Dear Friends,

When PPL Teen Fellow Seoyon Kim was just six months old, she and her parents moved from their home in Korea to Florida, where her father had been hired by a university to teach mass communications. While Seoyon was too young to be able to remember that period, her mother’s description of daily life in a new country, far away from friends and family, made a deep impression on her daughter. “My Mom talks about how when we first moved to Florida, she was home alone in the apartment with a baby, and there was this really creepy willow tree outside, and she’d never seen trees like that, and she kept thinking that they were like ghosts.” Her mother’s vivid image of willows looming over an apartment building window can be seen in one of the textile works in Seoyon’s exhibition, Return of the Celestial Visitor, a multimedia arts showcase created in response to her research in Special Collections, and now on view in the Marble Staircase Community Gallery on the third floor.

Some time later, Seoyon’s father got a job at Rhode Island College and her family moved here, but then after a few years he took a job at a university in Kansas, and they uprooted once again. Kansas, too, lives in her mind, and in her exhibition, as a stark, almost apocalyptic image recalled by her parents: “What comes to mind when I think about Kansas is my parents mentioning that they were driving down this long, long road, and it’s just fields to either side, and the farmers were - I don’t know the exact name for the process, but they burn the crops to prepare for the next year and there’s just smoke in the sky - and that felt like a very artistic, symbolic image!” 

Seoyon is an only child, and while she laughingly says that she has enjoyed not having siblings, she is also aware of the way that her family’s particular circumstances have affected their relationships to one another as well as to the world outside

“Being such a small, isolated island somewhere, not being quite so connected with the environment around us, to the people around us, being such a small, isolated group has made me more hyper-aware of our family dynamic, I guess. I feel like if we were in Korea, where my parents actually know people and we would have family around us, and we would feel more rooted in our environment, we’d have a pretty different relationship, I think. My family turns to each other more, because of how disconnected we are with the place - and because we moved around a lot, too - not just because of being in a different country. It feels - especially when I was little, it felt like a really small world.”

After their brief time in Kansas, the family returned to Rhode Island, where Seoyon has explored the world through the arts in myriad ways. She says that while her parents are not artists, they enjoy art, and the whole family enjoys going to museums. “Providence is such a really creative nice place to grow up, there’s the RISD Museum and so many creative people around.” In addition to her multimedia visual arts study and practice, she is an accomplished writer, who serves as the Rhode Island 2024 Youth Poetry Ambassador; she also plays the flute with the All-State Band, and studies the kyagum, a traditional Korean harp, performing at events hosted by the Korean American Association, where she is a volunteer. Her approach to her arts education has been a mix of seeking out professional practitioners for lessons and making her own, experimental way, sometimes with a bit of inspiration from YouTube tutorials. The works in her exhibition combine oil painting, wood working (which she first tried during the Fellowship through an internship with mentor Jeffrey Yoo Warren), and textile arts such as knitting, crochet, and weaving, which she taught herself via YouTube during COVID lockdown.

As the 2024 Teen Fellow, Seoyon spent several months conducting research into the many images and artifacts that make up PPL’s Special Collections. While she didn’t go in knowing exactly what she was looking for, she had already spent years making visual art and writing poetry that centered around intersecting themes of family connections, uprootedness, and isolation. When she came across a scrapbook titled Allen Family Hot Air Balloonists, 1874-1905 - featuring photographs and news articles about a family of “aeronauts” who carried out hot air balloon ascensions for public exhibition - the imagery and the lyrical descriptions of the balloonists floating in isolation over New England landscapes, and landing, often unexpectedly, in the middle of fields or even salt marshes, sparked a sense of recognition. 

“The first things I looked at were whaling logs, and those were journals of sailors from Rhode Island. And then when I started looking at the Allen Family, they’re also Rhode Islanders. And because my family doesn’t really have roots in Rhode Island, seeing whaling and the Allen Family, they’re so ingrained in Rhode Island history, and I was really interested in that, but what drew me closer to the hot air balloons in particular was, I hadn’t been looking for it at first, but the imagery of a hot air balloon in the sky, that really did evoke this small, isolated world I was thinking about with my family, and then I started really liking the hot air balloon imagery and looking for parallels with my family history and it felt like it just fell into place really well.”

In addition to the Allen Family scrapbook’s words and images, Seoyon’s inspirations included 19th century embroidery samplers memorializing family names and dates, and images from a 19th century pattern book of figureheads for the prows of ships. 

“When I was thinking about fiber art for this project, along with woodworking, I was thinking about how gendered those crafts were, and [for the sampler] thinking about probably a mom spending so many hours making this memorial to her family, it was really touching - and I was also just impressed with the embroidery! And with the figureheads, I thought they were really cool, but also it was just the idea of journeys, a boat ride journey.”

Seoyon’s uncanny ability to synthesize experience and feeling, and then express that synthesis through tactile, creative use of media, technique, and imagery, is alive in each individual work in the exhibition, and in the exhibition as a whole. The works invite the viewer to look closely, and to be alert to the emotions that arise while taking in the allusive narrative that unspools across their multidimensional surfaces and images, made up of balloonists, spectators, landscapes and skies both calm and threatening, shelters that may or may not provide safety. We invite you to visit Return of the Celestial Visitor before it closes at the end of this month, and experience the unforgettable journey that Seoyon has created, one which might alter your perspective of your place in the world.

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Also! Please join us Saturday, July 13, from 10:30am to 12:30pm, to brainstorm about planning a finale event for Bloodtide at PPL, the communally created installation currently on view at PPL, facilitated by artist Eli Nixon! “Bloodtide at PPL” is an activation of Eli's book, Bloodtide - A New Holiday in Homage to Horseshoe Crabs.

The installation has animated PPL's Atrium since January, 2023; in December 2024 the organisms need to come down from their stairway habitat and find new homes. Join artist Eli Nixon and Rebecca Noon, of the Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, to help plan an event at PPL in November where this re-wilding process will begin. In the spirit of this holiday and the hundreds of hands involved, we are summoning all who want to muse together on how we should make this happen and what we all need to do together next! Get all the details of the event here - we hope to see you Saturday!

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In gratitude,

Christina Bevilacqua

Programs & Exhibitions Director

p.s. For the month of July, Community Partnership Facilitator Sophia Ellis is participating in a fellowship at the Frank C. Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies located at Mystic Seaport Museum; we are thrilled that Sophia was chosen for this exciting opportunity, and look forward to all that she will bring back to PPL from her experience, which will deeply inform our fall programming - stay tuned for updates later this summer!