Public Art in Rhode Island

This is a small birthday gift to our daughter Elif. Happy birthday Kiddo!

I guess public art is nothing new. We have all seen and enjoyed monuments, sculptures, and architecture for a long time. However, the emergence of additional art pieces in public places is relatively new; and the growing number of public art and their variety add more enjoyment in unexpected places. We visited one a while back, The Goddes of Work, and enjoyed the newly finished mural. One of the organizations leading this movement in Rhode Island is The Avenue Concept which helped me understand some of them better.

Photograph the Public Art

Early last week, Jim sent an e-mail and suggested that “… we all go to photograph graffiti today.” And in mid-afternoon, he came to pick us up. He knows his way around Rhode Island, and after a couple of turns off Broad Street in Providence, we faced a large mural on the facade of a building. In the content below, I gave links to the artworks and their creators separately if I could locate their information.

A Cluster of Wall Art On A Street

Yes, the street name was A St., and the area offered several murals, as we discovered, but we started with the Night Flight by Lauren Ys. At its center, a female face stares at the viewer with her hair flowing out to form the shape of a moth. Just like moths go through a series of metamorphoses, art can transform the artist and the viewer. The Night Flight certainly changed the building by residing on its facade. It was created in 2016.

As I faced the Night Flight, I noticed a short dead-end street to its left with other paintings. The large wall at the end was covered with letters formed by many words. As I photographed it, I tried to make out the big letters; was it SLIER or SIJIER? But eventually, after looking at the photographs, I settled on SLOER using the letter shapes in the words. I researched all these options and stumbled on posts that identified the letters as SLOER. It seems that the artist was Sloe or Sloer. But more research was needed.

On that dead-end street were other paintings. One series seemed to pay tribute to the Road Runner cartoons with a sign of One Acme Rocket, echoing the Acme dynamites the coyote used to use.

Click on the images to see them larger, uncropped, and read their titles.

Rice Street Dragon

A long wall on the same street had a complex piece dominated by a dragon. Much of the wall was covered with graffiti writings that were hard to decipher. One grabbed my attention as if it read JAMAL, and you can guess why! But those who can read graffiti may laugh at that. I put that detail as the lead image at the top of the article.

While taking photographs and working on them later, I realized how hard it was to read graffiti. Some research and reading taught me that figuring out the writing on the wall can be very difficult, and it was so on purpose. The artists may not want the viewer to read them, and even after deciphering, the writing may mean different things, from their tags to purposeful words. More on the Dragon later.

B Street and Central Street

We walked a little more and turned right to see the small sculpture Jim mentioned. At the corner of the next street, a cat sculpture carved on a tree trunk stood in front of an iron fence as if it was minding the gate.

Across the street was a dark bluish-gray wall with colorful flowery patterns painted on it. The signature on one side was impossible for me to read. On the left was a big white wall with many faces drawn on it. I later learned that to be Love Is A Many Gendered Thing, by Brian Kenny, created to celebrate gender fluidity on the exterior wall of Open Door Health, South Providence clinic.

Mathewson Street

We photographed all these, and Jim drove us downtown Providence. The first stop was a parking lot on Mathewson St. On one side of the lot was a mural I photographed before, She Never Came, by BEZT. The implied disappointment is somewhat relieved by the mouse whispering something in his ear and the parenthetical addition to its title, She (Eventually) Came. A story told in three words, which reminded me of an anecdote attributed to Hemmingway. When asked if he could write a story in six words, Hemmingway says sure, and continues, “Baby shoes for sale, never used.”

And, on the other side was a new one, Salt Water, by Garden of Journey (Georgie Nakima). With energizing, vibrant, neon colors, the artist presents another symbol of the transformative powers of art. The two Back women seem to symbolize the power of art in a deep space setting. We photographed them both and moved to the next stop on Weybossett Street.

Weybossett Street

The parking lot was just behind the Turk’s Head Building. They retained a wall from the building that used to stand there to hide the parking lot view. Arched windows on the street side had painted murals, 401: After Winter Must Come Spring, by Fu’una. And, on the inside of the wall were Stationary Creature Envelope Windows by Minio Mind Warp. The Envelope Windows reminded us of Big Nazo characters we used to see on the street on special occasions.

We enjoyed all the public art, needing only short walks on Providence streets. In addition to the newly created public art, the financial center with its landmark buildings like the Turks Head Building or the Superman Building reminded me of the art of architecture.

We came home, had a cup of coffee, and my curiosity got the best of me. I started researching these public art pieces, titles, and artists. I even marked their locations in Lightroom!

Help From TAC

Through research, I identified Night Flight, Love Is a Many Gendered Thing, Salt Water, Stationary Creature Envelope Windows, She Never Came, and After Winter Must Come Spring. I realized I was hitting a brick wall, and The Avenue Concept, the organization behind much public art, provided some quick information to satisfy my curiosity; nothing in detail or great depth, but just quick identification.

Additional Information

• The SLOER piece was indeed his name, made up of all the other graffiti artists who he feels inspired him over the years. It was an important mural he had to brain-dump on a wall as if to say, “These are the people who made me and my art.”
• The dragon mural was a collaborative effort by several local graffiti artists like Sloe, Nerve, Reak, and more. Artists executed the project themselves.
• And the grey wall was probably a test run for a bigger installation.

Locations

Here is a map I created to show where we have visited and what remains to be done. The green circles with a camera icon are places we have visited, including some I will write about in the coming weeks. The black circles indicate the ones we plan to visit.

It is worth driving around to see these public artworks. We got too excited by the views our eyes caught and missed a huge mural on the side of the building hosting the Night Flight. Next time, I will be more observant! And, yes, there will be more public art views!

Hunting for public art in many places in Rhode Island can be fun and educational.

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