NRF President Frankie Vagnone sat down with Newport This Week to discuss the opening of “GAMES, GAMBLERS & CARTOMANCERS: The New Cardsharps” at the Vernon House, the founding of NRF, and the future of the organization’s work in Newport.
Art&Newport and the Newport Restoration Foundation (NRF) are pleased to announce the opening of a contemporary art exhibit at 46 Clarke Street, otherwise known as “The Vernon House.” The exhibition is titled “GAMES, GAMBLERS & CARTOMANCERS: The New Cardsharps,” and features the work of seventeen artists who have revisited the storied art historical trope of card play. The free exhibition is open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from July 1 to October 1, 2023.
The exhibition, curated by Dodie Kazanjian and Alison M. Gingeras, uses Newport’s historical and contemporary card-playing customs as the basis to explore wide-ranging interpretations of cards and their associated cultures throughout history. Card games have been a mainstay of cultures around the world for centuries, a rich, global history that is reflected in the breadth of work in the exhibition.
Each of the artists in GAMES, GAMBLERS, & CARTOMANCERS has created work that engages with the iconography, mythologies, and practices of card play. The artists featured in the exhibition are Tina Barney, Cecily Brown,Francesco Clemente, Elizabeth Colomba, John Currin, Austin Eddy, Hadi Falapishi, Shara Hughes, Rashid Johnson, Sanya Kantarovsky, Karen Kilimnik, Sean Landers, Tala Madani, Rob Pruitt, Walter Robinson, Katja Seib, Katie Stout.
The venue for the exhibition, 46 Clarke Street (otherwise known as “The Vernon House”), is apt for an exhibition reflecting a complex and layered history. The Vernon House has housed generations of Newporters, and it has been witness to the evolution of Newport—from a thriving port-city reliant on the trans-Atlantic trade, to a depressed former economic-center, to the site of urban renewal projects and historic preservation efforts, to the modern, vibrant city today.
Colonization is present in the very fabric of the building and is a thread connecting the Vernon House to a wider conversation about the impact of colonization and globalization (both past and present). Many of the works in the exhibition engage with these same issues, as the evolution of card playing is tied into the history of colonization and cross-cultural exchange.
This is the first time The Vernon House will be open to the public following a multi-year project researching, investigating, and documenting the historic structure and the stories of the people who lived and worked in the house.
“The opening of the Vernon House, for this contemporary art exhibit, is really the first outward step, and a sign of the future, for the Newport Restoration Foundation,” said NRF President Frankie Vagnone. “Our strategic goal is to make NRF a deeply community based cultural organization that is open to a wide variety of voices and interpretation. For this reason, we’re not considering Vernon House as a traditional historic house museum, but rather a place for dialogue, education, and investigations into contemporary storytelling.”
Tickets for the free exhibition are available at www.newportrestoration.org/tickets/
About Art&Newport:
Art&Newport is a nonprofit that aims to develop and host a series of city-wide visual arts presentations in Newport, Rhode Island. The goal is to put Newport, with its unique institutions and natural riches, on the map as a place to learn about and share the ideas and visions that only art and artists can provide.
Art&Newport will build on and further establish our town’s reputation as a leading cultural destination.
Newport, RI— The annual Doris Duke Preservation Awards, a joint program of the Newport Restoration Foundation and the City of Newport, encourages excellence in historic preservation by recognizing exemplary preservation, restoration, and rehabilitation projects as well as education and advocacy initiatives that have taken place throughout Newport County. This year’s awards also seek to highlight innovative approaches to preservation, including new technologies, materials/products, excellence in practice, creative adaptive reuse, climate change adaptations, and similar progressive concepts.
Newport Restoration Foundation and the City are calling upon the local community to nominate innovative and best practice preservation projects completed within the last three years that have added value to the character of the community. The winners will be acknowledged at an awards event on Friday, September 8, 2023 (details of the event pending). Please see below for award criteria and how to submit a nomination. The deadline for nominations is July 17, 2023.
Award Criteria
Further information about how to nominate a project or individual can be found at newportrestoration.org/DDPA or by emailing Margaret Back, NRF’s Preservation Associate, at margaret@newportrestoration.org.
Who was Cato Vernon?
One of our ongoing projects is to discover more about the people who lived, worked, and worshiped in NRF Preservation Properties like 46 Clarke Street—many of whom were enslaved women, men, and children.
While we do not have an illustrated likeness of Cato, he left behind a written record which helps reveal his lived experience.
[Exterior of 46 Clarke Street, 1933]
After the war, like many of those who served in his regiment, he was owed back-pay from the military and he also never received a military pension. In 1793, he was imprisoned in the Newport gaol for his debts and he dictated a letter to William Vernon, his former enslaver, asking for debt relief.
