2009: Worth another look

Published Dec. 22, 2009 at 9:36 p.m.
The gallery highlights of 2009
The lousy economy hit home this year as Stairwell Gallery in Providence and Yes Gallery in Warren closed their doors.

PSYCHEDELIC DREAMS Lyon’s “Sound and Light.”

The lousy economy hit home this year as Stairwell Gallery in Providence and Yes Gallery in Warren closed their doors. RISD Museum cut staff and director Hope Alswang was fired...I mean, suddenly resigned over undisclosed differences with president John Maeda. In November, beloved Coventry painter Maxwell Mays died. The charm of his Rhode Island landscapes, as seen at Providence Art Club in September, remind us why especially in gloomy times we turn to art. So here are the highlights of 2009.

• THINKING BIG
In August, Providence artist Michael Bizon, who recently decamped for Los Angeles, filled 5 Traverse with a wall of speakers the seemed like some altar to the gods of music. And he invited visitors on an art treasure hunt that ended at a curious woodland hermit art shack. It was just one of the wonders presented at the Providence gallery, which consistently presents solo shows of some of the finest art produced hereabouts, including this year Bizon, Lisa Perez's quiet biomorphic abstractions, and Scott Lapham's sensuous landscape photos. But in '09, 5T mapped major aspects of the local scene, from the digital art hoedown "Pixilerations" (which Maya Allison, who joined 5T as gallery director late last year, organizes), to "Book As a Post Modern Medium," charting the central place of artist books here, to "Collective Access," rounding up works from AS220's print shop. It's a sign of increasing ambition from the gallery, and perhaps for Rhode Island art.

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