WaterFire Providence presents NetWorks Rhode Island and the Chazan Collection: A Half-Century of RI Patronage at the WaterFire Arts Center (WFAC) a large-scale exhibition featuring over 100 NetWorks Rhode Island artists. This exhibition celebrates a dynamic community of innovative artists living and working in Rhode Island and their champion, Joseph A. Chazan M.D. The exhibition is made possible by the support of BankNewport.
NetWorks Rhode Island, initiated in 2008 by Dr. Chazan in collaboration with Umberto Crenca, documented and celebrated the work of 113 Rhode Island artists through video and photographic profiles created over a 9-year span, 2008-2016. This catalog includes all the artist’s bios, most of which have been updated by the artist specifically for the exhibition, and links to their current websites or social profiles (if available) and their NetWorks RI website profile pages.
Astrid
Astrid is an Armenian American interdisciplinary artist, born in Havana, Cuba. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Her prolific body of work includes stained glass, ceramic sculpture, oil stick and ink drawings, and conceptual, site-specific installations, among others. She has exhibited widely over the course of several decades, and her art is held in numerous public and private collections. Astrid’s work is characterized by bold, spontaneous strokes, and a palpable sense of animated turmoil, drawn from the world around her and the subconscious reaches of her mind.
David Allyn
David Allyn is an artist whose work is an investigation into the evolution of urban space and culture at the intersection of ceramics and printmaking. His process begins with selecting architectural sites and documenting the locations with photographs as a way to create one-of-a-kind porcelain objects that offer a fresh vision of our contemporary age. Allyn utilizes various silkscreen-printing methods to produce ceramic work that is layered with color and imagery as a method of documenting and commentary about the urban
landscape.
Allyn received his MFA from RISD and attended undergraduate studies in Wisconsin, the state of his origin. Upon completion of his graduate studies in 2003, Allyn founded the community ceramics program at The Steel Yard, an arts education non-profit based in Providence, RI now in its 19th year. Allyn has been awarded a McKnight Fellowship and has been chosen as a Rhode Island State Council of The Arts Fellow. He has work in several museum permanent collections, including Newport Art Museum, Museum of Art, at Rhode Island School of Design. Allyn currently maintains a full-time studio practice at Studio50 in the 50 Sims project in Providence Rhode Island.
Ben Anderson
Ben Anderson, born in 1960, has a BFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. He is an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island and works from his studio in Warren.
Boris Bally
Boris Bally is a Swiss-trained goldsmith working as a contemporary metalsmith and designer Rhode Island, where he maintains his studio business, Bally Humanufactured. Bally’s work is a disciplined body of objects which vary from eccentric through formal to humorous, provoking thought and reflecting on some of the distortions of our ordered world. Over four decades, his practice has become an amalgam of the skills of an able industrial designer, a gifted craftsperson, a discriminating sculptor and a cultural critic. For years, he has been organizing major art exhibitions facilitating political activism to end gun violence. Bally was interviewed for the Smithsonian Institution’s, “Archives of American Art: Oral History Project.” His work has been featured in numerous international and national exhibitions and prominent publications. Public collections include London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Art & Design New York, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Brooklyn Museum, The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collections housed in the Luce Foundation Center for American Art, Renwick Gallery and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. His artwork has earned him numerous state fellowship grants in design and crafts including an International Design Resource Award, the Felissimo Design Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Green Dot Award, Second Prize in the Fortunoff Silver: New Forms and Expressions II, the Visual Arts Achievement Award from the Arts & Business Council of Rhode Island, and a Society of North American Goldsmiths Volunteer Recognition Award.
Jillian Barber
Jillian Barber, originally from England, grew up in Westerly, Rhode Island. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design where she studied ceramics with Norm Schulman and glass with Dale Chihuly. Barber has had a career in ceramic sculpture, mask making and costume design. She brings a passion for portraiture to her mythical and imaginary animals and figures, attending to form, texture, light and fantasy. She combines a deep reverence for nature with the realms of dreams, imagination, and archetype. Barber was costume and mask designer/maker for the Chorus of Westerly Celebration of Twelfth Night for 30 years. She received a RISCA Fellowship, numerous Katherine Forest Craft Foundation awards for excellence in ceramics and had a retrospective at the Newport Art Museum where her work is in the collection. Barber shows her work at Jessica Hagen Fine Art & Design and Charlestown Gallery. She lives and works in Jamestown.
