A Contemporary Look at America’s Oldest Library
July 15, 2012–June 30, 2013
Opening: Wednesday, July 18, 6–8pm
Redwood Library and Athenaeum
50 Bellevue Avenue
Newport, RI 02840
T 401 847 0292
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time…
–Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
To Arrive Where We Started, a new exhibition at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, RI, uses the Library’s historic architecture and collections of art, artifacts, and books to create a dialogue between the past and the present. The project embodies themes of travel, exploration, access, and thresholds—concepts relevant to a library such as the Redwood, located in one of the nation’s oldest seaports. Conceived of and curated by conceptual artist Peter Eudenbach, the exhibition is on view from July 15, 2012, through June 30, 2013.
Employing spaces throughout the entire building, the project is a series of interventions that use objects such as the original key to the 1750 building, sculpture, 18th-century globes, a ship model, books, and other artifacts selected from the Redwood’s diverse collections. Speaking about the installation, Peter Eudenbach commented, “As we move further into the digital age with its characteristic dematerialization of knowledge, it is easy to forget that books and even words are objects.”
Founded in 1747, the Redwood Library and Athenaeum is America’s oldest lending library and the oldest library still operating in its original building. The many additions from the 19th and 20th centuries have left a cumulative structure that is itself a collection. To Arrive Where We Started continues the Library’s mission to perpetuate the dissemination of knowledge and the exploration of ideas. Beginning at the Library’s original entrance, the installation progresses along an axis from the oldest part of the building through the more recent additions, activating the architecture and creating a dialogue with the present. The Redwood’s Van Alen Gallery offers an elegy to native Newporter Captain Charles Hunter, who was lost at sea in 1873 and whose 200th birthday will occur during the final weeks of the exhibition. The installation includes a marble bust of Hunter, a pair of 18th-century globes, books on phrenology, and Hunter ephemera. “To arrive where we started” is perhaps the fate of all humans, from Odysseus to Captain Hunter.
Peter Eudenbach’s approach to sculpture, installation, and video operates between material and metaphor to explore the history of ideas while playing with our expectations of the commonplace. His work has been shown both nationally and internationally at venues such as Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; Exit Art in New York; and le Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, France. A recipient of a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, Eudenbach has had solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim in Neuenhaus, Germany, and at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia, in 2009. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he is an Associate Professor of Art at Old Dominion University.
To Arrive Where We Started and its accompanying publication have been made possible by grants from the Office of Research at Old Dominion University, the Rhode Island Council on the Humanities, and the Rhode Island Foundation. A program of lectures and films will be announced at a later date.
Press Contacts
Whitney Pape
[email protected]
T 401 847 0292
Mary Spotts
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T 401 847 0295, x101
