, Jose Menendez Lopez and Tatiana Goméz Gaggero.
A historic cottage situated in Westerly Library’s Wilcox Park is home to an Artist-In-Residence program that attracts creatives from around the country. It offers artists of all levels and disciplines to take risks and pursue new projects, while also providing creative and educational programming to the surrounding community. The latest artist-in-residence is Dave Solomon. He’s an award-winning, New York-based writer and director of film and theater. Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with him for this week’s episode of Artscape.
LitArts RI started in 2018 as a shared creative workspace for writers. Since then, the nonprofit has grown to offer events, workshops, and other support to Rhode Island writers and readers. They recently announced their new executive director, Christina Bevilacqua, who has been a part of the literary world of Rhode Island for a while now at the Providence Athenaeum, Trinity Rep, and the Providence Public Library.
Rel’s debut EP “Big Try” comes out March 7, and they’re performing at a release party at AS220 March 14. You can find out more about Rel’s music at HeyRel.com. Luis Hernandez: When did you start playing music and what got you into music as a performer? Rel: So I started playing guitar when I […]
For most of us, the days of keeping a stash of folded-up maps in the car glovebox are behind us. So in a world of smartphones and GPS, why go to a store that specializes in maps? That’s the question that Andrew Middleton is trying to answer at the Map Center in Pawtucket.
The Electromagnetic Pinball Museum is home to over 100 pinball machines, from the 1940s to today. Emily Rose and Michael Pare are two of the co-founders who started the museum when they found that they had too many pinball machines to fit in their home. Luis Hernandez visited the museum earlier this week.
Every month, the “Weird Island” podcast delivers weird and wonderful stories from Rhode Island, like the origin of the Turk’s Head building, the creation of a gym for women in the 1880s, or the story of the fearless lighthouse keeper of Lime Rock. It’s all the creation of Sara Corben, who started the podcast in 2021. Artscape producer James Baumgartner spoke with her for this week’s show.
This week, we’re looking ahead to the next few months in local arts and culture. Here to share what they’re most excited about for the winter and spring of 2025 are Artscape producer James Baumgartner, and Tracy MacDonald, arts and culture executive producer at Rhode Island PBS.
The Vox Hunters are a duo-turned-trio defined by their affinity for unaccompanied vocal music, a unique mix of folk influences, and the traditional songs and tunes of Rhode Island.If you’re a player or a fan of folk music in Rhode Island, there’s a good chance you’ve been to a Vox Hunters show, or attended one of the many community jams and sings they’ve led over the years. “I would say that our music would fall under the category of social music,” said Ben Gagliardi, one of the two founding members of The Vox Hunters. “It's music that brings people together. It's participatory, no one's really fully in charge. It has something for everyone to experience.”That focus on the participatory element comes from their own entry into the folk world – each were taken under the wing of older tradition-bearers in the region, and welcomed into folk music spaces when they were young. They play traditional music, but in a way that’s welcoming and inclusive to audiences old and young.
Hundreds of years ago, wallpaper looked very different than the simple repeating patterns we often see today. Originally done on wood blocks, early designs were extremely decorative, colorful, and labor-intensive. “The Art of French Wallpaper Design” is the latest exhibit at the RISD Museum, featuring samples of salvaged wallpapers, fragments and drawings of designs from the 18th and 19th centuries. Morning host Luis Hernandez visited the exhibit to talk with Emily Banas, the museum’s Associate Curator of Decorative Arts and Design. “The Art of French Wallpaper Design” is on now at the RISD Museum through May 11.
Since 2008, Providence-born writer, podcaster and public radio alum Nate DiMeo has been producing short, narrative essays through his podcast, “The Memory Palace,” featuring real-life stories pulled from lesser known corners of American history. His new book, “The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past,” features nearly 50 stories, some from the podcast, some new, and accompanied for the first time by illustrations and archival photos. Now based in Los Angeles, he’s coming back to Providence on Saturday for a reading at RiffRaff bookstore. DiMeo spoke with morning host Luis Hernandez for this week’s episode of Artscape.
Lithuanian-American siblings Vija and Dovas Lietuvninkas have been singing traditional Lithuanian folk music since they can remember. “One of my earliest memories in general is of my grandfather singing Lithuanian folk songs to us as we were going to sleep, as lullabies as we’re sleeping over at their houses,” Dovas said. “So, literally from the […]
The Community Libraries of Providence offer a slew of free arts education programs, including sewing, rug tufting, and how to use 3-D printers. But a weaving class at the Mount Pleasant branch has been especially popular.
Heidi Henderson is a dancer and choreographer who lives in Wakefield. Her latest work is called untitled sad piece and it’s a collection of 10 dances: solos, duets, trios and ensemble pieces with all five members of her company, Elephant Jane Dance. Untitled sad piece is set to the music of The Carpenters, the 1970s brother-sister duo known for the sweetly sad voice of Karen Carpenter. Elephant Jane Dance will perform the piece tonight (Thursday, 11/7) at United Skates of America in Rumford.
This election, Rhode Island voters have the opportunity to weigh in on five statewide ballot questions. In the weeks leading up to Election Day, we’ve been covering each of them in depth. This time, we focus on Question 5, which asks voters to approve a $10 million bond for the continuation of the Cultural Arts and Economy Grant Program.
Hamilton de Holanda is the world’s foremost player of the Brazilian bandolim, a 10-stringed instrument that he developed by adding an extra two strings to the traditional mandolin. He’s defined his own style of Brazilian jazz, blending a contemporary jazz sound with the regional folk style choro, which centers around the bandolim. De Holanda was a featured performer this past weekend at the University of Rhode Island’s annual Guitar and Mandolin Festival.
When long-time journalist John Kostrzewa left the Providence Journal in 2017 after decades on the job, he planned to retire. But he found himself feeling like there was more to do. John is an avid hiker, and a few years after leaving the Journal he came back to write a column called Walking Rhode Island. Then he published a book by the same name featuring forty of what he calls “the most scenic, natural, and historic trails in the state.” Morning host Luis Hernandez talked with Kostrzewa about the book, and a few of his favorite hikes for the fall.
On a recent Saturday, a group of grade-school aged children wearing red t-shirts lined up on the sidewalk on Westminster Street in the West End of Providence. They were outside of two empty storefronts that used to hold Community MusicWorks. The youngest children were at the front carrying small drums and mallets. They were followed […]
If you skateboard or surf in New England, you know the name Sid Abbruzzi. He runs the Water Brothers Surf & Skate Shop in Newport, and played a key role in expanding the skating and surfing culture in the Northeast. He’s the focus of the new documentary “Water Brother: The Sid Abbruzzi Story.”
Saxophonist, composer and music educator Leland Baker studied jazz in New Orleans and New York before coming back home to Rhode Island. Since then he’s established a residency at the Courtland Club in Providence, performed at the Newport Jazz Festival – and he hopes to use his position as music education manager with the Newport Festivals Foundation to build musical mentorships like those he experienced in Louisiana.
A new musical documentary by Jason Tranchida and Matthew Lawrence features transcriptions of the Navy’s 1919 investigation into homosexual activity by sailors in Newport, along with music from a vaudeville drag show that was going on right down the street.
The old mill buildings of the Olneyville and Valley neighborhoods in Providence were once the home to hundreds of artists. Back in the 1990s, space was cheap in the old mills and many artists were happy to live and work in these run-down post-industrial spaces. But starting in the early aughts, artists faced evictions as many of those buildings were torn down or converted to luxury loft apartments or condos. So what’s available now?
Back in the 1990s, Providence was home to a thriving community of artists. One of the things that made it possible was the ample affordable live/work spaces artists found in the old mill buildings of the city’s industrial past. With many of those buildings gone and little affordable housing to spare, can Providence hold onto its reputation as a cultural capital?
For this week’s episode of Artscape, an interview and studio session with Rhode Island band The Whelks, an acoustic trio defined by their three-part harmonies, and a shared love of early country, swing, and Rhode Island.
Hundreds gather in New Bedford’s Riverside Park on Saturdays throughout the summer to enjoy Latin American food from local vendors who got their start through the Patio de Comidas initiative. The series, which also features music, dancing, and local goods, concludes on Saturday with a grand finale: the Festival Tipico de Guatemala.
This year is the 50th anniversary of Monumenta, a ground-breaking collection of outdoor sculptures by 40 different artists. Some of those names included Willem de Kooning, Christo, and Barbara Hepworth. It was an ambitious exhibit that didn’t get much attention from the art world at first, but it’s now recognized for its influence on large-scale public art. Morning host Luis Hernandez recently spoke with Jim Donahue, Curator of Historic Landscapes and Horticulture at Newport Mansions, which is hosting a symposium on Monumenta this Saturday.
TRANSCRIPT: This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Luis Hernandez: It’s been nearly 30 years since the demise of the North Providence Summer Basketball League. It started as a pickup league for local kids in the early 60s and rapidly grew into one of the most popular in the region. A new documentary […]
Friday night, the Kingston Chamber Music Festival will host the world premiere of “Woodland Songs” by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, performed by the Dover String Quartet. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with Tate about how he incorporates Chickasaw music with classical traditions.
The Ocean State is pretty far from Louisiana, but the sound of Cajun country can be found all around Rhode Island – thanks in part to Alan Bradbury and Michelle Kaminsky. They’ve been dedicated to playing and teaching Cajun, Creole and Zydeco music here for decades, bringing back what they’ve learned from master musicians in Louisiana. They’re two members of the Cajun band Magnolia, which has been playing together throughout New England since 1989. For this week’s episode of Artscape, they joined morning host Luis Hernandez in the studio for this interview and live performance.
After fleeing slavery in 1839, abolitionist, miner and sailor John Swanson Jacobs embarked on a journey that would take him to Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and ultimately Australia. It was there that he published his life story in a local newspaper – a unique document that not only gave an account of his experience under enslavement, but also named his enslavers, criticized America’s founding documents, and called out the American citizens who allowed slavery to persist. A new book shares his manuscript in full, accompanied by a biography of Jacobs. It’s called “The True Story of Slavery: The United States Governed by Six Thousand Despots.” Morning host Luis Hernandez spoke with the book’s editor, Jonathan Schroeder, a literary historian at the Rhode Island School of Design.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum’s scrimshaw collection, which includes hundreds of whalebone clocks, pie crimpers, musical instruments, canes and umbrellas, is advertised as the largest of its kind in the world. Naomi Slipp, the museum’s chief curator, said these items weren’t considered fine art when the museum’s founders began collecting them from locals in 1903, […]
This week’s episode of Artscape features an interview and studio session with Providence-based “hot jazz” band Paper Moon. Morning Edition host Luis Hernandez talked with guitarists John Birt and Dylan Harley, who describe the band’s music as a kind of time travel back to the sounds of early jazz and artists like Django Reinhardt.
With a background in literature and classical music, Providence musician Olivia Dolphin writes piano driven pop songs about relationships and self-reflection. The Providence singer-songwriter’s latest single, “Ghost Story,” is a cautionary tale about heartbreak and the perils of modern dating.
Where does an agnostic find hope in the face of the injustice of the world? And what happens when that agnostic starts hearing the voice of god in the rain? These are just a few of the themes of the radio play “God Talks to an Agnostic.” Written and directed by Don Mays the play explores the complicated role of the Black church in the life of a person struggling with their spirituality. The third season of “God Talks to an Agnostic” airs this weekend. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with Don earlier this week.
The recently-retired URI professor was honored this week with the Rhode Island Pell Award for excellence in the arts. Artscape producer James Baumgartner visited Dilworth in his studio in Providence for this profile. Bob Dilworth has been drawing and painting since he was a child growing up in Lawrenceville, Virginia in the 1950s and 60s. The art teacher at a local HBCU encouraged Dilworth to apply to the Rhode Island School of Design, and after studying painting there, he went on to teach a few different places, before coming back to Rhode Island in the early 90s. After teaching at URI for nearly 30 years, Dilworth retired in early 2020. But he hasn’t slowed down. I met with him in his garage studio in a quiet corner of Providence where he paints for 10-14 hours a day. Dilworth had several paintings in progress on canvasses 6-8 feet tall. Most of his paintings are portraits, more or less life-sized, and he describes the subjects as his community: his friends in Rhode Island, and people from his hometown.
The Newport Historical Society’s latest exhibit is called “A Name, A Voice, A Life: The Black Newporters of the 17th-19th Centuries.” Morning Edition host Luis Hernandez talked with Rebecca Bertrand, the museum’s executive director and Kaela Bleho, the digital access manager of the museum and co-curator for this exhibit.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Transcript:Luis Hernandez: This is a fascinating exhibit from what I’ve had the chance to see online and digging through the artists that you have, who have added their works to it. But I just want to start with the origins of this exhibit. When and where did the first conversation start to put this together? Rebecca.
Rebecca Bertrand: Well, this exhibition started as a database project. It was a four-year research project, which turned into a database called Voices from the NHS, which was a research project that started as a digitization effort, which was an opportunity that Kayla worked on for four years here at the NHS, digitizing over 4000 manuscript records which were references to Black and Indigenous Newporters. And this was an effort to get references up online where you could pull up a manuscript record and then see references to life events, birth records, death records, marriages. Real, actual human life stories and biographies could be built through these online records.
Kaela Behlo: As Becca mentioned, we worked to digitize part of our historic manuscript collection. So we have an incredible collection of historic documents from the 1600s through to the present day. We have ships’ manifests. We have medical records, religious records, merchant papers, just this incredible wealth of this resource that we wanted to make as accessible as possible. Not just transcribing what’s on the page, but really trying to understand the human experience as it has been recorded hundreds of years ago. So we have over 15 biographies that are hosted on the website now that you can explore under our featured story section that take this really deep dive into people’s lives and experiences. And we were so excited to share this online and we wanted to share it with the public in other ways because we realized there’s barriers to access online as well. So that’s really where the exhibit was born.
Two historic documents on display illuminating the experiences of Robert Wainwood. Left: A document from June 18, 1781, stating Godfrey Wainwood would manumit Robert, an enslaved man, after nine years of service if Robert behaved and did not leave without permission. Credit: Madison van Wylen / Courtesy of Newport Historical SocietyHernandez: Either of you, please tell me. I’d love to hear about any one particular document that jumps out at you that has a story that connected with you on some level. Or it just is really cool because anything like this is cool anyway. Rebecca, what about you? Is there an interesting document or story that you have?
Bertrand: I think one of my favorite pieces from this exhibition was the way that we were able to tie contemporary art into the show. Because I think for a lot of people, manuscripts and the database only go so far. And so something that we worked really hard on was, thanks to a small grant that we received from Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, we were able to commission three pieces of contemporary art for the show. Three artists – Cat Laine, Toby Sisson, and Eric Telford – were commissioned to make art specifically based on three of the stories of individuals who are highlighted through the show. So Kaela and Zoe, who’s the other co-curator of the exhibition, were reaching out to artists and we brought them down to the Historical Society and showed them some of these manuscripts and worked with them on the biographies and said, here are these stories of individuals from the 18th century. How does this resonate with you? And would you like to create a contemporary interpretation through whatever medium you work with? So I think a piece that really is incredible to me is the self-portrait photography by Cat Laine that is the most unbelievable photograph that she worked on for months and months and months that is just so powerful and such an incredible representation of an 18th-century woman, that you absolutely have to come down to see for yourself because it’s so powerful and such a really incredible representation of this woman, living long before photography existed. And I think it’s a really, really powerful piece.
Hernandez: I’m wondering if, from the very start of this project, if there’s something that surprised you, something that you learned about Newport that they don’t teach in school, or maybe they don’t teach in most books. Or something that just surprised you altogether about your hometown.
Behlo: I think what really blew me away is just how much information is there embedded in the archival record. I think there is this misconception that it’s very difficult for people to find references to Black and Indigenous people during this period, because all of the records are predominantly kept by the white, the wealthy, the powerful. But there are mentions buried. You just need to look for them. And I think the process of being able to recover those, not just names, but experiences that has really been the thing that has blown away the most. And also, there’s so much more to find. There’s so much work that we need to continue doing. And I think it’s very important to us that now we have this framework to work, we can just keep this work going for as many years as possible.
Artist Jean-Marc Superville Sovak with his sculpture “Six of the First” Credit: Madison van Wylen / Courtesy of Newport Historical SocietyHernandez: How we see history will depend a lot on our own background, our race, our ethnicity, our nationality. I’m wondering from your experience over the years, do you find people respond differently to exhibits depending on their background and their experiences?
Behlo: Yeah, absolutely. That’s why when we were developing this exhibit, it was so important for us to not work in a vacuum. As I mentioned, we work with Zoe Hume, who’s a PhD student down in Florida, who is focused on visitor center curation as part of her course of study. So she brought a whole fresh perspective. We also had several exhibit advisors who are either members of our community or members of the scholarly community who are going to bring their own thoughts and perspectives to the table. And we wanted to be as collaborative as possible with our colleagues in the community. So we have several contributing organizations, including the Rhode Island Black History Society, who loaned us objects for the exhibit. And other organizations that really we wanted to have conversations with them about this work and the way we were going to interpret it before anything was ever published or the exhibit was put together. Because we recognize, as you mentioned, we are historians that bring, we probably bring our own biases to the table. And it was so important for us for this to be a hugely collaborative and community-focused effort.
Bertrand: And I think one thing that I could add to that is that for the better part of my entire career, I’ve focused in one way or another on the public interpretation and visitation to museums or cultural events. And I think everyone brings their own background and heritage to what program they’re participating in. However, it’s our responsibility to hope that the next generation does better. And so through exhibitions and programs that we build around this, that’s why we’re going to put in so much dedicated effort to bring school children to this exhibition so that they are better than our generation was, than your generation, than our parents’ generation, than our grandparents’, because that’s the way. That is the gift that we can give to society to hope that everyone in the next generation can be better.
Credit: Madison van Wylen / Courtesy of Newport Historical SocietyHernandez: Kaela, what do you hope people will take away from this exhibit?
Behlo: I think it was important for us to first set the stage. I don’t think you can take for granted that people are really aware of the slave trade, specifically the slave trade in the north and how Newport was really heavily invested in that. So it was important for us to first of all, give people that, that context, make people aware of this, this history that is really essential to the story of this city. And then I think from there we needed to refocus the exhibit to talk about the enslaved and free people of African descent, who really experienced this history firsthand. And that’s why we chose to focus on our five individuals, because we were really hoping that the public would connect with them on a personal level. So you’re moving past the really harrowing statistics of the slave trade and the reality of the trade and focusing on the individuals that were affected by this, that survived this – and their families, their descendants who still live in Newport today. So we’re really hoping to draw this thread through this incredible history.
Hernandez: Again, I’ve been speaking with Rebecca Bertrand, the museum’s executive director, and Kaela Bleho, the digital access manager and one of the co-curators of this exhibit. Learn more online at the public’s radio dot org. Rebecca, Kaela, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Behlo: Thank you.
Bertrand: Thank you for having us.
Click here to learn more about “A Name, A Voice, A Life: The Black Newporters of the 17th-19th Centuries.”
Exhibition co-curators Zoe Hume and Kaela Bleho Credit: Madison van Wylen / Courtesy of Newport Historical Society
J. Mamana on Bandcamp and at JMamana.net
J. Mamana: Well, yeah, I lost my childhood best friend, and my college best friend. People I was really close with at the time. And, I think the first record I made, I was just out of college. I was full of like, you know, political, vengeful feelings and a sense that I needed to uncover some great network of references, and I was interested in these accreted layers of history. And then I think these things happen in your life and you start to have to face yourself more and it becomes difficult to just look at the political situation or read your esoteric history books and and find answers that make you feel okay. So, I felt like I had to explore myself, which was something I was very disinterested in doing initially. Actually, I thought it was kind of silly. The idea that you would make a pop record or a rock record and pretend that you were doing something authentically yourself.
So I felt like, oh, I’m not feeling very good, I really want to deal with this stuff, you know. And I talked to the therapist and I’m not feeling better yet, and so I was like, well, maybe I’ll just, like, write a song about how sad I am, and then I would be like, what? I’m going to write a song, I’m going to write a song about how sad I am?
Is that, isn’t that what they’re all supposed to be or whatever? And so I started kind of building these layers of, I don’t know, second order meaning around what would it mean for me to make an album about myself? What would it mean to turn inward? And I still don’t have the language really to talk about it, but that was the idea.
https://youtu.be/2kXNoxQ8iNsMusic Video for “Hope Saved July” the first single from J. Mamana’s forthcoming album, “For Every Set of Eyes”James Baumgartner: That brings to mind one of the songs on your album, Hope Saved July, and you sing about pain. You say, “it’s so profane, surely no one else in the world has felt this kind of pain.” Can you say a little bit more about that?
Mamana: Absolutely. That is, you know, what we in the biz call a joke. Well, I thought it was funny, the way that when something happens to you that feels so monumental, you’re like, oh my god, I can’t even believe how bad this feels to miss this person or to have lost this. And then you think for a little bit and you’re like, well, this is, everybody has this experience. Death is this universal thing. It’s guaranteed. I think there’s just, I wanted to represent that experience of being like, no one’s ever felt as bad as I have, but of course, everybody has felt that bad. That’s what that line is about, I think.
[Music: Hope Saved July]
Baumgartner: Let’s go back to the music for a second. The album opens very boldly to my ears with “Genius or Apostle.” It opens with a fugue for string quartet.
[Music: Genius or Apostle]
And to my ears, that string quartet has some hints of Bartok, maybe some hints of Shostakovich. And then it resolves as the piano enters and I’m thinking what is this? Oh, this really sounds very familiar to me. I know this song. There’s something here that really reminds me. What was that?
Mamana: Yeah, so the melody you’re referencing is a melody that is foundational for me. It’s from the slow movement of the Beethoven Pathétique Piano Sonata, his 8th Piano Sonata. [Music: Beethoven: 8th Piano Sonata, 2nd Movement] It is a fugue. It’s one of the first, I’m not like a fugue master, but I always wanted to write a fugue. I thought it’d be kind of crazy to open with a fugue. If you’re writing for string quartet, you’ll have two violins, a viola, and a cello. And you’ll have four versions basically of the same melody. And those four melodies in that fugue were written around that Beethoven melody. Like, in absence. So I was trying to create the sense that you were experiencing that Beethoven melody, but the melody wasn’t there. And in some sense, that melody being very, very personally important to me, I love Beethoven, he’s kind of my, one of my favorite guys.
After my friend Mark passed away, obviously I didn’t know he was going to pass away, I was driving down to New York to see him the day before he died, or I found out he died. And two days later, I had tickets to go see Beethoven’s Opus 131 String Quartet number 14. And, yeah, I just found it to be, I don’t know, extremely moving and important that I was able to experience this music in that period of time, and I felt like the record should open with an homage to this person, my friend, through the experience that I had of this music.
J. Mamana’s latest album deals with themes of loss, grief and hope. Credit: Wyatt Winborne / Courtesy of J. Mamana[Music: Genius or Apostle]
Baumgartner: And one of the key moments in Genius or Apostle is: “as he appears…” Who is he?
Mamana: You like to leave things open ended, but I was always imagining him as like the singer, the performer. There’s a lot of confusion, amongst artists, amongst listeners, critics, whatever, about who’s singing to you. Who’s the singer? Is it, when David Bowie sings to you, is it Ziggy Stardust? Is it Davey Jones? Or is it David Bowie? Who knows who it is. And so I think that because the album, “For Every Set of Eyes,” was meant to be an exploration of myself, I felt like I needed to open by creating the character of myself.
“He appears before you.” Who is he? What does he want? He’s gonna sing at you. He’s gonna do all these demagogic tricks to like, make his sadness will be your sadness all of a sudden. And I feel like pop music has a weird way of that. I think of like Plastic Ono Band, the John Lennon album or something, these albums where people are like really sad and they’re supposed to be being primal and authentic. I’m just like, suddenly John Lennon’s mom being dead is like my sadness. I’m experiencing it and it’s him communicating his specific sadness, but also it’s run through the mythology of John Lennon and the strange cultural detritus through which I’m able to access this guy. I never met him. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know what he was really feeling. So all that felt, Genius or Apostle for me is like a stage setting moment. Here’s the singer. Here’s what he’s going to do. Like, should we trust this guy? I don’t know.
Baumgartner: J. Mamana, thanks so much for talking with us today.
Mamana: Thanks for having me.
Baumgartner: J. Mamana’s second album, “For Every Set of Eyes” will come out on August 23rd via Holy Family, but the first single is out today on Bandcamp and streaming platforms, it’s called “Hope Saved July.” Mamana played a couple of songs for us when he visited the studio including “Hope Saved July,” and “Peace on Earth.” He will be one of the special guests at a show at the Columbus Theatre on June 8th featuring Museum Legs and Noah B. Harley.
The first time I walked into the Providence Athenaeum, I was taken aback by its grandeur. It looks like a classical Greek temple on the outside, with a high ceiling inside that reveals what appears to be endless rows of books.
“When people first walk up the granite staircase into the temple, they usually just stand in awe of everything that they see around them,” said Kate Wodehouse, director of collections and library services at the Athenaeum. “The books that line from floor to the ceiling, and the artwork. And it’s just a magnificent scene, and it contrasts with the exterior of the building, which can be sort of cold and austere. But it’s a really warm, welcoming place, and like nearly everyone says to us that comes in, it’s what a library should look like.”
The Providence Athenaeum sits at the corner of Benefit and College streets in Providence, Rhode Island. Credit: Cat Laine / Courtesy of the Providence AthenaeumAll around the place, often hiding in plain sight, are fascinating pieces of art and history. I asked Wodehouse to show me some of the artwork and books in their special collections. We started upstairs with a tiny painting that’s just three-and-a-half by five-and-a-half inches.
“It’s a tiny little sliver of ivory, and hand painted with watercolor,” she said. “It’s painted by Edward Malbone, who was a well known Newport artist, and he painted it in 1801.”
It’s called “The Hours” and it depicts three women in delicate robes with curled hair. Edward Malbone died young of tuberculosis, and his sister tried to sell the painting to the Athenaeum for $1200. But the library couldn’t afford it.
“The Hours” by Edward Malbone. Watercolor on ivory. Credit: Karen Philippi / Courtesy of the Providence Athenaeum“A young teenage daughter of one of the board members overheard her father speaking about this, and her name was Eliza Patton,” Wodehouse told me. “And she decided that she would take it upon herself to raise the money to acquire the painting, because she wanted it to come here to Providence and be in the Athenaeum. So her father sort of laughed at her but she was dogged and determined, and she took the painting, carried it in a little green felt bag, and went door to door around Providence collecting money. Her mother said, ‘if you manage to collect $1000, I will contribute the last $200,’ which she did. And the painting came to us in 1854 and has been in this elaborate walnut carved case ever since.”
Next, Wodehouse took me to a small room, bathed in natural light, with shelves of books and several portraits. Two of the portraits are of Edgar Allen Poe, one of the more famous people known to have visited the library.
“He was here in 1848, courting a local poet by the name of Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived down on Benefit Street,” Wodehouse said. “So you can see her portrait up on the wall here. She is wearing a bonnet with pink ribbons streaming down, and that was a portrait taken about ten years before they met.”
While Poe was attempting to woo Sarah Helen Whitman, they would meet at the Athenaeum.
“And on one of those occasions, Sarah Helen Whitman took a book from the shelf. It was a journal called American Whig Review. And she turned to a page, a poem called ‘Ulalume,’ a ballad, and she asked Poe if he knew who had written it because it was published anonymously. And he said he indeed had been the author of it, and he signed his name at the bottom of the page, Edgar A. Poe,” Wodehouse said. “And we know this because she recounts this story many years later to one of Poe’s biographers. And, in doing so, she says she went back to the library to look for the volume, and there it was, almost 24 years later, still on the shelf. And at that point, we took it off the circulating shelves and moved it down to a more secure area, but it’s still here today.”
The Art Room at the Providence Athenaeum features several portraits, including mirror images of poet Edgar Allan Poe and a taxidermy raven. Credit: Cat Laine / Courtesy of the Providence AthenaeumBut romantic encounters over poetry at the library were not enough for Poe to capture her heart.
“I should tell you that they were briefly engaged to be married, but the stipulation from Sarah Helen Whitman was that he abstain from alcohol,” Wodehouse said. “But alas, that was not to be.”
We headed down to the lower level to see the special collections room. As you walk in, there’s a gigantic cabinet decorated in the style of Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was made to hold “The Description of Egypt,” a 25 volume work from the early 19th century created by French scholars during Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt. It’s one of the treasures of the Athenaeum’s rare book collection. Another is a collection of poetry, biographies and criticism of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. There’s also a first edition of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”
“Because our readers are very active, many of our first editions like ‘Moby Dick’ from 1851 is in a bit of a shambles, I would say,” Wodehouse said. “But that’s part of the charm of our circulating collection, because we were buying things at the time that they were being published and they were popular, and they circulated because we are a reader’s library first and foremost.”
Kate Wodehouse shows James Baumgartner the Egyptian cabinet built for holding “The Description of Egypt,” a 25-volume set of folio with details from France’s survey of Egypt in the early 19th century. Credit: Luis Hernandez / The Public's RadioI asked Wodehouse if she has a favorite item in the special collections.
“My favorite item in the collection is Albertus Seba’s ‘Cabinet of [Natural] Curiosities,’ which is a four-volume set that was donated in the early 20th century,” she said “They are large folio, red Morocco leather-bound books with gilt, and they represent an apothecary’s collection of natural specimens that he collected, and it was produced between 1730 and 1760. And they’re beautifully illustrated copper plate engravings, and then all hand colored. And they’re really whimsical, artistic, and that has been my top thing that we have down here.”
