Main Street and go to the second floor or walk up the brick steps to Moore

Terrace. The Inner City exhibition is on the third floor of the Chace Center.

by Providence community artists, Meg Turner and Andrew Oesch. For one

day only on September 26th, the project will be installed at the RISD

asking visitors to consider their role as authors of the city and how we dictate

our environment through individual desire and group effort.

This is about the city of Providence. The city we will build together is about

the numerous potential Providences we each carry with us day-to-day

through the existing streets and buildings. It will show our voices blending

Providence as a collaborative composition of the voices of the city’s

residents, one that depends on the active imaginations and collective efforts

from neighborhoods across the city.

that has been exhibited at New Urban Arts

(Providence) and the Green Lantern Gallery

(Chicago). Chicago art critic, Albert Stabler,

described the Green Lantern installation in the

following manner: “The result is at least a moving

illustration of a de-centered totality, a cohesive

diagram of an impossible place, a simple scheme

implying a grand gesture of incidental accidents–

everything that this show, at its best, strove to

convey.” (From a review in Proximity Magazine of

the Green Lantern Gallery, curated by Anne Elizabeth Moore, in March 2009.

other works around the Museum. After viewing the exhibition, visitors are

People will arrive at the RISD Museum’s

Moore Terrace and be greeted by a volunteer

who will hand participants a sheet of

instructions and an allotment of stickers.

There will be a series of large cardboard hills

and land masses carving up the terrace;

these will serve as the structures upon which

the museum visitors, artists and facilitators

will build the city. The stickers will be

drawings of various architectural elements

and complete buildings. Using scissors,

markers, and blank cardboard building

cutouts with stakes attached to their backs,

participants will construct their own built

environment – be it fantastical, based on

current realities or unimagined futures.

Once participants have completed their respective buildings, they will give

them voice by writing a message, a memory or a hope on a long ticker tape

banner, Turner and Oesch will connect these messages to a grid of strings

that hangs above the fabricated cityscape.

******

only not for much longer, since he will be living, working, and traveling on a

1988 Bluebird School Bus, beginning September 1st 2009. For the past two

years he worked at New Urban Arts as one of the Artist Mentoring Fellows.

He plans to take his Mentoring and Creative Practices on the road, continuing

the type of work he has done in Providence at New Urban Arts, City Arts!,

The Rochambeau Branch Library, The Olneyville Community School, English

for Action, and The Steelyard. Exploring the boundaries between communitybased

arts education and personal creative practice, he finds beauty in

individual efforts adding up to chaotic, complex, and grand collaborative

achievements.

project with students from New Urban Arts at AS220′s Foo Fest (August

installation at StART on the Street

2007). Andrew graduated in 2002 from the Rhode Island School of Design

with a BFA in Furniture Design.

believes in the power of buildings to narrate the personal histories of the

inhabitants of a city. Finding peace and inspiration in the out-of-use

industrial spaces of Providence, she is engaged in an ongoing compilation of

portraits of the city as it exists right now. Showing this work at AS220,

Craftland, the 5 Traverse Gallery, and RISD alumni sales has seen portraits

of specific buildings become the catalyst for an outpouring of stories,

associations, and personal connections. The desire to bring these voices of

Design in 2008 with a BFA in Printmaking. Since that time she has been

working primarily at The AS220 Community Printshop, and on projects with

The Providence Public Library Special Collections.

Other recent exhibitions include Collective Access:

Gallery in Providence (July 2009) and Structuresof Light and Weight

artists at The Hope Artiste Village. (February

2009)

Co-sponsored by RISD|Public Engagement and the Offices of Multicultural

acknowledgment of place and concept, a year-long initiative committed to

broad investigation and intentional collaboration. Through this initiative, the

RISD community will fully explore the concept of “providence” as foresight,

prudent management, and divine direction. At the same time, RISD’s home

in the Capital City serves a rationale and impetus for exploring the many

contexts across which we encounter its geography and meaning. Using

curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular opportunities to produce

meaningful and impactful learning, YOP provides multiple intersections for

learning and rich possibilities for sharing that help to strengthen our sense of

self and inform our engagement with others. For more information, visit

www.RISDinPVD.org

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).

2010.

Providence Tourism Council

Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

Ministry of Culture / Directorate-General for the Arts, Portugal

Friends of Contemporary Ceramics

For more information, please contact Andrew Oesch at aoesch@gmail.com or

401-316-7475. Additional information can be found on the RISD Museum

website (www.risdmuseum.org)