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Artist in resident opening at Dirt Palace Classic for Sep 1st! Residencies are for a 1 year term with the opportunity to renew for another 2 terms. Read more about the opportunity on our Website. Applications are due May 15th.
At any given time there are five “members” or Artists in Residence at the location in Olneyville Sq that we now refer to as “Dirt Palace Classic”. Together artists in residence have built and maintained studios and shared facilities that include: live/work artist in residence spaces, a library, a large shared kitchen, a print shop (specializing in screen print and letterpress), a music rehearsal space, a wood shop, an animation/film editing suite, and a workspace for large projects. Membership rent for a live/work studio and a work only downstairs studio including all utilities, heat and internet at the Dirt Palace is $550 per month.
To learn more about the opportunity and how to apply check out our website at https://www.dirtpalace.org/dirt-place-classic-info apply The application does require a few steps, so don’t wait till the last minute! |
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| | WEDDING CAKE HOUSE WORK/EXCHANGE |
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Applications are open through May 31st for the Wedding Cake House Work/Exchange artist residency. This opening is for a Sep 1 move in with some training in August.
This is a 12-18 month post that provides housing and a stipend for helping to run the bed and breakfast as well as residencies at The Wedding Cake House (namely innkeeping at the Bnb and residency program support).
For more info, check out details on our website. Cole (under the tree)! It’s months away, but we’re gearing up to miss you so bad! |
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| | INTERLACE GRANT WRITING MENTORSHIP |
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The Interlace Grant Writing Mentorship Program pairs an artist who has written successful grants in the past with an artist who is newer to grant writing. Mentors will help Emerging and Mid-Career Artists (“Mentees”) with the Interlace Project Grant application processes as well as provide general mentoring support. Please note: Only visual artists eligible to apply to the Interlace Fund are eligible for this program. APPLICATION INFO HERE |
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| | | | | April/May Installation: I surround you with Love by Malda Smadi |
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I surround you with love. Artist Statement: Reflecting on what kind of emotional residue this installation might leave behind, I wanted to offer something drawn from my own methods of coping. This began with a phrase from a video meditation I was listening to on Youtube which repeated: “I surround you with love” in a soft female voice. Intended to soothe, it became an urgent realization of our reliance on technology to reconnect with something deeply spiritual. The focal point is the sculpture that derives its form from Kaf Maryam, or Rose of Jericho—a dessert plant indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa. Its root-like, bulbous body carries medicinal associations known to ease menstrual pain and support with labor and infertility. When soaked in warm water, the plant resurrects, thereby symbolizing hope and renewal. Fabric is the bonding medium. In its intimacy, I found soft forms that mimicked floral buds, and offered the surface for the meditative yet laborious work of repeatedly stitching the phrase “I surround you with love” on its borders. The pink bed sheet lived in my studio, keeping me warm, while it collected dirt and traces of folds and creases over time. It also holds a synchronous relationship to one I had growing up. In the other bed sheets I gathered, they represented femininity, girlhood, playfulness, solitude, desire, pain, sensuality, and care. As in much of my work, I’m drawn to the tensions between beauty and distortion, and death and safety. It reflects a bodily experience that brings to existence that which is monstrous yet tender, caught between the cyclical pull toward nonbelonging and dissociation, and the desire for connection and love. Drawing on processes that are repetitive, like mark-making, or finding references in nature of microscopic bacteria that resemble flowers in bloom, I try to find these subtle links in the stillness of being. When we close your eyes and enter deep into our bodies long enough to find that stillness, what do we feel? |
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Malda Smadi (b. Damascus, Syria) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Providence, RI. Malda holds an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2023). She received a BFA in Visual Communication at the American University in Dubai in 2008, and in 2017 was granted a year-long fellowship in Abu Dhabi, UAE with the Salama Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship. She was awarded 1st place in Fine Arts from the Sheikha Manal Young Artist Award in 2016. Smadi has showcased her work in a number of group exhibitions in the US and the UAE, including her curatorial debut at PS122 Gallery (NYC), Field Projects (NYC), Fathom Gallery (Washington DC), Nightingale-Brown House (Providence), Sotheby’s (Dubai), Alserkal Avenue (Dubai), Warehouse 421 (Abu Dhabi), among others. |
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| | | | April/May Word Shelter artist: Rosalynde Vas Dias |
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Rosalynde Vas Dias’ poetry has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, West Branch, The Pinch, Laurel Review, The Collagist, The Four Way Review and elsewhere. Her first book, Only Blue Body, won the 2011 Robert Dana Award offered by Anhinga Press. She lives in Rhode Island.
