Dear Friends,

As waning October delivers the last of its tricks and treats, we’re looking forward to a busy November, starting on day one of the month, when artist Hollis Hare will present “Painting with Fibers: A Discussion on Queerness and Fiber Arts,” including a pop-up showcase, artist talk, and interactive workshop focused on their felting and fiber arts practice. Sophia’s deeper dive into Hollis’s work, and a video of her conversation with Hollis, can be found below. Learn more about the program here.

Then, we invite you to join us on Saturday, November 4 for the opening of the “Pop-Up Langston Hughes Reading Room and Event Series,” the second in our fall series of pop-up activations of the Joan T. Boghossian Gallery, curated and produced by the Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading Committee (LHCPR) and blackearth lab. This pop-up reading room, which will be open through November 25, will focus on Hughes’ connections to water in his life and work, as reflected in his poetry and his memoir The Big Sea, detailing his years as a merchant marine. We invite you to drop by on November 4 anytime from 11 am to 2 pm to enjoy live music and a chance to read and reflect on selected works by Hughes, and then at 2 pm we’ll convene in the Mural Room for a conversation with visiting scholar Shawn Christian, Associate Professor of English at Florida International University, along with artists and scholars from LHCPR and blackearth lab about Hughes and his work, conceptions of identity, and the African diasporic relationship to the water. Professor Christian is a literary scholar and public humanities advocate whose research focuses on African American literature and culture, including the long Civil Rights Movement and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as women’s and gender studies. 

Image from the Langston Hughes Papers. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

******************

Here is Sophia’s report on her conversation with artist Hollis Hare:

You may be familiar with the eerie children’s story The Green Ribbon? My first memory of it comes from Carmen Maria Machado’s adaptation in Her Body and Other Parties, but an earlier version was in Alvin Schwartz’s 1984 In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories. It’s a quasi-love tale, popular with young readers due to its shock value, which follows Jenny, who always wears a green ribbon around her neck. Jenny meets Alfred when they are young, and they marry and grow old together. At different stages of their relationship, Alfred asks why she never takes her ribbon off and insists that she explain. It is not until they are old and she is ill in bed that she says to him he can remove her ribbon, and when he does, her head falls to the floor. Dun dun duuun! 

This short story was an early inspiration for Hollis Hare, a Providence-based fiber artist and illustrator. Hollis is also a storyteller who weaves the fantastical, fairytales, and the formation of social constructs in their practice. In their younger years, they were influenced by Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Read in the Dark. As they got older, their work took on a more whimsical, soft, pastel quality, combining their early influences into themes of identity and morality, but conveying them with a particular softness. 

“The Green Ribbon is shocking from this cute, whimsical setting. I definitely do things like that. A lot of my work has symbolism using elements like ribbon, or needle and thread, also animals and masks, you know, lots of theatrics.” Like much folklore that becomes popularized through a contemporary lens, Hollis’s work is about shifting the vantage point of something that has already been told. They explain: “I’ve always been interested in fantasy realms and how it’s sometimes easier to tell a story about real issues using fantasy or made-up creatures. And I think that it’s easier to resonate with a larger audience when you take subjects out of the real world and put them into a fantasy setting. I find it really interesting that we don't have a modern version or a version that tells the queer stories or the queer tales.”

In Hollis’s upcoming artist talk and interactive workshop, they will discuss their felting and fiber arts practice and showcase their current tryptic. With this body of work they are conveying gender performance and (re)formation of identity while utilizing new methods in needle felting. Their work also intentionally considers how we think of craft versus capital A “Art.” “I was able to develop these ideas that I really want to put in the setting of fine arts, but using a medium that came from an arts and crafts movement.” They have a deep love for the tactility of wool and its rich history as one of the oldest forms of textile fashioning. Their work and practice truly activate how we see and then re-see materials, and how we can look to fairytales and the dreamy as conduits to present-day conversations. Lineage and journey are present in Hollis’s work, which metephorically asks us to take another look.

“I think people get that my work is like a warm invitation, because the subjects are usually animals or they’re usually things that are made up -- like different cryptids or whimsical creatures. And then when you sit with my work, I tend to want the viewer to just kind of eat every inch of the image or the fiber arts and see past the cuteness and also wonder, ‘Oh, what are they actually doing over there?’”

Hollis invites you to always remember to support local makers by checking out The Good Trade Makers Market at Waterfire Arts Center which will be happening November 18 and 19 and keep an eye out for local pop-up markets! 

To see more of their work, visit their website and check out the video below to here them talk more about what they do.

In gratitude,



Christina Bevilacqua xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxSophia Ellis

Programs & Exhibitions Director xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxCommunity Partnerships Facilitator