2022 Biennial: Passages

The Jamestown Arts Center (JAC) in Jamestown, Rhode Island, invites you to rediscover our sense of place and find new ways of seeing during the 2022 Biennial: Passages, an Outdoor Arts Experience featuring 13 publicly accessible artwork installations. 

The Jamestown Arts Center Biennial provides an incubator for artists’ ideas and showcases a broad range of public installations in diverse media. By displaying artwork throughout Conanicut Island, the JAC creates avenues to actively engage visitors with artists and their work. The biennial is the result of a nationwide call for artists’ proposals. Artworks were selected by a blind jury from the Jamestown community, with Nick Capasso, a curator of note in the field of public art and the current director of the Fitchburg Art Museum.

Selected artists: Thirteen artworks are on view throughout Jamestown until October 31, 2022, by the selected artists: Amelia Wilson (Rhode Island) Look Outs and Letters, 2022; Claudia Ravaschiere and Michael Moss (Massachusetts), Like You and Me, 2022; Daniel Shieh (New York), Sound Fort, 2022; Eileen Travis (New York), The Poppy Field, 2021; Jean-Marc Superville Sovak (New York), Six of the First, 2022; Jerome Harris Parmet (Maryland), Coming Together, 2006; Keith Francis (Massachusetts), White Fence, 2020; Linda Hoffman (Massachusetts), Refuge, 2020; Mark Dornan (New Jersey), Renewal, 2021; Peter Diepenbrock (Rhode Island), The Ephemeral Nature of Time, 2022; Rob Lorensen (Massachusetts), Gateway, 2004; Sean Harrington (Rhode Island), Fear and Wonder, 2019-2022; and an artists’ collaboration with Mary Meagher, Anne Kuhn-Hines, Janie Harris, and Melody Drnach (Rhode Island), Wrack Line: 2050, 2022.

Exhibition theme: Each of the selected artworks responds to the theme of the 2022 Biennial, Passages, in distinct ways. The concept for Passages was inspired by the Town of Jamestown on Conanicut Island, itself literally and physically defined by the ocean in Narragansett Bay. Metaphorically, Jamestown’s passages refer to its evolving communities: first by Native Americans, next by European settlers and colonial farmers, followed by immigrants, families with vacation homes, and year-round residents. 

Some artworks speak directly to the passage of history such as Jean-Marc Superville Sovak’s Six of the First, a monument to some of the earliest recorded enslaved Africans to have been brought to Newport County in 1743: six women named Yallah, Morandah, Mowoorie, Simboh, Burrah, and Yearie. Other artworks create physical passageways to embody the theme, including Daniel Shieh’s interactive and participatory Sound Fort and Rob Lorenson’s Gateway. 

Other installations are intended as cathartic remembrances of the pandemic and hopeful messages to the future. Thousands of hand-crocheted poppies by artist Eileen Travis blanket a field in Jamestown and invoke the poppy flower as a symbol of remembrance and hope, as it was after the loss of life from World War I. While the artist duo Claudia Ravaschiere and Michael Moss created an immersive installation of reflective domes, Like You and Me, to mirror the sunlight and invite self-reflection.

The 2022 Biennial: Passages, an Outdoor Arts Experience is on view through October 2022. Visit the biennial website for information on how to tour the free exhibition or contact the Jamestown Arts Center here.

2024 Biennial: The biennial continues in 2024. Artists will be invited to submit proposals in the spring of 2023. 

About the Jamestown Arts Center: 
The Jamestown Arts Center is a multi-disciplinary visual and performing arts space that hosts art exhibits, theater, dance and musical performances, film screenings, and educational programming including artist talks and hands-on art classes for all ages. The JAC opened in 2010 in a former boat repair shop redesigned by award-winning architects Estes/Twombly. Since 2014, it’s won five of Rhode Island Monthly’s ‘Best of Rhode Island’ awards, including the Editor’s Pick for Outdoor Art in 2021.

The Jamestown Arts Center is a leading arts and cultural hub for Rhode Island and beyond, where creativity, ideas, and innovation flourish. For more information visit here.