April Foolish

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DIRT PALACE APRIL 2019 Sunday April 7th 6 – 7:30pm Artist Talk / Interview Artist Matt Tracy in conversation with Mary-Kim Arnold ------------------------------------------------------------ ​ Supported through the Art Culture and Tourism department, as part of theWoonasquatucket River Greenway Arts project, the Dirt Palace is commissioning artists to make new work in conversation with the river, its history, and the future plans for the neighborhood greenway, October 2018 - July 2019.  Our fourth event “Invasive” Features the installation by artist Matt Tracy in our Storefront Window Gallery. Join us January this Sunday the 7th at the Dirt Palace while he discusses his work with local writer Mary-Kim Arnold Dirt Palace is looking for new Artist in Residence Members July and potentially August The Dirt Palace is a self organized feminist collective that supports  artists by providing affordable studio space, facilities, shared resources, opportunities and a culture of cooperation. The Dirt Palace is trans-inclusive, strives to be accountable and to work intersectionally. Seeking experimental feminist with projects that will make use of our current facilities: Legal live/work space with: screen printing shop, letterpress, animation stand, music rehearsal room, wood shop, large shared space for building bigger projects, and library. Members are expected to attend weekly meetings, monthly work days, do regular chores, keep the kitchen clean, and take a leadership role over running some aspect of the collective project vaguely falling under the conceptual roof of “The Dirt Palace”. If you are interested, all of this (and more!) will be explained in our epic 20 page document called “the Occupancy and Consciousness Agreement” that we will e-mail you upon request. Residencies at the Dirt Palace average about 24 months. We are looking for a commitment of at least a year minimum. Rent and expenses end up breaking down to about $430 - $455/month: Rent - $300/month Heat - $60/month (paid all year round) Electric - $57 - $70/month (varies) Internet - $13/month Sundries - $10/month (TP, dish soap,etc) Parking is included. If you would like to learn more contact us at dirtpalace @ yahoo dot com Dirt Palace is also looking for a downstairs studio sub-letter. Work only. ***Downstairs studio / work space available*** - 6x8 feet expandable to 8x8 feet. includes use of wood shop, storage space, access to large common area for bigger projects, opportunity for print shop access.  $125 per month. If you would like to learn more contact us at dirtpalace @ yahoo dot com SAVE THE DATE (S) !!!!!! WEDDING CAKE HOUSE PAINTING WORKDAY! Always wanted to do a workday at the Wedding Cake House but haven't gotten around to it? Are you excited by seeing color change walls right before your very eyes? Are you one of those people who “loves to paint”? Do you love seeing other people wearing bunny costumes? Would you like to celebrate Easter by finding beer or chocolate hidden on the Wedding Cake Grounds? If you said yes to any or all of these questions, this next workday is for you! APRIL 20th and APRIL 21st Wedding Cake House Weekend Painting Marathon Both days 1pm – 5pm. We are in a mad dash (like the mad hare) to get all the interior painting done inside the Wedding cake house!! Many brushes make light work. Many hands make paint work. Many painting brushes paint the GD house. Bring your own roller if you got one. We'll have the paint, brushes, fuzzy things (not bunny tails) (no really – what do you call those things), music, snacks, etc. We'll end both days sharing a meal on the lawn. RSVP if you'd like to come to either or both days! Dirt palace public projects at gmail dot com RUFFLES REPAIR AND RITUAL: The Fine Art of Fixing Our inaugural exhibition at the Wedding Cake House will celebrate the 150 years since the house was built, by mounting 150 artist works. Opening May 18th 6pm – 9pm. More info coming soooooooon

