Genger's work reenergizes traditional feminine handcraft by making giant knit and knotted installations. Mister Softy (2005) is like an absurdist exercise video. The artist, dressed in sporty black shorts and bikini top, crawls over and under giant rugs laid across outdoor stairs in a pattern that sort of resembles a map. She enigmatically drags pieces around, altering the patchwork pattern, until finally dragging one away down a grassy path. Kramp also puts a twist on knitting by making tribal style knitwear that looks like something you'd wear to a tony party at your local yurt. His two pieces here seem to be puffy sweaters or gowns assembled from recycled scarves.
Knitting, masks, fabric soft-sculptures, monsters, mannequins, do-it-yourself craft — they're all aspects of the Providence style in the years bookending the millennium. Walker's abject 2011 abstract construction Stand is the one work whose look and materials don't fit in neatly, but you maybe, maybe could argue that her messy, junkyard aesthetic does. She stretches canvas over a five-foot-tall rectangle frame, stands it upright like a poorly jury-rigged bed, and stains it lemon on front and gray-purple on the sides.
Influence is often indirect and even unconscious and thus hard to trace. The correspondences in "Homecoming" to Providence art might just be coincidences of the zeitgeist, but the circumstantial evidence suggests there are lineages to be uncovered.
Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Brown University, Dale Chihuly, RISD Museum, More 
, Brown University, Dale Chihuly, RISD Museum, List Art Center, Saya Woolfalk, Less 