Deborah Baronas
Deborah studied textile design and painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. As a designer and creative director in the industry in New York City, Los Angeles and Europe she worked with designers and fabric manufacturers in global fashion centers. Based on her own work experience and family heritage, she explores the condition of the American worker and landscape. She designs site specific installations that produce interactive environments with textile scrims, glass, paintings, video, music and photography. Her work is based on archival research, interviews and portraits of her subjects. Deborah lives and works as a design consultant and fine artist in Rhode Island.
Reenie Barrow
With camera in hand, Reenie Barrow is equally happy photographing flowers picked from both her backyard and local fields, as well as packing her bags and traveling from Havana to Hanoi, through the Mid-East, Europe, Mexico, Asia, Easter Island, Egypt. In addition to her personal work, she has been a stills photographer for several independent movies. .” The thread that binds my work is a straightforward presentation with the ultimate goal of making photographs both visually compelling and catalysts for contemplation.” Her work has been shown internationally in more than 100 solo and group exhibitions. Her work is included in numerous private, museum, and corporate collections–among them the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Greece, and Fidelity Investments. One of the awards Barrow has received was given by the Greek Ministry of Culture “for her exceptional contribution to Greek culture” after the publication of her book, The Wreath of Dreams, Visions of Greek Villages. Barrow is a self-taught photographer with a VA from the University of California, Berkeley.
Nicholas Benson
For the past decade, Benson has continued to carry on the rarified craft of letter carving as well as exploring a new thread of artistically expressive and intellectual work that examines the scientific and informational languages of the digital age, and the tremendous amount of knowledge that is broadening our understanding of the universe. In this age of mass media and the onslaught of information, Benson uses his age-old craft as a symbol of human history and sets it in conflict with the transitory nature of digital information.
Howard Ben Tré (1949-2020)
Howard Ben Tré’s sculpture, and especially, as we shall see, his public works, are permeated by idealism. Even when his sculptures are intended for more private viewing, they draw on forms that are at once simple and universal. Ben Tré recounts that he began to cast glass when he looked at the molten liquid and realized that it was in essence very similar to molten bronze. In casting it, he lets it do what comes naturally to it. For similar reasons, he doesn’t artificially color his glass, preferring the watery green color that is natural to it, though he sometimes tints the glass by adding metal oxides. And although Ben Tré is often identified as a sculptor who works with glass, he has explored a number of other materials, which he treats with equal respect. Metal appears as cladding, adding a thin skin over areas of the sculptures. Or it may be an insert into a glass form. Sometimes it is a counter element, providing a sharp geometry to the softer curve of a glass form, an exterior frame, or an accent or band whose opacity accentuates the luminosity of the glass. Rubbing inner cavities with metal oxide, Ben Tré creates mysterious inner shadows. But there is never any trickery involved. Ben Tré continues to combine his work in the public realm with the creation of individual sculptures. These two modes play off each other, sparking new ideas and new forms. In the end, it is clear that they emanate from the same source—a sense of our common humanity and a desire to use art to bring people together. Ben Tré’s public and private commissions and projects return us to the realm where utopian visions and social ideals don’t seem so foolish after all. They remind us that dreams take root in the places in which they are cultivated.
Kate Blacklock
Kate Blacklock is a Providence-based artist who received her undergraduate degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her MFA from The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island College, and for nine years co-chaired the Ceramics Department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she was Associate Professor. She has been teaching in the Industrial Design Department at RISD since 2002. Blacklock’s studio practice has spanned over thirty years and during that time her work has moved from sculptural and functional ceramics to 3D printing, photography, and painting. She has had solo exhibitions around the country including, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Providence, and Ann Arbor. Her works are in many private and public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Mint Museum, The Fuller Museum, and the RISD Museum.
Jonathan Bonner
Making art is a marinade of questions. The questions concern everything from major concepts to small details. Solutions arrive from constant immersion in the marinade.
Leslie Bostrom
Leslie Bostrom received her BA from the University of Maine, Orono, and her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Between undergraduate and graduate school, she worked as a master printer in San Francisco, specializing in intaglio. Bostrom has taught drawing, painting, and printmaking at Brown University for 33 years. She has exhibited her work in solo shows in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Paul, Philadelphia, Seoul, South Korea, and Sydney AUS, and has been represented in group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and the New Yorker. Her most recent solo show was at the Main Gallery at the University of Rhode Island, where she exhibited large paintings that were “combination” images on stretched canvas and sheets of plywood. Bostrom is interested in the interaction of words and images in painting and for most of her career, she has been making works that engage political topics such as environmental degradation, human migration, feminism, and LGBTQ issues. Bostrom has lectured about her work in over 30 universities and museums, most recently at Nanjing University in Nanjing, China.
