Tracy Mahaffey
Tracy Mahaffey has been a professional stone carver for nearly twenty-five years. The concentration of Mahaffey’s work is hand-carved memorials and gravestones, as well as inscriptional architectural carvings and sculptural pieces. Though stone is her first love, she has recently been exploring other materials such as clay and cast metals to create smaller more intimate commemorative work. Tracy lives, works, and plays in a cat sanctuary in Greene, Rhode Island.
Saberah Malik
Saberah Malik, of Warwick, has combined the traditional and the innovative in both her art and her life. The daughter of an Indian civil engineer, Malik was a first generation Pakistani who grew up traveling throughout Pakistan, absorbing the region’s art and culture. She received her BFA and MFA in graphic design and was awarded a National Merit Scholarship, which brought her to Pratt Institute in New York to receive a Masters in Industrial Design. Following her arranged marriage, Malik and her physician husband moved to the United States. After her children were grown Malik returned to art making, and through the practice of shibori, she created her technique of manipulating fabric into “ethereally transparent forms of stones, bottles, and other artifacts.” She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, and has won numerous awards.
Salvatore Mancini
Salvatore Mancini is a Rhode Island based photographer. He was born in Itri, Italy in 1947 and emigrated with his family in 1952 to the United States. His photographic career of fifty years has been highlighted by extensive travels around the world, an intense interest in varied subject matters, and a recipient of artistic awards and fellowships. Some of the subjects he has photographed are Italian immigrants in Rhode Island, religious shrines from around the world, Rock Art for the American southwest, the industrial revolution of the Blackstone River Valley, the deinstitutionalization of Rhode Island’s State hospitals, Narragansett Bay, and most recently, ”Shrines of Healing”. He has received Rhode Island’s Pell Award and Italy’s Bolaffi Prize as well as numerous grants from the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts and Rhode Island Council for the Humanities to support different projects. His photographs have been exhibited, published, and collected throughout America, Europe, and China.
Peter Marcus
Peter Marcus’ recent focus is on “The New American Family,” the title of his recent exhibition at the Newport Art Museum. Marcus creates large-scale composite prints using a unique collagraph printmaking process. He says that his work crosses boundaries between painting, printmaking, and drawing. As a professor of art at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, for over thirty years, Marcus began experimenting with large prints of buildings. After several years of retirement in Jamestown, Rhode Island, he turned his attention to the face, creating provocative portraits of his friends and family. Originally from New York, Marcus obtained a BS from Parsons School of Design and an MFA from Brooklyn College, with special studies in printmaking at the Scuola del Libro in Urbana, Italy. Marcus has exhibited nationally and is represented in the collections of the Newport Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum and Dallas Museum of Art, among others.
Xander Marro
Xander Marro has been living the good life in the feminist sub-underground for too many years to count on her long bony fingers. She draws pictures (usually narrative), makes movies (usually not narrative), produces plays with elaborate sets and costumes (usually narrative, but confusing), and then makes stuff like posters, quilts and dioramas (probably narrative?). Her work is often about spiritual relationships to the material stuff of this world. Co-founder of the Dirt Palace in 2000 (feminist cupcake-encrusted netherworld located along the dioxin-filled banks of the Woonasquatucket River, which is to say in Providence, RI USA). Her studio (and heart) is there still.
Paula Martiesian
With a fifty-year-plus career as an artist, Paula Martiesian has been painting her entire adult life. A native Rhode Islander, she attended RISD both as a child and later as an adult, graduating in 1976. The former exhibitions curator for the BankRI Galleries, Martiesian is one of the founding members of Gallery Night Providence. She was the editor and co-publisher of Quix Art Magazine (1991-1998), a quarterly publication focusing on the cultural scene in Rhode Island. She is a strong advocate for the visual arts in Rhode Island and has earned awards for her work from Business Volunteers for the Arts and WaterFire Providence. Her paintings have been featured in regional galleries and museums and can be found in public and private collections throughout the country. Martiesian’s paintings focus on nature, both in the urban environment and in the wild, undeveloped stretches of the landscape. She is a colorist at heart, balancing the abstractions of space with her response to the natural world. Her paintings represent nature’s tapestry, a planet where no human treads. Nature, not as we see it, but as it might see itself – intertwined, co-dependent and woven into a single living organism.