Albertus Seba was an apothecary and a gentleman scholar, and in the fashion of the day he had collected many rare plants and taxidermy animals from all over the world. This was his “cabinet of curiosities.” The books were his way of showing off his collection.
Title page of Albertus Seba’s “Cabinet of Curiosities.” Credit: Luis Hernandez / The Public's Radio“So here, inside, this one has mostly flora and fauna,” Wodehouse told me. “It’s not a natural scene, but I think they are spectacular. And they’re so colorful, and they’re known more for the arrangement of the objects on the page than they are for sort of scientific integrity.”
There are pictures of animals from all over the world, but many of them don’t look quite right. The monkeys have very pinched faces. There’s some sort of marsupial that has a long, rat-like tail. And then there are some animals that were completely fabricated.
“This is the seven-headed hydra. So this was meant to sort of awe people about the amazing things that Seba had collected, but it is a fraud, of course,” Wodehouse said. “And an item like this was sold by someone – I can’t remember exactly where off the top of my head – but it’s parts of different animals stitched together. And it’s the kind of thing that, you know, you would marvel at, at the time.”
Reproductions of “The Cabinet of Curiosities” are now on display. You can find more information at ProvidenceAthenaeum.org.
The 7-headed hydra in Albertus Seba’s “Cabinet of Curiosities.” Credit: Luis Hernandez / The Public's Radio
Sam Shorr and Willy DeConto are the two brains behind Gif-o-Graf, a device for making short stop-motion animations. I met with Sam and Willy at their studio/workshop in downtown Pawtucket and before I could even ask a question, Sam wanted me to try out the machine.
Shorr: So this is the Gif-O-Graf. It’s basically a stop motion animation machine that uses cut paper as its medium. Have you ever made an animation before?
James Baumgartner: No.
Shorr: Okay, do you know what stop motion is?
Baumgartner: Yeah.
Shorr: Okay, so we chose this form really because it’s the simplest…
NARR: The Gif-O-Graf is a sleek black metal device, with three panels in a squared off C-shape about the size of a laptop. It has a stage where you move your paper around to animate it and a screen where you can review your work. Sam showed me how to put paper on the stage and take a picture. Then I moved the paper a little and took another picture. I repeated the process a few more times.
Shorr: And you just hit save and then that sends it up via the WiFi and then you can download it on your phone.
NARR: A QR code popped up on the screen, I aimed my phone at it, and just like that, I had a little 5 second animation on my phone. The whole process was simple and intuitive and took about 2 minutes.
Credit: James Baumgartner / The Public's RadioNeil Letendre: Any level of student at any grade level could get on a Gif-o-graf.
NARR: That’s Neil Letendre, a STEAM teacher at Winters Elementary School in Pawtucket.
Neil Letendre: And like you said, within minutes create, you know, it’s a very simple learning curve, very few buttons, you know, not a lot to not to learn.
NARR: Sam and Willy are leading an after-school program in Letendre’s classroom. He has 4 Gif-o-grafs and his students use them for group projects in his class to combine art and science. Today, each machine has 3 students using it together to make a short animation.
Neil Letendre: I love that it brings out so much creativity from the students. Students that you wouldn’t necessarily think had that in them. They get on those machines and the ideas just burst out of them.
Credit: courtesy Gif-O-GrafNARR: The simplicity of the machine has a lot to do with unlocking that creativity. There are just five buttons and a knob, and I only used two of the buttons when I made my animation.
NARR: Maria SanMartino-Clinton is the principal at Winters Elementary. She dropped by the class to talk to me even though she had lost her voice the previous day.
Maria SanMartino-Clinton: The level of engagement is amazing. When you see the kids working collaboratively together in groups, sharing ideas, they’re engaged and they just, they love to hear from one another to get more ideas and expand upon what they’ve already started on.
NARR: The Gif-O-Graf is the result of a collaboration that goes back to middle school. Sam Shorr and Willy DeConto grew up in the North Shore suburbs of Boston. They became friends in art class. Here’s Willy:
Willy DeConto: Making things like, I remember like learning how to make stencils was like a really, you know, monumental thing. And then after the stencils, screen printing, and then the screen printing.
NARR: They had a screen printing business together for a while. It didn’t work out but they did learn from it.
DeConto: We were into doing the screen printing and the process and the art making, but then through making it into a business, then we had to expand and learn new tools, like photography or doing web design or digital design. So it all sort of like, built off of that.
NARR: They also gained an appreciation for building a physical product and bringing it into the world. In 2020, Willy was working in product design for a company in Boston. When COVID hit, Willy’s flexible schedule meant he could work out of a studio space he shared with Sam.
DeConto: I’d be working in PowerPoint or something and Sam would be like making animations. So I sort of got sucked into it.
Baumgartner: Did it look like more fun?
DeConto: Yeah. I mean, I can’t, you know, I don’t want to say it wasn’t fun when I was doing, but yeah, definitely. I think making animations looks super fun, which was one bit. And then. The opportunity to be like making a tool versus just making something with a tool was like, yeah, you know, super enticing.
NARR: They went through a few prototypes and worked with a display manufacturer and a software designer, finally creating the sturdy, simple machine you can see today. The components come from a few different places, but the final assembly takes place in their Pawtucket workshop. The physicality of the Gif-O-Graf is a big part of its appeal. But the curriculum is just as important, Sam says.
Students at Winters Elementary in Pawtucket, R.I. work together on a Gif-O-Graf Credit: James Baumgartner / The Public's RadioShorr: Being able to transform the classroom, any classroom, Is a really powerful thing, you know So you literally turn the lights off, you bring Gif-O-Graf in, you put on some music put on a video and now all of a sudden it’s like a movie making studio. It’s like a very powerful thing to be able to take a piece of equipment or an intention and transform a space.
NARR: They initially thought they might get schools to use the Gif-O-Graf for after-school programs, but now they see teachers using it for many different lessons.
Shorr: And I think now that we’re 100 percent going for like, this should be part of your curriculum. And unless, our curriculum too is not trying to say like, we’re going to increase your math standards, you know. we’re really trying to say like, you’re in math class and you need ways to get your kids engaged. You need kids to have fun. They need to work together. This is a visualization tool that you can now integrate into your flow, and have something that gets the kids energized.
NARR: And the kids at Winters Elementary in Pawtucket were certainly energized. In the class I visited, the students used a madlib to write a 5-sentence story about going to the beach. They made a quick storyboard and then they were cutting out paper to make their animations. It’s like a glue-stick and construction paper project brought to life. Willy and Sam anticipated only getting through the first two steps, but the kids worked faster than they’d thought.
Shorr: We didn’t even think they were going to animate today. That was our plan. So, I think that’s something that you see with Gif-O-Graf. Especially because they’re working in a group. Like Adam, he doesn’t really make much of the artwork. But then he’s a great animator and he’s waiting to make sure he gets to animate. So I think they separate their jobs and they know they can share the responsibility.
Students line up their paper drawings on a Gif-O-Graf as part of the animation process. Credit: James Baumgartner / The Public's RadioNARR: Adam, a 4th-grader, describes it this way:
Adam: I usually make stuff bounce and make it go fast. And when I first started it looked like, it looked very weird. But now my editing looks a lot smoother than it was before. I like challenging myself. Because it just feels like something new and it feels like a challenge. And once I complete that challenge, I feel great.
NARR: Winters Elementary plans to buy 4 more Gif-O-Grafs for the next school year so more students can use the machines. There are Gif-O-Grafs in public libraries in Providence, Pawtucket and Cambridge that anyone can use. Sam Shorr and Willy DeConto are working with artists and teachers to expand the curriculum. They hope to make 60 machines this year and Sam says they have big dreams for the future.
Shorr: Our goal is every school and library in the country. I think we, it just from like an idea that like this could fit anywhere. and we really feel that it’s important and we’re excited about it. And we, and the feedback we get from certainly from kids and from teachers is that it’s a valuable thing. And so we want to, you know, from a mission, put it in as many places we can.
NARR: Sam Says it’s not easy these days to get kids off their phones and using their hands. But he hopes the Gif-O-Graf can help teachers bridge that gap.
There’s a new exhibit at the Gelman Gallery at the Rhode Island School of Design and the opening last month was packed with the exhibiting artists, their family and friends. A young artist named Ylsanita has a digital print in the show that uses augmented reality so viewers can see an animated version on their phones. It features a child playing with a toy dirt bike that is leaping over dump trucks and bulldozers.
“When I was a kid I was always enamored by bike culture and seeing people on bikes,” she said. “Whether it be dirt bikes or BMX bikes, and I always wanted to ride it, you know?” But she says the city’s policies of destroying dirt bikes get in the way of that. “So what I wanted to illustrate is that no matter what, the culture, it’s always going to emerge and it’s always going to continue on.”
Left: “White Flight/Black Swan Paradox” by Kahlil McKnight. Right: “We Gone Smile Through It” by YLSANITA Credit: James Baumgartner / The Public's RadioThe RISD Black Biennial features the work of 68 artists who are either connected to RISD or the greater Providence area and are from the African diaspora.
Chris Roberts is a professor at RISD teaching experimental foundation studies as well as history and theory. “For a lot of the Black students, for them to have an opportunity to contribute to a legacy – and for a school that oftentimes hasn’t always been most inviting and most inclusive of Black students – to have a really sort of student-driven effort that can be actually part of the school and fabric of the school and the students can look forward to” is important, he said. “I think it’s really important for them to see themselves as contributing to the history of the place, and not always sort of having to go against it or be an adversary, but that their energies can actually help improve and make the place better.”
The crowd at the opening event for the 2024 RISD Black Biennial Credit: J. Susie HwangThe show is curated by two RISD students, Amadi Williams and Isaiah Raines. I met with Raines, who goes by Prophet, in the gallery a few days after the opening. He told me about the show’s theme, “Sonder” – a relatively new word that means “the realization that everyone, including strangers, has a life as complex as one’s own.” Prophet said the show is organized into five sections about how sonder is inspired in the viewer: philosophy, culture community, family, and self
One of the first works you see when you enter the gallery is a black and white photograph of a man standing outside a brick building with a cigarette in his hand. It’s by Raheem A.B. a photography student in his third year at RISD. “I try to develop ways that I guess kind of supersede what we expect with portraiture, usually of people that are of ethnic communities like Black people,” he said. “So kind of this entire exhibition being about the idea of sonder, and kind of stepping into someone else’s lives and also their subject position.”
“Jerry, 2023” by Raheem A.B. Credit: James Baumgartner / The Public's RadioProphet said he made an effort to include as many local residents as possible. “We did an open call where we posted on Instagram, we posted up posters around Providence, just being like, ‘scan this QR, we’re accepting everybody’s art,’” he explained. “‘Submit if you’re Black and from the general Providence area,’ whether that be Fall River, whether it be up towards Boston and whether it be a little bit into Connecticut, just the area.”
Prophet grew up in the Providence area and now lives in Fall River. He said that, even though he grew up not far from RISD, it never felt accessible, comparing it to a castle on the hill in the clouds. “They have all these resources and they hoard them here, and you’re not allowed to access them if you’re not from RISD, if you’re not coming in through RISD,” he said. “And I think that it’s pretty detestable that RISD does that, but still expects students to go off the hill into Providence and take resources from Providence as well as eat off the resources here at RISD while claiming they don’t have resources, you know what I mean?”
“I just wanna dloh rouy dnah” by Kailyn Bryant Credit: James Baumgartner / The Public's RadioPhotography student Raheem also grew up in Providence. “Coming here from field trips, taking visits for after-school programs, you kind of get a feeling that, even though this place is in your backyard, for many of us in Providence it kind of still feels unreachable in a way,” he said. “It’s a strange feeling to actually get here because the perception is that this is going to be all fine and dandy, but there’s still always work to do. It’s really work not only to inspire others, I guess, and also show them that there’s a way to find your way in these bigger places, but to also show them that this is just one of many avenues you can go to, and that there’s always work to be done out there, especially for people like us.”
The curators for the 2024 RISD Black Biennial. Left: Amadi Williams. Right: Isaiah “Prophet” Raines Credit: Simone SolondzIf you’re a casual visitor to the RISD Museum, you might miss the show. The museum is an amalgamation of a few different buildings and it can be a bit of a maze to get around. The Gelman Student Exhibitions Gallery is part of the Chace Center, the newest building in the museum – but it seems like the gallery was designed to be separate. You can only get to it from an elevator or from a set of stairs in the North Main Street entrance. “We can’t call it the RISD Museum,” Prophet explained. “I can’t say that the second Black Biennial was in the RISD Museum. It’s just in the building that the museum happens to be in.”
The crowd at the opening event for the 2024 RISD Black Biennial Credit: J. Susie HwangProphet said this year’s Biennial only had a fraction of the funding that the first one had two years ago, and he feels like the school isn’t supporting it as much as they should. “There’s people within the institution that are actually about the show and about the community. And I do want to commend all of them,” he added. “But I want to make sure that that credit doesn’t go to RISD as a whole or RISD as an institution. It’s very much the work of these individuals within the institution doing work despite the institution to support us, that the institution likes to try to take claim for that. I feel like it’s just dirty. It’s wrong. It don’t feel right.”
Despite that lack of support, the curators have put together an impressive exhibition showcasing the work of Black artists from across the region. One last piece I want to highlight is on the far wall of the gallery as you enter the space. It’s called “The Abundant State of Things” by Boluwatife Oyediran. Prophet says it’s about “the immigrant experience and interacting with a culture that’s so different and feeling like an outlier.” A man is sitting casually on a couch. The background and his clothing are very dark, but his skin tones are rendered in blues and glowing whites, as if he’s the negative of a photograph, while bright points of yellow paint are scattered around him like an energy field. It’s painted in oil and acrylic, but it looks electric.
“I don’t have this experience,” Prophet said of the piece. “I’m not an immigrant. but I felt like I could understand, like I can understand what he was talking about on a more personal level than if somebody were to just tell me, and I feel like that’s what the show is about. That’s that sonder.”
The idea of “sonder” – the idea that everyone’s life is as complex as your own – comes through as you view the works and think about what it’s like to be a part of, but still feel separate from, a larger institution.
You can see the RISD Black Biennial through June 2.
“The Abundant State of Things” by Boluwatife Oyediran Credit: James Baumgartner / The Public's Radio
Join us for a conversation with author Brad Gooch at the Jamestown Art Center on Saturday, May 4th at 4:00 PM.
TRANSCRIPTHernandez: What’s your first experience with Keith’s art? Where did you first see a Keith Haring piece?
Gooch: Well, I was around at the same time. I mean, I’ve been saying that I sort of Forest Gumped myself into this biography since Keith came to New York in 1978. He was living in the East village, mainly at First Avenue and First Street. I was at Bleeker and Bowery at that time. And so, so it intersects. I mean, at first with his work, the first thing I remember, that’s what you’re asking, was walking from the West village to the East Village with my lover, Howard Bruckner, and on the street corners stamped in graphite at every corner, was this sign that said, “Clones Go Home.”
Then I began seeing barking dogs, crawling babies, especially on a newsstand in Soho, either Prince Street or Spring. And all this is anonymous. So that’s what added to the mystery and interest of it. And then Keith Haring begins this project in chalk, drawing on these black matte rectangles in the subways, which is where advertisements would go. But between the Smirnoff ad and the next ad for “Oh! Calcutta!”, there might be a week or two of fallow time. So he would draw on this and then they would be covered over. So they were kind of impermanent drawings. This project went on for like five years. He did about 5,000 of these, which is one of the largest public art projects ever completed.
And so if you were going to the subway, there are millions of people in the subway. Not all of them paid attention to these ads, but lots of people did, and especially downtown. And for a while, then again, it was still a mystery and anonymous. There was a piece in the New York Post that called him Chalk Man. So this added to the aura of Keith Haring before there was a Keith Haring.
Hernandez: You have this beautiful book that you’re describing his life, but if you were to describe to the novice in just a couple of sentences, two or three sentences, who is Keith Haring? How do you describe him?
Gooch: Keith Haring was someone whose mission, I would say, was art for everybody. And so he devoted this kind of tenure. career, starting with drawings in the subway, but at the same time that he was making work that would show in galleries and museums, he was doing popular work. He started a pop shop. And now we all know these, even if we don’t know the name Keith Haring still, or much about his life, we recognize these kind of buoyant jumping around figures and these barking dogs and crawling babies. So he made a language. And then shared it with the world in all these different media.
Hernandez: As you said, you were experiencing as you go through the subways, as he was developing his style and really starting to, build himself up as an artist was in the subways and through the work he did paint, you know, drawing and painting and chalk on ads. But at what point did that all of a sudden become mainstream?
Gooch: Well, yeah, he becomes an art star. And I think by doing these subway drawings, he also does a sort of end run around the art world at the time. Someone who I interviewed, Diego Cortes, who was a curator at the time, said to me that the art world of the 70s that they came into, was like white people in white rooms drinking white wine. Keith expanded this greatly and so he didn’t need to go around to galleries and dealers with his slides to find an art gallery. He already had this whole following underground. So he does his first show at Tony Shifrazi gallery and he’s 24 years old. The opening of the show is carried on the NBC or CBS, sorry, Evening News with Dan Rather with Charles Osgood narrating the story about this 24 year old kid from Kutztown, Pennsylvania. And so there were hundreds of people at this opening. And it was very different from the usual opening.
Hernandez: What happened to him emotionally when he was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, and shortly after that with AIDS?
Gooch: well his first reaction, I mean he goes down to the East River and cries. I mean he has a, obviously, even though he’s been expecting such a diagnosis because people are falling to the left and right of him at that time. You know, it’s still a shock and he’s still initially sad about this and overcome emotionally about this, but very quickly, turns it around, and his response to AIDS becomes, was very different for the, in certain ways, for the times.
I mean, he decided to do an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, which was like a rock star move, and come out publicly as a PWA, a Person With AIDS. And this was at the time that Rock Hudson was dying of AIDS and refusing to admit it, where Donald Trump’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, practically came back from the grave to say that he had had pneumonia. so everyone is in denial. Obituaries at the time usually gave the cause of death as pneumonia and people didn’t seem to have personal lives. Haring very much becomes an activist immediately, in his work and his paintings are suddenly about silence equals death and he’s involved with ACT UP, an important protest activist organization about AIDS at the time.
And also in terms of his work, he doesn’t wither away, instead he sort of revs everything up and he does more and more and more work. And he’s working until the last few weeks of his life and doing large pieces. He did a big mural on the side of a church in Pisa, His last major work he does at Yoko Ono’s apartment is a triptych of the Last Judgment, which you can see in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in San Francisco and a cathedral in Paris. So he’s really working up to the end and traveling. So very aware of death and taking this proactive stance.
Hernandez: Was there anything that surprised you as you were researching and putting this book together and digging into his life.
Gooch: I would often in the first couple of years of writing this, I was asked by people, “So what did you find out that nobody knows about Keith Haring?” And I would say, what a serious artist he was, you know, which often led to disappointed looks from people, but it was. Well, you know, and following the line of him putting himself together as an artist and then tunneling through his life, creating so much work constantly. I mean, he just had an extraordinary work ethic and was, you know, very serious about his work and you now can see it when you look at these Haring works in museums. They still speak and they have a kind of freshness and you can see all these influences that he was constantly sponging up that go into the work.
Hernandez: What do you want people to take away from this book and how they view Keith Haring?
Gooch: Well, I think that, what I also sort of discovered along the way was that everyone can recognize a Keith Haring work. Not everyone knows they’re by Keith Haring. I mean, he’s so much part of the atmosphere of our life. And also people didn’t know that much about his life. Haring actually was sort of a private person and a bit detached. I mean, he wasn’t exactly like his jumping around figures. So the way in which someone, an artist actually lives, and in his case, how he overcame so many obstacles to get his work out there and how much he cared about it, And how he brought this kind of activism into it. All that is actually inspiring. And it seems very much of our times also. I sometimes think Haring’s work makes more sense now than it did when we first saw it in the 1980s.
Hernandez: Brad Gooch is a New York Times best selling writer and the author of the new biography, Radiant, The Life and Line of Keith Haring. Brad, it’s been such a fun time reading the book and getting to know an artist that I’ve known about. I’ve known his work, but I didn’t know anything about him, and I’ve learned something. I really appreciate it.
Gooch: Oh, great. It was great talking to you, Luis. Thanks.
Hernandez: And if you’d like to hear more, I’m going to have a longer conversation with Brad Gooch at the Jamestown Arts Center, Saturday, May 4th, at 4 p. m.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Transcript:[music: Gian Carlo Buscaglia performing “El Cumbanchero” by Rafael Hernández]
Mareva Lindo: Gian Carlo Buscaglia has something he wants to clear up.
Gian Carlo Buscaglia: My very Italian name, Gian Carlo Buscaglia – I’m from Puerto Rico, from the future republic of Puerto Rico. I am not from Rome, or Venezia, but I’m from Puerto Rico. And I’m a singer, I’m a composer and a little bit of a clown.
Lindo: His songs, which are all in Spanish, span the breadth of the Latin American diaspora, from Puerto Rico to Argentina, and they range from songs of romance to the social justice songs of the Nueva Canción or New Song Movement that started in South America in the 1950s.
Buscaglia: This is from the 50s, beginning in the late 50s, early 60s, very similar to what was going on around the world as far as the Vietnam War, the more progressive lyrics, with more of a social content, having to do a bit less with romance. And romance of course is there, and poetry, but having to do with the social issues that were going on around that time.
Lindo: He said the music he plays reflects what he grew up listening to with his family in Puerto Rico. But Buscaglia didn’t start performing until he came to the U.S.
Buscaglia: I came to the States in ‘79 when I was 12, and by the time I got to high school – I was in the suburbs of Massachusetts and I graduated from Bedford High School in ‘84 – at that time I was playing a little, I had two or three chords. I got accepted to BU, but at the same time that I was at Boston University for animation, not necessarily music, but in the still in the creative world, I started playing in the streets of Harvard Square. I was 18, 19 around that time, and I dropped out of BU because I saw “well maybe this reaches my heart,” you know, even though I was not by far professional, or I had a few chords and that was it. But the Muses were there, the inspiration was there. So since ‘84, ‘85, around that early age, I started playing music in Harvard Square.
Lindo: You were a troubadour.
Buscaglia: A troubadour for sure. And those times were beautiful in Harvard Square, very bohemian, a lot of jugglers, clowns, different musicians, Tracy Chapman. Tracy Chapman, as you know, was around that time playing in the streets of Harvard Square. So it was a very magical time.
[music: Gian Carlo Buscaglia performing “Madrigal”]
Lindo: Forty years later, and now in Rhode Island, Buscaglia plays a lot of gigs at restaurants and weddings. Every Thursday through Sunday he can be found serenading patrons at Los Andes restaurant in Providence. But in the summer, Buscaglia likes to get back to his roots. He said playing along the city’s pedestrian bridge reminds him of his early years busking in Harvard Square.
Buscaglia: Because there’s enough people walking around. There’s enough people who appreciate the music and a lovely afternoon. And it reminds me of those times that – if I go to Harvard Square and play in Harvard Square these days, it wouldn’t come close to what I have found, luckily enough, at the pedestrian bridge. It’s just very nice. … It’s a beautiful place to play, a lot of traffic of people, people drop by from all cultures, and it’s a lot of dogs. I know most of the names of most of the dogs, as well. … It lends itself to play the romantic boleros that I play as the sun is coming down on the bridge. It’s just beautiful.
[music: Gian Carlo Buscaglia performing “Verde Luz” by Antonio Cabán Vale aka El Topo]
Transcript:This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: How are you teaching AI in an art class, in an art school?
Griffin Smith: We have a once a week studio course from 1 to 6 p.m. And that’s the same model, if you were an oil painter or a glass blower and in a traditional setting, you fill up all that time with the materials, you let the glass cool, you make things for hours and hours with a studio class, with these kinds of tools. You’re really retrofitting it for what feel like brand new questions. You know, how is it going to be my art if I make a thousand of these in a day. Photographers ask that question. Printmakers and ceramics artists ask that question. There’s a rich history of how artists deal with automation or transformation like digital tools.
So one thing that I think is a real gift of the tech is when my students ask questions that they think are very new within the past two or three years. We can couch those questions in art history. We can compare it to what the camera did to the photography majors on campus. We can compare it to how the internet disrupted art sort of in general. So even though it’s a studio course, we make stuff, and the questions that we ask end up sort of being art historical questions.
An example of AI-generated art created by RISD lecturer Griffin Smith for his class. Credit: Griffin SmithHernandez: It seems to me [that] out in the world, a big question people have is, “How is AI going to replace me?” Do students ever ask, “Wait a minute, how is AI going to replace me as an artist?”
Smith: Absolutely. We have senior students who are looking at the job market and saying, “Every job that I am applying to right now has AI in the job description and says we want you to know how to use it.” So we see it day-to-day adjusting for the seniors. And then you have first years at RISD who say, “What is the job market or the art market going to look like in four years’ time when I graduate?” And to have both of them in a class together sharing their concerns, it does really put things into context.
Hernandez: I remember hearing from you the last time we talked, you told me that artists aren’t as worried as designers are worried.
RISD lecturer and digital artist Griffin Smith. Credit: courtesy Griffin SmithSmith: Yeah, there’s a sort of tension on campus because we’re an art and design school, and in some ways artists and designers don’t really have that much in common. An artist, like an oil painting major at RISD, they’re going to be hired because they have a weird point of view, they have an aesthetic that’s all their own, and when culture changes, you know, if there’s a war that breaks out or COVID happens, the fine artists are there to critique it and to make weird stuff and to sort of represent this other voice in culture. And so the artists say, “If AI represents a crisis, I’ll critique it, I’ll make a great oil painting about the machine, and I can sort of do my role in culture. I can critique it as an artist.” My designers say, “Well, all day long, I get stuff from a client who says, turn this into an image, or turn this into a different kind of language.” And they see themselves doing what these AI models do all day long. They get in a text prompt, whether it’s an email or a brief from a client, and they say, “Make this into art.” And that seems like what the AI models do. So it’s a very different question for my designers when they say, “How am I going to be replaced in a practical, professional workflow?” My oil painters aren’t concerned about that.
Hernandez: Tell me one thing that excites you about AI in art.
Smith: The boundaries about who counts as an artist. You certainly don’t need to go to art school to count as an artist, but it used to be you need some kind of technical skill, you need some kind of physical ability to draw or to sculpt, and technology changes who counts as an artist, and who gets to make art. That happened with the camera, and AI is changing the amount of people in the world who think, “I can do art,” and that’s a very exciting prospect.
Hernandez: All right, now tell me one thing that scares you about AI and art.
Smith: Well, the great middle class of the art world is either artists working freelance for small contracts, or designers working in teams of five or ten, and that’s going to disappear. Freelance artists who can get paid ten dollars to make a little doodle aren’t in as high demand anymore because of AI. And a team of 10 designers working on a project together, a team of 2 or 3 people can do the same amount of work if they’re powered by AI. So, we’re gonna see, I fear, a sort of vanishing of a middle class of artists.
An example of AI-generated art created by RISD lecturer Griffin Smith for his class. Credit: Griffin SmithHernandez: What’s your concern moving forward, you know, when it comes to how students will use the technology? But also, again, because we’ve also seen that, in some cases, copyrighted images are being used, or people are claiming that their images and work is being used, because AI doesn’t know the difference.
Smith: One of the big conversations both on campus today and in particular in this two-day conference we had is something called model collapse. Model collapse takes as its central concern this notion that we’re filling up our academic journals, our research papers, and the internet in general with all this stuff written by bots. And even though GPT can write really convincing scientific papers and code and anything you might care to see, when you fill the internet up with all this GPT-generated stuff, you can’t continue over the next couple years and decades to train new AI on these systems because if you look at the whole internet it’s just a bunch of stuff AI wrote anyway. So you’re not getting better data as you keep training on the internet and that is both a practical concern and an ethical constraint, right? If it’s stealing from copyrighted materials and filling up the internet with things we’re not sure if they’re half copyrighted or how they’re protected, the short answer is, the law doesn’t have a clear decision right now, or it doesn’t seem like it will any time soon, on how you can copyright these AI outputs. And so for my artists, they just want to critique the copyright system, comment on what a silly joke copyright is in the first place. Artists like to sort of poke fun at these questions of appropriation and commodification of art. So I think as the internet gets weirder and weirder and more and more full of AI-written stuff – and by the internet, I also mean these research papers and journal articles – we’re going to have a real crisis of privacy and authorship as well. And it’s more than just a legal question. It’s an aesthetic and an artistic question of, well, what do we actually care about? And that’s where artists come in.
Hernandez: Fascinating. And a little bit frightening at the same time. Griffin, I really appreciate all the information and insight.
Smith: Well, thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure.
O&G Studio is known for their modern approach to making furniture inspired by New England historical craft. Over the past 15 years, their work has earned the attention of publications like The New York Times, Architectural Digest, and Vogue. Jonathan Glatt is the studio’s creative director and co-founder. Their factory in Warren is a classic old mill building once used for making zippers and Samsonite luggage. Glatt said he didn’t set out to be a furniture maker, but studied jewelry and metalsmithing in college.
“One summer I applied for an internship at Sotheby’s in New York, hoping to be around metalworks, jewelry, silver, arms and armor,” he said. “I got into the program, but they put me in the American Furniture Department, which I was peripherally interested in, but didn’t really know a whole lot about.”
During that internship, Glatt saw thousands of pieces of antique furniture and learned from the top experts in American furniture history.
