Every summer in Rhode Island, Art&Newport—an organization founded in 2017 by Dodie Kanazjian, a longtime contributing editor at this magazine—activates one of the seaside city’s most historic (and picturesque) sites with a temporary art exhibition. In the past, that has meant anything from a soaring installation of painted yacht sails by Cy Gavin at the IYRS School of Technology & Trades, to reinterpretations of the “historical trope of card play” by the likes of Tina Barney, Cecily Brown, and John Currin at the Vernon House.
Photo: JiaJia Fei
This summer, Brooklyn-based artists Na Kim and Austin Eddy are the subjects of two site-responsive solo exhibitions in the area, and both are looking poignantly skyward.
First, open this week, is “Na Kim: Portraits,” a series of small, lyrical cloud paintings (secured in waterproof frames) at the 17th-century Old Stone Mill in Touro Park, with an additional horizontal painting on view at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum on Bellevue Avenue. (Better known for her vivid figurative work, Kim, the art director of The Paris Review and creative director of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, will also show cloud paintings in New York this fall, at Nicola Vassell.)
“When I first started painting three years ago, I was drawn to painting portraits because of the inscrutable and changing nature of faces,” Kim said in a release. “I feel the same way about clouds that I do about people and faces. They’re constantly shape-shifting, appearing and disappearing. There’s something about paying attention to them that makes me feel present in the same way that I do when I’m painting or really connecting with another person.”
