Electric Box Artists - June 2021
Back in April, seven artists participated in the beautification of electric boxes throughout Uptown Warren: Heather Annis, The Lady J, Kristin Divona, Holly Emidy, Adam Kelley, Makerjake, and Connor Robinson. This project was a collaboration between the Town, the Warren Arts + Culture Commission and The Avenue Concept.
All throughout the month of June, we will be showcasing other works from four of the seven artists: Heather Annis, Kristin Divona, Holly Emidy + Makerjake!
Heather Annis
Heather J. Annis is an artist and educator living in Providence, RI. Her personal artistic practice focuses primarily on collage and ink; in community settings, she has facilitated workshops across the country for children, teens, and adults in a wide variety of art-making modalities, from small scale media like comics and zines to larger installations including murals and mosaics.
The drawings in this series are largely inspired by years of doodling in the margins of notebooks from junior high classrooms and graduate school seminars to waiting rooms and staff meetings. These notes and illustrations are at the heart of my daily art practice today. By committing to carving out time every day to make marks, the marks become a sort of visual chronicle of everyday life, recording snippets of conversation, interesting objects, and responding to the news and popular culture. Through this daily practice, individual experiences and memories move beyond the marginal and mundane into a larger landscape that is simultaneously rich with meaning and unabashedly playful.
Kristin Divona
Kristin is an illustrator who spends her nights wrestling with gouache, creating paintings about light, small moments and hidden figures. By day, Kristin is a visual information specialist for NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, using design and illustration to connect everyday life to science exploration and technology. She is also an artist member at The Collaborative.
Holly Emidy
Holly Emidy is a native Rhode Islander who has called Warren home for much of her life. She is an accomplished surface designer. After creating hundreds of patterns for the textile industry, she is now concentrating on making art just for herself. Nature and daydreams are her greatest inspirations
Jacob Ginga (Maker Jake)
Jake was born on the outskirts of a widely respected and involved Native American family from Massachusetts. He feels that he is forever occupying the cultural space between his Indigenous Ancestors and his traditional middle-class upbringing. His work is primarily a study of visual culture, a representation of himself in that emotionally complicated space. His work is explosive with color and details, whether it's his screenprints, digital drawings, or acrylic paintings. He has two main subjects: faces and animals, but both are interpreted through an abstract lens. His animals are a beautiful mashup of his indigenous iconography and pattern work with some street style flare. His portraits depict colorful and powerful faces that are dismantled and pieced together, creating artworks that combine cultural pattern work with contemporary design. It's hard to say whether his process brings him closer to his Native Heritage or merely cements him in this place of emotional and visual limbo.
