Word Shelter project in Providence
Down in Providence, near a bus stop on Broadway outside the Wedding Cake House, a sign faces the road: A sign, a sculpture, a rotating interactive textual experience. It’s called the Word Shelter and it was built and installed by Shaun Bullens a year ago and it features a shifting selection of text from writers, artists, and poets, for the pedestrians making their way down the sidewalk, for people waiting for the bus. The text shifts every six weeks, and the next featured text is by writer Sasha Wiseman, a debut of her project “Reflections of the Living Light,” which is a phrase of 12th-century mystic, composer, naturalist, and nun Hildegard von Bingen, whom Wiseman first encountered through her music. Reading accounts of Hildegard’s visions, Wiseman was struck by how similar some of the language felt to her own experience of meditation, and her Word Shelter project nods to these words. The Wedding Cake House offers project-based residencies geared towards mid-career artists as part of the Dirt Palace Public Projects umbrella, a Providence-based feminist artist-run non-profit which was founded in 2000 and now includes two facilities and a number of exhibition and residency programs. The opening for “Reflections of the Living Light,” and the celebration of the one year anniversary of the Word Shelter takes place on Monday, July 1 from 5-7 p.m. on the lawn of the Wedding Cake House, 514 Broadway, in Providence.
Museum hosts first US exhibit of Roger Mello’s art
A new exhibition at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art celebrates the work of Brazilian artist Roger Mello, and marks the first exhibition in the United States of his work. “Fuzuê!: Invention & Imagination in the Art of Roger Mello” includes work from a dozen picture books, plus book dummies, prints, and sculptures. In 2014, Mello won the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award, making him the first Latin American illustrator to win it. The word fuzuê comes from a Portuguese phrase meaning playful commotion, a lively chaotic energy. And Mello’s work captures a spirit of movement, play, vitality. In shades of green, a man in a hat bends over a single white flower against a spiral coil of green rectangles; it’s earthy and magical. A piece from “Joâo by a Thread” shows a white-against-black lacework image of figures weaving, all joined together by a single red thread. From “Charcoal Boys,” there’s a molten factory scene, hot glowing metal tipping from vats over an assembly line. And from “Griso, the One and Only,” hieroglyphic looking pegasus’s wings extend in vivid color across the page, with a red unicorn galloping below. The feel across his work is folkloric, dipping into shared cultures, drawing from Brazilian myth and history, and the result swings between the euphoric, the menacing, the high-drama, and the contemplative, colors blazing, animals and people and shapes together in harmony, in motion. “Fuzuê” runs through January 25. For more information, visit carlemuseum.org.
Anthology of student’s writing
The Telling Room, a youth writing and literacy organization based in Portland, Maine, recently published a new anthology of student work. “This Moment and the Next” asks “What do we do with this moment, this during? And how does the present bridge our pasts to our collective future?” The book gathers work from 43 authors. “I do not want to die,” writes sophomore Lily Jessen, “but / I do not think I want to turn fifteen, / either.” Fifth grader Cason Gatto writes this perfect distillation of spring: “The grass is growing / Oh! That means we can get wet / We can play baseball.” Sixteen-year old Luisa Kiangata writes of the clutch of anxiety. “I remember that if my biggest enemy is me, / then I can win. That is the power of now!” Deanna Ferris writes of a school for clouds, teaching them “how to move effortlessly across the blue sky,” how to shift from bright to brooding. Taken as a whole, the anthology is a rich and varied look at the ever-shifting now.
Coming out
“Pink Slime” by Fernanda Trias, translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary (Scribner)
“Concerning the Future of Souls” by Joy Williams (Tin House)
“The Coin” by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult)
Pick of the week
Cheri Anderson at the Bookloft in Great Barrington, Mass., recommends “The Witches of Bellinas” by J. Nicole Jones (Catapult): “An immersive experience into a weird fictional California cult. But beneath the surface of this extraordinary Eden there is something sinister at play. Has the main character really given up her life in NYC to live in this place to please her husband? Reminiscent of the underlying ugliness of “White Lotus” as well as the movie “Wanderlust” (without the humor) this story has a wicked twist that I did not see coming.”
Nina MacLaughlin is the author of “Wake, Siren.” She can be reached at nmaclaughlin@gmail.com.
