An Open Air Gallery Pops Up in Elmwood

If you’ve spent any time on Providence’s South Side recently, you may have noticed the half-woman half-cow who’s been hanging out on Elmwood Avenue. She’s wearing a black dress and she looks sort of lost. You can’t miss her.

Actually, there are lots of strange characters hanging out on Elmwood these days, like the vampire who prefers to suck his victims’ blood through the soles of their feet; the naked lady with the dark blue skin and the impressive mullet; the black vulture who sits contemplating a lifetime of eating trash and rotten meat. These and other strange apparitions are part of the Elmwood Air Gallery, an outdoor exhibit featuring original paintings by 12 local artists, inspired by folklore from the district’s immigrant and refugee communities.

The installation was developed by Anna Snyder and Timothy Ferland of Art for Place, a creative outfit specializing in public art that reflects a location’s heritage, diversity, and character. When PopUp Providence, (the Planning and Development Commission’s city-wide public art initiative) put out a call for proposals, Snyder says she knew she wanted to create a project that drew attention to the neighborhood she calls home.

“I wanted to do a project here because I feel like we’re a little under-resourced,” she says during a recent tour of the gallery. “Elmwood is a hub for immigration and refugee communities; there’s culture everywhere. So the idea for the project was to go to as many different cultural sources as I could and get folk tales from their mother country, then take those stories and give them to as many artists as I could.”

The result is the Elmwood Air Gallery, which features 12 original paintings, each hanging at a different intersection across a ten block stretch of Elmwood Avenue, each depicting folkloric heroes, ghosts, and origin stories from sources like Armenia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Malaysia, Mexico, the Narragansett Peoples, the Philippines, Thailand and Rwanda.

The paintings include Caleb Emerson’s neon green and pink depiction of Manananggal, a mythical creature with bat wings and a severed torso; Brian Mullen’s interpretation of Nang Kwak, a benevolent Thai deity who brings luck and prosperity wherever she goes; Shawn Gilheeney’s psychedelic rendering of Fanm Bef, the Haitian mother cursed to live out the rest of her life as half-woman, half-cow; Erik Ruin’s take on La Llorona, the ghost of a beautiful woman who cries out in the night for her lost children, and Snyder’s own contribution, a tribute to Las Hermanas Mirabal, the real-life sisters who fought to overturn the tyrannical rule of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in the 1950s.

“The mission is to make art that references the place where it’s installed,” says Snyder. “I think it’s much easier for a community to take ownership of a piece of art when they feel connected to it.”

The Elmwood Air Gallery runs through December 5 | A walking tour with the artists will take place on Saturday, October 4 at 2pm as part of the Knight Memorial Library Fall Community Celebration.