Jane Masters
Jane Masters is a local multimedia artist originally from Europe and the Caribbean. Her works in drawing, print-making, sculpture, and installation collapse the distinction between the fine and decorative arts. Integrating hand rendering with industrial processes, she creates complex patterns, images, and deadpan texts that address the human condition from a subtly feminist perspective. She has degrees from the College of William and Mary, the Kansas City Art Institute, and San Jose State University. She has executed large, permanent commissions for the Chambers Hotel in Manhattan, the Burlington Woods Corporate Park in MA, and Fidelity Investments in both MA and RI. Most recently, Jane Masters has taught at Connecticut College, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown University. Among other exhibition venues, she has shown at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the RISD Museum, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Williams College Museum of Art. She has received grants from The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Berkshire Taconic Artists Trust, and the Vermont Council for the Arts. Her work was most recently represented by Ellen Miller Gallery in Boston and Jennifer Kostuick Gallery in Vancouver, Canada.
Mary Beth Meehan
Mary Beth Meehan is a photographer whose work explores issues of culture, community, and visibility. She undertakes long-term, in-depth projects, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, RISCA, RICH, and others. “City of Champions,” her first public installation, in her hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts, was featured on the New York Times LENS blog, in 6Mois Magazine (France) and in publications in Great Britain and Japan. Her series Undocumented, investigating the lives of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., was published in Germany and China, and traveled the U.S. with the 2015 FENCE installation. Her current portrait series, SeenUnseen, was installed in 2015 as large-scale banners in downtown Providence. A former staff photographer at The Providence Journal, Meehan was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She holds a degree in English from Amherst College and a Master of Arts in Photojournalism from the University of Missouri. She lives in Providence.
Stephen Metcalf
Sculpture and science intersect in the work of Stephen Metcalf, whose large, often kinetic works derive from a structural principle called ‘tensegrity’—defined by inventor Buckminster Fuller as ‘tensional integrity’ or contemporary sculptor Kenneth Snelson, as ‘floating compression.’ Since his student days at the Kansas City Art Institute, from which he received his BFA in 1972, Metcalf has explored this concept in his sculptures, which he delights in releasing to the fields around his farm in Exeter, Rhode Island. Over the years Metcalf has worked in management for both television and construction but now is free to further investigate the connections between the physical world and his geometrical forms. Metcalf is active in the Art League of Rhode Island and as a trustee of the Rhode Island School of Design, which was co-founded by his ancestor.
Alan Metnick
Alan Metnick was born in Chicago and came of age in the 1960s. Shaken by the political turmoil of the era, he earned a BA in history at the University of Wisconsin. Determined to forge a meaningful life as an artist, Metnick first embraced photography, creating sensitive and strong work under the guidance of photographer Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he received an MFA. Characteristically, he discovered printmaking while making protest posters for the Vietnam War, Kent State, and Cambodia, under RISD instructor Art Wood. Since then Metnick has created a body of work (photography, serigraphy, drawing, and stained glass) that reflects his many talents and interests in “the historical, biblical, and personal.” Metnick has managed a silkscreen business and gallery, published books and portfolios, and exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in Rhode Island and Poland, among other venues.
Denny Moers
Denny Moers is known for his highly imaginative, technically innovative monoprints created by controlling the action of light and chemistry on the chemical-sensitized photographic paper during the print-developing process, giving his black and white photographs an extraordinary range of tonalities. Moers has said, ”I search for subjects with the intention to see what I haven’t felt before, make visible the invisible, to acquire what I cannot possess.”
