Artist Alicia Renadette to take up residence in Salve Regina’s Hamilton Gallery this winter

The Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery has named Alicia Renadette as the Department of Art and Art History’s 2024 artist in residence. From Dec. 3-12, the Rhode Island-based interdisciplinary artist will relocate her studio practice to the gallery to share her creative process with the Salve Regina community and kindle opportunities for dialogue, interaction and learning. The residency will result in a full show in the gallery, “Alicia Renadette: Resurfaced,” Jan. 22-Feb.19, 2025.

Renadette, a native of upstate New York, lives and works in Providence. She studied sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA) and Hartford Art School (BFA). Her award-winning artwork has been exhibited widely, including in local shows at AS220, the Newport Art Museum, the Jamestown Art Center and Brown University. Renadette is also curator and co-director at Newport’s Overlap Gallery.

In her residency, Renadette will explore the interplay of sculpture and mixed-media drawing, moving fluidly between two and three dimensions while building densely layered hybrid forms that draw from both the natural world and material culture. Her sculptural abstractions mine the lost and found, recasting discarded and displaced everyday objects as agents of history, memory and growth. Drawing plays a critical role in her accretive process. She approaches drawing not as a preliminary study or descriptive summary of form, but rather as an intuitive way to deconstruct, repurpose and transform the ideas and materials of sculpture.

“Over time, I’ve lost the muscle memory for observational drawing, and I aim to rebuild this skill,” Renadette said. “Each day in the gallery, I plan to spend 30-60 minutes drawing from direct observation, focusing on one to three sculptures that will be displayed in my exhibition.”

One sculpture, standing seven feet tall, has been difficult for Renadette to resolve in her studio because it touches the ceiling, preventing a clear view. “Bringing this sculpture into the Hamilton Gallery will allow me to gain the necessary perspective,” she said. “I also plan to experiment by using printed images of this sculpture as templates for new compositions. These could evolve into schematics for refining the sculpture or serve as a starting point for an entirely new body of work.”

The Department of Art and Art History has selected an artist-in-residence to work in the Hamilton Gallery since 2017. “Students can experience galleries and museums as somewhat sterile,” said Ernest Jolicoeur, gallery director and associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History. “Our residency program helps to activate the gallery’s space and weave working professional artists into our curriculum and dialogue with students. Students get an opportunity to better understand art making as a creative process, a research methodology and a daily practice.”