Spring Exhibitions Opening Reception

The galleries will be bustling with activity as we celebrate the openings of Ana Flores: Shaman Ladders and Other Stories, Dress Code, Pride: In Retrospect and DISCOlor: The Light Paintings.

Ana Flores: Shaman Ladders and Other Stories features sculptures and installations that focus on the cultural narratives that connect communities with landscapes. Informed by her own displacement as a refugee from Cuba and the sacred Narragansett land she now inhabits in Rhode Island, her work comes from a rerooting and a found sense of wholeness.

Dress Code, a group exhibition curated by Curatorial Assistant Megan Horn in collaboration with artist and educator Holly Gaboriault, considers how clothing and personal styling can be a powerful tool for self expression, camouflage, or armor, with garments carrying connotations of gender, class and cultural identity. The artists and designers featured in this exhibition explore how clothing codes the body, question the authority that determines those codes, and aim to break the “norms” of dress, presenting their bodies and selves on their own terms.

Pride: In Retrospect, in partnership with Newport Pride, is a journey through the history of the LGBTQIA+ community’s fight for equal rights. Step inside defining moments of queer history through captivating Getty photographs that tell the story of pride marches, including the events leading up to the Stonewall riots and the first Queer Liberation March of 1970.

DISCOlour: The Light Paintings: Bradley Wester’s exploration of the glitz and glam aesthetic of early Queer disco, harnesses the light of that era inside his paintings while projecting it joyously into the gallery. A utopian reimagining of a former time, the original disco was, for Wester, a rehearsal site for diversity and inclusion. “More than ever, DISCOlour: The Light Paintings celebrate Queer shine’s ability to turn hate and oppression into an imagined future—diverse, optimistic, joyous, and fun.”