On Thursday evening in Newport, a small, well-heeled crowd—including Carolyn Rafaelian, Jamie and Monique Coleman, Calvin Tomkins, Alex Da Corte, The Paris Review’s Emily Stokes, Karina Sokolovsky of Sotheby’s, and Kern Maass, president of IYRS School of Technology & Trades—assembled in Restoration Hall, the 18,000-square-foot home to the Boatbuilding & Restoration program at IYRS, for a dinner in honor of artist Cy Gavin. The following day, “Cy Gavin: Seven Paintings,” an exhibition of new, site-responsive works organized by Art&Newport (the brainchild of longtime Vogue contributor Dodie Kazanjian), would open there, remaining on view—at no charge to the public—for five weeks.
Born in Pittsburgh but based in the Hudson Valley, Gavin has long vested his work with an attention to the natural world, riffing on landscape and cosmology in his powerfully gestural paintings. The ones up in Newport are no different, at once inspired by IYRS’s immediate surroundings (Restoration Hall sits right on Newport Harbor), by the ancient practice of celestial navigation, and by what happens at the school on a daily basis.
On his first visit to the campus, some six months ago, Gavin peered down from the catwalk in Restoration Hall, watching IYRS’s students learn to build boats by restoring old wooden ones. Invited to do with the space what he liked (other Art&Newport shows have transformed the historic Isaac Bell House a half-mile east, or the Belmont Chapel in the Island Cemetery), he knew quickly that he wanted to embrace the context: “It was really difficult to imagine anything in that space that wasn’t related to a boat,” Gavin says, speaking by phone from Newport. “I think it would be lost in the space, too. And that was the point of coming: to get a sense of the venue, the orientation of it on the water, how it related to the town, how it related to where the sun sets.” In the end, his project became about “using the space to activate the paintings.”