Cato Vernon disappears from the known historical record sometime around 1798.
There is certainly more to discover about Cato’s remarkable life and legacy—not only his service in the Continental Army but also his shaping of the city of Newport through his carpentry work.
For more information about the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, visit BlackPast.Org
Image credit:
Ancestry.com. U.S., Revolutionary War Rolls, 1775-1783 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2007. Microfilm Publication M246, 138 rolls; NAID: 602384; War Department Collection of Revolutionary War Records, Record Group 93; The National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Strawbery Banke Museum, the City of Portsmouth, New Hampshire Planning Department and DPW Water | Wastewater | Stormwater Division, the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Earth Systems Research Center, and the Newport Restoration Foundation (NRF) are proud to co-host Keeping History Above Water® (KHAW) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on May 7-9, 2023 at the AC Hotel Portsmouth Downtown/Waterfront.
KHAW® was founded in 2016 by NRF to foster a national conversation focused on the increasing and varied risks posed by sea level rise to historic coastal communities. KHAW programs, conferences, and workshops focus on protecting historic buildings, landscapes, and neighborhoods from the increasing threat of inundation.
As one of the oldest port cities in the nation, Portsmouth has faced sea-borne challenges from the start. As its most historic neighborhoods and treasures find themselves increasingly threatened by sea level rise, more frequent flooding, and groundwater infiltration, the City, UNH, and Strawbery Banke Museum, a living history museum at the heart of that neighborhood – and at the lowest point in the city – are working together to collect data and test solutions.
KHAW: Portsmouth is designed to showcase the latest flood and climate data, discuss strategies and identify best practices, and bring new information to the dialogues on the impacts of sea level rise, recurrent flooding and climate change on historic resources begun at previous conferences. We seek to foster the discussion of how communities can adapt research data into actionable solutions and anticipate attracting presenters and attendees especially from the New England states.
Preservationists, public historians, museum professionals, archaeologists, planners, floodplain managers, engineers, architects, landscape architects, artists, conservationists, environmental justice advocates, government officials, property owners, resilience officers and other stakeholders are invited to submit session proposals.
Sessions may be individual presentations, panel discussions, or workshops, and will generally be scheduled to last 30 or 60 minutes. Please indicate in your proposal the length of your session.
We welcome proposals related to the theme “Water Has a Memory: Preserving Historic Port Cities from Sea Level Rise.” We specifically encourage sessions that:
Proposals should be submitted as Microsoft Word documents to sseacord@cityofportsmouth.com by 5 p.m. on December 10, 2022. Visit historyabovewater.org/2023-portsmouth for more information. Submit questions to the conference organizer, Stephanie Seacord at sseacord@CityofPortsmouth.com. Sessions will be selected by early January 2023.
Fall is in full swing and programming continues at Rough Point Museum. We hope you will join us for the exciting variety of programs planned this month!
TGIF Performance with Mixtapes and Pitches with Attitude
Rough Point Museum (680 Bellevue Ave.)
Friday, October 7
6:30 p.m.
$15, $5 for Salve Regina University students
Salve Regina University’s a cappella groups, Mixtapes and Pitches with Attitude, will close out our TGIF performances for 2022! Pack a picnic, bring chairs or blankets, and join us in the Formal Garden. Doors open at 6 p.m. In the event of rain, this program will be held indoors.
Funding provided in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and private funders.
Asian Export Art: A Discussion with Karina Corrigan
Rough Point Museum
Thursday, October 20
6 p.m.
$15
Karina Corrigan, Associate Director – Collections and the H.A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian Export Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, will discuss the collecting of Asian export art (art made in China, Japan, and South Asia for export around the world) by Doris Duke, her parents, and others in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her talk will highlight pieces on display in our special exhibition, Inspired by Asia: Highlights from the Duke Family Collection.
Spooky Roam Around Rough Point
Rough Point Museum
Saturday, October 29
5 to 7 p.m.
$20, free for Newport County residents
Just in time for Halloween, grab your costume and come see Rough Point at its spookiest. Rooms will be illuminated by candlelight and the Formal Garden will be decorated with jack-o-lanterns.
Museum Property Updates:
Rough Point Museum is open for the regular season through Sunday, November 13. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. The museum will also be open on Monday, October 10 for Indigenous Peoples Day. Rough Point will reopen for A Rough Point Holiday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from November 25 to January 1 (excluding December 24 and 25). Ring in the winter season with us at Jazz in the House on Saturday, November 26 at 6 p.m.
Whitehorne House Museum, at 416 Thames Street in Newport, will close for the season on Sunday, October 30. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.
Prescott Farm, at 2009 West Main Road in Middletown, is open daily from dawn to dusk.