WINDOW JANUARY WINDOW ARTIST: MATT TRACY Matt Tracy has been making art in Providence since 1999, focused mainly on painting and map-making, with occasional forays into mixed media three-dimensional work. He stopped painting for a few years because he was the co-ownership of an organic vegetable farm turned out to be quite a demanding job, but is thrilled to have returned to a regular studio practice and exhibitions in 2018. I’ve been living and working on the Woonasquatucket for 20 years, so I was thrilled to build an installation about the river for the Dirt Palace Window. The piece might be viewed as a diagram of a cycle, maybe physiological, ecological, and historical. As I built the installation, I began to think about and grow specimens of an invasive exotic plant called Japanese Knotweed which has become endemic to the watershed. It is destructive to native plant and animal communities but spreads very quickly and is extremely difficult to get rid of. The argument around whether to eradicate, manage, or ignore these exotic invasive in our ecosystems has a long and freighted history, and meanwhile the plants seem to basically be here to stay at this point. Japanese Knotweed, then, began to serve as a symbol for the bigger, scarier threat of climate change, which is harder and way more somber to talk about, but that I couldn’t stop thinking about as I worked on this piece. I came to think of fossil carbon as just the latest, albeit most deadly, in a long line of invasive factors introduced by humans that this particular ecosystem has absorbed and adapted to during the last 400 years. As such, the carbon in smoke that billowed from the stacks of Woonasquatucket textile mills 80 years ago has literally come back to weave itself into the living fabric of the river. It is now in every cell of every plant and animal, and will be here for centuries to come. This radical change is invisible, but these plants serve as a reminder that we exist in a natural system that operates on its own rules we are part of cycles that never stop, that we have no control over, but that choices we make as a species can and do affect them profoundly. https://www.matttracyart.com/ *****UPDATES***** Dirt Palace has been pleased to share space the past couple moths with artists and studio sub-letters Matt Tracy and Marci Green! MARCI GREEN fathom library (f:) is a submission based, pop-up art reading room in Providence. The collection is an ever-growing archive of contemporary creative work (with an emphasis on emerging and local artists) in the form of book-like printed materials. We are currently welcoming submissions! Annnnd having our first event (tap pic above for fb event page) an artist talk and book signing with photographer Clay Maxwell Jordan. Free and open to the public - hope to see you there! MATT TRACY I've been using space on the first floor to make a whole bunch of new work, mostly paintings, but I do sometimes venture into the 3rd dimension. It's been quite a while since I've had the time and space to make a new pile of work, so I'm very excited about the new ideas and colors and lines that are emerging in the stuff I've been producing. I also started a little wild plant nursery here in the studio, specimens from which are currently on display as part of my Dirt Palace Window installation. Go check out the window, and also come to my talk on April 7th! Upcoming Exhibition: I'm excited to be part of a show coming up this June with Lisa Sanditz and Lisa Corinne Davis atReal Estate Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Opening Date TBD! I'm working on a website for my work, but in the meantime, I post things I'm making over at Instagram. Tap my pic/name above to go there!  CODY ROSS Working on a short film that takes cues from phantasmagoric projections of luxury embodied in vintage perfume advertisements. "We gather a new selection of relics wrapped in lush, relational fabrics. The intent is to adorn reality. Once crystallized, we approach with grandeur. A soft boutique." Major thanks to Noraa for organizing all of this past weekend's TDOV events, including the rad TDOV fundraiser dance party at D.P.! GRETA SCHEING Greta has been mostly hoping everyone’s doing as okay as they can. Good omens: saw a crocus that’d pushed up a dry leaf to wear as a hat. Saw these four seagulls on the roof each with a bagel. Here are some drawings made with No Glykon Email gretron at gmail if you’d like a postcard (eventually) JOSEPHINE DEVANBU Maia and I gave an artist talk about Look at Art. Get Paid. at the ICA Philadelphia, see video here. We also had the chance to lead a workshop for 40 educators participating in the National Art Education Association's annual pre-conference for museum educators, hosted this year at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. We were granted our request to host the workshop at the MFA's Trustee's Room, the room where most high level decisions have been made about the museum's direction since 2010 when the board meetings moved to the new wing. We invited educators to break down into groups of four and design a ten minute workshop designed for fellow educators that used the room as an object or gallery to teach from, with particular attention to making room for ways of knowing typically marginalized within elite institutional spaces. One of the workshops had participants figure new ways to use chair that subverted the room's script. Another invited participants to open every drawer or door within the board room. One asked participants to go out into the galleries and ask a museum visitor what they thought the Trustee's Room would look like, then invite them back to check their guess.  Maia taking a call after the workshop, lying on the boardroom table. She was up till 4:00am the night before writing a grant in the bathtub of our Boston Airbnb. Workshop designed in consultation with MJ Robinson. PIPPI ZORNOZA Pentamerous Glossolalia - A 5 song, tri-lateral split between Manchester UK based artist CROWW, NINE ORIFICES (collaborative project of RECTRIX and Fortress Crookedjaw) and Black Mecha - just released on Internal Masonry!!! Internalmasonry.com So blown away by the printing of these new Bonedust shirts by Forrest Passage Printing! They'll be available as part of a lathe, tape bundle for the Fruit of the Ash album on Annihilvs. XANDER MARRO Half in summer (bare legs) half in winter (a zipped up parka with a hood). X is so ready to spend days at the ocean and time with (animal) friends. She started teaching a class at RISD. Extra hours are mostly in service to slide lectures about posters. Feeling good about passing on weird screenprinting tricks learned over long years of just figuring it out. Longing for days when new posters would manifest on electrical boxes in the middle of the night, but trying not to give into temptations of the poison romance of nostalgia. Listening to so many audiobooks while covered in plaster dust at the Weed Cake House. Always ready to talk about books. Always ready to talk. All love to all those walking through grief. All love to those holding friends tightly.

