Art Gallery Review.
Brown Daily Herald
February 5, 2001
“Are You Hungry Yet?” opened February 25th in the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center gallery at 26 Benevolent St., and has quickly become the Center’s most popular and eclectic exhibit. The opening of a new art gallery in the Center last fall has brought wide varieties of eccentric talent to Brown’s campus, and promotes integration between Brown and the greater Providence art community.
Centering its theme on food, Madolin Maxey, overseer of the gallery’s show, said that the Center has a special board gathered to decide themes and choose artists for each show. She said that the four members of the Sarah Doyle Gallery’s board all contribute and “choose for variety. We want to show the students at brown a variety of ways of looking at topics.”
Variety is certainly present in the Center’s new space. All of the paintings and sculptures shown portray food, but each is unique. Metal foods, glass foods, and edible pieces of china, like those made by Rebecca Stiemening out of salt and sugar, comprise some of the more noticeable works in “Are You Hungry Yet?”
Still life, as in Norma Anderson’s sculpture, “Potatoes,” realistic sculptures and photography, like Jill Brody’s photo collage of Chinese food markets, or Marge Delenius’ “Petit Fours,” made to resemble candy, sit beside ceramics from several different RISD professors, both current and retired.
The Gallery does not show student work, but does include professional work from faculty outside of the Brown-RISD area, including Salve Regina College, in order to build good relations with artistic communities at other universities.
“This is not a student gallery,” Maxey said, “but we would love for the students to have more studio visits with our artists.”
The four members of the Gallery’s board try to cover all of Providence with their connections to various artists and studio galleries, and make every attempt to give students artists whatever they want or need, and to help them in furthering their careers, Maxey said.
Upcoming shows at the Center’s gallery will be introduced by Professor John Carberry, and will open as “Celebrating Orange” to the Brown campus. “Ten big names in Providence will show here. Carberry loves this theme,” Maxey said. Well-known artists in the area will show pieces relating to the color orange and the gallery will be repainted a melon color.
The Sarah Doyle Gallery is 25 years old, and moved from Pembroke campus at its former Meeting St. location to 26 Benevolent St. during the fall of 2001. The Gallery receives only $2000 per year to operate, and yet Maxey firmly requested that the Gallery be handicapped accessible, despite the cost of $800 to build ramps into the Center’s aging foundations.
Frank Gasbarro, an artist in Rhode Island for the past 25 years, called the Gallery’s former location at Pembroke “run down and very inadequate. The new Sarah Doyle Center has much better lighting, better presentation, and better spacing overall.”
The Sarah Doyle Center gallery is open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Saturday, noon to 3 p.m. “Are You Hungry Yet?” will run through Friday, March 22nd.