To kick off the 2010 Spring season, Providence CityArts for Youth presents a collaborative exhibition featuring the work, portraits and self-portraits of artists from Top Drawer Art Center in Warren, RI. Building upon their September 2009 exhibition at AS220 entitled Double Vision, photographer Nathan Fitch and Top Drawer studio coordinator Seamus Hames bring us another compelling look at how art can be used as a tool for communication, interpretation and self-definition. Don’t miss the opportunity to meet and hear from some of the featured Top Drawer artists at the Artists’ Talk on March 25!

About the artists

Nathan Fitch
For artist Nathan Fitch, the camera is a tool with which to examine the things that interest him most in the world and in himself. To the artist, the experience of creating a still image is like shaving time down to a precise and hopefully arresting moment. Currently Nathan is living and working in Brooklyn, New York, and is shooting square images on a regular basis.

The artists of Top Drawer
Doug Nichols is one of our most passionate artists. His work is driven by the fantasy world of dragons and warriors, Power Rangers and Pokemon. His objects include coins, game boards, shields, and dragon's eggs, all constructed through his own ingenuity. Every object has power and magic. His recent works are almost exclusively made of wire and masking tape.

Anthony Pontarelli is a prolific painter and illustrator that seems to channel both his experience and his dreams into lush, layered paintings that document places in time. His characters seem to be floating through landscapes bending and changing into symbols on a flag, or a coat-of-arms, or an old box of soap.

Wendy LeBeau is an illustrator who's created the world as she sees it. In that world, her friends and family, and well-dressed young ladies, exist among ghosts and angels. Her latest project is both abstract and fashionable, as she builds large colorful textures on canvases, and plans on reproducing the designs on "shower curtains" and "business cods.”

Katrina Cathcart is an artist whose drawing style has developed from one-scene cartoons featuring her favorite people and things, into an explosive torrent of those things all swirled into one image. She has donated work to the permanent collections at the Intuit: Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago and Lifespan, Rhode Island. She has had work featured in Providence Art Windows, and was most recently given the Award of Excellence in VSA Arts and Volkswagen of America, Inc.’s Green Light Exhibition, a three year touring show starting at the Smithsonian Institution’s Dillon S. Ripley Center.

Anthony Brum’s artwork reflects his interests in the popular mediums of the day: film and television. More specifically, he concentrates on the contrasting genres of horror films and TV teen soap operas, recreating their characters and settings in drawings as well as three-dimensional constructions. As he approaches these subjects, his style turns them into something all his own, reflecting a childlike awe that’s scary and exhilirating.

Paul Martland collects blueprints and schematics, and delicately, selectively fills them in with permanent black marker in a purely meditative artistic process. The works' worn look is produced from his constantly bringing them with him wherever he goes, along with his huge bag of markers, and lend to the works' resemblance to ancient treaure maps. He most recently began a series of black Styrofoam sculptures that resemble 3D renderings of his blueprints, which he’s titled Japan.

Nick Taylor creates work based on the worlds of Manga and Transformers, adapting a popular style but adding his own handmade touch. In his short time at Top Drawer Art Studio, his drawings of robot warriors have quickly evolved into three-dimensional cardboard reliefs, creating small wall hangings that resemble sci-fi crucifixes.

Dominic Cabral’s work always contains a certain amount of joy. Whether it be an abstract painting, a portrait, a still life, or even a sculpture, his works start off slow and deliberate, and slowly accumulate momentum. He has tackled every subject matter imaginable, and is still searching for more and more to depict.

About Top Drawer
Top Drawer Art Center is a nonprofit visual art center providing art programs for adults with developmental disabilities. Through the arts, we are dedicated to creative expression, individuality, and self-empowerment. We work to promote the idea that art is a universal human trait that gives purpose to one’s life and works as a bridge between people and communities. The mission of Top Drawer is to unravel the traditional social isolation adults with developmental disabilities have faced and reintroduce them as working, productive members of a community, where their role has transformed from “disabled person” to “artist.”

Top Drawer Art Studio
At The BRASS
16 Cutler St.
Warren, RI 02885
401.289.2894
www.topdrawer.squarespace.com

Visiting the CityArts/Highlander Gallery
The CityArts/Highlander Gallery displays a changing rotation of exhibits year round highlighting the work of both students and local artists. It is located in the newly renovated Berkander Building in the center of culturally vibrant South Providence.

Address:
891 Broad Street
Providence, RI 02907
map

Hours:
Monday-Friday 9am-5pm
closed on weekends and federal holidays

Admission:
Free

For more information, contact Genise.