Meanwhile, a gallery off Wickenden Street, 5 Traverse, opened in April. “My intentions are to showcase local work, not just locally, but nationally at art fairs and biennials,” says owner Jesse Smith, 35. His space is showing a mix of local veterans, like Ruth Frisch Dealy, who has an exhibit scheduled for next September, and emerging artists like Marro and other Dirt Palace members who decorated skateboards in the gallery’s current exhibit.
Firehouse 13 opened on Central Street in January, featuring group shows organized by people who rent out the space, as well as music, dances, and other events. “I’m really trying to provide something for the fringe,” says director Anna Shapiro, 37, an artist herself. The Pawtucket recording studio Machines With Magnets has been hosting exhibitions with an illustration bent. Neil Salley opened his gallery of eccentric art contraptions, the Musée Patamécanique, in Bristol last fall.
The Hive Archive is finishing up the first phase of renovations to the old brick gasometer building it owns on Manton Avenue, though much work and fund-raising still lay ahead. In the meantime, they’ve organized a group show at Julian’s on Broadway through October 14 and are seeking artwork to exhibit on the outside of their building this fall.
The two biggest moves are the renovation and 43,000-square-foot expansion of the RISD Museum, slated to be completed next fall, and AS220’s redevelopment of the Dreyfus Hotel. Even with AS220’s new Project Space gallery opening there in June, the nonprofit still has a two-year waiting list for exhibitions. AS220 is in talks to redevelop a four-story building downtown, and perhaps expand its Empire Street building, to add even more studio and gallery spaces, including a shop for high-end designers and crafts.
As real estate development has steamrolled through Providence, a key factor for the future of the local art scene is the number of visual arts spaces that are now owned by their operators.
The importance of owning one’s own space was one of the lessons art folks learned from watching as the Eagle Square mill housing Fort Thunder was leveled about five years back to build a shopping center anchored by a supermarket (which recently went bust). Crenca points to AS220, Dirt Palace, Firehouse 13, and the Steel Yard. One could add the school galleries, Hive Archive and 5 Traverse. “This is a list of people who own their own space,” Crenca says. “They’re not going anywhere.”
Still, much disagreement remains in the art community about how well locally made art is represented in local galleries — and about the proper balance of exhibiting local work and art from elsewhere.
“The sense I have is there’s just not enough exhibition opportunities for artists . . . Quality venues are very hard to find,” says James Montford, 56, a Providence artist and interim director of Rhode Island College’s Bannister Gallery. For Rhode Island artists of color, the situation, the African-American artist adds, is “worse. Only because it’s a small world here . . . and opportunities are very few. And they’re going to be even fewer for artists who are coming at it and already feel excluded, right or wrong.”
Shapiro says, “If you’re really searching for good representation you’re going to have to travel the whole state, because it’s there, but it’s all spread out.”
Agniel, meanwhile, complains about focusing “on whether something was local rather than whether it was good . . . It’s just not the end-all criteria for me, and it never has been. I feel like in Providence it’s been heavily overemphasized. And I want to disabuse people of that notion. It’s not that we have so many artists in our community — it’s that we have so many artists of an international caliber in our community. That’s what makes Providence rare.”
