How does it feel for you to be participating in the Growing the Networks show after years of watching the Networks RI project happen?
Susan Clausen: It’s great, it just reinforces how massive the artist community is in RI. One project and one sort of perspective could in no way touch the enormous amount of artists that exist in this community. It just further exemplifies how many people are creators in this world we have here. The Waterfire staff invited all the participants from the Networks RI show last year to suggest an artist to invite to participate in the Growing the Networks show, which is sort of like the second generation of Networks chosen by the artists of the first iteration. There’s some really great work in the show. Wouldn’t it be great if they did another Growing the Networks? It would be really easy to fill that up. I have three pieces in the show, which runs until August 31. They’re having a series of artist panels, and I’ll be on one with six other artists on August 14. I have three animal heads in the show from my Endangered Species series.
Tell me more about the Endangered Species work.
Susan Clausen: They’re fantastical little animals, sort of “bobbleheads,” that represent creatures that are unknown to most people, but are out there and are at risk of extinction. They’re spirit animals that we could lose, in a sense. They’re symbolic of a mindset that is growing more scarce in this crazy world. They can help guide us through the passage of our life and time. They have moving parts, so there’s a sense of life; they’re not trophy heads. They’re living things, living portraits of things, that are activated when you interact with them.
Bert, your upcoming show at the Providence Art Club must feel like new ground for you.
Umberto Crenca: Well, it is. It’s not that common of a thing for a non-member to get a one-person show at the Art Club. So, I feel very privileged by that. The work is the Blue Moon series, from which a couple of pieces have been shown, but not any significant number have been exhibited publicly. I’m excited. There’ll be an artist talk, which will be in an interview format with Michael Rose. The opening of that show is on Sunday, August 10 at 2pm.
Is the Blue Moon work an evolution of your Divine Providence paintings?
Umberto Crenca: They’re a reaction to it in a way. With the Divine Providence series, I’m really kind of bound to reality. They’re very photorealistic. Whereas these pieces, it’s very open-ended in terms of the colors I use, the compositions, and things I may add symbolically into the pieces. There’s more creative freedom for myself with these works. They’re even more so about composition, and form, and shape, and color than the Divine Providence pieces.
Tell me about the music that you and Susan do with your group, the Gillen Street Ensemble, and your upcoming run with the Wilbury Theatre Group.
Umberto Crenca: With the Gillen Street Ensemble, it’s ritualized. We’re all interdependent. We have this meal every week. It’s created an amazing bond amongst us, a remarkable bond. We talk about everything under the sun while we’re having dinner and then we go downstairs and we perform. We do that whether we have a show coming up or not. This has been going on for quite a while, before we had any commitments to perform. It just kind of evolved naturally where we did a couple of performances outside of the practice space and eventually, probably two years ago, a show at the Wilbury Theater. It was very well received. The experience at the Wilbury was just perfect and awesome. The support, the space, it was so perfect for what we do. So, we went back to Josh [Short], Wilbury’s Founder and Artistic Director, and asked if we could do more than one performance there. He said, “I’ll go one better, you can open our season.” So, we’ll be doing a show called From Here to Where? at the Wilbury from Sept 18 through Oct 5, three weekends with 12 performances. Thursday, Friday, Saturday evenings and matinees on Sunday. The show is based on 10 text-based pieces that I wrote. It’s a combination of the texts with music, some of which is improvised, some is rehearsed. There’ll also be original videos with a VJ, and a number of dancers that are involved with the show as well.
How do you both find the time, motivation, and energy to do all of this?
Susan Clausen: Well, I don’t make tons of work. I find the time when I can work in the studio. I’m a bit of a weekend warrior in the studio. It’s slow in coming, but I keep my fingers in it and keep moving forward.
Umberto Crenca: Susan and I both did over 30 years at AS220. It’s fascinating and interesting and sort of revealing to learn how much that consumed our minds, feelings, our lives. To be free of that, to be able to focus more on our own work, and the space that opened up for us, you know, you don’t fully realize the level of commitment that you had and the amount of work there was. I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s just been really cool to be able to go in the studio every day, you know? •