“I got to learn a lot about furniture construction and then also a lot about seeing,” he said. “With pieces that are good or great to the casual observer, a lot of times there’s small differences, and the experts were really tuned into these small differences. And it was a real education in how small differences really made a big difference in the final effect.”
After the internship, Glatt returned to jewelry making. He opened a studio in Warren within the same building as Warren Chair Works, a company that specialized in traditional Windsor chairs, a style that began in 18th-century rural England and became popular in colonial America.
“At the time I wasn’t really finding a place where I wanted to be with jewelry and started doing larger metal work, which turned into furniture, which turned into much larger metal work,” he said. “So from, you know, hardware up through architectural metal.”
In 2009, Glatt started O&G Studio along with co-founder Sara Ossana, moving away from jewelry entirely to focus exclusively on furniture – beginning with the Windsor chair.
One of O&G Studio’s Windsor chairs: Aquinnah Side Chair, Bayetta Stain on Ash Credit: courtesy O&G Studio“What makes a Windsor chair unique from other, the typical type of wood chairs is, you have a solid wood seat and everything is attached to the seat. Most chairs, the seat comes last. So the Windsor chair, you have the solid wood seat. It’s carved from a big two-inch-thick board of wood. And then your legs, which are turned,” Glatt said. “And then above the seat, you have very thin spindles that are all put in tension against each other by piercing through steam bend arms, or what we call a bow, which is the big bend part that forms the back of the chair. So there’s a lot going on in a Windsor chair.”
You can find Windsor chairs in Independence Hall in Philadelphia and the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport.
“It’s an amazing design object and a fairly unique one that developed to a really high level in this particular area of New England,” Glatt said. “They combine material knowledge, tools, ergonomics, aesthetics, style. So it was an object that really combined all the things that make for an interesting design problem. … It doesn’t use a lot of material. It doesn’t use a huge diversity of tools. And you build something that is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Jonathan Glatt on the factory floor at O&G Studio Credit: James Baumgartner / The Public's RadioOn the factory floor, each piece of wood is carefully selected to avoid imperfections, and each chair assembled by a highly skilled team. The result is a simple, beautiful piece that looks contemporary yet classic. They’re painted in bright colors and manage to look both delicate and sturdy. Most of the chairs are unadorned, but O&G has made a couple of chairs with a few extra flourishes, like a carved snake along the back, or hands at the ends of the chair’s arms.
“We have one palm that’s open towards the sky and the other a fist that’s wrapped around a small sparrow, and the palm is going to get little freshwater rice pearls and the sparrow has eyes that are two dark little garnets,” Glatt said, describing one of their chairs. “What I love about them is from a distance, it looks like a regular chair. And then as you get close, you realize these little surprises.”
Detail of a Windsor chair from O&G Studio Credit: James Baumgartner / The Public's RadioO&G Studio has gone on to make cabinets, dining tables, beds, sofas and other furniture that match the design aesthetic of their chairs, but the Windsor chair still makes up more than half of their sales. Most of their work is in homes, but you can also see it in local offices, restaurants and places of worship like Touro Synagogue.
“We build these pieces. They’re meant to look good,” Glatt said. “But they’re meant to be, you know, intellectually intelligent, aesthetically beautiful, and they’re built very carefully by people that really take pride in their craft. So I think there’s a lot that you’re getting beyond just something to sit on.”
Gretchen Schermerhorn is the Executive Director of the SGCI – the organization putting on Verified by Proof. We’re also joined by Eddy López and Miguel Aragón, curators for one of the pop-up exhibitions called “Show Me Your Papers / A Ver, Y Tus Papeles.”
TranscriptThis interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: Gretchen, I’m going to start with you. Tell me a little bit about what’s special about printmaking compared to other art forms. Why the focus on this?
Gretchen Schermerhorn: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I don’t know about you guys, Eddy and Miguel, but I spend a lot of time explaining what printmaking is. It’s a haptic physical experience. Sometimes it involves a press. Sometimes you’re doing it by hand, but one of the coolest things, in my opinion, about prints and printmaking is that you have multiples, sometimes called an edition. I grew up as a painter, and I was turned on to printmaking in college, and it was like, oh my gosh, I can trade one with you, I can give one to my family, and so you have these multiple pieces of art that then again you can swap and trade, which makes that really fun.
Hernandez: All right, Eddy, Miguel, I wanted to ask you because you’ve curated one of the pop up exhibitions. It’s called “Show Me Your Papers,” or “Haver Y Tus Papeles,” which will be at the Public Shop and Gallery. Eddy, I’ll start with you. Tell me a little bit about what this exhibit is and what you have there.
Eddy López: The exhibition was born out of interactions with Miguel across different SGCIs, where we’re like, we should collaborate on stuff because, our work kind of deals with certain similar topics. I’m an immigrant from Nicaragua. Miguel is an immigrant from Mexico and we’re both printmakers.
So we’re like, is there a way to put together a show that is of course about printmaking, “show me your papers” is of course about showing printmaking, most printmaking happens on papers. But it’s also about the experience of an immigrant, right? When they hit up against either a border or a customs place where their papers are asked to be shown. Could we use that printmaking as a way to subvert that process? Because for many immigrants, that can be a really arduous process, right? You know, some people don’t have papers to be verified by. I came as an undocumented immigrant, so that idea of using printmaking to wrestle with that process for immigrants who come here I think it for me was key to to do this and Miguel was was a great partner in that,
Miguel Aragón: And for me, reading that title of the exhibition, just immediately because of my immigrant background and also knowing Eddy’s immigrant background, I told him this is like perfect for creating this conversation about immigration. And then we are obviously at a time where immigration is on top of everybody’s head, because everything that’s happening, not only on the Mexican U.S. border, but just basically everywhere in the world where all these people are being displaced and being pushed into other countries and just unknown status essentially. So there was something that really kind of shocked me this past summer when Texas decided to put some really big, large orange buoys on the Rio Grande. And then I started following the story and looking at the pictures of those buoys.
And so I made a piece specifically about that. Where in my piece, the buoy is overtaking most of the composition. It’s almost like a looming sort of sun within the piece. It’s approached in a very graphic way. So there’s very simplified geometric shapes. But basically trying to bring the viewer into an understanding that these things are beautiful in a visual way, but at the same time, they are something that are killing people. Endangering lives, pretty much anybody who could get in contact with those.
Hernandez: I mean, going through some of your work, you look at some very violent moments. And I just wondered like for you, just briefly, what is it you’re trying to get me to feel and see, mostly?
Aragón: I am trying to humanize what is happening to people around the border. And so I’m trying to, for everybody to slow down from the, you know, hectic daily life. And to just understand that just because you are not necessarily connected directly to these people. We are still all humans and we all are still sharing this world and we all want to have the same quality of life and happiness.
Hernandez: Eddy, for you, tell me about one of the pieces you want to, you would like to discuss.
“Pedestrian Entry” by Eddy López, one of the featured works in the pop-up gallery exhibition “Show Me Your Papers / A Ver, Y Tus Papeles” Credit: Eddy LópezLópez: So of my work, the pieces that I’ll have at the exhibition have to do with a series I started about two years ago. My sister shared with me my asylum papers from back in the eighties. And I went through those, I was a kid, so I don’t remember this stuff. And just seeing the language of the “war refugee” and all of the processing and the bureaucratic nature of the papers. I felt like I needed to make work that responded to that. So I have a small artist book there that shows some samples from my book: my papers, my papeles. And then it has photographs juxtaposed of the border as well, and you can open it, close it, the idea of the bureaucracy and the whole apparatus of allowing immigrants into the country.
Hernandez: This is a big topic, the issue of immigration as we’re coming to our election this November, but what do you want people to think about when they see your work on this topic?
López: I mean, I’m going to echo what Miguel said, because he said it beautifully: We’re humans, and a number of immigrants coming to the border are humans in need. And I think that the best thing we can do is respond as human beings and try to find connections there because we share, it’s a shared experience, living on this planet and our humanity. So if we can center that, I think if I can help people center that idea, I think then I think my work would have been, it’s been worth it.
Hernandez: I know there’s a lot going on, Gretchen, but if you could give me the brief rundown of what we can expect for the person going, what they’re going to be able to experience.
Schermerhorn: Yeah, the Open Portfolio, I like to think of it as the best art swap you’ve ever been to, like a swap meet for printmakers. So artists each get one table. They can give away work, they can barter work, they can sell work. I think it’s my favorite part of the conference because you go in there at one o’clock and you see a whole selection of prints and artists and talk to them you come back at three o’clock and you’ll see a totally different selection. but it’s not to be missed. That’s Thursday, April 4th, 12:45 to 5:30 at the convention center. And that’s free and open to the public. But it’s not to be missed. That’s something that’s a big fan favorite of the conference.
Hernandez: Gretchen Schermerhorn is the Executive Director of the SGCI, the organization putting on Verified by Proof. It’s a conference in Providence this week dedicated to the art and practice of printmaking, graphics, and small scale publishing. We also heard from artists Eddy López and Miguel Aragón, the curators for one of the pop up exhibitions. That one is called “Show Me Your Papers / A Ver, Y Tus Papeles.”
Keith McCurdy is the songwriter, singer and guitarist for Vudu Sister, a Providence-based band that includes a rotating cast of other musicians on violin, cello, bass and more. Drawing influence from ghost stories and the macabre, they describe their music as “Gothic Folk.” McCurdy says another big influence on their sound is the 90s “MTV Unplugged” series – in particular, Nirvana’s legendary set.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Transcript:
Keith McCurdy: I was very young. Nirvana was my first, the first band I ever fell in love with. My father was a young guy. He was a bass player. He was very much into the music at the time, and a lot of new wave and post-punk in the 80s. He was a Gen Xer, and he sort of tailored my tastes, if you’ll say. And I’d already really started to like Nirvana, even as a young child, when they were on TV and stuff. And I had the tapes, and a Sony Sport Walkman. When the “Unplugged” [album] came out, it showed me that a heavy band like Nirvana could also strip down and play really intimate, but still manage to be powerful and heavy. And then of course they had a cello in there, and there’s candles, there’s flowers, there’s a sort of gossamer femininity to it. But also there’s this real weight to the music and the aesthetic and everything that really spoke to me and always sort of stayed with me in my mind over the years.
James Baumgartner: You had an EP recently that was in Latin and ancient Greek. That’s a little bit out there. What inspired that decision?
McCurdy: I went back to college, later in life, around 28, 29. And I decided to major in classics as well as English literature. I went to URI, and I had a wonderful mentor, Dr. Daniel Carpenter, that sort of helped guide me with my project. But as soon as I started learning Latin and Greek, the first instinct I had was, well, first let me try to write a poem, and then I’m going to try to write songs in these languages, because I think that would be a wonderful challenge, and it was.
Baumgartner: The album, “Burnt Offerings” – can you tell me about one of the songs in particular, what’s a song that stands out to you?
McCurdy: Well, one that people seem to like too, and it’s one of our favorites to play, is “Credite Mihi.” And it means “Believe Me.” And it’s told from a perspective of this woman, Cassandra, who was very famously known as being this character that was gifted with foresight from the god Apollo. But she was also cursed that she would never be believed. And there’s a lot we can play with that thematically and interpretively, particularly with modern audiences and a lot of, like the #MeToo movement and stuff. Mythically she sort of exists as a conduit of fate or destiny. And that’s a big theme in classical myth about people trying to deny their destiny or avert it or somehow. But yeah, so I’m singing as her in that song, telling her story, her side, as well as I can.
[Music: “Credite Mihi”]
Baumgartner: Where does the interest in the macabre, the darker sounds, the darker themes come from?
McCurdy: Well there’s a lot of areas, there’s a lot of places that comes from, but I think primarily I’m mostly just interested in uncomfortable realities that you have to confront as a human. And I think that there’s always a time and place for these things, but that was the whole point of tragedy in the ancient world. For example, it’s for catharsis, catharsis meaning a purgation or a purification of the soul. And you know, going to the theater, for example, was a religious experience, it wasn’t just entertainment. It was competition, it was entertainment, but it also served as a religious function. So I find something very spiritually cleansing about confronting these realities that, maybe not every single one are you going to experience, but you’re going to experience some of it that’s not going to be comfortable. It’s not going to be pleasant. And I think art is the one of the best ways to deal with some of those things. And, you know, also I love horror movies. I love horror and I love ghost stories. I love Edgar Allan Poe. There’s something sort of darkly romantic about those things. And I try to capture a little bit of that, since I’ll have a song where it’ll sound pretty, but it’s about something very disgusting or macabre or something, you know, like a grave robber’s song or something.
Keith McCurdy Credit: J.P.N.Baumgartner: What stands out to you about the local music scene here?
McCurdy: There’s a lot of diversity in sound, I think. I think people are starting to get better about mixed-genre shows. That’s a big one for me. I don’t think you should just have like, oh, it’s an all-metal night. I think it’s good to have a mix. For example, we play often at the Scurvy Dog’s parking lot shows, which are a lot of fun. They’re free, and Jamie, the owner, does a great job of really mixing it up. And we’ve done great by being sandwiched between two really loud, heavy, dark bands. And then you have us, and you know, we’ve got Diane [O’Connor] on the violin and myself. They’re still heavy songs, they’re just sonically, you know, it’s acoustic. So that’s really worked out well for us, and I think I’d like to see more of that.
Baumgartner: And you have a new album coming out soon?
McCurdy: Yes, most of the songs are pretty much fully finished in terms of writing, but we’re just rehearsing them and we’re gonna be tracking this year. My aim for this album is to be heavier and darker, and I started exploring like a baritone guitar, and I tuned my acoustic guitar a full step down, and we’re exploring different tones. Thematically, though, I did start out with some ideas, but honestly, the last two albums I had done, I consider to be concept albums. “Burnt Offerings,” obviously, it’s got a concept to it. And the other one before it, “Mortis Nervosa,” was loosely inspired by old ghost stories. And speaking of that, I largely depersonalized a lot of my music over the years because I think it can be very taxing to do that over and over and over again. You have this very sensitive material that’s like coming from a very real place, and it can be painful. And there’s something really rewarding about that, but then if you keep doing it over and over again, I think it cheapens the sensitivity of that. So I largely de-personalize a lot of my music. But this is actually the first one where I started to explore that realm again, where some of the songs are actually fairly intimate to my own experiences.
Baumgartner: What are some of the personal experiences that you’re exploring there?
McCurdy: Well, I wrote this one song, I actually wrote it while I was in Sicily a few years ago, called “Having Trouble Sleeping.” And it was like the first song I had written that was really deeply personal for me, and it really deals with themes of finding a new life somewhere else, and finding peace somewhere else, like far away from your own home, and wanting to forget that life and create a new one. So that was something I was dealing with at the time.
[Music: “Having Trouble Sleeping”]
You can see Vudu Sister on March 29 at Long Live Beerworks in Providence and on April 6 at The Upside Bar in Warren. You can find their music at vudusister.bandcamp.com. For The Public’s Radio, I’m James Baumgartner.
“Wolf Play” opens Thursday night at the Wilbury Theatre Group. Written by Hansul Jung, the play is about a 6-year-old boy who was adopted from Korea by a family in Arizona who decide to rehome him after they give birth to a child. The play begins as the child, Wolf, arrives at his new home and meets his new parents, Robin and Ash.
Robin has desperately wanted to be a mother for a while, and she turns to internet message boards. This part of the play is inspired by real-life cases of American parents going to Yahoo and Facebook message boards to privately rehome unwanted children, the majority of which are international adoptees.
Although the original adoptive family call him “Pete Junior,” the child’s Korean name is Jeenu. He’s played by an adult actor controlling a puppet the size of a 6-year-old. Marcel Mascaró is the director for this production at the Wilbury.
“To me, the reason why there’s a puppet in this play is because that’s how people are treating Jeenu,” Mascaró said. “That’s how people are treating this adopted 6-year-old child. A puppet to me is something that we put an image on, that we put our impressions on, and we make in our own image to control them as much as possible.”
The puppet has no facial features, and is covered in matte black fabric tape. Sara States portrays Wolf and controls the Jeenu puppet.
“Jeenu’s very playful, and his limbs move and head moves to respond to people,” States said. “I think the idea is that it’s not like so polished, this puppet. It’s got a sort of rough-around-the-edges look to it and I think that’s the intention here, is that this is just a plaything in a way and it’s not made to resemble a real 6-year-old human child.”
Jeff Ararat as Peter, Sara States as Wolf (background: Teddy Lytle as Ryan) in “Wolf Play” at Wilbury Theatre Group Credit: Erin X. Smithers courtesy Wilbury Theatre GroupDespite the rough and blank nature of the puppet, he’s handled with great emotional dexterity by States as the puppet reacts to the adults who are controlling his life. Shunted from family to family, it’s no surprise that a 6-year-old would take on the characteristics of a wolf, howling, growling and swiping with his paws.
“I think it’s a coping mechanism,” States says. “Something a child might do or a person might do to deal with trauma, or when things are above them or can’t be controlled. Or also just taking on the persona of a wolf, an animal that’s able to survive and adapt to anywhere. It’s all about finding a pack. And I mean, from my experience as an adoptee, finding your pack can be really hard, you know. I’m Korean and I have caucasian parents here in the States. And I went to school in a very white school, a very white town. And so I think finding my pack was something that didn’t happen right away. It’s just a theme that I’m thinking about a lot and like, these aren’t bad people and they do make up a wolf pack of sorts. They’re kind of like outsiders, oddballs themselves.”
While Robin has been hoping for a child for years, her partner Ash is more reluctant, and is disturbed by the idea of finding a child from a shady internet message board in what is not exactly a legal adoption. Ash is a bit of a fictional trope: the tough boxer with the tender soul. But Ash is also non-binary, transmasculine and training to fight a cisgender man for their first professional bout. As States sees it, they’re an outsider like Wolf.
“Ash early on in the play sort of sees through the puppet in a moment and makes direct eye contact with Wolf,” States said. “So I think both characters to me are the most alike, in that they have the most to overcome or the most to, you know, find self or something like this. And so I think they see each other in a way.
Mascaró summarized the play: “For everyone else except Wolf, it’s about broken people desperately searching for their pack in a sea and in a dam of miscommunication. And for Wolf, it’s about a child, lost, searching desperately for his own family, in a whole dam of miscommunication.”
“Wolf Play” runs at The Wilbury Theatre Group March 21 – April 7.
The dining room at Gift Horse is decorated in light wood tones with a large bar in the middle showcasing a selection of raw shellfish on ice. Located in downtown Providence, the restaurant’s menu focuses on raw seafood, custom cocktails and a selection of Korean-inspired dishes like a Bulgogi Burger and Pajeon.
I met chef Sky Kim in the dining room on a recent afternoon, where she told me she draws much of her inspiration as a cook from her upbringing in Korea.
“In my family, we did a lot of ceremonies for our ancestors, which involves a lot of cooking. My grandma was really into cooking, like, fermenting, that kind of stuff. … I have three sisters, but one of them is super lazy, and the second one is super young. … So basically, they kind of forced me to cooking with her when I was young because I’m the only one who’s doing stuff, you know, helping [with] stuff. When I was young, I was, like, super chubby. And I loved eating, you know, that kind of, made me want to cook because I loved eating so much. I loved my grandma’s food. I wanted to learn what she does.”
When she was 18, Kim started a career as a food stylist, designing fake food for photo shoots. A mentor recognized that she had a talent for it, but said Kim could only truly succeed if she knew how to cook. So Kim signed up for a three-week cooking school in Italy, where she was in the kitchen for more than 10 hours a day.
“It was really physically hard and like mentally hard thing to do because I never actually professionally did that in a school,” she said. “So at the end of the day, we make everything and then chef tastes what we make that day. He pointed at me, like, ‘she needs to be a cook, her food is better than the others.’ After I heard that, I feel like everything has changed. After I went to Italy, I didn’t know how much I enjoy it. That after I cook and I serve to someone and that person enjoying that food – it just made me so happy and I realized how much I love this.”
Diners at the bar at Gift Horse. Credit: Catherine Dzilenski / Courtesy Gift HorseShortly after the cooking school in Italy, Kim came to Providence to train as an intern at Birch, a now-closed tiny restaurant that specialized in New American cuisine. It was owned by Ben Sukle, who now owns Gift Horse as well as Oberlin, the restaurant next door.
Sukle told me about when Kim first worked with him at Birch. “There was a group of interns we had at the time,” he said. “And one was very overconfident. And he was very confident and cocky, and Sky cut him down at his knees right then and there, and it was incredible to watch. I’m Sky’s biggest fan, next to her husband Chris. Immensely talented, absolute ball buster. I’m very lucky to work alongside Sky.”
After a couple of years at Birch, Kim went on to work in restaurants in New York City and Portland, Oregon until she had the opportunity to come back to Providence to work with Sukle at Oberlin. And when Sukle made plans to open a raw bar in Providence, he knew he wanted Sky Kim to be the chef. I asked Sukle what sets her cooking apart.
“The confidence Sky exudes when she’s cooking is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” he said. “It’s literally in her blood, in her DNA from her upbringing, and you can really tell. And you can tell when she’s actually, her thoughts, now seeing them on the plates with her own dishes and her own creations to me is the full circle moment I’ve always wanted to have.
Kim told me that the inspiration for many of her dishes comes from her grandmother’s cooking that she learned as a child.
“Sometimes I’m making something, it’s made me just happy,” she said. “The smell is like, oh my God, does it smell like my grandma’s food right now?”
Chef Sky Kim prepares Hae Muchim, one of the signature dishes at Gift Horse: Credit: James Baumgartner / The Public's RadioOne of those dishes is Hae Muchim, which translates to raw, mixed fish. The version Kim serves at Gift Horse is inspired by her grandmother, but with a focus on the local, seasonal ingredients available in New England: a combination of sweet potato, apple, fluke, cabbage, and Gift Horse gochujang.
The dish is a delicate arrangement of thinly sliced goodies, giving you a distinct array of tastes and textures that work in perfect harmony. It’s like eating a piece of music, with each ingredient filling in part of the sound spectrum. The sweet potato and sesame oil are like strong bass notes, with the cabbage as the mid-range and the sweetness of the apple and the spice of the gochujang as the high notes. And then flitting in between it all is the subtle melody of the raw fluke.
Kim told me that it’s similar to what her grandmother made, but not exactly like it. “So what I do here, I twist a little bit, but I don’t touch the base,” she explained. “If I touch the base, it’s gonna ruin the whole thing.”
I asked Kim what it feels like to be a national semifinalist for “Best Emerging Chef.”She told me that on the day of the announcements, her husband wouldn’t let her touch her phone for hours.
“I was like, what’s going on? What’s happening right now?” she said. “And then I opened the whole thing and I saw my name in the James Beard list and I almost cried. When I started my career as a chef, I never thought that I was ever going to get nominated. I never imagined myself, my name on James Beard. It’s just like, it’s so meaningful for me. It’s an honor and I can’t still believe that I got nominated.”
The other James Beard Award semifinalists from Rhode Island include Tuxpan Taqueria, Giusto, Courtland Club, and Bywater, as well as chefs from Foglia, Jahunger, Dolores, Newport Vineyards and Yagi Noodles. Final nominees will be announced April 3, and the ceremony takes place in Chicago on June 10.
Comedian Paul Mecurio has an off-Broadway show coming to the United Theatre this Saturday. Mecurio was born and raised in Rhode Island and after a brief career on Wall Street as a lawyer and investment banker, he moved into comedy. Since then he’s been on “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” and he’s currently on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” as a performer. He’s won Emmy and Peabody awards, and he hosts a podcast called “Inside Out with Paul Mecurio.” Artscape Producer James Baumgartner spoke with Paul about his off-broadway show, “Permission to Speak,” where he picks random members of the audience to come up on stage, asks them questions, and everyone gets to hear their story.
Transcript:This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Paul Mecurio: It’s actually born out of stand up. You know, there’s a thing in stand up called crowd work, right? Which is: you talk to somebody about their hat, but you don’t really care about their hat. You’re just talking about their hat because you have a perfectly written bit about a hat, and that drives me crazy when I hear people do that. It’s just, please just do the bit about the hat. You’re not kidding anybody. But beyond that, it started to become a conversation with people, and you start to realize — and you know, you interview people, and you do this for a living — it’s like, everybody has a story. It’s very cliche, but we, anybody over the age of six has a story. Something unique, something crazy, something “what?!” Whatever. And the more questions you ask, the better it is to get to that story, and that’s how this was born. And I was just randomly picking people out of audiences, and I was doing it at “The Late Show,” and some Broadway producers saw me doing it, and they said, “we think there’s a show in this.”
James Baumgartner: Okay, let’s hear one of those stories. This is Travis.
[Excerpt from “Permission to Speak”]
Mecurio: What are we doing here, what’s the issue?
Travis: Polio.
Mecurio: Oh yeah.
Travis: When my kids were younger, I would go to the school plays. Obviously, kids would be like, “Is that your dad? Is he Robocop?” I would tell the kids, “Hey, I’m from Vietnam, that’s how I got hurt.” They would be like, “Really? You were in Vietnam?” And I was like, “Yeah!” It was a joke, but my daughter is 18 now and a few months ago she was like, “Daddy, were you really in Vietnam?” And I forgot that I told her that. “I’d told everybody that when you were like six. I just never fixed it.”
Mecurio: So Travis was important to me for several reasons, because anybody with an affliction, people don’t talk to them. And they mean well, but you know, whether it’s somebody with MS in a wheelchair, or in this case, he had the kind of crutches where you knew it wasn’t a broken ankle, there was an affliction. And what happens with those people is, I think people are fundamentally decent and go, “Oh, oh, he’s got a thing. And I’m not, I don’t want to say anything inappropriate,” especially now we’re all so on edge about political correctness, that you end up ignoring the person and marginalizing them. And they don’t, that guy, if you go on, people go onto my website, paulmecurio.com, you can see that clip. This guy’s arms are, he’s pumped. He’s a really healthy-looking guy. You wouldn’t know if he had crutches. So he, in his mind, he’s still that young guy that didn’t have this, right? And then I loved it because you couldn’t write that. Like, if we were writers in a writer’s room and said, let’s come up with a thing where he lies to his daughter and says Vietnam, nobody’s gonna believe it. And he was laughing at himself. It checked off all the boxes of what we love about the show, which is it’s just letting people see how somebody else lives their life that you have no idea of anything about or any sense of like how people would sort of navigate those waters. And that’s why we loved him.
Paul Mecurio on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”Baumgartner: You grew up in Rhode Island. Is there anything unique to our little state that you bring to the show?
Mecurio: It’s such a microcosm of the world, Rhode Island. You know, there’s a variety of ethnicities and religions, and a variety of socioeconomic classes. So it’s like, I can relate to anybody because I grew up here. Plus I grew up in my parents’ furniture business, my mom’s furniture store, where she had me selling furniture at eleven to like 60-year-old people. So I kind of just have that ability, I guess, a gift for gab. And I also think Rhode Islanders kind of, pretty much — I think you’re from the Midwest originally, and I work in the Midwest a lot, they’re a little more reserved. I think Rhode Islanders are kind of more on their sleeve, like, “what did you mean by that?” They’ll be like, in a nice way, kind of in your face a little bit. And I think I bring that to it. I think that’s why I can do the show, because I’ll just say to somebody — like Frank Oz, my director, always marvels that I just say whatever I say. Like the guy who had polio, I go, “so what do you got, what’s going on, what’s your issue?” And he goes, he laughs every time, he goes, “because I’ve never seen anybody ask a question that way.” But it’s not offensive, I think Rhode Islanders just kind of get to the heart of the matter quickly, but in a way that’s not obnoxious, and I think that that has been, like, something I’m able to kind of bring to the show as well.
Baumgartner: Did anybody that you brought up on stage just leave you completely speechless with their story?
Mecurio: Yeah. One of the things that Frank, my director Frank Oz and I said is we have kind of like a 70/30 rule, which is 70 percent story, 30 percent funny. Don’t push for the funny. I’m a comedian, and you get scared if there’s not laughs every 30 seconds. But you can’t do this and worry about that, because I need to ask that second, third, and fourth question, right? And by that fourth question, you know, then you get that gold. Like, “How are you doing? What’s your name?” “Travis.” “What’s going on?” And then you ease into, “So why do you have crutches?” “Oh, I have this,” right? So now I’m a minute and a half in, and I haven’t gotten a laugh. That’s scary for a comedian. But if you wait, you’re rewarded with gold. It’s like in sports, letting the game come to you.
So, I had a woman on stage, transitioning into being a man. Mason. Transgender. And I wanted to talk for the same reason as the polio – they’re marginalized. I wanted people to see that they’re not these weirdo freaks or whatever. They’re just people trying to figure their lives out. So, he had his father with him. He’s about 28, Mason. And I said, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Five minutes in and I said, “So how did you tell your parents that you…” He goes, “I don’t remember.” And he goes, “Well, I have severe bipolar disorder and I’ve had electroshock treatments three times, so I don’t remember a lot of things.”
And everybody did what you did. Everybody’s like, “oh my god,” right? So now you can kind of feel the plane going into the ground. But it’s okay because the show’s supposed to reflect real life, and the peaks and valleys, just like a good film has the serious moments and the funny moments and the sad moments and all this stuff. So I took a beat and I went, “hmm.” But, I knew instinctively there needed to be something funny there to pop the balloon. So I went, “Wow, really?” I go, “You know, there’s a lot of things in my life I don’t want to remember. Maybe I should have electroshock treatment.” And everybody laughed. And then, and then Mason topped me, which I always love when they’re funnier than I am. He went, “My doctor’s great at electroshock. I can give you her phone number.” And everybody just started applauding. Mason was the star of the night. Everybody went up to Mason after the show, hugged him, “good luck.” Just graduated San Diego State University.