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Dark Side of the Woon

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DIRT PALACE JANUARY 2019 Friday January 18th 6 – 7:30pm Artist Talk / Interview Artist Sto Len in conversation with Erik Talley ------------------------------------------------------------ ​ Supported through the Art Culture and Tourism department, as part of theWoonasquatucket River Greenway Arts project, the Dirt Palace will be commissioning artists to make new work in conversation with the river, its history, and the future plans for the neighborhood greenway, October 2018 - July 2019.  Our third event “Dark Side of the Woon” Features the installation by artist Sto Len in our Storefront Window Gallery. Join us January this Friday the 18th at the Dirt Palace while he discusses his work with local musician, luthier, and Woonasquatucket River paddle guide Erik Talley.

WINDOW   JANUARY WINDOW ARTIST: STO LEN Dark Side of the Woon  :::  Sto Len Do you know the Woonasquatucket River? To know is to go. Its to see, feel, listen, smell, walk, ride, and even fall in. Its to share stories. To hop fences, feed the eels chicken, and have a secret spot. The Woon is ubiquitous yet unseen, its involuntary power of invisibility gets stronger the more we ignore it. While we have our backs to the water, it surges with power and endlessly flows through the city carrying with it a storied people’s history. Under the highways and bridges we made, under the ground we soiled, the Woony is live streaming, day and night, just for you. It is the bloodstream of the city, naturally pumping with fish and nutrients while seasoned with the industrial by-products of the revenue stream. The lab results show traces of dioxin and greed: toxicity but not a toxic city. Sto Len is a NY-based artist and waterway worker, who came to Providence this past December to get to know the Woonasquatucket. On “waterwalks” that followed the river’s edge and a canoe trip through the most polluted sites, Sto explored the more hidden areas of the river and documented his discoveries. Dark Side of theWoon features photographs, video, found artifacts, and site-specific mono prints. These “Chemotrophic Prints” were created with iron-oxidizing bacteria found near Lyman Mill Pond at the Centredale Superfund Site. Working en plein air (often from a boat), Sto uses his own marbling-like process to print directly off of the surface of water with paper. The end results are ghostly imprints that contain both the natural and anthropogenic residue of the site’s history. Recent collaborations in the waterways of New York, Colombia, and Vietnam has enabled Sto’s studio to be as large as a river and a practice that is both nomadic and global.  Dark Side of the Woon documents Sto’s initial trips on the Woonasqutucket, a journey that will continue to evolve over time. You can be part of his journey by signing up for a waterwalk with Sto here: stoishere@gmail.com Find more of his work here : www.stoishere.com  Bio: Sto Len is a printmaker, painter, installation and performance artist with interests in site-specific improvisation within a variety of media. His current body of work transforms the traditional printmaking art of Suminagashi (floating ink) into an experimental collaboration with nature and a site of discourse on environmentalism and art activism. He has exhibited his work internationally, including exhibitions in NY, Vietnam, Japan, London, Australia, Denmark, Canada and Mexico City.  Sto co-founded the alternative arts space Cinders Gallery in Brooklyn, NY which has exhibited hundreds of artists since its inception in 2004 and continues to curate as a project-based Non-Profit Arts organization. Sto is based in Brooklyn, NY with familial roots in Vietnam and his work incorporates these bonds by connecting issues of both their history, environment, traditions and politics.   *****UPDATES***** GRETA SCHEING Greta is working on an animation in collaboration with the creator of Netizens a film which she designed the credits for. It played at the tribeca film festival this past year. The requested postcards from last months digest are in the works! just need stamps. If you'd like to receive a postcard drawing email me: GretronATgmail also, made this collaborative drawing with No Glykon JOSEPHINE DEVANBU In 2019 I hope to bring even a tiny fraction of the abandon with which I speak IRL onto the internet. Getting myself to write online is like pulling out my own teeth and then trying to arrange them in a way that won’t bore or offend others. As I type, delete, and re-type, these words I am literally holding up the digest. Thanks for continuing to be the main character of your own epic journey, I can’t tell you how much it helps with my anxiety.   PIPPI ZORNOZA Pentamerous Glossolalia, a three way split between Nine Orifices (collaboration between RECTRIX and Fortress Crookedjaw), Croww and Black Mecha, will be released February by Internal Masonry. DANIELLA BEN-BASSAT Can draw you a bath...or a painting:   CODY ROSS "How to be open but not violated, how not to panic." XANDER MARRO Swept into the rot of winter. Looking for a wormhole to hide in with infinite time to draw pictures inspired by slug sex and early sunset visions burned into cold eyelids.   ***DIRT PALACE LIBRARY HI-LITES***   MONTHLY PICTORIAL TREAT FROM THE DUSTY SHELVES OF THE DIRT PALACE FURTHERING THE QUEST TO SPREAD FUN LIKE GIN AND JUICE, MOSTLY GIN   What is this? Just grabbed something off the shelf and photographed it. These are the jewels to behold.

