Newport Art Museum's artist residency returns with nationally recognized artist
For over two centuries, Newport has attracted influential artists, artisans, writers, architects and designers who were inspired by the natural beauty of this oceanfront community. The Newport Art Museum artist residency, AiR/Newport, is designed to encourage the creative, intellectual and personal growth of emerging and established visual artists and designers by giving them the time, space, and solitude needed to create, apart from the daily demands of production and deadline. Today’s permanent collections of Rhode Island’s many museums, cultural organizations and historic homes offer a rich repository of artifacts and archives for AiR/Newport resident artists to explore.
After a two-year postponement due to the global health pandemic, the Newport Art Museum has welcomed artist Aimée Beaubien for the month of June 2022.
Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago, whose work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally. Her cut-up photographic collages, installations and artist books explore networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal: a photographed plant, interlaced vine, woven topography merge into fields of color and pattern and back again expanding the ever more complicated sensations of reading a photograph and experiencing nature. Beaubien is an associate professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, where she has taught since 1997.
The Newport Art Museum is committed to cultivating a culture of inclusion and recognizes the importance of honoring, celebrating and sharing our individual differences and life experiences. The Museum believes in the idea that viewing our world from another’s perspective helps promote connection and civic engagement. On Wednesday, June 29 at 5 p.m., the Museum will present an Artist Talk with Aimée Beaubien when guests can hear directly from Aimée and see what was created during her residency in the museum’s Griswold House. More information and registration is available at newportartmuseum.org.
A few short weeks later, the museum will celebrate the opening of its summer exhibition, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Things I Had No Words For,” which opens to the public on Saturday, July 16 and was curated by Newport Art Museum Senior Curator Dr. Francine Weiss. O’Keeffe is hailed for her representational paintings of colorful flowers and southwestern landscapes. Yet O’Keeffe made many strong and vibrant abstract works throughout her career. In the past decade, scholars and curators alike have devoted more attention to O’Keeffe’s use of abstraction, which the artist herself proclaimed was her visual vocabulary for ineffable emotions and sensations.
Featuring oil paintings, drawings, and watercolors, this exhibition will celebrate O’Keeffe’s exploration of abstraction, which established her as one of the foundational American modernists. Powerful, bold, colorful, and evocative, O’Keeffe’s abstractions represent her unique style and approach to nature and landscape. O’Keeffe lived and worked in Santa Fe and Taos, and was first exhibited at the Newport Art Museum in 1938. The museum is proud to bring her work back to Newport.
For a sneak preview of the exhibition, enjoy a festive evening of dinner and dancing at the Summer Art Party on Friday, July 15. This annual summer fundraiser is a tradition that dates back to 1927.
One of the most highly anticipated and lively cultural events of Newport’s summer season, the Art Museum’s festive Summer Art Party attracts cultural and civic leaders, artists, collectors, philanthropists, and other art-world notables from across the country.
Summer Art Party co-chairs Ellen Bowman, Elizabeth Brooks, Kimberly Cummins, Patrick Dolat, Fran Slutsky, and Ellie Voorhes have designed a fabulous, Sante Fe-inspired evening,s a nod to the time O’Keeffe spent living and working in New Mexico. Southwestern fare and cocktails prepared by Blackstone Caterers will be served, and Jill Rizzo of Studio Choo East will design the event’s artful floral decorations. The dance floor will be back this year and DJ Meghan Taylor from Chicago will be mixing the music.
A live auction will feature one-of-a-kind travel and culinary experiences. Auctioneer John Hays, Deputy Chairman of Christie’s, will be in charge of the live auction followed by a paddle raise, which will support the Art Museum’s dynamic exhibition program.
For a full schedule of events, classes, camps, and more information, please visit newportartmuseum.org, follow us on Instagram @newportartmuseum, or stop by 76 Bellevue Ave., Newport.
“At the Museum,” provided by the Newport Art Museum, appears each month in The Daily News and online at newportri.com. For more information, call 401-848-8200.
This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Newport Art Museum welcomes Aimée Beaubien as resident artist
