Bannister Gallery 2021-22 Exhibitions

Rhode Island College 2-D Faculty Exhibition 

• September 2–24, 2021

View Images and Artist Statements

Bannister Gallery is reopening its doors with our Annual Faculty Exhibition, which offers an opportunity for the community to experience first-hand the artistic talent that is in residence at Rhode Island College. These faculty artists are integral to the current aesthetic and conceptual dialogues present in our studio art department. Their practices include research-based and interdisciplinary methods that are at the core of contemporary art. RIC’s faculty artists exhibit widely and receive prestigious awards, grants, fellowships, and residencies. As a result, they encourage students by their example to think across boundaries. Collectively, these distinguished, award-winning artists bring a unique vision to the region’s cultural tapestry.

Rhode Island I.M.A.G.I.N.E.s Peace: A Metals Exhibition

• October 7–29, 2021
• Symposium (Free and Open to the Public): Friday, October 8, 10 am–4:30 pm

Additional Information about the Exhibition and Symposium

View Artist Statements from the Exhibition

Rhode Island I.M.A.G.I.N.E.s (Innovative Merger of Art and Guns to Inspire New Expressions) Peace is a visual art exhibition featuring artworks made from decommissioned handguns by twenty local and national artists, including three Rhode Island College alumni, at Bannister Gallery. The goals for the exhibition are to transform defunct objects of destruction into aesthetic objects of contemplation that draw attention to the impact of gun culture and violence and to art as a force for transformation. Organized by Boris Bally, Dianne Reilly, Sara Picard, and Victoria Gao, RI I.M.A.G.I.N.E.s Peace is a specifically metals-focused exhibition that seeks to educate RI metalsmiths, benefits from RI’s history of metal manufacturing, and hosts exhibits of world-class metals artists from home and away. While Bannister Gallery supports all artists involved in this exhibition, the specific views and opinions expressed by each artwork are those of the individual artist only.

Invited Artists        

• Matthew Coté
• Lauren DelBrocco
• Peter Diepenbrock
• Shingo Furukawa
• Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch
• Stefan Gougherty
• Hoss Haley
• Vee Hight
• John Huckins
• Rob Jackson
• Nicole Jacquard
• Niki Johnson
• Terry Lavin
• Tim Lazure
• Michael Nashef
• John Rais
• Catherine Rubery
• Howie Sneider + Peter Tenney
• Peter Snyder
• Billie Theide
• James Thurman
• Jennifer Walstead
• Stephen Yusko

John O’Connor: Self-Avoiding Walks

• November 10–December 10, 2021
• Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 10, 4–7 pm

John O’Connor presents a group of large drawings, a series of smaller text-based paintings on panel, and several free-standing sculptures. This exhibition, facilitated by Professor Richard Whitten, focuses primarily on O’Connor’s large-scale, labor-intensive works on paper. In these drawings, O’Connor transforms disparate forms of information and data through idiosyncratic processes, creating equally idiosyncratic abstract shapes, forms, patterns, and text. His drawings evolve incrementally over long spans of time, as O’Connor absorbs, plots, and transforms information into vibrantly colored pieces that straddle an aesthetic line between diagrams and fully articulated structures, forms, and spaces. O’Connor utilizes text in myriad ways, both in form and function: from jotting down miniscule process notes to rendering visually complex cursive and block letters in his own invented fonts. Conceptually, O’Connor’s works attempt to give visual form to those fraught moments when an individual's internal intentions and desires are affected, opposed, or concretely influenced by a more powerful natural, political, or psychological force.

View the Digital Exhibition Card, Featuring a Curator's Statement from Professor Richard Whitten

Don Smith: Space, Intuition, and Expression

• January 20–February 11, 2022
• Currently open to on-campus students, faculty, and staff only.

View the Artist Statement

View the Artist Interview

In this new exhibition, Professor Emeritus Don Smith demonstrates three “types” or categories of paintings: Spatial Compositions, Bar Works and Expressions. The Spatial pieces are arrived at through a complicated format of drawing, usually done from life. Once the drawing is in place, Smith begins to paint over areas he feels to be extraneous, leaving various shapes or forms to which he assigns a particular color value. The Bar Works entail a similar methodology, where only vertical marks are used in a process that is highly spontaneous and intuitive. The Expressive paintings – inspired by artists from the New York School in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, exemplified by de Kooning – reveal the structure of one form passing over another, a new paradigm in recent painting.

Doug Bosch: Apparati

• February 21–March 18, 2022

View the Artist Statement

View the Virtual Artist Talk

Art and science softly collide in Apparati, an exhibition of small sculptures by Professor Doug Bosch. The intersection of Art & Science is a complementary one that highlights strong parallels. In this exhibition Bosch draws upon the aesthetics of early-age science to stage hybrid sculptures. Here, the artist coaxes the viewer to ponder the segue between dry textbook science and artistic invention. The results are playful and fascinating, inviting the viewer’s imagination to bring the small works to life.

Finding the Image: Kamini Avril and William Tucker

• March 31–April 22, 2022
• Artist Talk and Closing Reception: Thursday, April 21, 4–7 pm

View the Recorded Artist Talk

Facilitated by Professor Emeritus Don Smith, this exhibition features work by William Tucker, a sculptor and draftsman, and Kamini Avril, a painter. Widely respected as a modernist sculptor with works in major museum collections all over the world, Tucker will showcase a selection of his more intimate, smaller-scale bronze sculptures alongside Avril, a former Guggenheim fellow and celebrated painter. Together, their works form a conversation about form and abstraction across multiple media.

Annual Graduating Art Students' Exhibition

• May 5–20, 2022
• Opening Reception: Thursday, May 5, 4–7 pm

View the Virtual Tour 

The Bannister Gallery is pleased to present its annual exhibition of work by graduating seniors in the Art Department. Various studio concentrations represented include ceramics, metalsmithing, painting, printmaking, digital media, graphic design, photography and sculpture. Degrees earned through the Art Department include a BS in Art Education, a BFA in Art Education, a BA in Art History, a BA in Art Studio, and a BFA in Art Studio, the latter of which requires students to develop a stylistically accomplished and conceptually focused body of work. The exhibition also celebrates Senior Award winner Vanessa Gonzalez and Harriet Brisson Award in Ceramics recipient Liping Zhang.