So that was a really special show for me. And the power of what it can do, and what Frank Oz loved about it. And the 70/30 rule was, like, if I was pushing for funny, I would get in the way of the stories. Just the funny bubbles up. The show is allowing people to see how other people live. And it’s opening, we’re getting out of our silos, out of our own little box, and we’re sort of showing to each other how we live and how we live differently, but we can still coexist.
Baumgartner: You can see Paul Mecurio’s “Permission to Speak” at the United Theatre in Westerly on Saturday, March 9, at 7:30 p.m. Ticket information at unitedtheatre.org. Paul, thanks for talking with me.
Mecurio: Thanks so much for having me, it’s been a real pleasure.
BONUS: As a bonus for the web and podcast versions of Artscape, we’re including this special extra clip from their conversation, featuring the unlikely story of how Mecurio got Paul McCartney on his podcast, “Inside Out with Paul Mecurio.”
Mecurio: So [Paul McCartney] was performing on the Colbert show and he had just finished rehearsal. I had to run into the studio for something and I round the corner and I’m running around the thing, and I run down the hallway and I see Paul McCartney standing in the hallway all alone. Nobody, not a handler, not a manager, not a security force, all alone, which threw me more than anything. And I round the corner, I’m like, “Oh my god, it’s Paul McCartney.” My whole world slows down.
And I’m like, should I say hi? Should I not say hi? And I’m like, look, he’s alone in the hallway with no security. He’s like a gazelle on the Serengeti plains. I’m a lion, I’m gonna pounce. So I just go over very quick. I go, honored to meet you. Huge fan. So excited to see your performance,” and I walk away. And he goes, “wait, come back.” And I go, “what? What do you want? I’m busy.” No, he goes, “What’s your name?” I go, “Paul.” He goes, “Oh, what do you do?” I go, “Oh, I’m in stand up. I perform and act” and blah, blah, blah. “Oh, I love acting, I love stand up, you got a kid?” “Yeah, I got a kid. You travel out there?”
So, five, ten minutes go by, I’m chit chatting with Paul McCartney. By the way, everybody who works on the show is going by, walking by us in the hallway, going, “oh, Paul Mecurio knows Paul McCartney,” right? But as I’m talking to him, I’m like really cool on the outside, I’m like, “Hey, I’m talking to Paul McCartney.” On the inside, I’m like, “I’m talking to Paul McCartney!” Like, out of my mind, right? Like the girls at Shea Stadium, right? And then I blurt these words out in my mind. I go, “Paul McCartney should do my podcast.” So again, maybe because I’m from Rhode Island and don’t have another function or whatever, I go, “Hey, you know what? I’d really like to talk about how you make music. Would you do my podcast?” And he goes, “Yeah, sure.” Just like that. Now, I’m completely thrown because I expected him to say no. Instead he says yes, so now I’m frozen. And he goes, “How would we do it?” And I’m not making this up. This is how I sound. I started rocking back and forth and rubbing my leg like I’m Rain Man. I’m like, “I’ll come to London!” And he goes, “We’re in a room in New York together, why would you come to London?” And then he goes, “Is it easy to do?” And I go, “Oh my god, yeah, it’s so easy, I don’t want to be a bother, I know you’re busy. You could do it on your phone, naked from your toilet.” I’m like, oh my god, what am I saying? So I’m like, “You know what, I’ll leave you alone, and I’ll find your assistant and we’ll set it up.” And this is the mind blow right here. He goes, “No, no, you and I’ll do it.” I go, “What do you mean?” He goes, “They’re going to just make it way too complicated. You and I’ll do it. But when I call you, you’ve got to be ready to do it. Okay?” So, I’m handing him my phone number. I walk away. He does the performance. I do my performance after him that I had to do. And then I am rushing to get to “The Daily Show.” I was working on “The Daily Show” at the same time. My phone rings. I don’t recognize the number. I let it ring to voicemail, and this is the message on my phone.
Paul McCartney: Hi Paul. This is Paul McCartney here. I’m going to ring you back in five minutes to do the podcast thing. I’ve got some time now, I don’t know when I’m going to run out of time. So if you’re there in five minutes’ time, you’ve got me. Okay, bye.
Mecurio: My favorite part of that is he felt he had to identify himself by both his first and his last name. It’s like, oh, that Paul McCartney.
Baumgartner: You know, from The Beatles. It would have been better if he had said, you know from Wings.
Mecurio: Right, exactly. From, from The Quarrymen. And, wow. And so we did it, and all we did was talk about music, and it’s on there, and I’m really proud of it. The whole thing’s been great, you know, just crazy to have him.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Luis Hernandez: Allysen, welcome to The Public’s Radio.
Allysen Callery: Thanks for having me.
Hernandez: You know, I’ve read a lot of your bio and been listening to your music, but when you run into folks, how do you describe your art? How do you describe your music?
Callery: Well, the moniker I got from my first label was Ghost Folk. And it kind of is a combination of, hauntingness. The music is haunting, but it’s also the ghosts of the past. I was influenced a lot by my parents, British Isles folk revival records of the late 70s. I mean late 60s, early 70s, like Steel Eyespan, and of course, Fairport Convention. And I, I really resonated a lot with Incredible String Band. And so I’m drawing upon those ghosts, and also I just happen to be a little spooky.
Hernandez: You’re self taught. What does that mean? Like at some point, at what point did you start playing an instrument or singing?
Callery: So we always had instruments in the house. My father played beautiful classical guitar. I played violin as a child. I really wanted to play cello, but my parents said it was too expensive. And my dad passed away really young and I got his guitar and I’d always sang, I sang in church, I sang at school in chorus and stuff. so I wanted an instrument that I could hold and play and sing to, so it meant a lot to me to carry on my father’s legacy.
Credit: Rebecca ZilenzigerHernandez: When did you decide, though, like, this could be a career?
Callery: Is it a career, though? Okay. I work a part time job that, you know, five hours a day, usually. And I’ve been there 20 years, so I can be a musician and make very non commercial music. I play a lot of local, by local I mean like an hour, hour and a half away, places and you play for three hours and you make your $200 plus tips. And then I have my job because I have a mortgage and I have a family and, and, you know. I gotta pitch in.
Hernandez: Your latest album is called Witch’s Hand. It’s a collaboration with a doom metal band from Germany called Mother Bear. Explain that one.
Callery: All right, so Mother Bear from Germany are these adorable 20 something year old boys that are friends with my label friends, who are like my age, but they love my music. And we were outside a club after I’d played, and they’re like, Hey, you want to collaborate? And you hear this a lot as an artist, but three months later, they’re like, Hey, do you have your songs? And I went into my music room and in a half an hour I wrote “Witch’s Hand”, my portion of it.
[MUSIC: Death Skull by Allysen Callery featuring Mother Bear]
Hernandez: You really didn’t get started until much later, right? You had a family. You decided to go that route, then go and do your music. But why that decision, and how did that play out through your life?
Callery: For me, it was really important to have a family I didn’t have one growing up. I really wanted to have that baby and I got my baby girl that I dreamed of. And while I was home with her, I started writing poetry. And those poems became songs later on, and then as she grew up and was more autonomous, I started going out like little bit by little bit, going to open mics, and then, I got the guts to write to a record label. Actually, it was a record label out of Germany that was originally from Brighton, England, called Woodland Recordings, and to my surprise and delight, he wrote back and said, send me some demos.
Hernandez: And now your daughter’s a musician?
Callery: And now my daughter, Ava, is a musician, and she’s in a band called Bouquet, and they do dream pop. It’s absolutely gorgeous.
Hernandez: Did you want her, did you push her into music, or that was her choice?
Callery: I got her a guitar after I saw her as a little kid, like, playing around with my guitar. That tiny guitar never got touched. But we were driving somewhere, and she’s like, Mom, I think I want to get a guitar and I went [reeeek] with the car and I turned around and we went to a place literally called Liquors and Guitars that has a big sign, but it was nearby. I got her a little acoustic, but like three months later, she’d already borrowed somebody’s electric guitar. So she’s the electric Callery.
Hernandez: You’re on the board of the Rhode Island Folk Festival, which is celebrating its 10th year this August. Previously known as the Providence Folk Festival. Can you give us a little early preview of what people are going to see in this year’s festival?
Callery: Boy, well, very big news. We got Tom Rush on the main stage. Everybody’s extremely excited about that. For my stage, I have some of my favorite people. Hungrytown, they travel all over the world. They’re huge in England. It’s a husband and wife team. Driftwood Soldier, they’re fantastic. There’s a few, you know, more local people that are doing it, but we’ve got several stages. We’ve got a main stage, like the big clamshell stage, and that has the bigger bands, like more people in the bands. My stage is called Songbird Stage, which is named after my record, The Songbird Sings. It was very nice of them.
Hernandez: Between, I mean, the traveling, the shows, your work and your family, you know, I’m wondering like when you fit in creating new music, creating new pieces, and are you working on anything?
Callery: Yeah. I mean, it comes all the time and, you know, it’s a fallacy that you have to like go up into your garret to be able to create. I’ve written songs in the car driving home. I’ll just dictate it into my phone. And then I’ll, you know, tweak it, and then I’ll set it to music. And this miraculous invention, the smartphone, I have GarageBand right on my phone. And I’ve recorded so much here, like right on a phone. I even have a record called Lost Children that are all demos that I’ve recorded on my phone. And it’s on my Bandcamp.
Hernandez: What are you going to play for us today?
Callery: This song is called “Dark-winged Sparrow.”
[MUSIC: Dark Winged Sparrow]
[MUSIC: I’m Not Scared of the Dark]
“True Detective: Night Country” is the fourth season of the HBO crime series. It’s set in a remote Alaskan mining town above the Arctic circle, during the darkest days of the year – the time when the sun never rises and things get a little weird for the people in the fictional town of Ennis. The show stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis. It’s the third acting role for Reis, a former boxing world champion who was born in Providence and grew up in East Providence. Reis spoke with Morning Edition host Luis Hernandez for this week’s episode of Artscape.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TranscriptLuis Hernandez: This is a fun show. I’m really enjoying it. This show uses the elements that we’re used to seeing in a murder mystery, but it mixes in the supernatural. A little bit “X File”-y sometimes. you know. When I’m watching it though, and this is what I love about it, I’m not sure, did I just see something that’s real? Or is that imagined? Is this a dream? Is this supernatural? Your character though, one of the things I love about her is, she seems really comfortable with all the ambiguity with everything that’s going on. And I’m wondering, how do you relate to your character? How do you relate to the way that she deals with things?
Kali Reis: Oh man, Navarro is such an amazing character. She’s such a layered, hard to read, yet very vulnerable, and kind of easy to see where she lands as far as, does she see what’s right in front of her or is she hearing something else as well on top of? So, I relate to my character, right, in a lot of ways. Number one, her being from Iñupiaq and Dominican background, being part of the community but not fully immersed in the community and not full. Coming from Cape Verdean and Wampanoag background, you kind of have that sense of you’re not enough for either or you’re not fully for either. So you kind of have to walk in these two different cultures and kind of see where you fit in. She’s also part of law enforcement, which has different perspectives from the community that she’s actually policing. She has a crave for justice and truth, especially when it comes to the women in the community, especially bringing awareness to the different issues that I’ve chosen … There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of similarities between the two, I don’t just believe in just the rational, just what’s right in front of me. You know, I believe we welcome the dead, to walk among us.This thing, when we pass on, we go on to the other realm, you know, sometimes the veil, as they say, is pretty thin. And there’s a lot of things that can’t be explained, out of our control that I believe has a lot to do with that.
Kali Reis (L) and Jodie Foster (R) star in “True Detective: Night Country” as two police officers working to solve a mysterious disappearance.Hernandez: I’m wondering, your experience as a boxer and what you take from that into acting, because these are two very different things. You train for an event, you train, train, train, train, train. Then you have the event. This is: you rehearse, rehearse, but you could be doing a thousand takes to get it right. How do you compare the two?
Reis: Well, with boxing, you can train, train, train, and then the bell rings. And then the whole game plan has to go out the window because I don’t know, you hurt your hand. The opponent fights way different than you thought. You always have to have a tool. So with training, you have a game plan, but you have to sharpen all your tools and you have to be very present and able to make the right decision in a moment’s notice. With acting, I noticed that you can rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, but if you have somebody that brings something way out left, out of the box for a scene, it’s like, you got to think on your toes, you got to react. You gotta be very very present. … It was a lot of, a lot of the same parallels as well as the endurance. Like I go in the gym thinking I’m going to do 10, 12 rounds of sparring, but 20 rounds later, because my coach wants me to do more, I’m just like, all right, let’s go. It’s the same thing. It’s like take after take after take, I know I can do better. I know I can do better. I know I can do better. I can do something different. I don’t have a ceiling. And that’s something that naturally from the years and years and years of boxing that I took into acting. Nobody told me to do that. It’s just kind of something I figured out.
Hernandez: You’re involved in a thing that’s known as the MMIW, the missing and murdered indigenous women movement. And I just want to know, how did you get involved in that? And tell us a little bit more about it.
Reis: So MMIW is a movement that started, I believe, in Canada and then kind of started trickling its way down to … America to highlight and bring awareness to missing and murdered Indigenous women. I first found out about MMIW as a movement when I heard about the highway of tears. I’m like, well, I know of women, of stories, of just our people getting targeted, but there was nothing tangible to put on it. We just know, you know what I mean? … So I just started using my boxing platform to just bring awareness to it. The more awareness, the more people who know, the more we make it a big deal, because it is a huge crisis, that people will start asking questions. … So I just took it upon myself to use the voice that I have to be a voice for the voiceless.
Aka Niviâna (L) and Kali Reis (R) in in “True Detective: Night Country” Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. DiscoveryHernandez: For fans of the show, the thing that’s really cool about this season is that it is so much from the perspective of women, the two stars of the show, you and Jodie Foster. Also it also includes a lot of actors and characters who are indigenous. And I wanted to just ask you a little bit about that, if you could talk about that and how that played out in the story, as well for you in real life.
Reis: I feel like as far as it being two women leads, two women officers, we are able to relate to the characters – I mean the crimes, the victims, a little differently. You know what I mean? it’s just, it’s not, and this is Jodie’s words, it’s not, that could be my sister, my mother, my aunt. It’s like, that could be one of us, you know, as a law enforcement officer who is a woman. And to have Issa López as a woman director, writer, showrunner, I just think it was just a different perspective. It was flipped on its head and it’s reality.
Hernandez: I wanted to ask you about the other aspect of this too, again, because we’re looking at the story of indigenous people. I just heard a story, recently about, again, how Hollywood tends to look at different groups and sometimes stereotypes just jump in, because somebody doesn’t know any better. And so watching this series, I’m thinking it feels more real. It doesn’t feel like stereotypes. It feels more genuine, though I’m going to be the first to admit I don’t know. For you, do you think that the portrayal was more authentic, that they’re getting it right?
Reis: A lot of these stories up until recently have been told, not from us, but for the assumption of what, how they know it is to be us, history. It’s the assumption of “this is what happened” and “this is our interpretation, let’s romanticize it. Here you go. Everything’s great.” Now with this, it was really interesting that … Issa and the team took it upon themselves. … And also had two, two executive producers that were from Alaska, Alaskan Native, and they had a whole council of elders. It was done right. … And to have the two executive producers, Princess Johnson and Cathy Tagnak, which are my sisters now, to go through everything with a fine tooth comb with their elders and say, “This is right. This is wrong. This is not how we would say it. This is what would happen. This is relative.” And also they are part of the land. Their stories are intertwined with this whole story. So I’m just really happy that everybody from the community is proud to see themselves finally in something and not just a one dimensional way.
Hernandez: It has been fun watching, so continued success to you. Kali, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Reis: Thank you so much, it’s been a pleasure. I’m happy I got to do something local, man. I miss home.
Hernandez: Kali Reis plays Evangeline Navarro in the latest season of “True Detective: Night Country” from HBO. All six episodes are currently streaming on MAX.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
When you think about seeing great art, you probably think about a visit to a museum or gallery – someplace like the RISD Museum or the WaterFire Arts Center. But, believe it or not, some really good art can be found at airports, including T.F. Green International.
So, where do you find it? When you enter the front doors – either on the top floor at check-in or the bottom floor at baggage claim – immediately turn to the right. You’ll see it. The airport works with the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, or RISCA, to choose artists to highlight every few months.
Morning Edition Host Luis Hernandez was at the airport recently when they were putting up work from three new artists.
“Whenever I’m in airports, the only thing I think about are the other airports I’ve been in, you know, it’s just like mania,” said Jeff Foye, gallery coordinator for the program. “I’ve been in a number of airports, you know, Reno, then in Chicago, I can think of Orange County, Los Angeles – [they] all have public art programs. And whenever I get to see the art, I’m in a different place. I’m not thinking about the airport. And suddenly I’m looking at the art, I’m engaging, I’m having a thoughtful moment. And it’s like, you know, it’s a meaningful experience, as opposed to just, I’m in another airport, I gotta get this thing done, I gotta get to the gate, I gotta get food, you know. You get to lift out of the logistics and look at something and think about it.”
The airport art program – which also shows artists at a gallery in the Block Island Airport – has been around since 2012. Any resident of Rhode Island can apply, so long as they’re not a student, and it’s open to artists in all media formats. Over the course of a year, anywhere from six to nine artists get to present their work on the walls on both floors.
“When I see art in an airport, it helps me differentiate that place from another place,” said Molly Dickinson, Public Art/Cultural Facilities Program Director at RISCA. “So when I go to Miami and I see the big installation of kaleidoscopes made out of different fish images, I always know it’s Miami. It’s very specific. So when you come to T.F. Green and you see art by Rhode Island artists, it makes it unique and helps you remember where you’ve been, and gives a sense of place and a sense of the state.”
Luis talked with the three newest artists about their work and what it means to show it at T.F. Green.
Tiffany Mendez of Cumberland Credit: Luis HernandezPainter Tiffany Mendez of Cumberland drew inspiration from flowers she photographed. “I created a body of work for the airport with this in mind,” she said. “I took some photographs of flowers at the Rhode Island Botanical Center and also flowers in my own garden. And I knew that they were all natives to Rhode Island. And I knew that this had to be a Rhode Island-based sort of theme.”
Another one of the featured artists is muralist Mandy Howe of Portsmouth, whose large panels feature Rhode Island landscapes. “These big panel paintings were part of an outdoor art project I initiated at a gallery in Middletown, Rhode Island, near Newport during COVID,” Mandy said. “Because all the galleries and museums were shut down. So we started a mural project outside. And these were all installed on a balcony outside. So people can still see art walking by or driving by. So that’s where this kind of group and style came from.”
The third artist is Providence-based photographer Izzy Rodriguez. “A lot of what I do and what I’m passionate about is trying to capture moments in history that we may never see again,” he said. “Essentially the photograph is the history.” Pointing to a photo of PVD Fest, he said “This is Washington Street completely full of people, you know, shoulder to shoulder … I don’t know that we’ll ever see this again.”
Izzy said it means a lot to him for his work to be featured in this place where some people are getting their very first impression of the local culture. “My art being at the airport when people are arriving is essentially saying, ‘hey, not only do we put art at the forefront, but this is one of the artists that we put at the forefront.’”
Their work is on display at T.F. Green International Airport now through early summer.
Luis Hernandez talks with photographer Izzy Rodriguez at the T.G. Green galleryProvidence Children’s Film FestivalThe Providence Children’s Film Festival starts Friday night and runs through February 25th. It’s the 15th year of the festival, which showcases films for the whole family from all over the world. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with festival director Eric Bilodeau for this preview.
Still from “Dancing Queen” directed by Aurora Gossé Credit: Åsmund HasliThe following transcript has been edited for clarity.
James Baumgartner: Is there a theme to the festival this year?
Eric Bilodeau: There’s not a theme in particular. We have guiding principles and one of the major ones that we adhere to is “what you watch matters.” It’s food for the mind. And just like what you eat matters and we feel that what you watch matters. And so we really try to find the films that will feed your minds, inspire, and really develop young people’s imaginations.
Baumgartner: I saw that “tasty cinema” is part of the program this year. What is “tasty cinema?”
Bilodeau: To complement the features and the films being shown. Every day we pick a film that’s being shown and we represent a flavor from that culture. And this year we’re using soups to do that. And so every day we’ll have a different soup representing a different culture of a film being shown. And, so we have a whole lineup of soups. The names are so much fun, it sounds like a Dr. Seuss lineup. But it really was a popular thing last year that we enhanced this year.
Baumgartner: I also noticed that you called these dinner table films. What exactly did you mean by that?
Bilodeau: You know you’ve gone to a film that resonated with a child when they bring it up at dinner. And so we’re thinking, we’ve heard so many anecdotes from parents that are basically saying, “Oh, I couldn’t believe this, like one of the first films our kids ever brought up at the dinner table was a film we saw at your film festival, and they wanted to talk about it more without us provoking them, you know, let’s talk about this film, they brought it up on their own.”
Baumgartner: I know it’s hard to pick favorites, but can you tell me maybe there’s one that’s particularly for younger children that’s a standout? One for tweens? One for teens?
Bilodeau: Sure. Probably the youngest one: “Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia,” that is definitely for the younger crowd. But very enjoyable, beautiful animation from France. The opening night film is great. “Dancing Queen,” from Norway. It’s our opening and our closing night film. And, that’s wonderful for the, 12, 13, 14 [year olds]. And then, for the teens, “Scrapper.” It’s from England. It’s really a well done film that ‘s for all ages and for families of all ages.
Baumgartner: What’s “Scrapper” about?
Bilodeau: “Scrapper” is about a young girl who doesn’t tell anybody, but she’s raising herself. Her mom had passed away, and she figured out a way of just still staying in the apartment and living without any guidance. And then her father appears, whom she has not met before, and how they develop, redevelop a relationship.
Students use the Gif-o-graf as part of an animation workshopBaumgartner: Are there any workshops or other aspects of the festival aside from screenings?
Bilodeau: There are. We have, stop motion animation, Three stop motion animation workshops that are happening with the Gif-O-Graf people. The Gif-O-Graf guys have developed these amazing machines made here in Pawtucket, that basically teach stop motion animation without having to slow down for technical reasons as other setups tend to do. Six, seven year olds could do this, up to 13, 14 year olds. I can’t stop playing with it myself. It’s so much fun. And, and you really get, you leave with a finished film. You download it to a phone or to some type of device and you leave with your film that you made.
Baumgartner: I understand there’s an “access for all” idea behind the festival this year. Can you tell me about that?
Bilodeau: Absolutely. That’s something we’re really proud about. This is the first year we’re initiating a ticketing system where we have a suggested donation, but we also have a ‘give what you can’ to attend the film fest, or give nothing at all. It’s really, nobody will be turned away, because of financial reasons. All of our venues will have that ‘give what you can’ ticketing system.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
The Providence Children’s Film Festival is an underwriter of The Public’s Radio. We make our coverage decisions independent of business support.
Less than three years after opening, and just months after being featured in The New York Times, Hunky Dory in Warren has closed. The restaurant was known for its unique approach to local, seasonal, Southern-inspired food – but it was also home to a community of folk musicians.
Every month on the first and third Wednesdays, while the restaurant was closed, chef and banjo player Sam Duling would open the doors for an old-time music jam session.
A rotating cast of anywhere from six to twenty people would come from across Rhode Island and Massachusetts toting their fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and more. Most had never met before getting wind of the jam, which was promoted very gently through a Facebook group, the occasional mention on Hunky Dory’s social media, and by word of mouth.
That’s how fiddler Peri Sasnett ended up there.
“It’s like the most random group of people of all ages and occupations,” she said. “I don’t even know what a lot of people do in their day jobs, but everyone just sort of comes together in this space for this specific, niche little thing, and forms a little community.”
Old-time jams are like that. There are people ready and willing to play old-time music almost anywhere you go – and when someone opens up their space to make it happen, they will come.
“To go to some random person’s house, you have to get an invite,” Sasnett said. “And so to have kind of a neutral space like this, where anyone’s welcome and anyone can join, is a great way to get an introduction to the scene.”
When I moved from Chicago to Providence in 2022, I was one of those people looking for a jam. My partner and I started coming to play at Hunky Dory within weeks of moving, and we’ve rarely missed one since then. It’s a special thing to move to a new place and be able to immediately settle into a welcoming, appreciative and generous music community, which is what we found at Hunky Dory – thanks to Duling, as well as to fiddler, banjo player and guitarist Jason Wood, who helped make it happen.
“The jam is the highlight of my calendar. I look forward to it every two weeks,” Wood said. “Social music has become a very important part of my life, and this is probably my favorite event in that genre that I attend.”
Joanna Ray (left) and Sam Duling (right), co-owners of Hunky Dory in Warren, now closed for good.It didn’t hurt that Duling provided exceptionally good food. By the circle of musicians, he would fill a table with charred brussels sprouts, smoked chicken wings, melon wrapped in country ham – whatever he felt like cooking that night.
For Sam, it was a longtime dream of his to have a space like this to host his own jam.
“Having a place to host people, and especially when you’re running a restaurant, and you’re not always able to make it to all these jams and travel – the people come to you,” he said. “I’m just happy that everyone comes to the jam, you know. So it’s been a beautiful win-win for everyone, I think. And there’s snacks.”
I ate at Hunky Dory many times. It was as warm and welcoming a restaurant as it was a space for the jam session. Duling’s partner Joanna Ray, the restaurant’s co-owner, said their goal was for everyone coming in to feel like they were walking into their home for dinner. “So really approachable, but then lots of surprises and upper-scale experiences in a really comfortable atmosphere,” she said.
They were committed to local, seasonal food, something that came through in every dish, with seafood from Andrade’s Catch in Bristol, vegetables from Moonrose Farm in Rehoboth, beef from Stony Creek Farm in Swansea, among many other local sources. The menu was kept small and carefully curated. Dishes included things like pillowy hot honey drop biscuits, “Bloomin’ Hen of the Woods” – which is one huge deep-fried hen-of-the-woods mushroom – and a sorghum- and tomato-glazed smoked black sea bass head, served on a bed of marinated tomatoes, Carolina Gold rice, and preserved tomato broth.
Hunky Dory’s “Bloomin’ Hen of the Woods” – one huge deep-fried hen-of-the-woods mushroom.Duling and Ray called the food “Southern-ish.”
“I grew up with a Southern mother and a Southern grandmother around, and so I grew up eating Southern food and Appalachian food,” Duling said. “That was like my home base, that was what I knew and was most comfortable with.”
After moving here from Charleston, South Carolina in 2019, Duling said they saw a niche that could be filled in Rhode Island. “No one was really tackling Southern food in a way that spoke to authentic Southern food, and kind of told a tale of the South, and the whole tale. So we decided to follow that path and label ourself as Southern-ish in a way – to not pigeon-hole ourselves, but to definitely have that as our foundation of everything we do.”
One of the dishes that really stuck with me was their crab rice. Hunky Dory’s version is made with crab from Andrade’s Catch; Carolina Gold rice middlins, which are broken bits of rice that result from hulling and processing the grains; Broadbent Country Ham from Kentucky, a dry-cured ham similar to prosciutto; and topped with scallions and shaved bottarga, a salted, cured fish roe pouch.
It’s a dish, Sam says, that comes from Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina, from the Gullah Geechee people – descendents of enslaved Africans who developed a unique culture, language and cuisine due to their isolation in island and coastal communities in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. Crab rice, like so much good food, was born out of necessity and ingenuity, turning what would have been considered scraps into something delicious.
“That’s just really the essence of Southern and Appalachian cooking, is making something delicious and beautiful from literally nothing,” Duling said. “The crab rice, to us, encompasses the whole story of what Southern cooking is.”
One of the signature dishes at Hunky Dory was crab rice: local crab, Carolina Gold rice middlins; Broadbent Country Ham from Kentucky; and topped with scallions and shaved bottarga.Their commitment to creating this welcoming place and serving thoughtfully prepared food led to good press and good business. But behind that success were many 80- to 100-hour weeks.
“It’s been really hard to make this decision, because we are doing really well. Dinner sales are up 30% over last year,” co-owner Joanna Ray said. “We’ve gotten really great PR recently. And so we are doing excellent, and it’s easy to get caught up in that. But then when you take a step back, there’s still so much financial struggle. … And we’re so far off, Sam and I are still doing the dishes every single night here.”
And so they made the tough decision to close the restaurant. They’re selling the assets along with the lease, although they do plan to keep making their popular pimento cheese under the Hunky Dory name – and the name itself is not for sale. As for the space, they’re hoping it’ll go to someone who wants to keep it a restaurant.
“We’re not really looking to just sell to anyone and everyone. That’s not really our goal, to just cash out and get money and leave,” Duling said. “We want to leave it in good hands and make sure that the town is getting another great restaurant and another great person to come in.”
Sam broke the news to the Wednesday night jammers in December that the restaurant would officially be closing, meaning the end of the Hunky Dory jam as we knew it. He told me later that, hard as the restaurant work would get, the jam would give him something to look forward to.
“It’s been so wonderful. As anyone may know, or can probably tell, running a restaurant is hard. So to have that little reprieve, and to have that break, and to have that little time to look forward to, to connect and play music … it kind of refills your soul in a way,” he said. “When things are rough, or we’re really busy, or I’m understaffed or, you know, just restaurant stuff happens, it’s great to have a jam to look forward to. And then, even though it’s more work and it’s tiring and I’m up late, none of that matters, and it doesn’t register because it’s refreshing. It feels like you go to the spa or something, or you did a cold plunge the next day, because you feel refreshed after the jam, even if you didn’t sleep.”
