Stand to Sea is an exhibition of prints by Allison Bianco on view at Providence Public Library through June 30, 2024.
At the top of the stairs on the third floor, the monumental six-foot copper plate etching imagines watery worlds through the lens of maritime artwork traditions. Bianco was awarded a RISCA Make Art Grant to work with Ben Watkins to create two site-specific frames that wrap around the corners of the Library’s architecture. The rising sea of mythic proportions in the print comes in the form of seven waves that travel over hundreds of years, past whales and whaling ships, from the edges of faraway oceans to the Atlantic, where they reach land at the Point Street Bridge in Providence, RI on September 21, 1938. Bianco researched at Special Collections at PPL, blending a myriad of scrapbook references, aerial photographs, whaling log illustrations and sentiments of historic Japanese Kawaraban papers to produce a view of her home state of Rhode Island, with a bright and foreboding atmosphere.
Photographs by Erik Gould