Pictured: A portrait of artist Jillian Barber’s parents with one of their love letters across the image from the exhibit honoring women. PHOTO CREDIT: Jillian Barber
The University of Rhode Island Providence Campus Arts and Culture Program hosted an art exhibit entitled “Visioning,” which featured 40 female artists for Women’s History Month.
Steven Pennell, the coordinator for the URI urban arts and culture program, holds an exhibit every month in the first and second floor lobby gallery of the Shepard Building, which holds the library and the Feinstein College of Education and Professional Studies.
Pennell said the lobby had tremendous potential to reach audiences through visual arts because of how often people pass through each day. He started doing monthly exhibits in the lobby in 1999 and has continued ever since.
Pennell said that each month’s exhibit focuses on different topics of social justice and diversity, and that he values giving people a platform through these exhibits.
“Sometimes it’s a one-person show,” said Pennell. “Sometimes it’s topic-driven, so about domestic violence or about cancer or about a particular issue or I say to the women artists, what is it that you as an artist, who is a woman, need to say this particular exhibit?”
Pennell said that the lack of criteria for this month’s exhibit resulted in a variety of diverse topics from a range of artists, from novice students to professionals.
“There are 40 artists in all different media and all different styles matters,” said Pennell. “So there’s abstract artwork, there is landscape artwork, there are portraits. Some of them are more socially conscious and some of them are just really lovely works of art.”
Jillian Barber, a 1968 Rhode Island School of Design graduate and professional ceramic artist, is one of the artists featured in the exhibit, and she said that her childhood has heavily influenced her work.
While studying at RISD, Barber was interested in creating portraits of people through physical masks, made with plaster face castings.
“I started pressing clay into the molds of their faces, and creating sort of magical mythical images around the face with dragons,” Barber said. “Some of the images, a lot of images that I loved as a kid, dragons, mermaids, all animals of all kinds, that still comes through my work to this day.”
Barber described her ceramic pieces in the “Visioning” exhibit as facial portraits of people surrounded by headdresses of broken plates and dishes.
“People have been donating,” Barber said. “I’ll look outside and there’ll be a pile of plates on the porch, which is fun.”
Barber also has a hand-colored photograph in the exhibit of her parents from World War II in 1944.
“When I was looking through my father’s box of memories that I have,” said Barber, “I found love letters from my mom, which I didn’t know I had. And I read them and it amazed me because I’m the only person besides my father, whoever read what my mother wrote.”
Barber hand-colored an image she found of her parents and put the love letter across the image, creating one of her favorite pieces by commemorating her parents’ love.
“I had wanted to mention how brave my parents were to fall in love and marry in time of war,” Barber said. “How brave my mother was to marry, have a child, leave her family, get on a boat, and come to live in America. It’s amazing.”
Pennell said that it’s rewarding to see all of the different works that the artists have contributed to the exhibits over the years and especially with this month’s exhibit.
“It’s a celebration of all the different things that artists who are women do,” Pennell said.