The old-time jam is still looking for a new home – but the community that grew out of it will live on.
“A jam or a session, I think of as a kind of living entity, right? It depends on who shows up, and people come in and bring different tunes and different ideas. I think the physical space is an important part of that. Not the only part of it, but that’s part of the milieu,” said jam co-organizer Jason Wood. But, he added, “if that changes and the people are still there, that’s the most important thing.”
Old-time musicians playing at Hunky Dory in December.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at The Gamm Theatre through February 18, 2024
Transcript:
Luis Hernandez: The show opened on Broadway in 1962, won the Tony for best play in 1963, and became a film in 1966 starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The play opened last week at the Gamm Theatre, and both Artscape Producer James Baumgartner and I saw it and have our review of the show. James, what did you think of George and Martha?
James Baumgartner: The play fits into a genre of fiction I like to call “People Being Mean To Each Other.” I know that sounds kind of dismissive, but there are so many examples of this: married couples or families fighting and actively trying to hurt each other. The Jonathan Franzen Novel “The Corrections” is my go-to example of the genre, and I often find it tiring to see people fighting like this. ButWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf goes so far beyond with the characters’ cruelty and animosity towards each other that it is a thrill to watch.
Hernandez: When you say “people being mean to each other,” I’m reminded of “The War of the Roses,” the Kathleen Turner/Michael Douglas movie from 1989. But this play set the template for this type of story. George is a history professor at a small college, and Martha is the daughter of the college president. And she resents George for not making more of himself. The play opens with the couple getting home from a faculty party, and Martha has invited a younger couple over for more drinks. Nick is the new biology professor at the college, and Martha says that she wants to welcome him and his wife. But she has some ulterior motives as well.
L to R: Tony Estrella (George), Gunnar Manchester (Nick). Credit: Cat Laine courtesy Gamm TheatreBaumgartner: Yeah, she does have an interest in the tall, handsome, younger professor. But it seems like the main motive for inviting the younger couple is that George and Martha will now have an audience for their epic battle. And they do perform for this audience, even bringing them into their games of torturing each other.
Hernandez: And it’s not enough to make them play in their games; George and Martha torture the young couple as well. It’s a three-act play, about 3 hours long, including the two intermissions, but it breezes by, and that’s all thanks to the fantastic performances by the actors, particularly the leads played by Tony Estrella and Jeanine Kane. I had a chance to talk to them after Sunday’s performance. I asked Jeanine what it was like to play such an iconic role.
Jeanine Kane: The only resource I have, really, for this role is me, and what’s going on, you know, in my life and what I’ve, where I’ve come to at this point. So, you know, just letting myself come to the role, you know what I mean, rather than putting something on myself to make it someone else.
Jeanine Kane (Martha). Set design by Jessica Hill Kidd. Lighting design by Jeff Adelberg. Credit: Cat Laine courtesy Gamm TheatreBaumgartner: She’s great, and so is Tony. Even though they are constantly fighting throughout the play, Tony and Jeanine show us that this couple has a remnant of love; maybe it’s just familiarity, but they’ve been together for 20-25 years, and they know how to play off each other.
Hernandez: The set was beautifully built and planned by Jessica Hill Kidd, and the lighting by Jeff Adelberg is subtle and perfectly sets the different moods as the play progresses. Here’s what Tony Estrella had to say:
Tony Estrella: You can really lose yourself in the detail of it. You can feel like you’re in the living room. I think it pulls the audience into that house with them in a beautiful, beautiful way. It’s very exciting. But then as the play evolves, the house becomes its own organism over time, you know, and it kind of, it comes to life in a way. That feels that lifts the play into something else, I think into poetry.
Baumgartner: Yeah, I loved the wallpaper and the bookshelves and the hi-fi. It does feel like you are inside of a mid-century professor’s living room. And let’s not forget Nick and Honey, played by Gunnar Manchester and Gabrielle McCauley. These are “supporting” roles, but the actors bring us into the characters as their lives are wrecked by George and Martha. This is an iconic play of the 20th century, and you could see it on film, but it is thrilling to be in the room with these performers.
Hernandez: This is probably the best show I’ve seen so far at The Gamm. This is a homerun for me. You can see “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” at The Gamm Theatre in Warwick now through Feb. 18.
L to R: Tony Estrella (George), Jeanine Kane (Martha). Background L to R: Gabrielle McCauley (Honey), Gunnar Manchester (Nick). Credit: Cat Laine courtesy Gamm Theatre
Disclosure: The Gamm Theatre is an underwriter of The Public’s Radio. Editorial decisions are made independently of business support.
The Tomaquag Museum is Rhode Island’s only museum that’s totally devoted to telling the story of Indigenous peoples from a first-person perspective. Thanks to a substantial grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, it’ll soon have a new home at the University of Rhode Island campus in Kingston. In a conversation with Morning Edition host Luis Hernandez, the museum’s executive director, Lorén Spears, said the new location will be more expansive and accessible.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TRANSCRIPT:Hernandez: Lorén, it’s such a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much for the time.
Lorén Spears: Kutapatush. Thank you.
Hernandez: I want you to start by telling us a little bit about this grant. And again, it’s from the National Endowment for the Humanities. What will this new grant make possible?
Spears: So this new grant is really to help us start, you know, getting to the point of construction in our new museum project, along with other funding that we’ve received. It’s actually a challenge grant. It’s over $444,000, which we have to match two to one. … It’s literally to help us begin the construction of the new museum, which has lots of components to it – an education center with educational classrooms, the Indigenous Empowerment [Center], which includes a cafe so that folks can come to the museum and experience indigenous foods while they’re learning about indigenous culture, and our research, archive collections research center, and of course the museum exhibit gallery at large, as well as outdoor exhibition spaces.
Hernandez: Why the new location? What’s behind the move?
Spears: So it’s something that our museum board and staff have been working on quietly for a long time, because we’re in a very remote space in Exeter, on the Arcadia side of Exeter – and although extremely beautiful, not easy for people to find. And one of our biggest problems is, not only hard to find, but we’re also having problems with flooding there. This last storm was included in that, where bridges were closed that were leading people to us, on these rural back roads. And so that makes it really a challenge. So we are really looking forward to being in a more central space, easy for people, tourists and average Rhode Islanders alike, to find us, for schools and programs to have an easy place to park and not a hard place because our space is so tight. All of those things will come in really handy and plus we’ll be on RIPTA lines, and that makes it accessible for folks that don’t have public, that don’t have cars. You know, a lot of people living in urban environments like to use public transportation. I live in a rural space, so it’s hard to do, but sometimes we use it still.
Hernandez: Isn’t it true that the new location is actually kind of close to a scene of, if I’m not mistaken, the 1675 Great Swamp Massacre? Isn’t it nearby there?
Spears: It’s not too far away, you’re right. And you know, we, it’s going to be the anniversary, 350th anniversary next year of the Great Swamp Memorial, or the massacre itself, I should say, and the subsequent memorials. Our community – meaning the Narragansett community, which I’m a citizen of – we think that’s really important for those stories to be told and for people to remember, and to understand that that war, which Europeans dubbed King Philip’s War, really is the war for New England. It was to conquer this space and create this new place that we now call New England. And it went up to 1678 in northern New England before the finality of the war, and it was to break the sovereignty, if you will, of indigenous nations here.
Hernandez: I’ve always been fascinated by not only the history between, you know, obviously colonists and the indigenous people who are living here, but it’s how that history is told. And so obviously you get one perspective, which is what a lot of us have had in school. And then there’s the indigenous people’s perspective. And I’m wondering, how does the museum address that history? How do you tell that story?
Spears: Well, you know, our mission is always to tell that story from a first-person perspective. It’s to promote the dialogue around these conversations. It’s to allow people to hear and process and think and have conversations around what these perspectives are. And I often will say that history isn’t the linear line that people like to portray it as. It’s really a big circle that you could call a pie. And the center point of that pie is that point in time in history, and every single slice that you could make into that pie is all the varying perspectives of that point in time. And none are right and none are wrong. They’re just all of our viewpoints based on our experience, philosophy and our ideology and our politics, and everything else we know about ourselves that makes us who we are is fed into that perspective. And I think as learners, it’s really important to hear lots of different perspectives and to understand where people are coming from. … That’s why we do projects like “A Key into the [Language of] America” by Roger Williams, where we wrote footnotes from our perspective, based on what he was saying about our community, what we felt about what he was saying about our community. And I think it’s important for people to understand that in that project, we weren’t picking on Roger Williams per se, but we were saying he was coming from a certain viewpoint, a very, you know, Puritan, Christian viewpoint, that was not the same as our viewpoint, and which is why he often, even when he said nice things about us and our culture, he would in turn also call us negative things like heathen and infidels and things like that, because we didn’t have the same religious beliefs.
Luis Hernandez: You’ve been doing – again, the museum has been around now since 1958 doing educational programming all this time. Now that you’re going to have this new home, I’m wondering, do you find people showing more interest in the work? Are they more excited? What have been the trends over the years, by the way, in, in people coming and visiting and seeking that knowledge and information?
Spears: Well, I can remember when I first started being the executive director here, we thought when we hit a thousand people in a year that we touched, that was a lot. And now we’re hitting 20,000 people a year. You know, it’s a lot of people when you start cumulatively adding that together. And I know that the new museum will just add to that opportunity because we’ll be more centrally available, we’re on the bus line, we’re near the train station, we’re on the bike path. It’ll create so much more opportunity and access for people to visit the museum and more engagement through interior exhibit spaces, art galleries, as well as external exhibit spaces that we have planned in the landscape, including a mini village with art installations of a longhouse and a wetu and the dugout canoe. … We continue to expand and be able to continue to hire more and more staff. And that means we’re impacting, you know, the general community of people, but also the native community that are telling their first-person stories through this museum as educators.
Hernandez: So what are the next steps for this new space? When does the location open?
Spears: Oh, that’s always the million-dollar question. So we are working very diligently with the University of Rhode Island, who acts as the planning, zoning sort of boards of this process, since it is on URI land. And we’re hoping, fingers crossed, to break ground sometime this year, but there are still some behind-the-scenes regulatory things that we have to get through in order to actually get to a groundbreaking date. And so I won’t even try to venture a guess as to exactly when that is, but we will be sure to, you know, ring the bells and scream loudly and send out every form of media possible when we do know of a more firm date for groundbreaking.
Hernandez: Lauren, it’s been such a pleasure. I really appreciate the insight. Thank you so much.
Spears: You’re welcome. Kunoopeam.
Go to tomaquagmuseum.org for more information.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
You can hear Paper Moon play every Wednesday night at the Royal Bobcat in Providence. Go to papermoonjazzband.com for more information or or check out their instagram, @papermoonjazzband.
TRANSCRIPT:
John Birt: We really dug into the music, kind of pre World War II, and particularly jazz that involves the guitar, and it really includes the acoustic guitar. So really getting into that world of, okay, you got acoustic strings, you’re kind of playing music from the songbooks of the 20s, 30s, and 40s. And really just exploring amazing sounds, and things from our favorite artists really, like Django.
Luis Hernandez: What is it about that era for you, Dylan?
Dylan Harley: I really like the simplicity of being able to just show up with two guitars and cause a scene and make a ruckus. And also that it’s, there is something timeless about it. That is, when you’re playing it, you do feel like you’re traveling through time or can be transported and you can see that happen for people who are listening to it as well. So between the simplicity and the kind of deep impact that that simplicity has, especially in this highly advanced technological age we’re moving in towards. Also as a drummer, I grew up playing, drums were my first like, love, true love. But it’s a bit cumbersome to move drums around all the time. So as a lazy musician, I really enjoy just showing up with the guitar.
Hernandez: Tell me a bit more about that interplay between the two guitars though, and, you know, what you can and can’t do with that.
Harley: Sure. my job, so I play rhythm guitar in it and, as I said, drums were my first instrument. And so I’m really approaching it sort of playing the guitar as a drum set or playing it as a drummer. So my job is really to lay down the foundation of the rhythm for John to wild out over and get crazy on.
Birt: And then, like, on top of that, you kind of always have the, He’s the rhythmic pulse. He’s really the thing that’s driving everything. And then what Django Reinhardt was doing, and also what I’m trying to do, is to kind of fill in the gaps. To add different textures, to add different kinds of things to kind of accent what he’s doing and really kind of fill in the space.
Hernandez: Tell me a bit more about that era and some of the performers you admire most.
Birt: Well, I mean, Django Reinhardt’s kind of the beginning of a lot of our sound. And then really the sound world that he was obsessed with is really kind of, he’s learning about jazz through recordings. So Django’s hearing all of this in Europe. And he’s hearing Louis Armstrong, he’s hearing Duke Ellington, he’s hearing all these different sounds and reacting to it as someone who grew up in Europe playing mostly kind of folk music. So he hears all of this, he hears the sounds of jazz, he hears the note choice, and he just kind of goes off and does his own thing. So that kind of sound world, plus once you add in stuff on Grappelli, like the interplay of an instrument that has sustain, like a violin or an accordion, plus what we’re doing with the guitars, really ends up kind of completing the picture.
Hernandez: How long have you been listening to Django?
Birt: I mean, I feel like I probably got into Django’s music heavily maybe about five years ago, six years ago, it’s always something like I knew about, but I really, I started trying to play it with some friends and I was mostly doing it on electric guitar. And I was like, no, this isn’t really, this isn’t the sound yet. I’m working on it. And then when COVID happened, that was kind of where I had the moment to kind of hit a hard reset as far as how I play. And I was like, Oh, well let’s really get into that acoustic sound. Let’s get into this technique that you need to be able to like really amplify what you’re doing and get that kind of sound.
Hernandez: What is it that drew you into this music though? What is, like, is there a moment you’re just like, oh my gosh, this is, this is everything?
Harley: One moment that’s clicked for me is playing live for people because this music is its immediacy.
Birt: It’s kind of a visceral ness to it. It’s music that really drives forward. You know, even when it’s slow, it still has like this really kind of, it always feels like it’s a little bit ahead of the beat. And I think, too, it’s music that’s kind of meant to be experienced live. I think the recordings do it justice. And really, when you hear Django play the same song in multiple takes, they’re completely different. So there’s just constant playfulness, there’s constant interplay between the two of us, and the more people that we play with, the better. but yeah, it’s music that just kind of, to me the thing that probably drew me in the most was the colors that, that Django decided to use in his chords, and in his melodic ideas is that he’s really, he’s taking ideas from the blues, but he’s also doing and using notes that normal American blues players would not use.
Hernandez: I wanted to switch over and ask you about the scene, the music scene here in Providence and again, you both have been involved in a variety of bands over the years. And then you mentioned the pandemic and I was, you know, thinking about the impact that that had on so many of us, but on artists, especially because you’re talking about performing live and for a while we couldn’t. And so I’m wondering, what would you say about the current state of music right now and how it was shaped over these last few years with everything that’s happened?
Harley: I think that we’ve seen like a real need for live music … One thing that I really love about this music that we’re playing in particular is that it’s great as background music. People can be having their date night. It can also be a focal point for people to listen to and, you know, hear what we’re doing. And meanwhile, we’re having fun doing it no matter what’s going on in the room.
Hernandez: But you said there’s a need for it. Is that, is it something from, from the performers or from the audience?
Harley: I think both. I think that just being in a physical space with other people. And feeling the actual pulse and vibrations of music and the pulse and, you know, coming from our end and the pulse and vibrations of love or laughter or food or plates clinking coming from the audience’s end. That’s food. You know, that’s, you can’t see it, you can’t touch it, but that’s actual food. There’s so many times that before going to the gig, I’ll be like, I’m tired from work. I don’t want to do anything. And then as soon as I get there, all of that washes away and I go home with more energy than I had walking into it. And I’d like to think that that’s the same for the people who come to see us play as well.
Hernandez: John, Dylan, it’s been such a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Harley: Thanks for having us.
[Music by John Birt on vocals and guitar, Dylan Harley on guitar, and Albert Behar on accordion.]
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
“La Broa’ (Broad Street)” makes its world premiere at Trinity Rep on Jan. 18, and runs through Feb. 18. More information at trinityrep.com. A disclosure: Trinity Rep is an underwriter for The Public’s Radio.
TRANSCRIPT:
Luis Hernandez: Tatyana-Marie, thanks for talking with me.
Tatyana-Marie Carlo: Hi, I’m so happy to be here.
Hernandez: It’s called “La Broa’,” that’s of course referring to Broad Street in Providence, but does the whole thing focus on just Broad Street, this one little area, or more?
Carlo: We focused on Providence, Broad Street, and then Central Falls. We looked at the communities in which there are the largest demographic, demographics of Latine people, and that being Providence and Central Falls. At the time of the writing, I believe that over 40% in Providence and over 70% in Central Falls are Latine folks.
Hernandez: Is the play in English or Spanish or bilingual? What’s it like?
Carlo: The play is in both languages. I would say it leans towards English, but definitely there are portions of the play that are in Spanish.
Hernandez: What’s it been like for you as the director and putting this performance together, something that’s been very much anticipated, and it’s been in the works for years?
Carlo: My goal in being a theater maker back to my days at Microtheater [Miami] – where we met, back to our days at Microtheater – was bilingual theater. And I think that bilingual theater allows us the opportunity to reach more people and also bring generations of families together. When my grandparents were alive, they didn’t speak very much English, and my cousins, because assimilation used to mean survival. My cousins don’t necessarily have the language in the same way. And we were able to collectively together, to watch a piece of theater and everyone understand what is happening. And it has been my mission, my personal goal to do that, to make bilingual plays. And I’ve been doing that for the past, I want to say, since 2014, I’ve been doing – wait, is that 10 years? Oh my god.
Hernandez: We’re showing our age.
Carlo: Please, I know. That’s crazy.
Tatyana-Marie Carlo, director and Orlando Hernández, playwright Credit: PHOTO BY: NATASHA SAMRENY COURTESY TRINITY REPHernandez: Your experience now, being here in Providence a little longer than I’ve been here, is there, is there a thirst in the Latin community for more theater?
Carlo: Big time. I mean, we have amazing theaters like ECAS who is doing Spanish language plays, and Rhode Island Latino Arts. We have Teatro en El Verano in the summer that tours through Rhode Island. I believe we’re going into our seventh season here at Trinity Rep. So there is a hunger. There is a desire for not only Latine work, but work that is in Spanish and in English. And we’re seeing that, based on the audiences that are coming to Trinity Rep and the excitement around this play in particular, I think that there is 100% like hunger for this kind of work here in Rhode Island.
Hernandez: What’s most exciting about this for you? What are you so looking forward to?
Carlo: I think the thing that I’m most excited about here is when I came to Rhode Island, I didn’t necessarily see a lot of Latine work happening on stage, and I didn’t see it at Trinity Rep. And I’m part of the company, and I love them very much, but it wasn’t happening at Trinity Rep in the same way that it is now. We did “Sueño” a couple years ago by Jose Rivera, and that was iconic because we had people from the community in the play. Trinity Rep’s model is a company model, but then also I was always curious of like, how do we integrate these amazing artists that are doing Teatro en El Verano in the summer, who are like working outside in the summer, in the heat, making these plays happen? How do we also translate that so that they’re able to be on the main stage? And now most of the people that are in the play, we have 10 amazing performers, most of them are Rhode Island natives or have moved here when they were young. And that’s the majority of the cast. And for me, I think it’s important to not only have the pioneers, right, that we’re talking about in the play, but the pioneers that are to be, and the pioneers that are happening now, especially in the theater. And that makes me the most excited.
Hernandez: Looking forward to the show. Really, really am. Thank you so much for sharing with us, and break a leg.
Carlo: Thank you! So excited.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
Marta Martinez and Rosalyn Tavarez, who plays Ana (the character based on Marta) Credit: PHOTO BY: MARISA LENARDSON COURTESY TRINITY REP
Luis: I’m Luis Hernandez, and this is the Public’s Radio. Artscape producer James Baumgartner is here with me to talk about a few of the holiday season performances that are happening around the area. Hi James.
James: Hi Luis. We have four different productions to talk about. Let’s start with It’s a Wonderful Life at The Gamm Theatre.
Luis: I love the movie It’s A Wonderful Life, and there are not a lot of movies from the pre-1970s that I love. When I got the chance to watch the theatrical performance at the Gamm last year, I was curious about how they were going to bring this story to life. I was pleasantly surprised. They perform this as a live radio performance like the old radio plays in the 20s and 30s.
Luis: You know I love the technical aspects of a stage performance. And this show does an amazing job of creating a radio studio environment – something you and I know well. The actors move back and forth from their seated positions to the microphone to perform their parts, and the way they move around the stage is seamless, recreating the feel of a radio play.
James: Back in 2020, we worked with The Gamm to present this as a radio play on the air since they weren’t able to do live performances during the height of the pandemic. Here’s a little excerpt from that.
Luis: That excerpt shows one of the really fun parts of the show: the sound effects performer. This part is without lines, yet this person is like the show’s conductor. They’re off in the corner of the stage behind a table of objects, each used beautifully to create the sounds for the radio play. You forget they’re up there because they’re so good at creating the sounds that accompany the story.
James: And they did the same for our on-air version, using those objects to help create the atmosphere of the play.
Luis: The show was absolutely lovely and a fun time. It goes by rather quickly. But, it’s worth the experience. You can see It’s A Wonderful Life at the Gamm Theatre in Warwick through Christmas Eve.
Taavon Gamble as The Ghost of Christmas Present, with the children’s cast members Lily Altomari and Lou Weschler Credit: PHOTO BY MARK TUREK COURTESY OF TRINITY REPJames: Trinity Rep is putting on their 47th production of A Christmas Carol this year. And they reimagine it every year. This year’s version is directed by company member Steven Thorne. In the program notes, Thorne says, “Isolation is really on my mind this year. Scrooge is so isolated – he’s isolated himself. Every human being on the planet has such a visceral experience of isolation as a result of the pandemic. We have been changed because of it. I think that adds a different lens on how we receive what it means to not be able to connect to people.” You can see A Christmas Carol at Trinity Rep now through December 31st.
The cast of “Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge” at Contemporary Theater Company Credit: REDIT: SETH JACOBSON PHOTOGRAPHYLuis: And if you want a completely different take on the Scrooge story, you can check out “Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge” at Contemporary Theater Company in Wakefield. This play centers on a minor character from A Christmas Carol – Mrs. Bob Cratchit. Instead of being the dutiful wife, she’s sick and tired of the 21 kids in the household and she’s not going to hide it anymore. And the Ghost of Christmas Past is trying to show Scrooge the various events of his life, but the ghost’s magic doesn’t work and they keep ending up at the Cratchit house. So it’s a real send-up of the Scrooge story and other Christmas Traditions. You can see it at Contemporary Theater in Wakefield through December 23rd.
(from 2021) Yury Yanowsky with Nutcracker Mask, Erminio Pinque with Rat King mask Credit: PHOTO BY DYLAN GILES COURTESY OF BALLET RIJames: And finally, there’s Ballet Rhode Island’s performance of The Nutcracker. In 2021, they changed the masks worn by the Nutcracker and the Rat King. It was a collaboration with Erminio Pinque of Big Nazo, known for creating scary and grotesque monsters that are also kind of endearing. Here’s Erminio describing the Rat King:
Erminio Pinque: So I really wanted to incorporate that sense of organic gristle. So the mouse has a real kind of furrowed brow and kind of a snarl expression. But it also isn’t hateful or monstrous, you know, it’s basically the way a rat would look like if it were about to eat something delicious maybe or gnawing its way out of a closet or something.
James: You can see Ballet Rhode Island’s production of The Nutcracker at The Vets December 15th through Christmas Eve.
The Gamm Theatre, Trinity Repertory Company and Ballet RI are corporate underwriters of The Public’s Radio. The Public’s Radio coverage and editorial decisions are made independent of business support.
The film follows two young people, Simone Zimmerman and Eitan, who doesn’t share his last name. In it, we see how they grew up with a view of Israel that doesn’t fit what they experience when they go there. For this week’s Artscape, Morning Edition host Luis Hernandez spoke with Rhode Island-based filmmaker Sam Eilertsen, who makes his directorial debut with this film.
The Dec. 7 screening of “Israelism” at the Columbus Theatre is sold out, but the film will be available to rent online Friday through Sunday. Go to israelismfilm.com for more details.
The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future.
TRANSCRIPT:
Luis Hernandez: Briefly describe the film for us. What can people expect?
Sam Eilertsen: Thank you for having me on. So our film “Israelism” is about, really digs into American Jewish community’s relationship with Israel through the stories of two young Jewish people who sort of in many ways represent a broader element of of our generation of young Jews who grow up being sort of taught to be really attached to Israel without necessarily learning a lot of details about Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. And when they actually sort of witness on the ground the way that Palestinians are being treated by the state of Israel, it totally shatters their perceptions and sets them on a journey that sort of leads to activism and ultimately leads to advocating for creating a very different situation in Israel/Palestine, where all people could be free.
Hernandez: You started filming this way before the war between Israel and Hamas, obviously, but when the war started, what were you thinking and feeling considering the message of the film?
Eilertsen: It’s a really hard moment for all of us working on this film. Our filmmaking team is primarily American Jews, but also includes both Palestinian Americans and Israelis as well. … So it was a really, really difficult moment for everyone. We have colleagues with family on the ground in Gaza. And also that we have colleagues who lost family members, friends or family members in Hamas’s attack on October 7th.
We postponed most screenings, pretty much all screenings for the first two weeks after the war broke out just to make sure that we were in the right emotional place to be showing this film, and also that we were understanding how to have these conversations because it is more difficult than ever, but we’ve been kind of going back out on the road with the film and trying to make space to have conversations where people that might have differing opinions can come and have a real dialogue. And I think we’ve, we’ve done a great – I hope we’ve done a good job with that. I think most of our conversations have been actually really like fruitful and productive, and not scary like conversations about this are often portrayed as being, I would say.
Still from the new documentary “Israelism” co-directed by Sam EilertsenHernandez: I just wanted to get a sense briefly, if you could, about what your experience was like when you first went to Israel. Not just your view of Israel and the Jewish people, but also of Palestinians when you first met, you know, Palestinians in Palestine.
Eilertsen: I actually visited both Israel and the West Bank for the first time when we had just started making this film, which was a really interesting experience. So I obviously had read a lot like you alluded to, I had watched a lot of documentaries. Nothing fully prepares you for what it’s actually like to cross the wall, so to speak.
And I really always encourage people – obviously right now is, it would be a difficult time – but I really do encourage people who are asking questions and trying to understand what to think, if they can, to actually go to the West Bank and see what it’s actually like for people living day to day on the ground.
We visited the city of Hebron and the city is divided up by all these checkpoints. And the goal here is to protect these very radical religiously motivated settlers, who are a small community of Jewish settlers who are living in this very large Palestinian city deep in the West Bank and are actively sort of, like, taking over people’s houses and taking them away from them, from people who are just trying to live their lives. And the Israeli army is there to protect them, and specifically not supposed to protect Palestinian civilians from the settlers if the settlers decide to do violence. And so they’ve set up all this like very over the top segregation systems. Like, there are these people who are here and they’re taking someone else’s homes away. And why are they allowed to be there? And it’s very disturbing to see that.
Hernandez: Let me come forward to your time at Brown. You graduated in 2012, correct? Yeah. What was it like, being Jewish on campus then? What was the relationship like with Palestinian students?
Eilertsen: I think right now there’s a lot of sort of moral panic about the atmosphere in college campuses. I think there was maybe less so then. Our freshman year was the year of Israel’s, the first time that there was a major military conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
I remember at one point – first of all, like one of my best friends showed up on campus and he would, had his Israeli army uniform that he often wore, or the shirt that he got from like an Israeli soldier that he often just wore around campus. In our dorm, there was also a Palestinian student who had a poster of Yasser Arafat on his wall. So it was – but everyone would just hang out. So it was very interesting to be around. But I remember during that war in Gaza, two of my good friends, both Jewish, got in an almost physical altercation in the lunchroom. Because, you know, one person thought that what Israel was doing was totally wrong, and one person thought that what Israel was doing was totally necessary and it’s all Hamas’s fault. And that was just what the atmosphere was like.
Still from the new documentary “Israelism” co-directed by Sam EilertsenHernandez: From what you experienced as a student in the early – I mean, again, you graduated 2012, so more than 10 years ago, to what you see now, what do you think about that?
Eilertsen: There’s a lot of really laser focus on college campuses in a way that I think is not productive right now, in the sense that you know, we’ve been doing a tour of many, many college campuses. That was planned starting before October 7th starting on and after October 7th.
We postponed some screenings and then resumed doing them. There started to be a really intense sort of hate campaign to get our screenings canceled, and people who have no actual connection to colleges sending like literally thousands of template emails to college presidents demanding that they cancel our screenings, and claiming that like that the atmosphere is going to be so dangerous and we’re putting students in danger by even showing this film. And the University of Pennsylvania actually threatened progressive Jewish students with discipline for showing our film, which is just just wild.
All that said, like when you actually show up and talk to people, if you show up in the right way I’ve found conversations to be really fruitful and kind and understanding. And I think that, you know, there’s always going to be college students who are very passionate and want to protest for this cause or that cause, and it’s important to be able to speak out about what you believe.
Overall, I would say that students are, like all of us, feeling a lot of anguish about what’s going on, but that doesn’t mean they’re not ready to have a reasonable conversation if you engage them in the right way.