Coral Bourgeois
Originally from New Orleans, Coral Bourgeois, born in 1954, received her BFA from Northern Texas State University. An artist who works with tiles, her studio is located in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Stephen Brownell
Born in Rhode Island in 1963, Stephen Brownell has a degree in botany from the University of Rhode Island but pursues a painting career at his Providence studio.
Donnamaria Bruton (1954-2012)
Born in 1954 in Wisconsin, Donna Bruton received a BFA from Michigan State University, an MFA from Yale University, and a certificate in painting from the Art Institute of Chicago. She resided in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and was a professor of painting at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Ilse Buchert Nesbitt
Ilse was born in Frankfurt/Main, Germany in 1932. She grew up in Japan between 1936-1947, returning to Germany at the age of fifteen. In 1954 Ilse began to study fine art at the art academies of Hamburg and Berlin, focussing on lettering and typography through 1959. There, she completed her first woodcut prints.
Ilse moved to the United States in 1960 and taught typography and book design at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, R.I for five years. In 1965, Alexander and Ilse Buchert Nesbitt founded the Third & Elm Press at 29 Elm Street in Newport, Rhode Island. From the beginning, using only handset type, the press printed and published limited edition books, note paper, and cards on an 1897 Golding platen press and original woodcuts on the 1830 Acorn hand press that inspired the press logo. At first, Third & Elm also printed letterheads, business cards, and invitations, however at present it no longer produces this type of work. Since 1965 she has done numerous one-woman and group shows in the U.S. and Germany. Work can be found in the U.S. in the libraries of New York, Chicago, Providence, and many others. Her work is also housed in Germany in the libraries of Hamburg, Leipzig, and in the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach as well as in numerous private collections around the world.
Press Motto: “Whoever works joyfully and enjoys what has been done is fortunate” (Goethe). This applies to the shop. It is small, my tools and means are limited, and the absolute quality for which I incessantly strive may be hard to attain, but I enjoy what I do and so I am happy.
Ilse Buchert Nesbitt
Jesse Burke
Jesse Burke is a New England native and currently lives in Rhode Island with his wife and their three girls—Clover, Poppy, and Honey. He received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he is a faculty member, and his BFA from the University of Arizona. Burke’s work deals with themes related to vulnerability and identity, as well as human’s complicated relationship with nature. His monograph, Intertidal, was published by Decode Books in 2008. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and abroad, including The Haggerty Museum, the Perth Center for Photography, and the Tucson Museum of Art, and is held in many private and public collections, among them the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the RISD Museum.
Lawrence A. Bush (1951-2019)
“Nature is my model, sometimes literally, always conceptually. With clay and glaze I imitate nature. With function and form; color and texture; history and need, I attempt a layering of forces and structures similar to that found in natural things like flowers.” Lawrence Bush is a potter, collaborator, and educator who has taught ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design since 1984, heading the department for twenty years. Bush fuses histories of art making and craft tradition to serve contemporary need. Freedom to move among handwork, mechanized production, and digital technologies is important. Originally from Seattle, Bush holds a BFA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the College of Ceramics at Alfred University. His professional activities and special projects at RISD are numerous. He has exhibited nationally, has work in the RISD Museum, the Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred, and many other venues.
Nilton Cardenas
Nilton Cardenas was born in Lima, Peru; he embarked on an academic journey nurturing his passion for painting at the renowned Institute Superior Jose Sabogal in Lima. In 1993, his family set foot in Miami, Florida, seeking new opportunities, and eventually settled in Providence, Rhode Island. In 2023, he accomplished a significant milestone by obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Organization, Leadership, and Change from College Unbound, further enriching his expertise and paving the way for a promising future. With his ancestral roots as inspiration, Nilton’s artwork showcases his artistic prowess, which has been featured both domestically and internationally, serving as a spiritual reawakening and creative liberation. He was a member of the board of Cranston Art Commission (2021-2023) and board director of Sol Gallery (1999-2004). Sol Gallery promoted Latin art and culture. His dedication extends beyond administrative functions, developing his talents as an artist and art instructor with children, youth, and adults in the diverse Providence community. He works for the Providence Public School Department (PPSD) and in after-school programs and summer camps for different organizations that support art and culture in the city of Providence. Nilton’s unwavering dedication has garnered recognition from Rhode Island City Halls and state representatives, affirming his role as a revered role model and catalyst for positive change within our communities.
