ReSeeding the City: Ethnobotany in the Urban - Opening reception October 26, Rhode Island State House, Lower Level Gallery
Reseeding the City: Ethnobotany in the Urban
A project developed under the aegis of the Providence Biennial for Contemporary Art
Part of The Year of the City: The Providence Project.
A Focused Group Exhibition
Rhode Island State House, Lower Level Gallery
82 Smith Street, Providence, Rhode Island
October 25 – November 27
Opening Reception October 26, 5:30 – 8:00 pm
& A Day-Long Forum
Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Brown University Stephen Robert ‘62 Hall 280 Brook Street, Providence, Rhode Island
October 26, 9:30 am – 5:00 pm
EXHIBITION
Providence, RI—From handmade paper crafted of local waste plant fibers expressing the changing nature of Providence’s rivers (collaborating artists May Babcock and Megan Singleton), to a knitted, and then felted wall hanging interpreting the thickly built city as a setting and a subject (Margery Winter’s Mend a City), the goal of the exhibition ReSeeding the City and its attendant community forum is to expose and explore a range of responses to the often contending forces of people and plants in the urban setting.
In the special dual project of contemporary art exhibition and community forum, we ask afresh how forces of nature and urban life may productively align. In this way the exhibition recalls the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show, in New York, whose logo was a simple pine tree—aptly deploying a symbol of American political revolution to herald an aesthetic revolution.
Curator Tolnick Champa emphasizes the timeliness of the exhibition and its special venue, in remarking, “Today, visual art is taking an increasingly prominent role in sparking urgent questions about the conditioning role of nature, and in informing debate about its responsible cultivation in the urban. The exhibition highlights these interlocking challenges; in places it may suggest impasse, in others reconciliation. The sense of inquiry and argument inherent in the work will amplify and resonate in the historic venue of the people’s State House, a site for productively reseeding this debate.”
Installations newly created for this exhibition include the dramatic Ebb and Flow VII by May Babcock and Megan Singleton, a nearly 25-foot long wall relief of handmade paper pulp harvested from local plant fibers, Woonasquatucket River mud, and wild urban plants. It will wend its way across the entrance wall, following the dendritic paths of the river’s watershed.