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Downhill into December

my luv is increasing//and transcends common sense Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

DIRT PALACE DECEMBER 2018 Wednesday December 19th 6 – 7:30pm Artist Talk / Interview Artist Shey Rivera in conversation with Josephine Devanbu ------------------------------------------------------------ ​ Supported through the Art Culture and Tourism department, as part of theWoonasquatucket River Greenway Arts project, the Dirt Palace will be commissioning artists to make new work in conversation with the river, its history, and the future plans for the neighborhood greenway, October 2018 - July 2019.  Our second event “Stormwater” Features the installation by artist Shey Rivera in our Storefront Window Gallery. Join us December 19th at the Dirt Palace while they talk about their work on storm runoff in urban settings. Along with the window installations that The Dirt Palace is presenting, there is a RFQ for new public art in Olneyville that is currently live (deadline January 2nd, 2019!) Memorial Retrospective for Cyndi Wu Thursday, December 20, 2018 at 6 PM – 9 PM 159 Sutton Street Gallery more info

WINDOW DECEMBER WINDOW ARTIST: SHEY RIVERA RÍOS Shey Rivera Ríos (pronouns: they/them) is an arts manager and multi-genre artist active in the mediums of performance, installation, digital media, and poetry/narrative. The creations spam several genres and a myriad of topics, from home to capitalism to queerness to magic. As an arts manager, Rivera engages with art and culture as a catalyst for social change through placekeeping, community-driven design, cross-sector partnerships, and creative industries. Rivera is also a performance curator and producer of interventions that activate people creatively. They are an active member of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) and board member of the Alliance of Artist Communities. They are also a Fellow of the Intercultural Leadership Institute (ILI), a Brown University Public Humanities Community Fellow, and have completed residencies in Santiago, Chile, at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Santiago alongside Las Proceres feminist collective; and in Pittsburgh, PA, at City of Asylum and BOOM Concepts Gallery.  "Stormwater" is a mixed media installation reflecting on the environmental issue of storm runoff in urban settings. The piece pushes back on urban renewal by proposing green space instead of more concrete developments. The sunflower is Yoruba deity Oshun, goddess of the river. This is a digital prayer/spell that becomes physical in the predominantly Latinx neighborhood of Olneyville in Providence, RI. SUBLET INFO ***Downstairs studio / work space available*** - 6x8 feet expandable to 8x8 feet. includes use of wood shop, storage space, access to large common area for bigger projects, opportunity for print shop access. 1-3 month lease - flexible! $125 per month. please email dbenbass@gmail.com for more information!*   NEW YEAR'S CARD BIZNESS  New Years alert! Send us winter greetings! zines! love! cards! we'll take what ever we can get! Also do we usually send you a New Year's card? Do you want one? This year is an illusion. We are all illusions. But we'll still send you a postcard. Hit us up at dirtpalace@yahoo.com if you want to make sure that your address is correct.  *****UPDATES***** JOSEPHINE DEVANBU Maia and I on the National Mall after pitching at the National Gallery and Hirschhorn. We may or may not have slept the night before. We’ve been running all over the east coast for the past few months–  back and forth to Philly for the residency at Haverford College, pitching Look at Art. Get Paid. at about a dozen art museums (including the Whitney, the Smithsonian American Museum of Art, & Mass MoCA). It’s been a nerve-wracking blessing to propose the project so widely, and a joy to have such a solid collaborator and community through it all. Lots of hoops to jump through– and savor– yet.     GRETA SCHEING Drawing some and preparing for the dark and cold. Send your address to gretron(at)gmail if you'd like a postcard  PIPPI ZORNOZA Bonedust Fruit of the Ash was released on Annihilvs!! - to purchase the digital album go here To purchase the CD or other formats go to Annnihilvs here RECTRIX had a blast performing in the midwest this past week. DANIELLA BEN-BASSAT Had a great public conversation with Cody about eels. If you have any information about the eels in the Woonasquatucket River, please text the eel hotline at 401.400.1750. Also, more Neil Young Zuma shirts available! - http://danbbass.storenvy.com/products/18749293-neil-young-zuma-tee-shirt CODY ROSS I had a great public conversation with Daniella about eels. I also got a new job in digital preservation, whatever that means. Have you ever heard the French term "to end up in the decor"? It means "to drive your car off the road." ⁘ Cathedral, a public bathroom on your cell phone, is available for download. "The gestures are small, tensile, vibratory." Soon featuring poetry by former Dirt Palace member Megan Manowitz and music by current Dirt Palace member Daniella Ben-Bassat. ᴅᴏᴡɴʟᴏᴀᴅ ɴᴏᴡ . . . XANDER MARRO Rotating schedules and digging into the darkness and night. Also thinking about travel and drawing. And so thinking of Henna, night dweller and comics queen of Berlin. Here is a picture I drew of her last winter. Her feet aren't really fucked up like this though.  Here is a link to her drawings etc. Learn Finnish by toggling between her queer feminist bingo in English/Finnish! Working on scheme to import her "Femmes for Satan" hologram bags...  ***DIRT PALACE LIBRARY HI-LITES*** MONTHLY PICTORIAL TREAT FROM THE DUSTY SHELVES OF THE DIRT PALACE FURTHERING THE QUEST TO SPREAD FUN LIKE GIN AND JUICE, MOSTLY GIN New to the Dirt Palace Library! New to the world! Anne Elizabeth Moore's book on Julie Doucet. Not to brag, but our copy is autographed!! Laugh out loud at passages like: "Men eager to share their opinions - which invariably included an admission that Doucet's work had sexually excited the speaker. Why the doings of so many dongs was thought to be of interest to me was beyond my comprehension."