Daniel G. Clayman
Daniel Clayman has been working with glass as his primary medium for forty years. His work reveals his interests in engineering, the behavior of light, and how the memory of experience acts as an impetus to his studio explorations. Working large and small, he employs technology from the simplest hand tool to the latest three-dimensional modeling and production tools. An artist/educator, Daniel was the Effron Family Endowed Chair at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia from 2018-2021. He has been a Visiting Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design and Artist in Residence at Tyler School of Art and Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has lectured worldwide. He is the recipient of numerous grants and is working on a permanent installation in Toledo for the Federal Arts in Architecture program. Currently, he works in his studio full time pursuing new ideas.
Dennis Congdon
Dennis Congdon holds a BFA in Painting from RISD and an MFA from Yale. IN 1983 he won the Prix de Rome and became a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He has taught painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tyler School of Art and has been on the faculty at RISD since 1984. In 2003 he received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and in 2010 RISD’s John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. Congdon’s work has been exhibited widely. Since 2013 he has had three solo shows in New York City: at the CUE Foundation in 2013, (curated by Stanley Whitney,); at the Horton Gallery in 2014; and “Congeries” at Zieher Smith and Horton Gallery in 2015. In 2015 his large work “Hummocks” was included in the James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition at the ICA Boston, (curated by Kijidome.)”
Umberto Crenca
Umberto (Bert) Crenca is a multidisciplinary artist with a long exhibition and performance history. His work appears in the permanent collections of the Rhode Island School of Design and Newport Art Museums and in numerous private collections in the US and abroad. Well known for being co-founder and longtime artistic director of AS220, a nonprofit center for the arts in downtown Providence, Bert is a passionate advocate of the conviction that all people should have access to the means to cultivate and express their creativity. He has received numerous honors and awards for his community work and holds honorary doctorates from Roger Williams and Brown Universities. See more of Bert’s work at www.umbertocrencaartist.com
Ruth Dealy
I am a painter who has lived and worked in Providence, Rhode Island for the past forty-one years. I received my BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1971 and my MFA in 1973. My paintings have been in the form of two series: one of self-portraits and the other of landscapes, both interior and exterior, which act as secular altarpieces. Having fixed subjects has allowed me to submit one vision fully to time, light and mood so that there is a scientific as well as spiritual, element.
Jessica Deane Rosner
Jessica Deane Rosner was raised in Manhattan and received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she majored in enameling. Back in New York, Rosner worked in enamel and then jewelry before relocating to Cranston, Rhode Island, almost thirty years ago. She began to work in pen and ink, eventually finding satisfaction in two distinct kinds of drawing: narrative with text and purely abstract explorations. She says “in both genres I like my work to show my hand and to illustrate a certain density of page, so that even if all there is, is line, there will be may of them and the final image will be as complete an exploration of line as I can achieve.” The Diary Project, which combined both stylistic elements, was shown in its entirety at the DeCordova Museum, and she has exhibited her abstract ink drawings in Boston, Rhode Island, and New York.
David DeMelim
David DeMelim pursues parallel explorations in printmaking and photography. He earned a BFA from the University of Rhode Island, studying with Bart Parker and Chris Cordes, and has been involved in advancing computer-driven printing technology. With a focus on the built landscape and its human connections, DeMelim considers form, weight and proximity in his compositions. He is not interested in capturing a “Kodak moment, but rather a syncopated succession of moments that combine to recall or define an event.” Much of his work explores an image’s ability to fix a memory through the use of multiple layers and paired images. The dynamic energy of Providence’s cityscape has produced an ongoing body of work, as has a recent Cuba trip. DeMelim has exhibited his work at institutions all over Rhode Island and is represented in the collections of Sheldon Whitehouse’s Senate Office and Rhode Island College, among others.
John DeMelim (1924-2019)
Collage is at the heart of John DeMelim’s art; to him, it is the most cohesive way to represent the myriad of differing realities we experience each day. His images derive from extensive travel and study of ancient cultures in the Amazon, New Guinea, and Mexico, as well as visits to Mali, Japan, and Greece, with his late wife. DeMelim’s home in Johnston, Rhode Island is a museum of art and artifacts from this rich life. He received a BS from Tufts University; a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and an MFA from the University of Guanajuato, Mexico. A longtime educator at Rhode Island College, he was an integral force in the creation of its art department. DeMelim brings a mastery of printmaking techniques, painting, and assemblage to his collages which take both two-dimensional and three-dimensional form. He has shown his work in New England, New York, California, and Mexico.