He has photographed subject matter as diverse as New England architecture, medieval wall frescoes and tomb reliefs, contemporary construction sites, western landscapes and prairie dwellings, consumed structures, and most recently, marshlands. Denny Moers received his MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop. During the 1980’s he worked as Aaron Siskind’s first assistant and printer. He received a RI Pell Award for Excellence in the Arts and was the recipient of the Rhode Island Council on the Arts Fellowship in Photography four times. Denny Moers has had numerous exhibitions worldwide and his photographic art is included in over 30 public collections throughout the world including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Huston Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City. His artwork has graced over 30 book covers. The film, Casting Deep Shade, is a biographical portrait of his life and work based on a book with the poet C.D Wright and a tandem exhibition at Brown University in 2018. Recent exhibitions include a large survey of his process entitled Poetic Variations: Anatomy of a Process at UMass, Dartmouth, 2023-2024. A film accompanied this exhibition entitled Betwixt & Between. His artwork is represented by the Stephen Daiter Gallery, in Chicago, and available through the Robert Klein Gallery.
A NOTE ON THIS SELECTED WORK FOR NETWORKS EXHIBITION
This selection of paired monoprints seeks to unfold my process of artmaking so as to make transparent how my ideas transmogrify from one monoprint to another; a conversation of sorts often made years apart.
Andrew Moon Bain
A multi-faceted artist and musician, Andrew Moon Bain was born in 1974 in Texas and grew up in the Pacific Northwest, playing classical music in the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra. Since receiving a BFA in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design, Bain has become an active part of the Providence arts community as an exhibiting artist, songwriter, musician and producer. He also is the co-founder and head designer of Urban Social Empowerment, which focuses on branding social marketing concepts for Rhode Island youth.
Morris Nathanson (1927-2022)
As the founder and president of Morris Nathanson Design, with offices in New York, Boston and Providence, Morris Nathanson has led projects all over the world. He has won many awards for his hospitality venues and restaurants. In 1986, after decades of business travel, Nathanson settled down in his native city, Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and renovated an old mill building for his firm’s office. An early advocate for adaptive reuse, Nathanson has been in the forefront of developing Pawtucket as a highly respected arts district. As a fine artist, Nathanson creates paintings, prints, and wood sculptures, drawing from his design aesthetic, bold use of color, and knowledge of modern art. Nathanson received his BFA from the University of Miami, and honorary doctorates from Rhode Island College and Johnson and Wales University.
Allison Newsome
Originally inspired by the redwood forests in her native California, Allison Newsome sculpts on site, in response to the land. She writes, “I tote my clay, wax, aluminum, plaster, into the elements and then return to my studio with the memories embedded in my fingertips, like a naturalist returning from the field with specimens.” Her work addresses issues of environment and human interaction. It provides an avenue into figuration with embedded abstraction, at the same time inspired by ancient forms. Newsome has a BFA in sculpture from Chico State University in California and an MFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design. She teaches in the ceramics program at Harvard University. Her work has been shown at the RISD Museum, the Newport Art Museum, Fuller Craft Museum, Beatrice Wood Museum and internationally. A recent project is the series of glazed terracotta lions atop Newport’s Audrain Automobile Museum.
Jacqueline Ott
Jacqueline Ott is an artist who lives in Providence and works in her Pawtucket, Rhode Island studio. Born in Camden, New Jersey, she received a BFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She was an adjunct faculty member at Rhode Island School of Design for nine years, and also taught at Brown University and Roger Williams University. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, PA, Providence, RI, Boston, MA. and Abu Dhabi. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fund, a Rhode Island State Council for the Arts Fellowship in Drawing and Printmaking, a Rhode Island State Council for the Arts Fellowship in Painting, and a Rhode Island State Council for the Arts Artist Project Grant. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Newport Art Museum, Newport RI; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Corporate collections that include her work are Fidelity Investments, Meditech, Boston Ritz-Carlton Residencies, the Dialysis Centers of Rhode Island, and Edwards and Angell, Providence RI.
Barbara Owen
“Layers and repetition are fundamental in my work. While these two words describe the physical aspects of the work, they also describe the act of making them. A shape’s outline is cut repeatedly until there is nothing left, a painting is cut into strips to weave new forms, and the repetition of shapes builds larger compositions. These techniques symbolize the passage of time, personal experiences, and ways to find imagery. As a formalist, I explore the relationship between shapes and space, while as a colorist, I aim to evoke emotional responses through my work.” Barbara Owen received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY, and an interdivisional BA in Sculpture and Poetry from Bennington College, VT. Her pieces are found in private and corporate collections internationally. In 2016, two of her paintings were selected for exhibitions with the Arts in Embassies (AIE) program, one in Ports Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and the other in the permanent collection at the American Embassy in Paramaribo, Suriname. She is currently a visiting artist at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, Providence, RI.