Hernandez: Critics of the film have said that it’s a misrepresentation of the Israel-Palestine conflict. They’ve even said it’s antisemitic and one-sided. How do you respond to that?
Eilertsen: I’ll kind of break that down into two pieces. Obviously, the claims that the film itself is antisemitic or puts Jews in danger is very offensive to us as Jewish filmmakers who made this film. You know, not just myself and my co-director, but most of our producers as well are Jewish. We have Israeli executive producers. So to say that the film itself is antisemitic, it kind of goes to like the larger cultural issue here, which we try to always talk about, is there are very real threats to Jews, and antisemitism and hatred. And then there is also this issue of conflating any criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
And then, in terms of it’s not an accurate representation of the conflict, I mean, we tried to make a film about one particular story, which is a story of a very significant segment of young American Jews. We don’t claim to speak for everyone, absolutely.
One study said that 38% of Jews under 40 consider Israel’s actions to constitute apartheid, which is quite an extraordinary number, given that if you had done that poll like maybe 15 or 20 years ago, I think the percentage probably would have been tiny.
So, I think that to say that we’re not representing a very real segment of the community is not true. In terms of, is it a fair and balanced history of the conflict? That’s not the movie we tried to make. I think that we tried to tell, again, the story of, like, how a certain segment of the community feels that they were educated and what they feel was not correct about that education.
And I always tell people, like, there are a lot of other history books, films, resources that people can read that show the conflict. There’s a book called “Side by Side” that will take you through every single event in the history of Israel and Palestine and give you the Israeli narrative and then the Palestinian narrative on the next page. That wasn’t the movie we set out to make.
Hernandez: What are you hearing from people who’ve seen the film, their thoughts on the film, different communities and their thoughts on the film? And how does that go with what you kind of hope people will take away from the film?
Eilertsen: We’ve had really positive reactions from the vast majority of our audiences. … So we’ve gotten a great deal of support particularly from other younger Jews who often come up to us afterwards and talk about how this story represents theirs. And a lot of Palestinian audiences have really resonated with the film. … Most of the criticisms are either based on people having not actually seen the film and making assumptions, or if they’ve seen the film, their criticisms are often about what we didn’t include or the fact that it’s not like a long comprehensive history of the conflict. In terms of actually engaging with the real substance of what the film says, for people who’ve actually seen the film people might say “I disagree with this and that, but I also think you have a lot of great points,” which, that’s great for me. I really appreciate that.
Hernandez: Sam, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate the conversation. Thank you.
Eilertsen: Thank you so much for having me on.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
When UMass Dartmouth Chancellor Mark Fuller took office two years ago, the university’s art school was at a crossroads. The College of Visual and Performing Arts had been operating out of a former department store in downtown New Bedford for 20 years. A lease-to-own agreement for the property was about to expire. So Fuller faced the choice of buying the Star Store for a dollar, or continuing to rent it from its private owner.
The Star Store — an elaborate, Beaux-Arts building whose renovation helped spark a revitalization of downtown New Bedford as an arts and culture district — had widely reported maintenance problems, including a leaking roof and a busted air conditioning system. But, in his first public interview since the Star Store closed abruptly in August, Fuller claims there are other costs to taking ownership that few people seem to understand. To comply with new green building codes for state-owned property, Fuller said most of the Star Store would have to be rebuilt.
“It was air handlers, it was chillers, it was new windows meeting codes,” he said. “It was new wall infrastructures for sustainability. It was new doors.”
Fuller said the price tag for turning a 100-year-old department store into a green building fell somewhere in the range of $50 million to $75 million. That cost estimate sounded absurd to many people in New Bedford. And as journalists and politicians dug for details, they found Fuller’s cost estimates weren’t based on recent inspections or property assessments. Instead, Fuller said he got his numbers from conversationshe had with DCAMM, the state’s Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance. I asked Fuller how he could make such an important decision without clear documentation and precise cost estimates.
“Well, it seems perhaps less nebulous to me than to others because we were experiencing exactly these costs on a campus project for a building that we owned. So there was nothing nebulous about that,” Fuller said. “We know exactly what the renovation is costing at the Arts and Sciences Building. And it was $900 a square foot. The square footage costs of renovation that DCAMM provided were exactly what I was experiencing on campus. And so to me, it was a very, very credible number and I had multiple conversations with them about that number.”
“We know that, you know, the mayor, and many of the citizens are disappointed. We’re disappointed,” Fuller said. “But that doesn’t change the reality of what it would cost us to own that building. One of our major revenue streams at a university is student tuition. So basically, we would have had to raise tuition to pay for that building. I couldn’t do that.”
Instead, Fuller advocated to keep renting the Star Store from its private owner. He said this was a much cheaper way of keeping UMass Dartmouth’s art school in downtown New Bedford.
“Think of this as an apartment. Our obligation was never to renovate a building,” Fuller said. “You would never fix the roof on an apartment that you’re renting. That’s the responsibility of the landlord.”
Then, this past August, just two weeks before the fall semester started, the Massachusetts Senate removed a line in the state budget that had funded the Star Store’s rent for the past 22 years. It was an unexpected change that Fuller said was spearheaded by Mark Montigny, New Bedford’s own state senator. Montigny later said that continuing to rent the Star Store would amount to squandering more than $50 million the state paid under the lease-to-own agreement.
“We would be in the Star Store today if the appropriation had continued. There was no plan on my watch to withdraw from the Star Store,” Fuller said. “We were operating under the best assumption that the appropriation would continue. The governor had put it in the budget, the House had put it in the budget, and Senator Montigny removed it from the budget and stopped our ability to even maintain the building.”
“I know that Senator Montigny had a, you know, particular agenda that he wanted the university to own it,” Fuller said, “despite the consequences, the financial consequences that that would mean to us. And so that’s why it didn’t make it through the Senate. And that surprised us.”
The art school closed over two frantic weeks at the end of August. The transition interfered with students’ education and triggered outrage in New Bedford. Many students now split their time between private studios and a makeshift facility the university set up in a former Bed Bath & Beyond in Dartmouth. I visited the building this month. One graduate student, Immer Cook, said he’s been biking around with fragile ceramics and 50-pound bags of clay. To wet that clay, Cook uses a trash can filled with water instead of a sink. Then, since there are no functioning kilns onsite, he transports his sculptures back out of the facility to fire and glaze them in other studios.
I mentioned to Fuller that, based on my visit to the space, the new facilities didn’t seem up to snuff.
“Oh, absolutely not. And we are, we are well, well aware of that,” Fuller said.
Still, Fuller said the university can only refund tuition if the students formally withdraw from their classes, which means they wouldn’t get any course credit for the three months of work they’ve already done.
“And I know that’s not satisfactory. I get it,” Fuller said. “We’re working around the clock to get everything stood up as quickly as we can. So we’re looking at options in terms of, you know, perhaps new facilities on campus that we can control, and not be, you know, subjected to exit, if you will, based on political whims. So we do have to control our destiny in the future, because this has been a trauma.”
Fuller said the university is renovating the Bed Bath & Beyond campus this winter so the art students can actually finish their work onsite. He said the university is considering extending the lease there for a second year. But Fuller said the long-term solution could look like a new one-story building on the main campus. I asked him if a return to the Star Store is still on the table.
“I never like to say nothing’s possible but, you know, it was expensive to move out,” Fuller said. “I’d be, you know, very open to looking at showcasing, you know, our artists’ work in New Bedford through a gallery or an event space. What is difficult for me to envision is standing up academic programs in, you know, in the Star Store or other facilities that we don’t control … because it puts us at so much risk doing that, as we have experienced here. Politicians change. Budgets change. All of that changes.”
Many people in New Bedford are still hoping there’s a way to save the Star Store. Local politicians have called on Governor Maura Healey to broker a solution. New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell has offered to buy the Star Store and lease it back to UMass Dartmouth. I pressed Fuller to find out who he’s actually talked with and where those conversations went.
“I can tell you that I’ve spoken with Mayor Mitchell. I think his desire is to return everything into the Star Store. I don’t see that pathway. I don’t see how that happens,” Fuller said. “Because even if it were to be put, somehow, that the city would buy this, they’re going to have to deal with the renovations. And you’ve read Mayor Mitchell’s press release from, I don’t know, a couple months ago. He said we could acquire it at the time, but we can’t fix it.”
“So I don’t know who is, I don’t know who’s fixing it. And even without the green building codes that I’m subject to, I think it’s much more expensive than people are anticipating,” Fuller said. “And that would fall on either some, I guess, appropriation that would come or some increase in taxes. I just don’t — I’m not seeing it. I don’t see how we get from where we are to there.”
Back at the Bed Bath & Beyond campus, some students have adapted to a new, slower artistic process. Others are paying out of pocket for private studios. And the Star Store, towering over the main intersection in downtown New Bedford, sits totally empty.
South Coast Bureau Reporter Ben Berke can be reached at bberke@thepublicsradio.org.
A Singularly Marine & Fabulous Produce: The Cultures of Seaweed is on now through Dec. 3 at The New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Luis Hernandez: How did you become interested in this? Why seaweed for an exhibit?
Naomi Slipp: Most people, when I mentioned what our big show is right now, they go, “Seaweed? Ugh.” There were two reasons that I think. Seaweed made for a really interesting exhibition or, or kind of piqued our curiosity as a project to explore in an exhibition. The first one was because we are very lucky to have an extraordinary painting in our collection. It’s a really large work painted by a local artist, local to the New Bedford area, who pictures seaweed gathering in France.
I think the other thing is exactly what you hit upon. There are so many kind of cultural traditions that are core to sort of southern New England … ones that maybe we take for granted, like the clam bake or you know, even I know so many people that rake seaweed and put it in their garden beds.
The coastal heritage, the coastal history of this place really means that seaweed has been sort of a significant part of that story for a really long time and made it feel like it would be an interesting sort of thread to explore. And then I think the third thing, as we started to get into the project, was there are so many contemporary projects right now studying seaweed and looking at seaweed as an answer to many of the kind of key critical issues that we’re facing today. And so being able to explore the history and then kind of think about how today seaweed was being utilized to answer things like global food scarcity or climate change or the changes in our coastal waterways, like that felt like a really interesting kind of environmental angle that we could look at and bring the story up to the present.
Hernandez: Describe a couple of the pieces. Because I know you have like paintings, you have ceramics, you’ve got a wide variety of things.
Slipp: It ranges from really extraordinary silver examples of silver from the New York Yacht Club and from the private Tiffany company collection. Which really show how, like, the most elite material, silver, right, this sort of over the top, expensive, decorative art form really reveled in picturing seaweed to things like this enormous piece of housing insulation that was produced sometime around 1900 and was found inside of a house in the Connecticut area. And it was commercially manufactured and sold and they found that kind of housing insulation as far away as California, but it was made in the Boston area. We’ve got, as you noted, lots of tablewares, china, serving dishes. There’s wallpaper. There’s textiles, there’s photography.
Hernandez: Is it true, I think I saw like a coat made of seaweed or something like that?
Slipp: There is not clothing in the exhibition but there is fabric and there are clothes that have been known to be made from seaweed. There’s a sculpture, which maybe is what you’re thinking about, there’s a sculpture out on the plaza that’s cast in bronze. And it’s a contemporary artist named Celeste Roberge who works in the Portland area. And she created a sweater entirely out of seaweed, mostly rockweed, the seaweed with like the kind of, you know, air bubbles.
And it’s a full size, life size sweater entirely of seaweed. And her project is sort of thinking about like, what will we need to adapt to in the face of climate change and sort of rising seas? What kind of clothing will people wear in the future? And in this case It’s seaweed.
Hernandez: In neighboring Rhode Island, collecting seaweed is a protected shoreline right under the Constitution. And that history obviously has directly influenced the new shoreline access law signed by the governor earlier this year. What do you think that says about the importance of seaweed to the region where, you know, I mean, it’s in the Constitution. It’s now, it’s forcing us to create laws today.
Slipp: It’s really curious, I think, the way that when you start looking at seaweed, you start recognizing how much, especially for states like us that are so coastal, how much the kind of privatization of land or questions about public access or our belief in what should be public and what should be private is, in part, yes, enshrined by law, but then also, in part, something of like the heritage of that space, right? I found it fascinating digging into this project, how different the laws are in Massachusetts and Maine about coastal access.
And it’s because Massachusetts and Maine have that conjoined history, right? They were originally one territory. Right next door, Rhode Island has really liberal, and increasingly now, more liberal rules about shoreline access. But Maine and Massachusetts, it’s really restricted.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
Luis Hernandez: This is The Public’s Radio, I’m Luis Hernandez. For Artscape this week, producer James Baumgartner and I saw “Hangmen” at the Gamm Theatre in Warwick. Written by Martin McDonagh and directed by The Gamm’s artistic director, Tony Estrella. James is here with me now to discuss the play. James, what’s it all about?
James Baumgartner: It’s a comedy about a fictional “second-most famous hangman in Britain.” There’s a prologue that takes place at an execution in 1963, The story centers on Harry Wade, the executioner.
Luis: This is a dark, dark comedy and it lets you know that in that first scene because right away, a man named Hennessy is executed – and he’s protesting his innocence as the guards are dragging him to the gallows. But I was laughing the whole time because it’s done with very dry humor. Like as Hennessy is clinging to the railing, the executioner’s assistant tells him, “If you’d’ve just tried to relax you could’ve been dead by now.”
James: Yeah, and they also correct his grammar. It’s an interesting contrast between that uptight British-ness and the underlying violence of capital punishment. After the prologue, the action moves to a pub, owned by Harry Wade, the executioner. And it’s 1965, just as the U.K. has outlawed capital punishment. Here, we get to see Harry Wade’s vanity as he struts in front of the regulars at the pub and refuses to answer a reporter’s questions about Harry’s thoughts on the end of capital punishment.
Luis: Yeah, but he eventually gives in to the reporter’s questions because he really does want to share his opinions about capital punishment with the world – as well as settle some scores with his rival, Pierrepont, the most famous hangman in Britain. And then there’s Mooney, the menacing mysterious outsider.
James: He just seems to be there to mess with Harry and the other people at the pub. I loved John Hardin in this role, I could feel his delight in being annoying to the other characters and sowing the seeds of doubt about that execution we saw earlier – that maybe they got the wrong man. Harry Wade is played by Steve Kidd who shows the character as a boasting, resentful bully hidden behind a bowtie like a veneer of respectability.
Luis: The few shows I’ve seen at the Gamm, they never disappoint when it comes to the set. This time it’s on two levels, with a beautiful, cozy English Pub on the lower level and the residence up above. The Gamm’s stage is small, but they fill it with action. But something that didn’t work well for me was the transition between the scenes, there’s music, the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” and there’s text telling you that it’s 1965. I didn’t see that as necessary, it didn’t do anything for me.
James: I disagree with you there. The year is very important. This is a transitional moment between the old stodgy Britain, and swinging London as personified by the creepy Mooney. This was the year that capital punishment ended in the U.K. The play was written more than 50 years after those events.
Luis: And we’re watching the play in the U.S. 60 years later where people were executed just last month, which adds an interesting element. Because it does seem like McDonagh is using the story to get his audience to think about what motivates us in situations where we seek to punish someone – is it justice or is it revenge?
James: And Martin McDonagh has said in interviews that it’s not an ‘issue play,’ but he’s obviously using this specific issue to get us to think about these questions. But really at its heart, it’s a dark comedy-thriller with some elements of mystery to it and I think it was a pleasure to watch.
Luis: I loved it as well. It also gave me a sense like I was watching “Cheers” – the pub with all the guys at the end of the bar. Loved it. You can see “Hangmen” at the Gamm Theatre, on now through November 26th.
The Gamm Theatre is an underwriter of The Public’s Radio. The Public’s Radio makes its editorial and coverage decisions independent of business support.
Luis Hernandez: I wanted to get a sense from you, as you start this new role, what’s your strategy?
Tsugumi Maki: I believe in strategy being a collaborative process. So I have a vision for the museum. But I would say strategy wise, I really want to work with the staff, and develop that together. I haven’t been here long enough to really know what the strategy should be. The staff has been here a very long time, they are passionate about this institution. And I need to look to them to help me guide that strategy.
Hernandez: You talked about a vision, though, so let’s talk about the vision. What’s the vision? What do you see?
Maki: The vision is kind of an overall vision for museums in general. Museums are at a crossroads. There are so many museums that are becoming less and less relevant to people and audiences. And what we need to do as institutions is to create opportunities for people to come where they feel like they belong in a museum right now. In the past, museums have been places where we are the tastemakers, we tell people what they should like and what’s important. And I think, especially with a younger generation of millennials, Gen Zers, they want to see things that they’re interested in, that they care about, that they’re inspired by. And so we need to look at them to get an idea of what we should be thinking about and doing, but then also creating content in a way that they’re going to enjoy. And make them want to come to museums, right? So that’s kind of my vision for museums in general. And that’s what I want to see happen at RISD.
Hernandez: You were just saying, and I’m wondering, that you’re at a crossroads, that museums are at a crossroads. Is it because people see museums differently? Or is it just the content? You were talking about content. What’s the crossroads?
Maki: When I tell people that I work in museums, sometimes they’re like, really excited, and sometimes they’re like, oh, I don’t go to museums, I, you know, museums kind of freak me out. I don’t really understand art. You know, some people think they need to dress up to go to a museum. You know, there are all these misconceptions about museums. And it’s because of the way that museums have traditionally been there. They’re kind of old and stodgy. They don’t necessarily speak to all of the relevant things that are happening in our society. And the thing is, the content that’s in there is actually relevant to what we’re doing in the world, right? Like we need to look to history to be able to think about the future. And how do we have those conversations in a way that can really inspire people that they see their own selves themselves in the work that exists in museums. So I think in that sense, museums are definitely at a crossroads. They have to think about engaging their audiences thinking about community in ways that they didn’t have to in the past. I started in the museums in about 1995. And I think that we told people what to do and what to see. It’s kind of this top down mentality. And that’s what younger people are kind of rebelling against at this point. They don’t want the top down mentality. They want to be part of the conversation. And I think museums need to be places where you can have those kinds of conversations.
Hernandez: Are there any plans to build stronger relationships and collaborate more with the local community?
Maki: Yes. And I think that the museum has been doing that. Our attendance has grown astronomically, like we have actually rebounded from pre pandemic, the museum. There are very few museums out there that have actually gained more attendance. We’re looking at our attendance records right now. People are coming. We’re creating relevant content already. And what we need to do is amplify that and more. … It’s about expanding that further, so that even more people feel that it’s relevant to their lives. I mean, RISD Museum is a very unique place. It’s an academic art museum on an art school campus, right. So we’re really important to the faculty, to the students. It’s the way in which faculty teach, it’s the way that students learn. But also, the RISD Museum is the largest art museum in the state of Rhode Island. It is the Civic museum of the state of Rhode Island and Providence. And so we play a different kind of role. And that is really, really important.
Hernandez: How much of that role is to help these young artists to find their voice as artists to build their career to become artists of the world?
Maki: Oh, it’s absolutely a large portion of this. But it’s not just teaching the students here. It’s about making sure that younger generations, I mean, there’s less and less arts in schools these days, right. So few schools have art, even one day a week, maybe they have it every other week, museums are a place where students can come and learn. We have so many programs here all the way from infants all the way through, you know, college students, adults, we try to educate everyone about art. And I think the less and less that arts plays a role in public schools, the more in which art museums become important. And the less and less people become attached, but like engaged with art, the less they’re going to be in touch with their own humanity. So we have a really important role to play in that way.
Hernandez: The art world and museums haven’t always been the most accessible or more inclusive spaces in terms of the work that’s on the walls. As you begin this role, I’m wondering, how do you see the RISD Museum becoming more inclusive of artists and groups that have, again, historically been underrepresented in the art world?
Maki: I think museums are starting to do that work. I think all museums are trying that. I think especially post 20-, post-COVID, post racial reckoning, all of those things, I think museums have really been thinking about that RISD Museum has done a fantastic job. They’ve been thinking about it deeply. … But there’s a lot more to do, you know, and I think inclusion is about not just welcoming people, but having them be participating and active in our society in our in our museum. So I’m not sure like I honestly don’t know all of the things that need to happen. I haven’t been here long enough to be able to, like really say, but I think that the work that we’re doing now is what we want to expand on.
Hernandez: In other jobs, have you seen that?
Maki: I think in other places, I’ve seen, it’s about acquiring artwork, and showing more, showing more artists of color. But what’s actually important is also inclusivity within the workplace, right within the museum itself. And it’s important to have diverse staff all throughout the museum so that they can tell all different kinds of stories at any given time. So I think that there’s opportunities in lots of ways, beyond just buying art by diverse artists and representing diverse artists, it’s about creating an inclusive workplace, it’s about creating inclusive programming for our audiences, it’s about bringing in diverse audiences, it’s like so many different things. It’s a lot of work, it’s really hard to do. But I think that this place has started that. They want to be an inclusive place where everybody is welcome and here because we want them to be here, not because we’re forcing them to be here, or anything like that. It’s already got a good start. I have worked at a lot of different places and every institution looks at diversity very differently. So I’d love the opportunity of being able to help develop that vision toward a more inclusive place.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
You can find more examples of Karin Sprague’s work at her website.
Artscape producer James Baumgartner met with Sprague at her workshop and studio, in a small wooden building behind her home in the North Scituate woods.
Karin Sprague: Today we’ve got everybody cutting slate. It’s a beautiful black slate that we import from the UK.
NARR: On the first floor, three stone carvers are carefully tapping away.
NARR: Javier Alfonso is chiseling bold, capital roman letters that look so precise that they could have been made by machine.
Javier Alfonso: And something that we try to keep here is the look, the chisel as it cuts the letter and leaving the chisel marks, that gives the idea and the look that it was handmade.
NARR: Michael Brahce is working on a stone for a couple who were both composers. The score for one of their works is carved into the slate. And Michael is carefully chiseling the outlines of soundwaves into the stone.
NARR: Sprague will work in granite or marble if it’s required by a cemetery, but when she can, she prefers to carve in slate.
Sprague: The chisel responds to the slate with every mark you make. The chisel and mallet in the stone, into slate will create a mark. And today even, you can walk into some of our oldest New England cemeteries and look at a stone, a slate stone that’s 350 years old and it looks like it was carved yesterday. You can still see the chisel marks from the carver. So if it’s great quality slate and it’s cared for lovingly in the in the cemetery. It’s a stunning artifact.
NARR: Sprague says it can take hundreds of hours to complete one stone monument.
Karin Sprague: It’s about a year and a half. Sometimes two years, sometimes a little more than that. And it’s not done until it’s finished and it just takes time.
NARR: It’s clear from just looking at the workshop that what Sprague makes is very different from most contemporary grave markers you would see at a cemetery. But it’s not just the carving process that’s different.
Sprague: We’ll meet together first in my home, I’ll make you a brunch, whomever is coming for this meeting, and we’ll sit at my table, I’ll light the candles, I’ll feed you. And then we’ll transition out here to the studio. You’ll meet the team, whoever’s here carving that day, you’ll see work that’s underway, I’ll reveal to you costs of everything you see, you’ll see different materials. And then we’ll sit here in what I call the upper room. And I’ll say, you know, show me some pictures of your husband, show me some pictures of your daughter. And then I say, and tell me about them. And then after time has passed, I’ll say tell me more.… And it’s through their story of how they lived their life that I somehow want to translate that into stone.
After a family has left, immediately upon their leaving, I will come back into the room and sit. And oftentimes the candle that I’ve lit at the start of our meeting is still going. And I will start to just do some rough sketches, I need to just pour out what I’ve heard. Just laying down some concepts over and over and various… and then I’ll let that go. And I’ll go for a walk.
NARR: As a child, Sprague loved to walk through the old cemeteries of New England and she was particularly drawn to the cursive lettering used on the grave markers. After briefly studying photography in art school, she returned to her love of lettering and set up a sign shop on Block Island, often carving wooden signs by hand. In 1991, she met David Klinger, who was carving in wood and in stone in a way that reminded Sprague of those old New England gravestones.
Sprague: When I walked into David’s studio, and I saw letters hand-carved, V-cut in slate. I realized wow, there’s somebody actually doing this right this very minute. … He said, “Lay out some letters that have curves and straights and I’ll teach you to carve a letter in stone.” And I went home on fire. … And when he offered me an opportunity, I took it and so that next day, my mother in law was dear enough to watch my six month old and I had spent the night before wondering, “Hmm, what shall I carve? I love the uppercase G. Oh I Really lovely uppercase D, what am I going to carve?” And so then I put an O there, and my first commission was God.
NARR: In the early 90s, Sprague was raising her children and carving the occasional sign in wood or stone until her father-in-law died in 1996.
Sprague: it was several weeks later, I remember sitting with my mother in law and just — we’re talking about Fran, my father in law. And I said, “You know, Terry, I have I feel a very clear leading to carve his gravestone. Will you let me and can I do it in Slate? And can we make it look like the 18th century?” … And she said without hesitation, “Yes.” … And I set about carving my father-in-law’s gravestone without a whole lot of experience, but a whole lot of love, slowly. And at that point, I had a three year old, a four year old, and a six year old. So it took me, it took me about two years, maybe a year and a half to carve his stone.
NARR: The Providence Journal wrote an article about Sprague carving the stone for her father-in-law and soon she was hearing from people who wanted her to create a grave marker for their loved one.
Sprague: and each time the phone rang, I’d say Well, thank you. Thank you for calling. Thank you for loving what you read and what you saw. But you do know that’s the only stone I’ve ever made. And they said yes, but we love the way you made it and why you made it because you loved your father in law so much and it really looks looks great, Karen.
NARR: And in the 25 years since that article ran, many more people have called — people who aren’t deterred by what can be a slower and more expensive process.
Sprague: Some have called here, because they looked at the regular monuments that were out there, surrounding their loved one’s grave, and they said, You know, I don’t want that. I don’t know what I want. But I don’t want that. … What do you — what do you imagine seeing when you come to the cemetery? And often they’ll say, “Well, you know, I just, I just want to, I want to touch something that’s beautiful.”
NARR: A small number of clients come to Sprague to design their own monument, but most come to her after the death of a loved one. When she meets with them in her studio, she says that there can be grief in the room.
Sprague: It’s not something I was trained. You know, I think there are probably some proper ministers out there that have gone through proper theology training to understand how to minister to those that are grieving. … And I asked a minister one time, you know, is there anything you could help me do better when I’m sitting with a family who’s grieving? And she said, Karen, you’re already doing it. The most important thing you can do is listen and ask them to tell you more.
For The Public’s Radio, I’m James Baumgartner.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
You can see Umberto Crenca’s “Divine Providence” at the WaterFire Arts Center Gallery now through Nov. 12.
TRANSCRIPT:
The gallery at the WaterFire Arts Center is filled with more than 200 of Umberto Crenca’s paintings in his “Divine Providence” series. He started the paintings in February of 2020 and he’s still working on the series. Crenca is best known as one of the founders of AS220, an uncensored, unjuried art and performance space in Providence. He also led the organization until his retirement a few years ago. AS220 was inspired by a manifesto that he worked on with a few artist friends in the early 1980s.
Umberto Crenca: We condemned everything in the art world – all museums, all art schools as being interconnected, hierarchical and all of this. And that art should be supported and should be uninhibited, and any and everybody should have the opportunity to be able to participate. And that’s basically what it was. And I mean, we condemned everything. Somewhat poetically.
Crenca’s collection of paintings in “Divine Providence” reflects that anti-institutional ethos. They depict the everyday urban fabric of his hometown. Mostly the two- and three-story multi-family homes in the various neighborhoods of Providence, with a few neighborhood stores and the occasional mill building. Instead of focusing on one building at a time, the perspective is often on the spaces in between the buildings, as the different roofs and walls intersect in the frame. The paintings are arranged on the walls mostly in chronological order of when they were painted.
Crenca: This is the first one, and that’s out the window of my gallery at home. And my neighbor’s yard.
James Baumgartner: It’s just your backyard, your neighbor’s yard, a shed, a couple of recycling bins, a couple of trash bins.
Crenca: Yeah. You know, electric lines and trash bins have been common more than anything else in my paintings. I think it’s like my signature thing. … If you have evolved as an artist, composition is first, you know. Theme, narrative, all of these other things, that’s really secondary to, and it’s subject to composition. A strong composition will speak to people, independent of what their knowledge is, or an academic background in the arts or any of that stuff.
There are a handful of recognizable buildings like Providence City Hall, but they aren’t depicted as “important landmarks.” For example: a church steeple peeks out from behind a house, and there’s a parking lot next to the Wedding Cake House.
Crenca: You know, in terms of what I’m trying to achieve here, a certain intimacy, a pedestrian perspective. We don’t, that’s the only time we ever see the world. Driving the car, we don’t see the world. But that is a lot of people’s reality, walking through neighborhoods, walking to their place of worship, walking to their bodega, walking to the neighbor’s house, walking to a friend, walking to the park, you know, and what are they experiencing? But to me, it was kind of to highlight and elevate the commonplace. The things that the vast majority of us experience in our daily lives, but maybe sometimes take for granted and don’t really appreciate that there’s this beautiful texture, this beautiful story about people’s lives and the places and architecture that kind of support human existence in the urban environment. I don’t paint in the country. I don’t know the country. That’s not my place. This is my place.
Although Crenca got his start as an anti-institutional rabble rouser, his art is now part of the permanent collection at the RISD Museum, he’s received honorary doctorates from Brown and Roger Williams University, and he’ll be honored tonight at the WaterFire FireBall gala with an Impact Award.
