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The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler
228 Angell Street
November 19- December 9
Deborah Bright
David H. Wells
Reception Nov. 19  5-7 pm

The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler, a nonprofit artists' space, presents a wide range of contemporary work in exhibitions by artists living or working in the greater Providence area. Artists are selected through an open juried process. Located on the East Side of Providence near Brown University and RISD, the gallery is on the campus of Wheeler School.

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David Winton Bell Gallery
at Brown University List Art Center
64 College Street
November 18, 2009 – February 14, 2010
ZUGUNRUHE: an installation by Rachel Berwic.

In ten installations created over the past twenty years, Rachel Berwick has focused our attention on human interactions with and understandings of the natural world. Her past works have examined species that are extinct (the Tasmanian tiger and passenger pigeon), nearly extinct (Lonesome George, the last surviving member of his subspecies of Galapagos tortoise), and “reborn” (the Coelacanth, a 400-million year old species of fish that was thought extinct and then re-discovered living at depth of approximately 1000 feet and classified as a “living fossil”).  Her new installation, Zugunruhe, is her second memorial to the passenger pigeon. Once numbering in the billions, the species inspired awe in nineteenth-century naturalists and experienced a rapid decline that brought it to the edge of extinction by 1900. The last passenger pigeon, Martha died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden on September 1, 1914.

Fascinated by the history of science and anthropology, Berwick spent over four years in research for Zugunruhe, studying writings of and about seventeenth- to nineteenth-century naturalists and explorers. She sought stories that, in her words, “illuminate the intersection between man and nature; specifically stories that surprise us into considering or imagining our place in the world, our coming into being and, now at a time of an awareness of global climate change, our possible extinction.”  

Zugunruhe consists of two components: a tree laden with amber passenger pigeons and encased in a 9' high octagon of mirrored, smoky glass; and a glass globe containing a dial that moves in simulation of migration and points to written reports of passenger pigeon sightings that are printed on adjacent walls.  The installation is characterized by intelligence and a cool elegance, and by Berwick’s visually arresting and metaphorically apt choice of materials: passenger pigeons are cast in copal—an immature form of amber, the stuff of fossils—and mirrors cast reflections that commingle the viewer (human) with the subject (animal), reinforcing the artist’s message of our commonality.

The term Zugunruhe was coined in the 1950s by ornithologist Gustav Kramer and refers to the phenomenon of nighttime restlessness and agitation displayed by birds at the onset of migration.

Zugunruhe Lecture Series

Paula Findlen
Ubaldo Pierotti Professor in Italian History, Stanford University
Athanasius Kircher’s Marvelous Machines
Wednesday, November 18, 5:30 pm

Ralph Rugoff
Director, Hayward Gallery, London
The Trouble with Nature
Tuesday, February 2, 6pm  

Peter P. Marra
Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, National Zoological Park, Washington DC   
Understanding the Migratory Connectivity of Birds
Thursday, February 4, 6pm
  
Nancy Jacobs
Associate Professor of History, Brown University
Africa, Europe, and the Birds between Them  
Tuesday, February 9, 6pm   

David Wilson  
Founding Director, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles
Nikolai Fedorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and the Roots of the Russian Space Program
Thursday, February 11, 6 pm

All lectures are in the List Art Center Auditorium
The Zugunruhe Lecture Series is funded by the Creative Arts Council, The Marshall Woods Lectureship, and the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University.

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The Krause Gallery at Moses Brown
250 Lloyd Avenue
Micro/Macro Landscape
Shane Prine
Andrew Buck
Michael Gottlieb
Nov 3-Dec 4
Reception, Thursday Nov 19  5-9 pm

Krause Gallery presents the work of three photographers, Rhode Island-based Michael Gottlieb, Connecticut-based Andrew Buck and Utah-based Shane Prine, each of who explore landscape through a micro and/or macro point of view.
 