Annu Palakunnathu Matthew
(b. United Kingdom; lives in Rhode Island, USA) photo-based work draws on old photographs to re-examine historical narratives in the US and South Asia. Matthew’s recent solo exhibitions include the Royal Ontario Museum, Canada, Nuit Blanche Toronto, the Newport Art Museum, and sepiaEYE, NYC. Matthew has also exhibited her work at the RISD Museum, Newark Art Museum, MFA Boston, MFA Houston, Victoria & Albert Museum, 2018 Fotofest Biennial, as well as at the Smithsonian. Grants and fellowships that have supported her work include a John Gutmann, MacColl Johnson, two Fulbright Fellowships, and grants from the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts. Minor Matters Books and sepiaEYE published her monograph, “”The Answers Take Time,”” in December 2022. Annu Palakunnathu Matthew is a Professor of Art at the University of Rhode Island. She was also the Director of the Center for the Humanities from 2014-2019 and the 2015-17 Silvia Chandley Professor in Peace Studies and Non-violence. Matthew is represented by sepiaEYE, NYC.
Elizabeth Pannell
Elizabeth Pannell lives and maintains a studio in Providence, Rhode Island. As a plain air painter working primarily in oils and gouache, Pannell strives to capture the essential impressions of the New England coastal areas with intensity and immediacy. She is a graduate of Parsons School of Design and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Allison Paschke
Allison Paschke lives and works in Providence RI. Her delicate and sculptural wall pieces and installations explore geometry using translucent and reflective materials such as mirrors, resin, acrylic gels, and porcelain. Paschke earned a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in Providence, Brooklyn, San Francisco, and other locations nationally. Paschke received a fellowship in “new genres” from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her work is included in national and international private collections as well as in several corporate and museum collections, including the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. She has curated three exhibitions in the Providence area and two in Brooklyn.
Agustin Patiño
Agustín Patiño is a classically trained artist, he studied architecture at Universidad Estatal de Cuenca for several years, and he then continued at the Universidad Central de Quito, where he studied painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Agustín specializes in large-scale public art projects, portraits, landscapes, still life, and contemporary new figurative artwork. His first solo exhibit was in Cuenca, Ecuador, which was the beginning of his artistic career which has taken him all over the world. Agustín spent four and half years living in a region of Ecuador, what is referred to as the “Amazonia”. He explored the mountains, rivers, and wildlife of this area. His time in the “Amazonia” played a substantial part in his development as a human being and as an artist. Inspired by art, and nature, he learned how to value and respect the ecosystem and the species that inhabit that region. “My artwork has been enriched by my travels to the Amazonia and encounters with the aborigine people, the rivers, the animals, and everything that inhabits this wonderful and unique part of the world. The opportunity to visit some of the major metropolis of Latin America and Europe has also been a great influence on my artistic sensibilities along with the knowledge of the importance of protecting the blue planet in which we live.” – Agustín Patiño
Lisa Perez
A multi-disciplinary artist, Lisa Perez makes abstract sculptural paintings, objects, and works on paper that investigate attention, perception, and spatial dimension. Fusing the subtle edges between mediums, her practice takes a malleable approach to form. The work invokes minimalism initially, but slowly one encounters an unfolding of playful extremes in color, shadow, form, and a subtle humor countering austerity. An off-kilter grid evokes rigid order but embraces chaos through unexpected movement. Teetering on the edge of familiar territory, the lines, marks, and forms of the works defy assumption and predictable categorization. Perez says, “It is abstraction channeled through a desire for order and perfection.” Perez received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and currently lives and works in Rhode Island. Her work has been exhibited locally and nationally and is in the RISD Museum as well as private and corporate collections.