Crenca: I feel very fortunate and humbled by a lot of the attention that I’ve gotten. But everybody deserves it. Everybody should feel confident about who they are, and what they contribute. And everybody should find a way to celebrate or be celebrated. You know, I will continue to paint, I will continue to tell the story of Providence. It’s a story I know best. But there are a lot of new young artists that are demanding some attention and whose voices need to be heard. And they need to be supported in the same way that I’ve been supported all these years.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
Jontavious Willis is performing at the URI Guitar Festival on Thursday, Oct. 19 at 7:30 p.m. at The Towers in Narragansett. Go to uriguitarfestival.org for more information.
TRANSCRIPT:
Jontavious Willis: I think the connection between like old school church, like old school rural church, and the correlation between church and blue will gospel and blues. You know, I grew up you know, I grew to understand it more. And yeah, I had appreciation for the older things. And you know, that’s kind of what I always like.
James Baumgartner: Can you tell me what the connection is between blues music and church music?
Willis: Yeah, these are the same people making music one on Saturday, one on Sunday. Some of the some of the cadence, similar music, similar words, just a few words off different you know. … And also, there’s always borrowed from each one of one of them know, like Thomas Dorsey, the father gospel music, he started off as a blues but a famous blues player in the early 20s. And he went on to be the father gospel music painting, great songs. Great gospel song that people still saying today. Yeah, so it’s, it’s you know, as that back and forth because it’s the same culture doing both. John was a music he’s a you know, so it’s, yeah, there’s so many similarities and the you look into the blues scene, a lot of the blues guys will you know, what passes at certain times because it’s similar pastures. And like the the underlining you know, I guess the reoccurring theme of Blues and Gospel is to put on like, performance a show like the past Yeah, he preaching but it’s also like a, like a, you know, a performance, you know, then the same thing with these blues players. And you can always see dad in a story that most of them were church people in. They enjoy it. They enjoy going to church and singing in church, a lot of the gospel people won’t won’t want to acknowledge it, but a lot of them enjoy listening to the blues.
[music: Jontavious Willis, “The World is in a Tangle”]
Baumgartner: Do you pick up songs from old recordings? Or is it from the older blues musicians that you’ve met? How are we picking up songs and styles of music?
Willis: Yes, it’s all it’s all of that. … Mr. John D would definitely one of my biggest influences. He actually taught Taj Mahal some stuff too. When he moved to North Carolina, Mr. John D is a was a great finger picker. He didn’t want that motivated me to finger pick. It wasn’t Mr. John D. Holman. Um, and then yeah, some of it some of it Yeah, you get for record because like I said, the vocabulary were placed by those fools. You can’t you know, you can’t you can’t not listen to him. You have to you have to listen to those folks to kind of get the blueprint in and get the get the you know, the feel for it.
Baumgartner: Why is blues music important to you right now?
Willis: It’s important to me because it’s a part of my history and is a part of, you know, rule rule history as well. I mean, urban history well, but a lot of the players that I listened to, had a big rule background so I think it’s a part of America story of black store and it’s a story that’s not really been told you know at least it’s one sided a lot most of you here Mississippi Chicago but it’s more places in in the US that birth a lot of gray lose and still still doing it. So I think that’s important to kind of keep that story going.
Baumgartner: You’re playing the URI Guitar Festival Are you playing solo? Do you have a band with you? What can people expect to see on stage?
Willis: I’ll be playing solo and and and plan from the heart you know? You know, just good time blues.
[music: Jontavious Willis, “Take Me to the Country”]
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
“Becky Nurse of Salem” is on now at Trinity Rep in Providence, playing in repertory with “The Good John Proctor.” The plays are on through Nov. 10. Click here for tickets and more information. “2216: The Remix of a Global Experiment” is on now at the Wilbury Theatre Group through Oct. 15. Click here for tickets and more information.
TRANSCRIPT:
James Baumgartner: I’m James Baumgartner and this is Artscape. We have two plays to talk about this week. One from Wilbury Group called “2216: The Remix of a Global Experiment” — we’ll hear from the playwright in a few minutes. But first up from Trinity Rep is “Becky Nurse of Salem,” a dark comedy written by Sarah Ruhl and directed by Curt Columbus, that plays on some of the themes and characters of “The Crucible.” Artscape editor Mareva Lindo joins me now to talk about it. Mareva, tell us about the play.
Mareva Lindo: The play centers around Becky Nurse, a modern-day resident of Salem, Mass. who is a descendant of Rebecca Nurse, a real historical figure who was accused of witchcraft and executed as part of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Becky is a tour guide at the Salem Witch Museum, which is where we first meet her. If you, like me, don’t know or remember “The Crucible” all that well, that’s fine – Becky reminds the audience of what they need to know right up top.
Baumgartner: That’s right. And life hasn’t been too kind to Becky. She has chronic pain, her bills are stacking up, her daughter died years ago of an opioid overdose so she’s raising her teenage granddaughter on her own, she’s still pining for her high school crush – and then she loses her job. So in desperation, she goes to a modern-day witch, who gives her a few charms and spells to help her out.
Lindo: Yeah, and Becky is carrying so much – she’s angry about what happened to her ancestor so long ago, something she really can’t escape in her town or her job; she feels immense guilt about her daughter’s death; she’s incredibly worried about the same thing happening to her granddaughter; she’s now bitter about being fired; she’s lonely; and she’s in this unbearable physical pain from endometriosis. And that’s really the heart of the play, and it struck me, is this running theme of women’s pain and generational trauma.
Baumgartner: Yeah, it’s very moving. Something I loved was the portrayal of the relationship between Becky and her granddaughter Gail. Gail’s 15, almost 16 and she’s just out of a mental health facility. Their relationship is contentious, we see them argue and fight, but there’s love and affection and caring between them that really comes through. Jihan Haddad as Gail and Angela Brazil as Becky really brought that out.
Lindo: Yeah, and speaking of performances, I have to say, Meg Thalken who plays the witch was really amazing in this role, and so funny. She stole the scene anytime she came on stage.
Baumgartner: Yeah she’s kind of a fun con-artist but her spells actually work. But the play is completely focused on Becky Nurse, and Angela Brazil carries this show with such a broad range – she’s powerful, fragile, and she’s funny.
Lindo: Absolutely. And great performances all around, but she in particular had a lot on her shoulders.
Baumgartner: She did. “Becky Nurse of Salem” is on now at Trinity Rep in Providence, and it’s playing alternating with “The Good John Proctor” which is kind of a prequel to the events in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” The plays are on through Nov. 10.
Baumgartner: Turning now to The Wilbury Group, which has a world premiere at its space in the Valley District of Providence. It’s called “2216: The Remix of a Global Experiment.” They describe it as “an immersive and thought-provoking theatrical experience that weaves together personal narratives, historical truths, and futuristic possibilities.” JaMario Stills is the creative force behind the play. He recently talked with morning host Luis Hernandez.
Luis Hernandez: I understand from reading on this is that Afrofuturism is a major influence in your work. And I’m wondering how it plays into “2216.”
JaMario Stills: It’s a theoretical framing to help me understand and excavate this idea of Black and brown folk being realized, and to “best version of themselves,” the greatest version of themselves, the most realized version of themselves. As folks traverse from the transatlantic, landing in the South, how they themselves had to become Afrofuturists to see themselves out of that shape. So being from the South, I just inherently have taken on that, that coding. So yeah, and that’s very much so germane to being from Florida, which is where the story and it’s geopolitics are framed.
Hernandez: Looking at everything that is happening in your home state of Florida, how that plays into this show, how that plays into your storytelling?
Stills: It’s kind of unavoidable to tell a story right now without talking about Florida. And so the initial idea was, when I talked to Wilbury about it I was like, I would like to do a play about a community of Afro-diasporic people coming together to create a new global doctrine for the future, which would be like a new Declaration of Independence, all created by BIPOC people. What that actually entails is me getting the thoughts and ideas of the people I’m collaborating with. So as we talk about Florida, what has been your experience? And this is me, just talk to the actors – what has been your experience with monuments? What has been your experience with ecological terror? What has been your experience with gun laws? So these are all sort of touch points that are hyperlocal in Florida, but affect us all. And so they come to the table understanding the sort of ideas we want to uplift, and they find their way into it.
Hernandez: It sounds like an incredible experience for you and the performers. Now I’m thinking for us, the audience, this is going to be very different from a traditional show.
Stills: You know, it is, and I’ve been doing theater for a long time. I’ve never seen a show on this stage that was developed, idealized, and practically staged, with a complete democratized way of working. So as we’re performing this play it then goes into 2216, the year 2216, in which we become, as we call it, Black and brown avatars of ourselves. We become like, the dopest, we become the coolest, the sharpest, the most righteous, you know, we’ve zoomed out into the future and created these like ghetto superstars, you know what I mean? And so when we go from the world of trying to understand it, we get to a point where it’s like, but let’s just knock it all down, and let’s get to what we want to do. Let’s tell the stories we want to tell, without the constructs of the well-made play, you know what I mean? Let’s actually just do our own thing. … Let’s see this show from various textures. Let’s see it from a video media that represents maybe a confessional. Let’s see it from a voiceover, let’s – I mean, theater is so dope, like, you could do anything. And so it’s about actually finding the bendability of the stage. How can it become something in which a modern audience who is already so consumed, actually goes to the theater and have a theatrical experience, right? Like, how do we make them part of the show? How do we create a space in which people feel like, okay, this is why I left Netflix tonight. Like, this is, I get to travel. Do I understand and identify with all the points? Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. I absolutely do. But you’re coming for an experience.
Hernandez: Well, it’s called an immersive and thought-provoking theatrical experience. There’s a lot going on. It’s fantastic. Listen, JaMario, thank you so much. I appreciate it, and break a leg.
Stills: Thank you, family. I appreciate you. Y’all have a good one.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
You can see Lily Henley perform tonight at 7 p.m. at the Bobby Hackett Theater at the CCRI Warwick Campus. Click here for tickets and more information. You can find her music at LilyHenley.com.
Transcript:
Lily Henley was five or six years old when she first heard the fiddle – and she immediately became obsessed with it.
“Always I was asking for a violin all during my early childhood,” she said. “And when I finally got one, I knew that I wanted to play fiddle.”
She got her fiddle at age 11 and soon joined a band.
“They were adults that were, you know, playing local gigs around town,” she said. “And I was like, kind of a precocious 11-12 year old that, I was probably like, very cute. But I was really serious. I was like a real, real nerd.”
Within a couple of years, she was going to a music camp led by the famous fiddle player Mark O’Connor. While she was there, she learned to play in many different styles – old-time, Irish fiddle, Cape Breton, bluegrass and others. Her music today combines those fiddle styles with old Ladino songs that she’s set to new melodies.
“I’m Sephardic. Half my family is Sephardic and … so I grew up with a lot of that music at home. I grew up singing some songs in Ladino as a kid, it was just sort of that part of my identity. It was just kind of an accepted kind of thing,” Henley said. “I guess when I finally came to singing the songs myself, and delving deeper, and like finding new songs, I allowed all of the music influences that came from other styles to affect how I approached my interpretation – just because that is the tradition. The tradition is that the way Sephardic people have always sung in Ladino has been affected by whatever the instrumental tradition and melodic traditions around them have been. And for me, as an American Sephardic artist, a lot of American and other styles of music were influencing me.”
Last year, she performed in Boston for the Christmas Celtic Sojourn concert series.
“There was a moment in the concert every night where I explained what the Ladino language is, and also who we are as Sephardic people. So a lot of people say Spanish Jews, when they’re referring to Sephardic Jews and who we really are, are the descendants of Jews that were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition, which was a long time ago,” Henley said. “So the culture itself actually developed in mostly in the Ottoman Empire, but basically, across North Africa, parts of the Middle East, the southern Mediterranean, there were parts of Western Europe that had Sephardic populations and the whole culture and the language really are a post-expulsion development, which is something that people don’t know a lot about. And the fact that what really makes the language separate from Spanish, is that it has all these influences from Turkish and Arabic and Hebrew … it’s a mishmash language.”
Henley’s latest album is called “Oras Dezauradas,” which means “time out of time.”
[music: Oras Dezauradas]
“In Ladino, ‘Oras Dezauradas’ is almost an idiomatic phrase, like it kind of refers to the way that time feels when you’re just in so much longing and so desperate for something that time just goes on and on forever. Because you’re just, you know, every moment without this person that you love is like a million 1000 years,” she said.
Another song on the album is called “Avre Tu Puerta Serada” which means “open your closed door.”
[music: Avre Tu Puerta Serada]
“There’s this fiddle, this strong fiddle energy, there’s two fiddle tunes on it that I wrote myself that kind of bring in several fiddle styles that have really inspired me over the years,” she said. “It’s almost a cyclical experience of like growing up with all these different musics. And never, I mean, as a kid, I never could have imagined how they would come together in a way that felt authentic to me.”
For The Public’s Radio, I’m James Baumgartner.
“Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play” is on now at the Contemporary Theater Company in Wakefield through Sept. 30. Go to contemporarytheatercompany.com for more information.
TRANSCRIPT:
Luis Hernandez: This is The Public’s Radio. I’m Luis Hernandez. “Mr. Burns, a Post Electric Play” is on now at the Contemporary Theater Company in Wakefield, Rhode Island. It’s a 2012 play written by Anne Washburn with music by Michael Friedman. Artscape producer James Baumgartner and I saw the play this weekend, and James is here to talk about it with me. All right, James, this is an odd one. What is it about?
James Baumgartner: Yeah, it is. It’s one of those plays that really stands out just from its description. It takes place in a near future after some sort of apocalyptic event, where now there is no electricity. So in Act I, some of the survivors of this event, they’ve gathered around a campfire, and they’re reminiscing about an old episode of “The Simpsons” called “Cape Feare.” It’s the one where Sideshow Bob is trying to kill Bart Simpson. And the survivors are trying to piece together the episode from their fragmented memory.
Hernandez: And it’s still one of my favorite episodes. And as the play progresses, it’s further in the future, and that episode of “The Simpsons” has been transformed into a play. And then much further in the future, it’s a musical that’s only loosely based on the original episode from 1993. It’s a bit of a gimmick, but it’s enticing, especially if you’re a fan of “The Simpsons.”
Baumgartner: A really great thing about this performance, it’s outside. The first two acts, they’re performed outside on a patio, with the audience in a semicircle around the performers. So the survivors of the event, they’re around a campfire, and the audience is part of that campfire, you really feel like you’re part of the action there.
Hernandez: Yeah, the outdoor setting is really interesting. And I think it is effective, I think it was a lot of fun. You know, you have these really interesting moments. Granted, there’s a trail right next to the stage. So people are walking by, you can hear the traffic. I give the actors a lot of credit – they kept their cool and kept doing their job. But one of the things I really love about contemporary theater is that you can try things, you can be very experimental. And one of the things they did in the show is, they had a lot of moments of stillness and silence which added, of course, to the fact that I can hear the crickets in the river next door. But that doesn’t always work. You can’t pull that off on a big stage. There has to be constant action, but they kind of did it here. And I think it worked. Do you have any favorite moments?
Baumgartner: Yeah, Act II takes place seven years after this apocalyptic event. And now there are touring theater companies that travel around performing old TV episodes as entertainment for all the other survivors. And they also perform commercials as sort of nostalgia and comfort food. One of those commercials is a medley of pop music from the aughts. The actors are going all out during this medley, they’re really having a lot of fun. But there’s an underlying sense of fear because we’re still in that post-electric future. And the members of the traveling theater troupe are competing with other troupes. And if they aren’t successful, they may not survive.
Hernandez: One of the things I enjoyed about this is that it was three acts, and in each act time passed. There was like seven years between Act I and Act II, and then 75 years between that and Act III. And each act changed. By the third act, it’s a musical. I thought it was a lot of fun. Again, going back to the experimentation of contemporary theater, and I think sometimes they pulled it off, sometimes they didn’t.
Baumgartner: Yeah, there was a moment in the first act where they’re trying to remember the “Simpsons” episode, there’s a little bit too much of trying to figure out things. It wasn’t the most exciting dialogue in the play. But overall, a really fun performance. A very clever play, a lot of fun to see the moments connected from one act into the other as the “Simpsons” episode morphed into something very odd. And the young performers were really giving it their all.
Hernandez: Yes, my overall impression I give the actors thumbs up for putting all of themselves into it. The show was strange, but it was fun. You can see Mr. Burns a post electric play at the Contemporary Theater Company in Wakefield now through Sept. 30.
You can see Taposh performing at the Rhode Island Heritage Festival in October, and in the meantime you can catch him on Facebook.
Mohitosh Talukder Taposh has worked as an accountant for the city of Providence for more than 20 years.
Mohetosh Taposh: At City Hall, everybody knows me as Taps. “The Indian guy Taps,” you know?
James Baumgartner: And you’re not Indian, you’re from Bangladesh – these are two different countries!
Taposh: Right, right, right.
And while Taposh makes a living working for the city, his true passion is making music. He sings and plays the harmonium. It’s a small wooden box about the size of an accordion, and like an accordion it has a bellows. Taposh pumps the bellows with his left hand while playing a piano-like keyboard with his right. [sound of harmonium]
Over the last few years, he has amassed a Facebook following of tens of thousands of people, as he leads groups singing together in the Bengali language. He got his start when he was six years old.
Taposh: My mom was a widow with four kids. And I was six years old at that time. So my mom couldn’t take me to the football field or cricket field. So my mom teaches me music and I learn. She’s my guru, basically, you know. I learned music from my mum. And when I was 11 years old, the Bangladesh government, they sent me to Sweden to join International Summer Villages.
This led to Taposh becoming something of a child celebrity in Bangladesh in the late 70s and early 80s, when the nation had just one television station. Taposh sings traditional folk music and also what he calls “mass music,” which is both music for the people – for the masses – as well as music sung by a large group, singing the same melody in unison. [music clip]
After coming to America in the 90s, Taposh worked multiple jobs to make ends meet. But he missed making music.
Taposh: And for six months, I went to every school in New England area we know, like Johnson and Wales, RISD, URI, MIT, Harvard, BU. … So physically, I went there and I took the information of who is from Bengal and who has interest to do the music.
In 2003, Taposh used these connections to bring 100 people together to sing “1,000 Years of Bengali Music” at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium. This led to more and more concerts around the region over the last 20 years. Earlier this year, Taposh brought a group to sing in New York City’s Times Square.
Taposh: They celebrated the Bengali New Year on 14th April, early in the morning, and I was the music conductor. And we had like more than 200 performers.
So how does he bring hundreds of people together to sing? He says it comes down to friendship.
Taposh: I don’t want to be a teacher. I’m not a teacher, right? I want to be a friend. When I meet someone, I bring them in my house, as to feed them free food. And then at one point, they’ll be my friend, and then let’s do party. And when I do party, let’s do music.
Taposh now has a huge following on Facebook. He attributes his initial popularity to a video he posted in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Taposh: So Saturday morning, I was having coffee, Mom just wake up and I said “let’s sing together.” And somehow, Mom said, okay. … And Mom said, “Do not post on Facebook,” and I said “No way.” But of course, I did that. And that song, within a week on Facebook, it was 1.5 million. And I think it’s not for the quality of the song – it’s like a guy singing with his mom. And I said, “Mom, I love you.”
After we talked, Taposh played a song for me by Lalon Fakir. [music by Lalon Fakir]
Taposh: And the philosophy is like, all of us, we are same. There is no religion, there is no poor or rich, you know, there is no caste system, there is no Hindu or Muslim. All of us, we are human beings and this world belongs to us. So 200 years back, Lalon was singing that song. And still, after 200 years, I am Taposh who is in Rhode Island – I am singing the same song. … I don’t make my own music. I play music and to me, honestly speaking, music is love. And I feel we should spread the love everywhere. … It’s a small revolution, maybe small, very small. But I can see the change. So let’s share the happiness, you know. Let’s give the positive vibes to you, to the next door, to the neighbor, to the society, to the country, to the world.
[music by Taposh]
For The Public’s Radio, I’m James Baumgartner.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
A new bronze statue will be unveiled this weekend honoring Edward M. Bannister, an African-American artist who lived in Providence in the late 19th century and was one of the founders of the Providence Art Club. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with members of the Bannister Community Art Project, who helped make the statue a reality.
Charlestown, Rhode Island is hosting the Rhythm and Roots Festival this weekend, with more than 20 acts across three days of music. The lineup includes Trombone Shorty, Greensky Bluegrass, the Revelers, and Tuba Skinny from New Orleans, who play music inspired by early jazz and blues of the 1920s and 30s. Artscape producer James Baumgartner and editor Mareva Lindo talked with Erika Lewis, who plays bass drum and sings for Tuba Skinny.
Ira Cohen, a bookseller and art model who kept a literary spirit alive in a tough New England seaport, died this January at 70 years old after a brief illness. Cohen was the focus of what turned out to be the last show UMass Dartmouth exhibited at its gallery in downtown New Bedford before the university abruptly closes its campus there at the end of the month. For this week’s Artscape, South Coast Bureau Reporter Ben Berke interviewed more than a dozen people who knew Cohen. The result is a collection of stories, memories and impressions that form another lasting portrait of Cohen.
UMass Dartmouth is closing its art school at the Star Store in downtown New Bedford and relocating all classes and studios to the state university’s main campus in Dartmouth. The university’s chancellor, Mark Fuller announced the closure in an email to faculty on Monday, less than two weeks before the start of the school year.
A new art exhibit at Brown University’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice explores a landscape of spiritual and physical freedom through the lens of history.
The Kingston Chamber Music Festival marks its 35th season this year with seven concerts of music from across the centuries. The final three concerts are this weekend. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with composer Tina Davidson, whose work “I Hear the Mermaids Singing” will be featured on Sunday.
Originally built in 1929, the Providence National Bank Building was demolished in 2005 to make way for a residential tower that was never built. All that's left now is an empty facade – one brick wall on Weybosset Street propped up by steel struts. Instead of windows, the facade has five panels that feature a new mural every year. This year’s mural, "Parade" was painted by Michelle Perez. It features giant bright orange koi fish, held aloft by people riding bicycles and skateboards on a cool blue background. For Artscape this week, we hear from Michelle as she's putting the finishing touches on her painting. She says she was inspired by summertime in Providence.
Edie Fake was first known for his work in comics and zines. Then in the mid-aughts he started creating architectural drawings of real and imagined LGBTQ spaces in Chicago featuring bright colors, crisp lines and geometric designs. Now you can see Fake’s “On The Wall,” an all-encompassing room at Providence College. Artscape Producer James Baumgartner talked with the exhibit’s curator, Jamilee Lacy.
The 2023 Providence Biennial for Contemporary Art opens Thursday, July 13, at the WaterFire Arts Center in Providence. It’s a combination of two exhibits with nearly 50 artists, almost all from the Providence area. Artscape producer James Baumgartner has this preview.
The Newport Classical Music Festival opened its 54th season earlier this week, and there are several concerts this weekend. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with festival director Gillian Friedman Fox for a preview of a few of the concerts.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me.” It’s a saying many of us heard as kids. But a project by local photographer Gershon Stark turns the phrase on its head. In this week’s episode of Artscape, Morning Host Luis Hernandez talks with Stark about two exhibits at the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts that highlight the power of words.
Actor Alan Cumming is known for his Tony Award-winning turn as the emcee in Cabaret, as well as roles in Spy Kids, The Good Wife, and more. Ari Shapiro is a familiar voice to public radio listeners as the host of NPR’s All Things Considered. The two are performing together in “Och and Oy! A Considered Cabaret,” coming to the Zeiterion in New Bedford on Saturday, June 24. Cumming spoke with morning host Luis Hernandez.
"New Excellent Woman" is the latest album from Providence-based musician Asher White. At twenty-three years old, she already boasts an impressive catalog of over a dozen albums. White describes her music as collage pop -- reflected in the range of influences you can hear represented in it, from Sufjan Stevens, to The Books, to Daniel Johnston. She came to the studio for this conversation – and a performance – with Artscape producer James Baumgartner and Morning Host Luis Hernandez.
The first Providence Porchfest is happening this Saturday, June 10. It’s a series of concerts taking place on porches across the East side. Artscape Producer James Baumgartner talked with two of the organizers, Peter Evangelista and Brendan Kinnell, as well as Beth Barron, one of the performers.
Sweeney Todd is a challenging show for directors and actors to recreate on stage. It’s a show with dark themes but if done right, it should be really funny. The latest iteration is playing at Trinity Rep.
The latest play from the Wilbury Theatre Group is “Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight,” an original musical inspired by Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Artscape Producer James Baumgartner talked with the playwright, Darcie Dennigan, and composer, Niki Healy, about their collaboration on this unusual piece.
Natasha Connolly said she likes writing because it “forces you to look at the world in a different way.”
The Newport Art Museum has two exhibitions right now, showcasing a panoply of art created from apparel and textiles. Artscape Producer James Baumgartner visited the museum recently and talked with two of the curators who put the shows together.
Sherenté Mishitahin Harris is a two-spirit gender-queer pow-wow dancer from the Narragansett tribe. One of his greatest loves is performing in traditional women’s dance competitions across New England. But many in the community still hold onto traditional gender roles – and some judges don’t let Sherenté dance in the women’s category. A documentary called “Being Thunder” tells his story.
Artscape, producer James Baumgartner talks with Andy Grover, a Providence resident who makes Lego models of historic buildings in Rhode Island.
“Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America” examines the impact of wrestling CEO Vince McMahon on American culture and politics.
We have two plays for Artscape this week: "Jardín de Otoño" from Teatro ECAS, and "Indecent" from the Wilbury Theatre Group.
"Sound in Space, Sound in Place" is the latest exhibition at The New Bedford Art Museum. It features sound art that fills the converted bank building with sounds that invite the visitor to explore.
Raskin’s latest release is a collection of dream-pop songs with a message of love and acceptance to their younger self.
The latest play at Trinity Rep is called “The Inferior Sex” - a comedy that takes place in the office of a women’s fashion magazine in the early 1970s.
It’s been almost 50 years since the end of the Estado Novo authoritarian regime in Portugal. A local film series looks at life under the regime.
If you go up to the third floor of the New Bedford free library this month, you’ll find a display of handmade dresses, pillows, wall hangings, necklaces and more in a glass display case. It’s all part of the Afghan Women’s Art Project, a collaborative effort to support newly arrived refugees from Afghanistan. Artscape producer James Baumgartner spoke with the organizers of the exhibit.
The Motion State Dance Festival takes place Thursday through Saturday, featuring live performances as well as dance on film.
Nuestras Raíces, meaning “our roots,” has been documenting the stories of the state’s many Latino populations since 1991.
The Providence-based ballet marks 45 years with world-premiere performances choreographed by members of the company.
The Providence local imagines what traditional Black American folk music will sound like in a world where rising seas, desertification and natural disasters have rendered much of the world uninhabitable.
Crystal Williams envisions a RISD that’s more inclusive and accessible – and tuition-free.
Members of the Rhode Island Philharmonic Youth Orchestra had a rare opportunity this past weekend when they performed at the Vets alongside the professional musicians of the Rhode Island Philharmonic. Artscape producer James Baumgartner visited a rehearsal before the performance to talk with the young people about the experience.
Faith Healer, the 1979 play by Brian Friel is at the Gamm Theatre in Warwick. Artscape producer James Baumgartner and I saw the play this weekend.
Last year, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act. Despite the name, it actually includes a lot of plans to address climate change. Last week, we went over the big-picture plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But what will these policies mean for you? And when can you start taking advantage of them?
Funda Fest is celebrating its twenty-fifth year with two weeks of storytelling, starting this Saturday. Morning Host Luis Hernandez talked with one of the featured storytellers, Antonio Rocha as well as Valerie Tutson, executive director of Rhode Island Black Storytellers and Funda Fest.
As we wrap up 2022, morning host Luis Hernandez and Artscape producer James Baumgartner look back at some of our favorite stories form the world of arts and culture over the past year.
The Gamm Theater is bringing back their annual production of a Christmas favorite, "It’s A Wonderful Life," this time with a twist: they’re performing the story as an old-time radio show.
For twenty years, Craftland has featured the work of artists and craftspeople in its small shop on Westminster street in Providence. It started as a temporary holiday art show and store, before the term pop-up shop was even popular. Artscape producer James Baumgartner and morning host Luis Hernandez talked with Margaret Carleton, one of the store’s founders, and Deb Dormody, who has been involved with the store since its earliest days.
Libraries play a crucial role in providing books, educational opportunities, and essential resources to the public. But when the pandemic hit, libraries had to redefine how they serve their communities. Morning host Luis Hernandez recently spoke about the evolving role of libraries with Cheryl Space, Library Director at Community Libraries of Providence.
New Englanders will gather today for another Thanksgiving, but many may be unaware of the origins and history of the annual American tradition. Paul Robinson and John Brown III recently gave a presentation at the Rochambeau community library in Providence called “The Myths of Thanksgiving.” John Brown is the Narragansett Indian Tribe’s Medicine Man and Tribal Historic Preservation Officer. Paul Robinson is the former state archeologist for Rhode Island and retired part-time professor at Rhode Island College. Artscape producer James Baumgartner and morning host Luis Hernandez talked with Paul in our studio and John joined us by phone.
For more than 30 years, the Wedding Cake House stood empty and abandoned on Broadway in Providence. In 2017, an arts organization took control of the building. After three years of renovations, it’s a work of art on its own. Now the house hosts residencies for artists, along with a bed and breakfast business that supports the organization.
The Gamm Theatre’s production of “Sweat” is on now at their home in Warwick. Artscape producer James Baumgartner spoke with morning host Luis Hernandez about the play.