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EELS IN OLNEYVILLE SQUARE ?!?! PROOF!!

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DIRT PALACE NOVEMBER 2018 EVENT! EELS in the Olneyville Square?? PROOF!! ------------------------------------------------------------ ​ SUNDAY NOVEMBER 25th 6 – 7:30pm Artist Talk / Interview Artist Daniella Ben-Bassat in conversation with Cody Ross Supported through the Art Culture and Tourism department, as part of the Woonasquatucket River Greenway Arts project, the Dirt Palace will be commissioning artists to make new work in conversation with the river, its history, and the future plans for the neighborhood greenway, October 2018 - July 2019. Our first event “EELS in Olneyville Square? PROOF!!” Features the installation by artist Daniella Ben-Bassat in our Storefront Window Gallery. Join us while she talks about her work and research into the eels in the Woonasquatucket.

WINDOW   OCTOBER - NOVEMBER WINDOW ARTIST: DANIELLA BEN-BASSAT Daniella Ben-Bassat's eels installation in the Dirt Palace Storefront Window Gallery 5 views     Daniella Ben-Bassat is an artist and musician based out of Providence, Rhode Island. With an interest in making paintings, music, and sound sculptures that reveal the presence of the mystical in the mundane, she draws inspiration from trash, nature, spirituality, and psychedelic culture. Her work aims to exist in a tenuous space that warbles between morphing abstraction and the material of the everyday. "I first found out about the eels in the river at a 4th of July party. People were throwing chicken pieces into the water, and the eels were swarming. Equally mesmerized and furious that no one had told me about this phenomenon sooner, I needed to know more. Eel larvae migrate from the Atlantic's Sargasso Sea -- floating for about a year until they reach fresh water in the Woonasquatucket (an Algonquin word for "where the salt water ends"). As they approach the shore, they become more pigmented and yellow, mirroring their increasingly muddy surroundings. Sexual differentiation only happens once the eels are between 1 and 3 years old, and it's highly dependent on environmental factors like population density. With a high tolerance for pollution, they live in the river for between 5 and 20 years until they reach sexual maturity and their physiology changes in preparation for their return back to the sea to spawn. Their digestive tracts get smaller and their pectoral fins get bigger to improve their ability to swim long distances. The skin becomes thicker, the composition of their body fluids changes, and their retinas adapt to prepare for deeper water with less sunlight. Determined to capture video of my neighbors, I purchased two orders of chicken nuggets at the local Burger King and a friend joined me at the river with an underwater video camera. We found a 2x4 piece of wood and fastened the camera to it. We also fastened pieces of chicken nuggets to the wood with some strong Gorilla Tape. The long piece of wood, once submerged in the Woonasquatucket, would allow us to get underwater footage without actually going into the river, and the pieces of chicken nuggets would lure the eels close enough to the camera to capture some (hopefully) good shots. This technique proved to be flawless in execution. The eels were most excited about the chicken nuggets that were fully submerged, and were less likely to get the pieces of chicken that were bobbing on the surface of the water."