Timothy Philbrick (1952-2022)
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines proportion as ‘the relation of one part to another.’ Pleasing proportions render the whole harmonious, symmetrical, and agreeable. I feel that this is central to good furniture design. With considered, but rough, mathematical proportions arrived at visually, I strive to create furniture that is graceful, balanced, and sensuous. I try to give each piece a clear, quietly stylish stance. Finally, I attempt to select woods that complement the overall feel of a piece and grain patterns that enhance the curve or shape of an individual part. Born in 1952, in Providence, Rhode Island. Lives in Narragansett Rhode Island, where he maintains a studio. Attended Program in Artisanry, Boston University (Certificate of Mastery, Wood Furniture Design 1978). Apprenticed with John C. Northrup Jr., restoring and reproducing American period furniture (1971-1975).
Erminio Pinque and BIG NAZO LAB
Erminio Pinque is a performer, puppet & prop fabricator, Instructor of “Creature-Creation” and Artistic Director of BIG NAZO LAB, an international touring troupe and creature-making studio that employs a variety of mask and wearable sculpture techniques to create mobile spectacles and audience interactive alien creature theatre.
Peter Prip
Peter Prip, the son of Danish master metalsmith John Prip, was born in Denmark, shortly before his father came to teach at the Rhode Island School of Design. Prip attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, School for American Craftsmen, and after an apprenticeship with Ronald Pearson, launched a career as a studio metalsmith and jeweler. Over the years he also did product development work for Reed and Barton as well as freelance design and model-making for the jewelry industry. Today Prip acknowledges that he prefers the forms and shapes inherent in making sculpture from metal; in his words, he “honors the material in different ways.” Prip has been an adjunct faculty member of the Department of Industrial Design at RISD since 1988 and maintains a fresh enthusiasm for working with new students.
Angel Quinonez
I have been painting and drawing forever, and from the moment my little fingers picked up a bulky crayon my love for all things art began. I always wanted to be an artist, and throughout my life, I have been blessed with people who have pushed me in the right direction. My artwork is driven by the necessity to create or capture things or ideas. I often paint things that are part of my environment, drawing from books, films, my music collection, and friends. I am constantly thinking about all my pieces that are in progress and new work that I am trying to figure out. I have always been my biggest critic. My studio is filled with paintings that have been sitting for years. It took a long time to be able to put work aside. I used to sit in front of a painting for hours, even days. I don’t know what direction my new work is heading. I have been carving wood and small pieces of stone for the past couple of years. I am always trying to explore new mediums, and trying to take things to new levels. After all these years I am still trying to create the perfect painting.
Andrew Raftery
Andrew Raftery is an artist specializing in fictional and autobiographical narratives of contemporary American life. Andrew loves prints for their ubiquitous role in our world: on wallpaper, ceramics, textiles, and other functional objects, such as bandboxes. He welcomes the challenge of using seemingly antiquated techniques such as engraving to treat contemporary subject matter. Andrew’s studio practice is research-based, branching out into collaborations with museums and scholars. He is a Professor of Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design and is represented by the Ryan Lee Gallery in New York. His home and studio are in Providence, Rhode Island.
Tony Ramos
Originally from East Providence, Rhode Island, Tony Ramos was born in 1944, and obtained a BA in art from Southern Illinois University and an MA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. He lives and paints in France.
James Reynolds
James Reynolds is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design where he majored in sculpture and later studied the art of tinsmithing in San Miguel de Allende, a small town in central Mexico. He has been creating large-scale repousse metal panels in copper and stainless steel for use in interior and exterior architectural spaces, as well as artwork in tin-plated steel since 1991. James has participated in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions; his artwork is included in the permanent collection of the RISD Museum of Art as well as in the Wheeler School’s Public Sculpture Collection in RI. He is currently working for VERTEX, Cell and Gene therapies, on a curative treatment for Type 1 Diabetes.
CW Roelle
CW Roelle is a graduate of The Maryland Institute College of Art. He has been making art in Rhode Island for over 20 years, the past 11, more specifically, in Foster. He is a recipient of the Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship and a RISCA fellowship for 3D art.
Anthony Russo
Anthony Russo is a freelance illustrator. His clients include the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Esquire, Random House, LA Times, Vanity Fair, etc.
