Allison Bianco
Stand to Sea, 2023
intaglio, screen print with glow-in-the-dark ink
diptych: 36 x 72 inches overall
Edition of 7
We are pleased to present Allison Bianco’s third solo presentation with the gallery. Bianco's work creates a unique visual history of New England and the surrounding areas. Employing printmaking as her main medium, the imagery addresses how the space between water and land can change slowly over time, or drastically with the onset of huge storms. Although the delicate etchings describe a past moment, the bright screen-printed elements become a comic intervention, deepening the narrative within the landscape. This exhibition features new large-scale works and studies for Bianco's recent public art commissions.
Stand to Sea, a large diptych measuring 36 x 72 inches, 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 to rise 20 feet up the seven hills that the City was built upon. So ends this day was a phrase commonly used by Captain William A. Martin in concluding the daily entries of his whaling log. Traveling around the corner from the hurricane of 1938 to Captain Martin’s harrowing whaling journey from 1887 aboard the E.H. Adams, the ship meets waters at times four fathoms high in one of the most hurricane-ridden seasons of the century.
Allison Bianco received her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, HI and her BA in Studio Art from Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA. Bianco completed her first public art commission (2022) for New York City’s PS958 in Brooklyn. She was awarded a commission for Rhode Island College’s Horace Mann Hall to feature three permanent artworks (2024). Stand to Sea, a solo exhibition of Bianco’s work was shown at the 30th Annual IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair in New York (2023) and Providence Public Library (2024). Bianco is the recipient of a finalist award (2024) and a solo exhibition (2014) at The Print Center in Philadelphia. Her work is 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.