Michael Gottlieb
 My dad bought me my first camera on my eleventh birthday, a Brownie Hawkeye 620 box camera. From that moment on I knew whenever looking through the lens of a camera I would see images in a different way. Whether shooting scenics, animals, insects or people, a passion inside me tries to become part of that image, feeling its beauty, its troubles, its sadness, its happiness, and its place in nature. Sometimes I'm able to capture that in a photograph and it makes me smile.

Shane Prine
As an artist, my goal is to capture an elegiac quality in subjects both animate and inanimate. A phrase that I believe encapsulates my most recent work is "the presence of absence." A central theme of my work is memory – what informs memory, how does it change over time, why is it that memories are often romanticized … or how is it that nostalgia and trauma often color memory accordingly. Other related ideas contained here involve questions of identity and belief. What I continually strive against in my artistic endeavors is to "make pretty pictures;" rather, I’d prefer to create some compelling, thoughtful images.

Andrew Buck
My focus has long been the landscape. My use of the term 'landscape' is based in the writings of John Brinkerhoff Jackson. His use of the term went back to the source word, the German landschaffen, which referred to that which results when 'man' reconfigures (e.g. digs the grid of ditches in Ohio) and uses the land, in essence creating his own landscape on the natural landscape.

I try to avoid the usual 'man destroying nature' view, concentrating instead on the more complex issues of our relationship with nature, the effects of natural forces have on us, and our attempts to 'control' or use the land. I’m also interested in how the shape of the land affects what we do with it and how we use it.

Located in Moses Brown School on Providence's East Side, The Krause Gallery is dedicated to exhibiting a broad spectrum of contemporary artists' work.

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Providence Art Club
11 Thomas Street
Mon-Fri 12-4 • Sat & Sun 2-4
Closed for Gallery Night

Maxwell Mays Gallery
Dodge House Gallery

Founded in 1880 to stimulate the appreciation of art in the community, the Providence Art Club has long been a place for artists and art patrons to congregate, create, display and circulate works of art. Through its public programs, its art instruction classes for members and its active exhibition schedule, the Club continues a tradition of sponsoring and supporting the visual arts in Providence and throughout Rhode Island.

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The RISD Museum of Art
224 Benefit Street enter through the Chace Center at 20 N. Main Street

NOVEMBER Gallery Night Programs
Join a conversation with curators and artists. Take gallery exploration into your own hands. Enjoy live music with wine at our cash bar. Exercise your artistic potential with optional coaching.

6-8pm Drop-in Art Lesson: Receive one-on-one instruction from a professional artist/educator. Materials are provided; no experience is necessary.

6:30 pm Panel Discussion: A Medium’s Means:
Ceramic Past and Present
Michael P. Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center
The gallant and coy figures of eighteenth century decorative porcelains find contemporary resonance in Arnie Zimmerman’s ceramic laborers who toil and muddle through a metropolis in his exhibition Inner City. This close dialogue between the historical and contemporary offers a point of departure to explore continuity and change within the techniques and meanings of ceramics. In this panel discussion artist Arnie Zimmerman, Lawrence Bush, Associate Professor and Department Head of Ceramics, and Judith Tannenbaum, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art, consider contemporary ceramic practices in relation to the medium’s history, modernist discourse, and the prevailing strategies of contemporary art.

6:30-8pm Music in the Galleries

7pm Visita Guiada en Español/Guided Museum Tour in Spanish or English. Meet in Chace Center Lobby for either choice.