For this project, I drew on some of my typical and current preoccupations and combined them with ideas that the form of the Word Shelter itself suggested - constraint, enclosures both safe and confining, and transformation.
I’ve been wrestling with some poems about light (visible & invisible light - the spectrals contained within visible light) for over a decade—so I brought some of those preoccupations into this piece—as well as the poet’s anxiety as to how non-human entities understand “themselves”—which seems to be brought about by the speaker’s own “too permeable membrane.” So the speaker in this piece struggles to soothe herself or not lose herself in imagining and projecting onto the wavelength of green, a sprouting seed, rabbits, her father’s ring, etc.
The form of the Word Shelter makes a longer poem than I would usually write. So I intentionally worked with expansion and contraction in both the management of the poem and the poem’s imagery (the expansion of the seed into a tree, the containment of the emerald in the ring setting, the flux of a spectral (green, in this case) “coming out” of visible, white light and then being subsumed by it again.
The constraints of the form resulted in a piece that meanders, is a bit messy. As I wrote, I was thinking a little bit of A.R. Ammons who used register tape as a constraint to create a long, but narrow poem where he was forced to keep going by the quantity of tape.
I am not entirely sure if the poet’s “logic” will be clear to the reader, but I tried to keep the images simple and limited to support the reader’s navigation of the piece. There is also an error, I think, where I began using “spectral” and it morphed into “spectra.”However, I am not displeased by my own mistakes and misunderstandings as I think they are accurate to the speaker’s own limit in her understanding of optics (and much more). |
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| | | | | Hi y’all, it’s been rough balancing life but I’d like to think I’m headed somewhere good. Here’s to the new portfolio project I’ll be starting in May until the end of this year! Next two months will be focused on drawing! I’ve also been learning more about ADHD, so as to try and regulate my nervous system and executive dysfunction. It’ll most likely be a project in my portfolio’s too! Here’s to the season looking up! |
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Whats good y’all, I have been working a lot more and putting more time into my studio work. The panther has been living in my stomach the past few weeks.

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Natalie Robertson Heyo!
I’ve been a resident at DP for a year now! I’ve been plugging away at (finally) editing a bunch of voice memos of the last year. The main findings from this process are that I approach music as a language to be improvisationally spoken with others and music is for capturing feelings more accurately than words. Playing many instruments is for locking in! for the meditation! for the variety of expressions on anything one can make a noise with! I’m realizing I’ve been studying music as a an experimental & folk-art-inspired composer would, and also, maybe it’s time I find some films and animations to accompany. The other locking in I’m doing is with locks via my job where I am far too interested in knowing key blanks & understanding locks… Anyways, back to the music
I, with the Bicentennial Memorial Accordion Choir recently played an improvised piece at night one of Non-Event’s Waterworks Festival. Janet’s gorgeous graphic score was inspired by the space full of steam engines: “We are playing as water moving through space and time, as individual drops and together as a waterfall.” 

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Q (John-Francis Quiñonez)
Howdy Dirt Palacistas,
Taurus Season has Arrived! Horns OUT, f*ckers! My birthday is May 6th, and my time here at the Palace and in Providence is coming to a close September 1st. Thus begins a wistful Spring & Summer! My FEELINGS are simply far too BIG for this newsletter (gotta incorporate the brand whenever possible), but blessings are abound:
> It was the honor of my whole lifetime to open for the Book Release of Muggs Fogarty’s Sex Camel 2.0! I am STILL buzzing.
> Sunny season is picking up at Big Feeling Ice Cream! After a year of people begging for a Tiramisu Flavor - I made a Tiramisu Flavor. Now, shh.
> I’ve got some great shows coming up at Lost Bag. Namely ~ May 7th with the Tin Can Telephone Animations Series, May 19th with Adelyn Strei, and May 21st with Thanya Iyer.
> My Next Performances are ~ May 16th at The Thing in the Spring in Keene, NH & June 21st at Prototype Paterson in Paterson, NJ
> Open Library Hours at Binch Press/Queer.Archive.Work are back every other Sunday!
