Dear Friends,
This new year may not yet feel that different from the one we longed to leave behind, but we’re halfway through winter, it’s light at 5:00 pm, and on a good day, we’re hopeful. We have lots of plans in the works for late winter and spring, and before we share them with you, we thought we’d share a bit of our thinking about the evolutions we’ve made over the past year, and how those evolutions are affecting our evolving planning for an evolving and unpredictable future.
While I’ve been the one writing this email message for the past 18 months or so, going forward we're going to widen the circle of voices you’ll hear from - starting now! Janaya Kizzie, PPL’s Events Coordinator and an essential thinker, practitioner, and producer in presenting cultural programs and exhibitions at PPL, takes it from here, with reflections on reimagining the work of bringing people together when everyone has to stay far apart:
Space and Spatiality
How can we gather? While the pandemic has made this question more urgent, it is not a new nor a newly complicated question. There is something inherent in human nature that drives us to circle around a fire, to find comfort, discourse, and untold generosity in others and in ourselves. It is what we at PPL have cultivated in the design of our newly renovated library building: we want to draw people together - literally. Right now, we can’t. This can be unfortunate, or cocktail-party/war-story anecdotal, or it can be an opportunity.
Gathering is more than bodies in proximity; it is also about space - in the physical and the intangible sense. Five people in a bus station is different than five people in a ballroom; five people in an 8:00 am Zoom meeting is different than five people laughing at a movie together over the internet.
Space is physical, space is tone, space is...spatial. There’s a shorthand of mood and significance we all understand in entering a physical space. I miss the energy of a front-row movie premiere. I miss the looseness of the edge of a party or the beginning of a buffet. Now, what does it mean when a speaker’s square is next to yours, instead of that speaker being behind a podium and raised up on a stage? How does it feel to make a joke solely in emojis in the chat of a YouTube livestream? How does the experience of a Zoom presentation change when you hear the speaker’s favorite song as you enter?
The past year has made us explorers, and we’ve committed ourselves to an unflinching shedding of the parts of gathering that are more institutional than useful, more dividing than unifying. We’ve left time behind: we need not all gather together at once to be together. We’ve left the rooms behind, for now: we seek out ways to make virtual spaces warm and collegial through the pixels. We’ve not ignored the strangeness, we’ve embraced it.
In April we’ll “open” our new exhibition, Sleep Mode, curated by Angela DiVeglia, Research and Outreach Librarian for Special Collections; it will be entirely virtual. Sleep Mode will illuminate the uncanny and unprecedented period of waiting, dreaming, and future-visioning we are all experiencing. We approach creation and recreation of the virtual gathering space with that same amount of care. We look forward to exploring space with you going forward.
In gratitude,
Christina Bevilacqua and Janaya Kizzie
p.s. We hope you enjoy these upcoming events and opportunities – and hope to see you soon!
This Sunday, February 7 at 1:00 pm, Langston Hughes’s powerful, poignant, often amusing poems will be read aloud by community members at the Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading, in a virtual presentation. PPL is thrilled to once again be a Community Partner for this beloved annual event, now in its 26th year! Register here to attend the virtual reading, and learn more about the reading, as well as related activities taking place throughout the month, here.
Other generous Community Partners include Beneficent Congregational Church, City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, Haus of Glitter Performance Lab, RI Council for the Humanities, RI Foundation, and the RI State Council on the Arts.
PPL is excited to be partnering with our neighbor Trinity Rep on America Too: Reckoning and Resilience, a 5-part online series that combines theater, music, and art with stories from our community, and seeks to catalyze dialogue around the many challenges and potential opportunities of this particular moment, as we confront the aftermath of a polarizing election season, observe the year’s anniversary of the arrival of the pandemic in Rhode Island, and reckon with the structural racism and anti-Black violence that continues to rock our communities. Read more about the history of America Too here, and see this year’s lineup,
view Episode 1 (which originally aired last week), and register for the remaining episodes here.
We were delighted to welcome FirstWorks to our beautiful new building spaces for filming their new UPLIFT project, highlighting the work of ten brilliant Rhode Island artists. New videos are being released daily this week, see them all here!
Our friends at Stages of Freedom will present a virtual conversation on “The Imperative of Integration” with groundbreaking philosopher Elizabeth Anderson on Friday, February 12 at 5:30 pm. The event is free, read more and register here!
If you missed our conversation last week with legendary designer, writer, and educator Gail Anderson, be sure to check it out here! Gail’s witty, inspiring talk on her wide-ranging life and career, including her most recent book, Outside the Box: Hand-drawn Packaging from Around the World was a delight from start to finish. Thanks to our co-presenter, the American Print History Association, New England Chapter, and its President, Alice Beckwith, for this wonderful opportunity to collaborate!