Ongoing Exhibitions
Inner City
Through Sunday, January 3, 2010  
Inner Cit yis an installation of more than 120 figurative and architectural ceramic elements by Arnie Zimmerman, one of the most significant contemporary artists working in ceramics today. The exhibition encapsulates the human condition: men are engaged in activities ranging from the grandest of feats to the repetitive aspects of the everyday, as they build buildings and carry out mundane chores. Are we destined to mark time and be doomed to endless Sisyphusian tasks or is there progress and achievement? Like the densely populated paintings of Breugel and Ensor, Zimmerman’s work is rooted in the myriad details of ordinary experience and at the same time it seems fantastical. His figures reflect ceramic traditions as much as they comment on contemporary urban life. Zimmerman received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred. In 2005, he was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship. Inner City is a collaboration with the architect Tiago Montepegado, who designs the site- specific architectural framework for the ceramic sculpture. Previous versions of Inner City were shown in Europe at Museu da Electricidade in Lisbon (2007) and Princessehof Museum, Leeuwarden, the Netherlands (2008).

The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480–1650 The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480–1650
Through Sunday, January 3, 2010
Renaissance engravings are objects of exquisite beauty and incomparable intricacy with a unique visual language made up entirely of lines. The Brilliant Line: Following the Early Modern Engraver, 1480–1650explores the art of engraving and its dynamic transformations during the European Renaissance. Showcasing works by the most outstanding masters, from great innovators such as Albrecht Dürer to virtuoso specialists such as Agostino Carracci, the exhibition demonstrates how engravers learned from one another and pushed their art to astonishing technical heights. The exhibition offers a unique opportunity to observe the rapid visual evolution of one of Europe’s first reproducible art forms. Accompanying the exhibition will be a fully illustrated catalogue available in risd/works online and in the Chace Center.  

Shih Chieh Huang (Spalter Media Gallery Rotation)
Through October 18, 2009
Shih Chieh Huang (Taiwanese, b.1975) describes his work as an “interchanging process between people and space.” The artist uses a low-tech approach to create installations with which the viewer interacts through sound and movement. Everyday objects such as electronic appliances, toys, plastic bags, and containers are combined with air, water, light, cables, motion sensors, computer parts, and video footage to construct colorful and playful environments. Huang’s installations contain numerous kinetic components which are constantly in flux, with elegant and strange results.

Zone of Attraction: Indonesian Textiles from the Permanent Collection
Through December 2009
This exhibition explores the wealth of cultural diversity in textiles from the islands of Indonesia. The geographical fact that the Indonesian Archipelago sits strategically between the Indian and Pacific Oceans has formed the world’s most complex and varied textile cultures. Centuries of contact with India, China, The Middle East, and Europe have resulted in a mosaic of printed and woven splendor unequalled in the world today. Techniques such as batik, embroidery, ikat, supplementary patterning, and gilding are all evidence of previous foreign contact. Examples of these techniques reflect Indonesia’scultural history beginning with migration from Southeast Asia in 8th century BCE though the twentieth century.  These textiles contribute to the story of Indonesia’s history of trade, religious practices, ethnic migrations, and colonialism.

Joe Deal: New Work
Through Sunday, January 3, 2010
The RISD Museum will debut two beautiful new bodies of landscape photographs by the distinguished artist, Joe Deal (RISD Provost 1999-2005, RISD Photography Professor 2005-2009). The series, West & West: Reimaging the Great Plains, 2005-2007, captures the expansiveness of this subtle terrain and its dramatic skies. The series Karst and Pseudokarst, 2005-2008, began with an image of a lava tube from West & West, which drew him to a rich exploration of dark and confined underground landscapes primarily in the states bordering the Great Plains. The exhibition coincides with the publication of the book, West & West, scheduled for release in October 2009. 

Nature/Artifice: Contemporary Works from the Collection
Through February 2010
The relationship between nature and artifice, reality and fiction, is central to a selection of contemporary paintings, sculpture, and video in the Museum’s collection. In some cases, natural materials— a lemon, thistles, or rocks, for example —are placed in artful arrangements or altered to extend their significance. Conversely, manufactured materials—ranging from audiotape to flip-flop sandals—may be configured to resemble natural phenomena such as a cascading waterfall or the Caribbean Sea. A number of the featured works were acquired recently and are being exhibited for the first time.

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