30th Annual IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair: Allison Bianco: Stand to Sea

Announcing a solo exhibition of new prints by Allison Bianco at the

30^th Annual IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair

 Javits Center, New York, NY

Booth 310

October 26 - 29, 2023

The show features large-scale prints by Bianco and the debut of  Stand to Sea, a six-foot copper plate etching with screen print that imagines watery worlds through the lens of maritime artwork traditions. The rising sea of mythic proportions comes in the form of seven waves that travel over hundreds of years, past whales and whaling ships, from the edges of far away oceans to the Atlantic where they reach land at the Point Street Bridge in Providence, Rhode Island on September 21, 1938. On that day one of the most devastating New England hurricanes caused the sea level to rise 20 feet up the seven hills that the City was built upon.  Bianco researched at Special Collections at the Providence Public Library blending a myriad of scrapbook references, aerial photographs, whaling log illustrations and even sentiments of historic Japanese Kawaraban papers to produce a view of her home state of Rhode Island, with a bright and foreboding atmosphere. Underneath the sea, in the deep unknown, time seems to pass unaffected by the turmoil above.

 

Etching on a large copper sheet over the course of months, the work illustrates how the space between water and land can change slowly over time, or drastically with the onset of huge storms. Bianco links the physical change of the landscape to her shifting remembrance of place, and the nostalgia she shares with its previous inhabitants.

 

Allison Bianco received her MFA in Printmaking (2010) from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI and her BA in Studio Art (2001) from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA. Bianco recently completed her first public art commission for New York City public school 958 in Brooklyn. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The New York Public Library, NY; RISD Museum, RI; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; University of San Diego, CA; and the Hawai'i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, HI; among others.