It can be an exhilarating but fleeting moment when a museum asks an artist to share their talents with the public. Very often a curator selects an artist’s work, hangs it up, and that’s it. According to artist Donna Bassin, that’s not what happened here. Bassin says the Newport Art Museum (NAM) extended an invitation to create a unique collaboration across time and place.
Bassin is a New Jersey photographer whose exhibit “Portraits of the Precarious Earth” is exhibited at the Newport Art Museum (NAM) through May 5, 2025. At her day job, she’s a clinical psychologist with a specialty in trauma, traumatic loss, and mourning. Bassin stresses that she’s also a mother and says maternal thinking plays into her work through its emphasis on protecting the vulnerable.
NAM describes Bassin’s photo-based landscapes as a response “to the environmental crisis and its psychological impact. These striking images reveal Earth’s vulnerability and the profound losses of land, animal, and plant life. At first glance, Bassin’s photographs draw inspiration from the rich histories of landscape painting, appearing idyllic. However, a closer examination disrupts this serene facade, unsettling perceptions of a natural world that remains unchanged. Each piece visually transforms traditional topographies, prompting viewers to question their understanding of what they see.” Injury, memory, resilience and repair are recurring themes.
In explaining the “collaboration across time and place”, the artist notes that connecting with the past came first, with the museum’s collection of 19th-century landscape painters. Bassin notes, “Those landscape painters were very aware of the potential damage to the environment from the push west. However, a lot of them portrayed the landscape in spiritual ways to let people know about the healing properties of nature.” Bassin curated selections from NAM’s collection of landscape paintings to mingle with her photographs, and they also inspired choices in her current work: “I thought, how do I get people to look at this environmental crisis? It can’t be photographs of dead fish or parched landscapes. The 19th-century painters gave me that sense of the beauty of nature, so I was able to interweave my own concerns about the wounds that we’re inflicting on our planet with their hopefulness and the beauty of the planet. So that’s the present.”
As for the future, a collaboration emerged through the talents of the students at The Bradley Schools. The schools serve children and adolescents whose psychiatric and behavioral needs cannot be met in a public school setting. The Newport Art Museum has had a partnership with the Bradley Schools for more than two decades and Artistic Director Danielle Ogden says the museum “spends a lot of time focusing on the relationship between the museum, its community partners, and mental health.” The NAM team recognized a natural alignment between Bassin’s work, the students’ sense of loss around climate change, and the need for action. The artist met with the students virtually, sharing her recent work and inviting student responses in artwork and writing that are now on display as part of the “Portraits of Precarious Earth” exhibition.
Upon viewing the Bradley Schools’ student work in person recently, Bassin called the collaboration an incredible opportunity because “I think that the kids felt understood, recognized by the wounded and repaired landscapes. And I think that’s the function of art. By looking at the work they produced and the stories they told, my sense was they felt acknowledged, recognized, held, contained by the wounded landscapes. Identifying in a way, as we all do if we allow ourselves, with our personal injury and wounds, that help is available, which is true for them and for all of us and for the environment.”
The exhibition and partnership project are featured in “The Art of Repair” on season four of ART inc. on Rhode Island PBS.
