Whether you are ready for it or not, welcome to 2020!
It will no doubt be a fast paced and exciting year and we are ready at the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts to help you through the year. We have put together an exciting schedule of exhibitions designed to support and enlighten our members and gallery visitors alike. True to our mission to expand your photographic horizons and support new work, we have put together a selection of exhibitions with something to appeal to and challenge most everyone.
We have started the year off with The Director’s Choice Exhibition which is currently on view and continues through February 14th. The Director’s Choice Exhibition is the one show I curate myself bringing in work not otherwise available to help set the tone for the year. This year I have invited all the jurors and curators we work with to exhibit their own work in this group show. This is a chance to both, revisit previous exhibitions and to preview some of our calls and curated exhibitions coming in 2020. The exhibition itself is composed of a varied selection of work from established photographers who are not only committed to their practice they share a common desire to help others realize their own personal vision. Collectively we hope to help you explore your Elysian fields to create work that is unexpected, evocative, thought provoking and ultimately satisfying if for no other reason than it is uniquely yours.
Time is running out to see the work of the artists who help to form our gallery exhibitions here in Providence. https://www.riphotocenter.org/the-directors-choice-work-from-our-jurors-curators/
Our next exhibition, a call for entries juried by J. Sybylla Smith opens February 20th and brings together a diverse selection of work in celebration of personal vision in “the heart goes nine”. We hope you will join us for the opening reception. https://www.riphotocenter.org/the-heart-goes-nine-j-sybylla-smith-juror/
We have an exciting array of solo exhibitions lined up in addition to several calls for entries and our annual members’ exhibitions. We will be hosting an Open Call for Alternate Process work and Photography without a Lens that will be juried by Ann M. Jastrab. Familiar to some of you from the Rayko Photo Center http://raykophotocenter.com/ Ann is currently the Executive Director of the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA. https://photography.org/ This call will include all forms of alternate capture techniques from toy cameras to contact printing and most everything in between.
New for 2020 we have added an extra members only juried exhibition to this year’s schedule. This new exhibition will be juried by Jesse Burke http://www.jesseburke.com for an exhibition opening in May. Based on the success of our Photo Stories call https://www.riphotocenter.org/photo-stories-juried-exhibition/ and the positive feedback from gallery visitors to last year’s Second Annual Juried Members’ Exhibition https://www.riphotocenter.org/second-annual-juried-members-exhibition/ we have combined the two ideas and created this as an additional member exhibition opportunity. Entered work will be juried as sets and not as individual photographs. The exhibition is designed to give the gallery visitor a better understanding of the selected photographers thought process or interest while giving the photographer the opportunity to explore an idea in greater depth than a single image typically allows. Work need not be linear nor tell a story to qualify. This exhibition will be in addition to the Third Annual Juried Members’ Exhibition coming in August, which I am excited to announce will be juried by Francine Weiss. Formerly the Director of the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, Francine is currently the Senior Curator of the Newport Art Museum.
Entry information will be posted as we finalize the details of each exhibition.
In the meantime I would like to thank you all for your participation in making 2019 such a successful year. We produced 20 exhibitions in which we featured eight solo artists, a number of curated group exhibitions, the popular Outspoken Expanded and a selection of open calls. Our Calls for Entries introduced us to an ever expanding audience and brought in work from across the country and around the globe. In addition to these regular gallery exhibitions we also hosted four PopUp exhibitions to feature student work and launched the first in a series of exhibitions outside our North Main St. Galleries.
I hope you will all join us in making 2020 an even more successful year and remember we open a new exhibition, or set of exhibitions on the third Thursday of each month.
– David DeMelim
Managing Director
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