The Bill T Jones / Arnie Zane company is performing on Friday night at The Vets, as part of a residency produced by First Works and the Brown Arts Institute. We'll also hear from four artists who share their perspectives on the midterm election.
The URI Guitar Festival started as an ambitious idea by director Adam Levin more than seven years ago. It started growing when the pandemic created a major obstacle to that growth. Levin did what all directors did. He got creative. This weekend the event launches bigger than it has ever been, stretching across multiple days. It also now includes activities and events that are learning experiences for beginners and more advanced players.
October is Dyslexia Awareness Month, and in Rhode Island, Governor Dan McKee has declared Dyslexia Awareness Week to start Friday, Oct. 14. For this week's Artscape, morning host Chuck Hinman talks to the authors of a book that tells the stories of some famous journalists who are dyslexic, and how they have managed their condition.
The Rhode Island Historical Society is hosting the Archive Remix Film Festival tonight in Pawtucket. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with the festival organizer, Becca Bender and Rai Terry, one of the film makers showing their films.
"Describe the Night" at The Gamm Theatre and "The Inheritance" at Trinity Rep are both hugely ambitious plays that cover decades and generations.
"Accessibility is Beautiful" takes place at the Steel Yard on Saturday, highlighting ways to make businesses more accessible for all people. Plus, AS220 has five gallery openings. We'll hear from three of the artists.
We’re heading into the Labor Day Weekend, with some good news for music fans used to the annual enjoyment of the Rhythm and Roots Festival in Charlestown. Longtime festival producer Chuck Wentworth had announced that, due to health reasons, he was calling it quits. But then, someone stepped up to save the festival.
When you go to Broad Street in Providence, you’ll see a street that is radically different from what it was just a few months ago. Among the changes is a street mural at the corner of Public and Daboll streets. Artscape producer James Baumgartner spoke with Rhode Island Latino Arts director Marta Martínez, who helped to facilitate the project, as well as René Gómez, the artist who designed and painted the mural.
The Warren Folks Festival takes place this Saturday. Artscape Producer, James Baumgartner talked with festival organizer Uriah Donnelly.
A temporary exhibit at the Museum of Work and Culture in Woonsocket highlights little-known but important moments in the history of Latino communities in Rhode Island. Artscape producer James Baumgartner visited the museum to learn more.
Rhode Island’s annual Dominican Cultural Parade and Music Festival is coming up this Sunday. Artscape producer James Baumgartner and morning host Chuck Hinman talked with festival organizer Marilyn Cepeda about what to expect.
Earlier this week, the three candidates for mayor of Providence spoke at a forum produced by The Wilbury Theatre Group and The Public’s Radio. The theme was the role of arts and culture in Providence. Former Director of Administration Brett Smiley, Providence City Councilwoman Nirva LaFortune and former Deputy Secretary of State Gonzalo Cuervo all participated in the event. The event was hosted by writer and filmmaker Don Mays.
Bramwell Tovey, the principal conductor and artistic director of the Rhode Island Philharmonic, died on July 12, 2022, one day after his 69th birthday. He joined the Philharmonic in 2018 after conducting many different orchestras, including the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, where he helped to found the VSO School of Music. Artscape Producer James Baumgartner talked with David Beauchesne, Executive Director of the Rhode Island Philharmonic, about the time he spent with Bramwell Tovey.
Last week, Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee named Lynne McCormack as head of RISCA - the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She comes to the position with a background in community development and arts administration, including previously serving as the Director of Art, Culture and Tourism for the City of Providence. She talked with Artscape producer James Baumgartner and Morning Host Chuck Hinman about her goals for the organization.
Mark Erelli is performing at Norman Bird Sanctuary on Friday, part of Newport Live - a concert series previously known as Common Fence Music. The New Bedford Folk Festival is this Saturday and Sunday. We talked with Tom Rush, one of the featured performers.
With exhibits on the Underground Railroad, the ghost of a childhood home and a dome made from 3-D printed hexagons, DATMA's current exhibit features public art in multiple locations across downtown New Bedford exploring the idea of 'Shelter.'
We have two items to feature in this week's Artscape: Rhode Island PrideFest and "Fairview" at Trinity Rep
Although PVD Fest had some small events in the last couple of years, this year is the first full festival since 2019. It’s a big one! There are events this Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 is on now through June 19th at The Waterfire Arts Center in Providence.
The Fabric Fall River Festival takes place May 12 - 14 and it’s about a lot more than textiles. There’s music, visual art, performance art, food and more.
Most bicycles you see at the local bike shop are made in a factory in Asia. But there are still a few people in the U.S. who make custom bicycles by hand. Brian Chapman of Chapman Cycles is a local builder with a world-wide reputation. Artscape producer James Baumgartner met with him to find out more about the art of custom bike-building.
Zan Berry and Isabel Castellvi are cellists who helped organize PVD Cellofest - a collection of concerts featuring a wide range of music genres but with one thing in common - the cello.
Zan Berry and Isabel Castellvi are cellists who helped organize PVD Cellofest - a collection of concerts featuring a wide range of music genres but with one thing in common - the cello.
April is National Poetry Month – and for Artscape, Chuck Hinman visits with Tina Cane, RI's Poet Laureate.
April is National Poetry Month – and for Artscape, Chuck Hinman visits with Tina Cane, RI's Poet Laureate.
The First RISD Black Biennial opened recently at the RISD Museum in Providence showcasing the works of nearly 80 artists. Artscape Producer James Baumgartner talked with the show’s co-curators.
The First RISD Black Biennial opened recently at the RISD Museum in Providence showcasing the works of nearly 80 artists. Artscape Producer James Baumgartner talked with the show’s co-curators.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Providence had a small Chinatown neighborhood, centered around Empire & Westminster Streets. Artist and designer Jeffrey Yoo Warren is creating “Seeing Providence Chinatown” - a virtual 3-D model of what was once a thriving community. Artscape producer James Baumgartner and morning host Chuck Hinman talked with Jeffrey about the project.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Providence had a small Chinatown neighborhood, centered around Empire & Westminster Streets. Artist and designer Jeffrey Yoo Warren is creating “Seeing Providence Chinatown” - a virtual 3-D model of what was once a thriving community. Artscape producer James Baumgartner and morning host Chuck Hinman talked with Jeffrey about the project.
Today's Artscape welcomes back Professor Massimo Riva, from Brown University's Italian Studies department, to talk about this years' festival of rare and restored films from the Cineteca of Bologna, one of the world's great archives of cinema classics, both known and unknown.
Today's Artscape welcomes back Professor Massimo Riva, from Brown University's Italian Studies department, to talk about this years' festival of rare and restored films from the Cineteca of Bologna, one of the world's great archives of cinema classics, both known and unknown.
For Valentine's Day we present a special Artscape: local restaurant owner and history buff Bob Burke tells the love story of Italian Count Paolo Bajnotti and Carrie Brown, grand-daughter of Nicholas Brown Jr., the namesake of Brown University in Providence. In Burke's telling, it's a story of love and tragedy, of death in a pandemic, and the desire to triumph over death by creating a series of memorials to a timeless love.
For Valentine's Day we present a special Artscape: local restaurant owner and history buff Bob Burke tells the love story of Italian Count Paolo Bajnotti and Carrie Brown, grand-daughter of Nicholas Brown Jr., the namesake of Brown University in Providence. In Burke's telling, it's a story of love and tragedy, of death in a pandemic, and the desire to triumph over death by creating a series of memorials to a timeless love.
The Gamm Theatre’s latest play opens January 27th. It’s called 'An Octoroon.' Artscape producer James Baumgartner and morning host Chuck Hinman talked with actor Marc Pierre and director Joe Wilson Jr.
The Gamm Theatre’s latest play opens January 27th. It’s called 'An Octoroon.' Artscape producer James Baumgartner and morning host Chuck Hinman talked with actor Marc Pierre and director Joe Wilson Jr.
The Nutcracker is a perennial favorite during the holidays, but this year’s Festival Ballet production is a bit different. Morning Edition host Chuck Hinman and Artscape producer James Baumgartner visited Festival Ballet’s rehearsal center for a preview of what’s new this year.
The Nutcracker is a perennial favorite during the holidays, but this year’s Festival Ballet production is a bit different. Morning Edition host Chuck Hinman and Artscape producer James Baumgartner visited Festival Ballet’s rehearsal center for a preview of what’s new this year.
What do you think of when you imagine a hand-made blanket? Probably something soft and warm for a chilly winter night. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with Lizzy Dargie, a Providence artist who has created a blanket that is none of those things. Instead, it’s a metaphor for life in the pandemic.
What do you think of when you imagine a hand-made blanket? Probably something soft and warm for a chilly winter night. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with Lizzy Dargie, a Providence artist who has created a blanket that is none of those things. Instead, it’s a metaphor for life in the pandemic.
The Slip started in the jamband scene in Providence and Boston back in the '90s and has gone on to morph into other incarnations. The Slip will hit The Fete Music Hall in Providence Friday night as part of a legacy tour. Morning Edition Host Chuck Hinman talked with Brad Barr.
The Slip started in the jamband scene in Providence and Boston back in the '90s and has gone on to morph into other incarnations. The Slip will hit The Fete Music Hall in Providence Friday night as part of a legacy tour. Morning Edition Host Chuck Hinman talked with Brad Barr.
Lifted is the latest production from the Wilbury Theatre group, now playing outdoors at the Waterfire Arts Center.
Lifted is the latest production from the Wilbury Theatre group, now playing outdoors at the Waterfire Arts Center.
On Artscape today, we take a look at the URI Guitar festival, getting underway this weekend, for its 6th year, showcasing a wide variety of virtuoso guitar and other stringed instrumentalists from around the world. Last year, because of the pandemic, the festival was all virtual, but this year, it’s operating on a hybrid model, with a return to live performances. The Public's Radio's morning host Chuck Hinman talked about that earlier this week, with Adam Levin, classical guitarist and URI professor, and the force behind the festival.
On Artscape today, we take a look at the URI Guitar festival, getting underway this weekend, for its 6th year, showcasing a wide variety of virtuoso guitar and other stringed instrumentalists from around the world. Last year, because of the pandemic, the festival was all virtual, but this year, it’s operating on a hybrid model, with a return to live performances. The Public's Radio's morning host Chuck Hinman talked about that earlier this week, with Adam Levin, classical guitarist and URI professor, and the force behind the festival.
"A Lie Agreed Upon" is on now at The Gamm Theatre in Warwick. Morning host Chuck Hinman and Artscape producer James Baumgartner review the play.
"A Lie Agreed Upon" is on now at The Gamm Theatre in Warwick. Morning host Chuck Hinman and Artscape producer James Baumgartner review the play.
George Wein died Monday at the age of 95. He was the founder of the Newport Folk and Jazz festivals and helped set the template for music festivals around the world. In 2015, he talked with Chuck Hinman, morning host for The Public’s Radio. It was 50 years after Bob Dylan played at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and shocked the folk music faithful with an electric guitar.
George Wein died Monday at the age of 95. He was the founder of the Newport Folk and Jazz festivals and helped set the template for music festivals around the world. In 2015, he talked with Chuck Hinman, morning host for The Public’s Radio. It was 50 years after Bob Dylan played at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and shocked the folk music faithful with an electric guitar.
The WaterFire Arts Center in Providence is currently showing “Eye to Eye” an arresting exhibition of portraiture by Mary Beth Meehan. Artscape producer James Baumgartner visited the Center in the Valley district in Providence.
The WaterFire Arts Center in Providence is currently showing “Eye to Eye” an arresting exhibition of portraiture by Mary Beth Meehan. Artscape producer James Baumgartner visited the Center in the Valley district in Providence.
Reverend Osagyefu Sekou is playing in Woonsocket Friday night with his band The Freedom Fighters. Artscape producer James Baumgartner has this preview.
Reverend Osagyefu Sekou is playing in Woonsocket Friday night with his band The Freedom Fighters. Artscape producer James Baumgartner has this preview.
The Rhode Island International Film Festival gets underway this week, running until the 15th of August.
The Rhode Island International Film Festival gets underway this week, running until the 15th of August.
The eighth Providence Fringe Festival is underway right now. Josh Short is the artistic director of the Wilbury Theatre Group, the lead producers of the festival.
The eighth Providence Fringe Festival is underway right now. Josh Short is the artistic director of the Wilbury Theatre Group, the lead producers of the festival.
Festival Ballet Providence kicks off a two-week run of performances of a program called "Emergence."
Festival Ballet Providence kicks off a two-week run of performances of a program called "Emergence."
High school art classes have had their own set of challenges during the pandemic. One Providence after-school program has come up with a creative solution to keep kids engaged in self-expression.
High school art classes have had their own set of challenges during the pandemic. One Providence after-school program has come up with a creative solution to keep kids engaged in self-expression.
As the end of the year approaches, The Public’s Radio is creating a digital art gallery to help us understand the events of 2020.
As the end of the year approaches, The Public’s Radio is creating a digital art gallery to help us understand the events of 2020.
For the past five summers, Providence has hosted PVD Fest, a multi-day street festival that fills the city with crowds watching performers from all over the world - musicians, dancers and even acrobats suspended in the air. All of that was cancelled this year.
For the past five summers, Providence has hosted PVD Fest, a multi-day street festival that fills the city with crowds watching performers from all over the world - musicians, dancers and even acrobats suspended in the air. All of that was cancelled this year.
For years, WaterFire has been a regular ritual celebrating downtown Providence, a symbol of the city’s rebirth after decades of decline. In the pandemic, it’s also become a way of memorializing those who have died of COVID-19, through an installation called The Beacon of Hope. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with WaterFire’s Executive Artistic Director Barnaby Evans.
For years, WaterFire has been a regular ritual celebrating downtown Providence, a symbol of the city’s rebirth after decades of decline. In the pandemic, it’s also become a way of memorializing those who have died of COVID-19, through an installation called The Beacon of Hope. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with WaterFire’s Executive Artistic Director Barnaby Evans.
In the aftermath of looting last week, plywood windows in downtown Providence began to turn into art. A group of people gathered at the corner of Eddy and Fountain streets earlier this week to admire the impromptu outdoor gallery. The Public’s Radio Artscape producer James Baumgartner was there.
In the aftermath of looting last week, plywood windows in downtown Providence began to turn into art. A group of people gathered at the corner of Eddy and Fountain streets earlier this week to admire the impromptu outdoor gallery. The Public’s Radio Artscape producer James Baumgartner was there.
How can you practice theater when you can’t be in the same room? How do you make art together when you can’t share a space? How do you have a violin lesson over a Zoom call? Three after-school arts groups in Providence are finding creative answers to those questions.
How can you practice theater when you can’t be in the same room? How do you make art together when you can’t share a space? How do you have a violin lesson over a Zoom call? Three after-school arts groups in Providence are finding creative answers to those questions.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum has repurposed its website to provide a 'museum from home' experience. But there's far more than what you would see if you could visit the museum right now.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum has repurposed its website to provide a 'museum from home' experience. But there's far more than what you would see if you could visit the museum right now.
While movie theaters and other large gatherings are restricted right now due to coronavirus, newportFILM has come up with a way to bring their documentary film series directly to the audience in their homes every week.
While movie theaters and other large gatherings are restricted right now due to coronavirus, newportFILM has come up with a way to bring their documentary film series directly to the audience in their homes every week.
Our weekly Artscape segment is on hiatus during the coronavirus pandemic, but we still want to share artists' stories with our audience.
Our weekly Artscape segment is on hiatus during the coronavirus pandemic, but we still want to share artists' stories with our audience.
On Artscape, we usually talk about arts and cultural events coming up in the next few days. But now, pretty much every event has been cancelled for the foreseeable future. So this week, we talked with a few people involved in the arts about how they are making adjustments.
On Artscape, we usually talk about arts and cultural events coming up in the next few days. But now, pretty much every event has been cancelled for the foreseeable future. So this week, we talked with a few people involved in the arts about how they are making adjustments.
The Gamm Theatre's in-the-round production of Sondheim's "Assassins" brings you close to the action and makes the audience feel complicit in the gun violence of history and today.
The Gamm Theatre's in-the-round production of Sondheim's "Assassins" brings you close to the action and makes the audience feel complicit in the gun violence of history and today.
Brian McEleney's adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Tale Of Two Cities" is on now at Trinity Rep. Artscape Producer James Baumgartner talks with Chuck Hinman about where the production succeeds and where the play falls short. We also have a preview of two contemporary dance productions you can see this weekend.
Brian McEleney's adaptation of Charles Dickens' "A Tale Of Two Cities" is on now at Trinity Rep. Artscape Producer James Baumgartner talks with Chuck Hinman about where the production succeeds and where the play falls short. We also have a preview of two contemporary dance productions you can see this weekend.
The Linotype machine revolutionized printing in the 1880s and 90s making it much faster and cheaper. For almost a century, Linotype ruled the newspaper industry until it was replaced by more high tech methods in the 1970s and 80s. But there are still a few of these machines around including two at DWRI Letterpress on Rice Street in Providence. Dan Wood has used his Linotype machine every day for the last year to comment on the news and document his life.
The Linotype machine revolutionized printing in the 1880s and 90s making it much faster and cheaper. For almost a century, Linotype ruled the newspaper industry until it was replaced by more high tech methods in the 1970s and 80s. But there are still a few of these machines around including two at DWRI Letterpress on Rice Street in Providence. Dan Wood has used his Linotype machine every day for the last year to comment on the news and document his life.
We're highlighting two concerts at The Vets this weekend: Angélique Kidjo plays her world beat reinterpretation of Talking Heads' album "Remain in Light" on Saturday and Squeeze shows off their brilliant Brit songwriting skills on Sunday.
We're highlighting two concerts at The Vets this weekend: Angélique Kidjo plays her world beat reinterpretation of Talking Heads' album "Remain in Light" on Saturday and Squeeze shows off their brilliant Brit songwriting skills on Sunday.
Providence Children's Film Festival starts Friday night and has short films, features, documentaries and a couple of classics. Many of the films are outside of what you might think of as "Kid's Movies" but artistic director Eric Bilodeau says that children want to be challenged by what they experience.
Providence Children's Film Festival starts Friday night and has short films, features, documentaries and a couple of classics. Many of the films are outside of what you might think of as "Kid's Movies" but artistic director Eric Bilodeau says that children want to be challenged by what they experience.
Zan Berry is the organizer of the festival and one of the performers. We talked with Zan and cellist Laura Cetilia about what makes the cello special and how they were inspired to move beyond the traditional sound of classical cello.
Zan Berry is the organizer of the festival and one of the performers. We talked with Zan and cellist Laura Cetilia about what makes the cello special and how they were inspired to move beyond the traditional sound of classical cello.
Providence Performing Arts Center is holding an open house event on Saturday, February 1st. Visitors will be able to walk on stage, visit the projection booth, and see how PPAC works.
Providence Performing Arts Center is holding an open house event on Saturday, February 1st. Visitors will be able to walk on stage, visit the projection booth, and see how PPAC works.
"Revolution of the Heart - The Dorothy Day Story" is a new documentary about the woman who helped create the Catholic Worker Movement. Her activism spanned the women's suffrage movement, the great depression, the cold war and the Vietnam war. We talked with filmmaker Martin Doblmeier.
"Revolution of the Heart - The Dorothy Day Story" is a new documentary about the woman who helped create the Catholic Worker Movement. Her activism spanned the women's suffrage movement, the great depression, the cold war and the Vietnam war. We talked with filmmaker Martin Doblmeier.
There are two official artists-in-residence living in Providence city parks right now. Specifically, the artists are living in historic homes that are in the parks. Matt Garza is one of the “Parkists in residence” he’s living in the Esek Hopkins House on Admiral Street in Providence. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with him earlier this week.
There are two official artists-in-residence living in Providence city parks right now. Specifically, the artists are living in historic homes that are in the parks. Matt Garza is one of the “Parkists in residence” he’s living in the Esek Hopkins House on Admiral Street in Providence. Artscape producer James Baumgartner talked with him earlier this week.
The play is based on the life of Bena Shklyanoy who left Kiev, Ukraine in 1976, eventually settling in Chicago.
The play is based on the life of Bena Shklyanoy who left Kiev, Ukraine in 1976, eventually settling in Chicago.
Local Ecologies is an art-based concept aiming to generate understanding of our place in the local landscape, by contemplating our coastal and river ecosystems, as they've been over-layered by all this indigenous, colonial, and industrial history.
Local Ecologies is an art-based concept aiming to generate understanding of our place in the local landscape, by contemplating our coastal and river ecosystems, as they've been over-layered by all this indigenous, colonial, and industrial history.
Festival Ballet Providence will perform The Nutcracker this weekend. We talked with Kirsten Evans who plays the Sugar Plum Fairy and Alban Costello who plays The Nutcracker.
Festival Ballet Providence will perform The Nutcracker this weekend. We talked with Kirsten Evans who plays the Sugar Plum Fairy and Alban Costello who plays The Nutcracker.
Public Shop & Gallery is a new art space in a wedge building at the corner of Aleppo St. and Manton Ave. in Providence.
Public Shop & Gallery is a new art space in a wedge building at the corner of Aleppo St. and Manton Ave. in Providence.
Fraser Smith was a journalist for the Baltimore Sun and Providence Journal for many years. His new book “The Daily Miracle”is a memoir of nearly 50 years in the newspaper business. He recently talked with The Public’s Radio political analyst Scott MacKay for this week’s Artscape feature.
Fraser Smith was a journalist for the Baltimore Sun and Providence Journal for many years. His new book “The Daily Miracle”is a memoir of nearly 50 years in the newspaper business. He recently talked with The Public’s Radio political analyst Scott MacKay for this week’s Artscape feature.
Last week, the city of Providence held a forum called “I Love The Nightlife” with a group of people who work in the “night time economy” – that is: musicians, dance clubs, bars, concert venues.
Last week, the city of Providence held a forum called “I Love The Nightlife” with a group of people who work in the “night time economy” – that is: musicians, dance clubs, bars, concert venues.
Shelley Katsh and Cathy Clasper-Torch are two multi-instrumentalists who have collaborated on a new album of 10 songs called “From The Inside Out.”
Shelley Katsh and Cathy Clasper-Torch are two multi-instrumentalists who have collaborated on a new album of 10 songs called “From The Inside Out.”
The film by director Joseph Lovett is a look at what happened to the Jewish families forced to convert to Catholicism or flee during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.
The film by director Joseph Lovett is a look at what happened to the Jewish families forced to convert to Catholicism or flee during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.
Merino park is in the Hartford neighborhood of Providence. A new part of the park just opened up with some equipment that’s a little different from what you may have seen in other parks before.
Merino park is in the Hartford neighborhood of Providence. A new part of the park just opened up with some equipment that’s a little different from what you may have seen in other parks before.
Visit the Rhode Island Statehouse to see art works inspired by the intersection of nature and the city.
Visit the Rhode Island Statehouse to see art works inspired by the intersection of nature and the city.
Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra's Artistic Advisor Bramwell Tovey is an accomplished composer as well as a conductor. The orchestra will play his "Urban Runway" this weekend - a short piece inspired by the fashionable (and not-so-fashionable) people of New York and Los Angeles.
Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra's Artistic Advisor Bramwell Tovey is an accomplished composer as well as a conductor. The orchestra will play his "Urban Runway" this weekend - a short piece inspired by the fashionable (and not-so-fashionable) people of New York and Los Angeles.
Rhode Island Stage Ensemble updates a horror classic at the Masonic Temple in Woonsocket: The Haunting of Hill House
Rhode Island Stage Ensemble updates a horror classic at the Masonic Temple in Woonsocket: The Haunting of Hill House
Since May, the RISD Museum has had an exhibition featuring many works of Gorham Silver. A group of artists put together a response to that show with "Unpolished Legacies."
Since May, the RISD Museum has had an exhibition featuring many works of Gorham Silver. A group of artists put together a response to that show with "Unpolished Legacies."
Doors Open Pawtucket & Central Falls lets you go inside 10 places in the two neighboring cities that are usually closed to visitors.
Doors Open Pawtucket & Central Falls lets you go inside 10 places in the two neighboring cities that are usually closed to visitors.
The Norman Bird Sanctuary in Middletown, RI features 325 acres of land, 7 miles of walking trails and now an artist residency program.
The Norman Bird Sanctuary in Middletown, RI features 325 acres of land, 7 miles of walking trails and now an artist residency program.
Taylor Mac: A 24 Decade History of Popular Music (Abridged) at the Vets in Providence on Saturday, plus Providence Improv Fest and Assembly of Light & The Body
Taylor Mac: A 24 Decade History of Popular Music (Abridged) at the Vets in Providence on Saturday, plus Providence Improv Fest and Assembly of Light & The Body
The Rhode Island Chinese Dragon Boat Races and Taiwan Day Festival comes to Festival Pier in Pawtucket on Saturday.
The Rhode Island Chinese Dragon Boat Races and Taiwan Day Festival comes to Festival Pier in Pawtucket on Saturday.
"Weird Fiction" is a genre that combines elements of horror, sci-fi, fantasy and magical realism. NecronomiCon Providence celebrates Weird Fiction with film, art, gaming, and discussions of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and other Weird Fiction creators.
"Weird Fiction" is a genre that combines elements of horror, sci-fi, fantasy and magical realism. NecronomiCon Providence celebrates Weird Fiction with film, art, gaming, and discussions of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and other Weird Fiction creators.
Spirit Family Reunion plays the Columbus Theater for an album release show on Friday. New Bedford has a grant program to help people create "Wicked Cool Places."
Spirit Family Reunion plays the Columbus Theater for an album release show on Friday. New Bedford has a grant program to help people create "Wicked Cool Places."
Vikki Warner wrote "Tenemental: Adventures of a Reluctant Landlady" as a memoir of the first few years owning a three-family house in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Providence.
Vikki Warner wrote "Tenemental: Adventures of a Reluctant Landlady" as a memoir of the first few years owning a three-family house in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Providence.
The Providence Fringe Festival started earlier this week, but there are still plenty of interesting performances to check out like the Olneyville Expo.
The Providence Fringe Festival started earlier this week, but there are still plenty of interesting performances to check out like the Olneyville Expo.
The South Coast Artists Open Studios Tour this Saturday and Sunday features about 50 studios. It's a great opportunity to see artists "in the wild" and enjoy the beautiful countryside of Tiverton, Little Compton, Westport and Dartmouth.
The South Coast Artists Open Studios Tour this Saturday and Sunday features about 50 studios. It's a great opportunity to see artists "in the wild" and enjoy the beautiful countryside of Tiverton, Little Compton, Westport and Dartmouth.
"To the Moon and Beyond" now on display at the WaterFire Arts Center in Providence is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The exhibition features a 23 foot diameter globe of the moon, as well as a collection of intimate paintings inspired by space exploration.
"To the Moon and Beyond" now on display at the WaterFire Arts Center in Providence is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The exhibition features a 23 foot diameter globe of the moon, as well as a collection of intimate paintings inspired by space exploration.
A couple of tried-and-true Independence Day activities, plus a preview of the New Bedford Folk Festival this Saturday and Sunday
A couple of tried-and-true Independence Day activities, plus a preview of the New Bedford Folk Festival this Saturday and Sunday
Bristol artist Bradley Wester uses found photos of soldiers doing things you don't usually see soldiers doing, like wearing nothing but a pair of women's pink underwear. Some members of the museum's board of directors wanted the photos removed from the current show at the museum.
Bristol artist Bradley Wester uses found photos of soldiers doing things you don't usually see soldiers doing, like wearing nothing but a pair of women's pink underwear. Some members of the museum's board of directors wanted the photos removed from the current show at the museum.
In June 2018, Salve Regina University started their Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Local author Ann Hood is the founding director and she recently talked with our own Scott MacKay about this “low-residency” program.
In June 2018, Salve Regina University started their Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Local author Ann Hood is the founding director and she recently talked with our own Scott MacKay about this “low-residency” program.
This Friday and Saturday, Mixed Magic Theatre presents “Night’s People” at Trinity Rep. Ricardo Pitts-Wiley tells us how he was first inspired by the night 35 years ago. Plus new kinetic sculptures coming to New Bedford and RI Pride Fest in Providence.
This Friday and Saturday, Mixed Magic Theatre presents “Night’s People” at Trinity Rep. Ricardo Pitts-Wiley tells us how he was first inspired by the night 35 years ago. Plus new kinetic sculptures coming to New Bedford and RI Pride Fest in Providence.
PVDFest 2019 takes over downtown Providence this weekend. Organizers say it will have more than 1,500 artists on 22 stages. There's too much for us to cover in a short segment, but we talked to a few artists as a sample of what you can expect from the festival.
PVDFest 2019 takes over downtown Providence this weekend. Organizers say it will have more than 1,500 artists on 22 stages. There's too much for us to cover in a short segment, but we talked to a few artists as a sample of what you can expect from the festival.
Chuck Hinman talks with Donna Harrington-Lueker about her look at the origins of the beach read, "Books for Idle Hours, 19th Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading."
Chuck Hinman talks with Donna Harrington-Lueker about her look at the origins of the beach read, "Books for Idle Hours, 19th Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading."
Artists, musicians and authors can sell their works in Rhode Island without collecting sales tax, but when it comes to books, the state seems to be making an odd distinction.
Artists, musicians and authors can sell their works in Rhode Island without collecting sales tax, but when it comes to books, the state seems to be making an odd distinction.
Mary Anne Carter is the acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. She recently visited Rhode Island to speak with the congressional delegation as well as leaders from the arts community.
Mary Anne Carter is the acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. She recently visited Rhode Island to speak with the congressional delegation as well as leaders from the arts community.