Nineteenth century shipwrecks & flying bananas? Expect the unexpected as artist & printmaker Allison Bianco layers Rhode Island’s actual topography and coastal history with neon colors and whimsical humor. The local artist explores the unreliable nature of memory using a combination of screen printing with copper etching called intaglio. We follow her fascinating process every step of the way in “Allison Bianco: Imagining the Storm” on “ART Inc.”
Read Part One here.
An interview with Jan Howard, Curator Emerita/RISD Museum:
Recently, “ART Inc.” producer Mary Steele spoke with a RISD Museum curator who added Bianco’s work to the museum’s collection. Here are excerpts from that conversation with Jan Howard, Curator Emerita at the RISD Museum in Providence.
A curator is responsible for the care of the collection, for making sure that collection is well cared for, is visible, is accessible. So that means we exhibit it, we publish it, we make it available to people who want to study it. It’s a resource. I worked with the print and drawings and photographs and help build that collection for the museum as well as make it accessible.
I was introduced to (Allison Bianco’s) work and I was very struck by the way she used printmaking techniques. I really had never seen anyone work quite the way she had. I felt she had a very distinctive voice and I was very curious to learn more about her work and to follow her work. That’s what I love, discovering artists.
She uses two different printmaking techniques. The first layer is an etching technique where you’re drawing on a metal plate so you’re not drawing directly into the plate, but you have a ground, a waxy kind of ground over the surface that blocks out most of what you’re doing. And then you can draw on top of that. In this case, she’s drawing with a needle, an etching needle. And so she’s just kind of scratching into that wax, not the plate itself. And so she can draw pretty freely as she does that, but oftentimes it’s a copper plate and sometimes you can use a copper plate that has imperfections in it. You can make that a perfect plate, but that’s not what Allison works from. She likes the kind of random marks that a plate might have in it already and incorporates those into the work.
I think that adds a kind of, for me, atmospheric or dimensional effect to the work. It adds a kind of richness to it. And then on top of that, she layers screen print, which as a technique people are probably familiar with from T-shirts and so many other kinds of things that are done. So even that combination of layering screen print on top of etching, it’s not so common. I mean, screen print is often done with kind of, you can do it with finer ways, but it’s often flat areas of color. And so it’s a brilliant use of screen print the way I think Allison works with it and how she adds the layers of color on top. So they’re just kind of these selective areas, and they’re also not naturalistic in the way she uses the color. I think that’s also quite beautiful. But it feels all right when it’s all together. It feels like it’s supposed to be that way, but you don’t know why.
I saw The Sinking of Matunuck, which she did back in 2012. It’s a panorama of the coastline and where we see a nice rainbow in the sky on the far left of the print. And so you’re really expecting this kind of nostalgic view of the beach. This is a place where Allison spent time as a child. So it is something very personal to her as often references in the works are, but once you get into the landscape, the bottom is also filled with this neon pink color. And when you go down there to see what that represents, you find that that pink is representing how the sea level was predicted to rise. And so that’s a very topical subject for this state, which has so much coastline here. That was interesting just to know that was subject matter dealing so directly with something of such a great concern to us. So of course, it was hard to resist bringing that into the collection.
Her subject matter is often landscape, but the colors are not naturalistic for the landscape and kind of surprising in how she applies them to it. She really engages you with the kind of beauty and there’s a kind of optimism or liveliness to the prints through the color that really engages you to come and look closely, which is what you have to do with Allison’s prints because she’s filled them with all kinds of wonderful information that’s only visible if you’re close.
(In) Stand to Sea from 2023, she’s really expanded how she worked in those ways. Every new print that you see of hers she’s working with technique, but to give us new information about this place we live. She works with a different line in Stand to Sea than she did in The Sinking of Matunuck, which had a kind of softer pencil-like line. Whereas this one’s sharp and delicate and more detailed.
We see that these waves, the final wave comes in and comes across Providence and in the way that the 1938 hurricane did. So she used a lot of imagery in this print from the research that she did at the Providence Public Library. So going into archives and looking at whaling logs, looking at photographs, looking at various materials they have here. So you find the Point Street Bridge falling apart. You see a lumberyard that’s scattering lumber all over the place, just small little vignettes. So there’s a little bit of the cityscape, but not kind of put together in a way that was natural, but just to give us almost little stories, little bits of the story of what happened at that time.
And then at the bottom you’ll see some ships, including the Gaspee. And this title that she uses, Stand to Sea, is a nautical reference Allison explained to me. And it’s one that is meaning for boats to head out towards sea when they’re too close to the coast or some kind of perilous elements. And so that’s exactly what happened to the Gaspee. So she’s bringing together this history. It’s not a linear story, it’s lots of vignettes in a kind of warning for us to always be kind of looking out for what’s ahead.
And I think it’s a wonderful way that she’s, again, expressing the same issues she was expressing in The Sinking of Matunuck: how are we going to deal with, how are we going to prepare ourselves for what’s ahead, especially environmentally? I think we have to know our past to understand our future. And I think that she’s having us reflect on what the state has already been through in many ways and what is so connected to this community and how are we going to build this community for the future.
Read Part Three here.
