Nineteenth century shipwrecks and flying bananas? Expect the unexpected as artist & printmaker Allison Bianco layers Rhode Island’s actual topography and coastal history with surprising neon colors and whimsical humor. The local artist explores the unreliable nature of memory using a combination of screen printing with copper etching called intaglio. We follow her fascinating process every step of the way in “Allison Bianco: Imagining the Storm” on “ART Inc.”
Recently, “ART Inc.” producer Mary Steele spoke with an archivist who contributes to the depth of Allison Bianco’s work. Here are excerpts from that conversation:
An interview with Jordan Goffin, Director of Special Collections, Providence Public Library:
In a nutshell, I get to oversee the library’s rare, historic, unique materials. That means acquiring things, trying to make sure that people know it is available, and encouraging people to actually come in and use our material.
So people come in and they’re looking at the form, the sort of structure, the historical details, because everything that we have in the collection is not just talking about a time, it is actually from that time. So you can look at it and you can see how people use material.
Whenever we get a call or an email from Allison (Bianco), everybody here at the library is excited about that. Sometimes people come in and they know what they want. They say, “This is the time period, this is the subject matter, this is the collection.” We always like working with Allison because there might be some of that, but there might also be an idea, sort of the idea of the sea or of waves or something that is not really precisely defined. In some ways it’s a little more work when someone doesn’t just say, “Give me this book, bring this down and show it to me.” But it really is the part of our work that we love.
The kind of materials that we brought out for Allison—she really was focused on nautical, maritime, the sea shipwrecks, things like that. And fortunately, we have a real wealth of sources on that subject. We have one of the largest collections in the history of whaling in the country, so that was an immediate, we knew we’d have some whaling things. We have a lot of other nautical collections that are kind of adjacent to it. So books about shipbuilding or books about essentially how to be a sailor, how to keep a logbook at sea, or how to tie knots or all those kinds of things that are connected to maritime life and nautical life. Allison was also interested in hurricanes and kind of extreme weather.
Seeing the result of an artist working with our material is absolutely the best feeling that we can get as librarians, archivists, people working in this field. Seeing something transformed, especially when it’s something that was maybe created a hundred or 200 or 300 years ago, and that was created not at all for that purpose. And if we can pick out elements or just see even the general kind of influence, knowing that material long after it’s sort of intended original use is still being valuable. It’s absolutely the best.
Read Part 2 here.