So hope to see you out and in the blossoms, Stay Sweet! |
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The ripping of my cocoon has begun! My self driven isolation is finally coming to a close as I realize that I can put effort into hanging out again now that the streets are blooming. Ive been going on walks and drawing constantly. It has felt impossible as my body has tensed with the incoming change, but I think I’ve reached a point where it feels real and necessary! I feel so grateful for all I’ve been able to do while living at Dirt Palace and my brain has finally realized that that isn’t going to stop just because I’m moving! Besides my childhood home, this is the longest I’ve lived somewhere for a long time!
Tattoo work has been great and I’ve gotten to do a lot of things that I didn’t even know I was dreaming of! |
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We did a flash day benefitting AMOR and we were able to raise $1110 and the designs are still available to be tattooed! Remy and I are both still offering the designs and will still be donating the money made from them. |
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| | I have approximately one billion ideas floating around various notes, but I’m finally locking them down with people to be able to get things done before things get hectic with moving! I got to perform and be cute with my friends in the Maid Cafe again this year! I’ve been doing little crafts and having fun making dumb little things<3 |
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As I look back at the eleven page document that holds all of my digests from these past three years, I feel really excited for the future. I am endlessly grateful for Dirt Palace and I’m so proud of what I have been able to achieve while here. Getting to see my progress through the years in such a compact way rids my fears that as soon as I leave this residency I’ll never make art again! I never stopped making art and (fingers crossed) I never will!! I’ve been able to witness so many amazing artists and I’m so inspired to see what the future holds! |
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Since I DO still hope to document my artistic practices, I have had the very fun and unique idea to start a substack! Reading Xander and Mimi’s whenever they release work has made me inspired by the medium! If you would like to join that go to the button below my entry!
Thank you for reading ses nation! See you soon! |
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Hello! I was on the radio! Talking about my recent essay: The Bridge that Turned Me Into A Troll. But actually not just the radio, but one of my all time favorite radio shows that my guess is that many of my friends already listen to…This is the Modern World with Trouble on WFMU. Big thanks to Trouble for having me, asking great questions and providing such thoughtful perspective.
Thanks to everyone who has sent in encouragement and tips on the What’sGoingOnWithWhat’sGoingOn essay. I’m still working on it all! But maybe from a different vantage point. Thinking these days about masks and anonymity. The Bridge that Turned Me into a Troll Part Two will emerge, but it might take a few weeks, or months. Email missxander at hotmail still open thought for thoughts, concerns, tips, rants, hatemail…the whole nine.
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| | Mostly keeping my head down and trucking on buttoning up some long standing projects. HARPY is taking a break from performing so we can focus on recording some new material. One of the few shows that we have coming up is June 19th in Portland Maine. Very excited to play with this lineup of incredible bands. |
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| | | Emergency Grants are due the 7th of every month and are intended to respond to various emergency needs such as eviction, utility shut-off, healthcare expenses, phone or internet service interruption, and more. Interlace Emergency Grants are open to all self-identifying Providence area visual artists. |
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| | Also - if you are able to donate to the Emergency Grant Fund - please do - all funds go directly to artists. To donate to the fund, click below! |
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| | | | | | DIRT PALACE IS HAVING A YARD SALE!! Sunday May 10th at the Wedding Cake House sidewalk come see the wares of some of the current members and other community members. We’ll have art supplies, clothes, lamps, junk, treasures, and so much more! Instead of a rain date, we’ll be having the yard sale in the Dirt Palace ballroom if it rains! See you from 10 to 4! |
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SICK show alert!! So excited for this one!!
Decide Today- anarcho industrial breakcore (from Cincinnati - former Realicide, digital hardcore legend) With local support from Palmslow Dialog Talk SexIsInsanity
Sunday May 17th at Lost Bag @lostbagspace doors 7:30pm Sliding Scale $10-$20 NOTAFLOF
This is going to be an incredible gig. Come out on a Sunday! The show will start on time!!! Everyone is killer, so not to be missed!!
This show is at Lost Bag, not DP!! |
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WARP is a collective studio located in historic Atlantic Mills, Providence, RI. We currently have openings for new studio members, more info can be found here: https://forms.gle/SQuYwVM3V2YJ92qM9 |
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| | | Copyright © 2024 dirtpalace, All rights reserved. |
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