Peter Diepenbrock
American, b. 1960. Peter Diepenbrock has achieved a distinguished record of accomplishment as one of Rhode Island’s most prolific contemporary sculptors. Diepenbrock holds a BFA, and a BID in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has exhibited his mid-scale work locally and nationally in prestigious museums and fine art galleries. In addition, Peter has received several awards for his earlier design work including the Marc Harrison Award for Excellence; Best Design Award at Accent on Design, New York International Gift Show; Excellence in Design for Dansk International; as well as multiple Rhode Island State Council on the Arts (RISCA) Fellowships in Craft, Design and Sculpture. Past design projects include flatware for Dansk International; functional objects for The Museum of Modern Art; metal furnishings for Dennis Miller Associates in New York; and the Troy Collection, founded by Peter, as a collection of sculptural and functional objects, sold through Barneys, The Nature Company, and over 400 boutiques across the country. His current public art practice has produced dozens of larger commissions which can be seen publicly and in private collections throughout the northeast. Past public sculptural projects include the 9/11 Memorial for the Rhode Island State House, Torsion III for The University of Rhode Island, Torsion IV for The Glass House in Bridge Water, New Jersey, Transversion for The Lakewood Public Library, Lakewood, Ohio, and the monumental rooftop Clock Man for The Foundry in Providence RI. Recent completions include Bunny Bikes, for River Side Square, East Providence, Spectral Shift, for Hasbro Children’s Hospital, Providence, And Lastly, Ostara, Village Green in Peacedale, in celebration of The Town of South Kingstown’s Tricentennial. Peter currently resides in Jamestown, Rhode Island.
Bob Dilworth
Bob Dilworth, born in 1951, received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; he is currently professor and chair of the art department at the University of Rhode Island. He resides in Providence.
Gretchen Dow Simpson
Gretchen Dow Simpson is the recipient of several prestigious commissions, including assignments from Bostonian Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Absolut Vodka, and Kirin Seagram Company. She has held solo shows and group exhibitions in museums and galleries across the country. Her work is held by many private collectors and corporations. She received the Pell Award in 2005 and an Honorary Doctorate Degree from Bryant University in 2009. She began her distinguished career taking photographs of buildings and worked as a freelance photographer in Boston, New York City, Minneapolis, and Scranton from 1962-1970. Her first painting was purchased by The New Yorker magazine in 1974 and 58 paintings were used as covers over a 21-year period. She is best known for her distinctive views of New England architecture. Simpson’s paintings are recognizable by their clean-lined, architectonic focus, with flat surfaces and deep perspective. Deceptively simplified, these paintings balance shapes, colors, textures, flatness and depth, all in a nearly flat frontal plane. The calm strength of these paintings is evocative of the comment, by 19th century Romantic Realist artist J. F. Millet, that “It is the treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime that gives art its true power.”
John Dunnigan
John Dunnigan is a designer, maker, author, and educator. His studio work has been shown in more than one hundred exhibitions, including ten solo exhibitions, and is included in private and public collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the RISD Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Dunnigan’s furniture has been featured in dozens of publications, such as The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Boston Globe, in catalogs and in books, including Edward S. Cooke’s New American Furniture (1989) and Witold Rybczynski’s Now I Sit Me Down (2016). In addition to maintaining his own studio practice since 1975, he was a partner in DEZCO Furniture Design LLC (2004-2010) and Windels Dunnigan (2018-2019), collaborations dedicated to sustainable practices in design for affordable production. A dedicated teacher, Dunnigan has been a member of the faculty at RISD for over forty years serving first in the Departments of Industrial Design and Interior Architecture. In 1995, he was a co-founder of the Department of Furniture Design eventually serving as Department Head for many years (2005- 08 and 2010-17) and he served as Interim Dean of the Division of Architecture + Design in 2008-09. He is a former Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the RISD Museum (2015-18) and the recipient of several awards including the URI Alumni award for Excellence in the Arts (1998). He was a RI Networks Artist in 2014. Dunnigan currently holds the Schiller Family Endowed Chair in Furniture Design at RISD since 2016.
