Not so Great, not so Fine

Yesterday we received word from the University of Rhode Island that Judith Tolnick Champa, director of URI's Fine Arts Center Galleries, and Roxana Tourigny, director of URI's Great Performances, will be laid off, and that the galleries and concert series will be terminated. Administrators say that the move, which goes into effect on July 4, was required as part of a university-wide $17 million reduction this year. Winifred Brownell, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, said that Academic Affairs is absorbing $12 million of that figure, with $2.7 million coming out of Arts & Sciences. Both Great Performances and the Fine Arts Center Galleries have already been eliminated from the college's Web page. On Tuesday at 4 p.m. in the Fine Arts Center's Main Gallery, Wakefield artist and activist Marc Levitt will facilitate a brainstorming session on the cuts and their impact on the state's cultural landscape. A Facebook group of alumni and current students has been created under the heading "Save the galleries!!" We'll have more tomorrow on the Independent Web site and in next Thursday's editions of the South County and North East Independent newspapers.

Rhode trip

One of the more interesting trends in the Providence contemporary art scene has been a grass-roots effort by young artists to obsessively explore, depict and record the city's decay and growth in street art, paintings, posters, found-object sculptures, assemblages and installations. Now they're paying attention in New York. Starting tomorrow, four Providence artists will showcase visions of the City of Hope at the Brooklyn gallery, RABBITHOLESTUDIO. The exhibition, titled "Using It Up," features the work of Zane Claverie, Shawn Gilheeney, Quinn Corey and David Allyn. Gilheeney's paintings, prints and street art bring the ghosts of crumbling Providence factories and buildings to life, finding beauty in the deteriorating landscape. Claverie combines pictorial history, graphic design and illustration, using found materials to make large-scale cut-and-paste collages that satirize modern culture. Corey explores the back alleys and Dumpsters of Providence for materials that he transforms into whimsical, often archetypal forms. Allyn fuses street decals with porcelain to create colorful ceramic tile reliefs that skewer contemporary ideals of gentrification and consumerism. If you've tossed something out in Providence, chances are one of these artists has turned it into art.

Where's George?

It's not hyperbole to suggest that the most-viewed painting of all time came from the brush of a Rhode Islander. Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington wound up on the U.S. one-dollar bill more than a century ago. Stuart, who was born and raised in Saunderstown, is considered by many to be America's finest portrait artist. Washington sat for him three times, but it was the "Athenaeum Portrait," which Stuart began in 1796 and never finished, that has earned lasting fame on the Yankee greenback.

In the 1990s Dollar George became an Internet cult hero when a Massachusetts man with too much time on his hands founded the Web site, "Where's George?". Bills stamped "Where's George?" can be logged into the site and tracked around the world. (I finally took the plunge myself last year, when I received a "Where's George?" dollar from Fall River, Mass., and used it to buy coffee in Rhode Island. After 246 days, 20 hours and 44 minutes of waiting, the dollar revealed its whereabouts, ending up in a pile of change 80 miles away in a Hampstead, N.H. store. Exciting stuff, no?)

Forget Elvis and Madonna. From Founding Father to national treasure to history's most famous layabout to Internet icon, George invented the American art of re-invention.

Matunuck magic

The first moth arrived during the third song, Fats Waller's "T Ain't Nobody's Biz-Ness If I Do," a fluttering welcome to the return of musical theater at the old barn in Matunuck. Opening with "Ain't Misbehavin'," Theatre By The Sea is celebrating its 75th anniversary of song-and-dance at the Rhode Island seaside, even though a few of those years, including most of the past three, were dark. The peculiar charm of the place remains. The drafty barn, hearing coyotes howl in the moonlight, watching clouds of fireflies explode on sultry summer evenings, dodging bats hunting mosquitoes, while savoring the gardens, the grounds and the musicals.

"Salty Brine always sat in the seat next to you," said the customer seated behind me during intermission. "He never missed a show." A friend recently told me that when she was a young girl, she used to sneak in, but only in time for the after-play cabaret. The magic of Matunuck, one of the last places in America where a barn playhouse still comes to life, stirs the collective memory of Rhode Islanders, stoking the gray matter where Theatre By The Sea and summertime go together like families and clambakes, neighborhoods and block parties.