Since Cade Tompkins opened her gallery space three years ago in her home in Providence, R.I., she has been using the mid-19th-century brick Italianate house, designed by Russell Warren, as more than just an installation site. It has become a collaborative device in her shows of contemporary artists like Beth Lipman, who covered Ms. Tompkins’s dining room walls with 30,000 pieces of glass, in a shimmering illusion of “wallpaper.”
This month, Ms. Tompkins has upholstered a chaise longue with fabric by Serena Perrone, who makes silk-screened photolithographs that meld images recalling Japanese Edo woodcuts with domestic Western objects and architecture. The fabric is called Biwa, after a lake in Japan, and it is hand-printed to order by Ryan Parker and Shelby Donnelly, technicians for the artists, for $495 a yard with a 12-yard minimum.
