Olivia Baldwin and Barbara Owen weave color, shape, and line to create work that slips between painting and sculpture. Each artist has a history of rigorous explorations into non-objective formal relationships that is demonstrated in their ability to intuitively compose even scraps of material into pieces that smartly explore space, create tension, and find harmony.

Olivia Baldwin’s recent work stems from using irregularly shaped remnants of dyed leather as raw material. She interweaves spectrums of them, pulling strips taut as she attaches them to stretcher bars with upholstery tacks. The narrowing and curving of the pieces warp the grid and pull colors through in unexpected ways. In other works, presented in the round, the leather is densely entwined around and through supporting structures of sawhorses and modified box springs. In some areas, the pieces are allowed to languidly hang and twist—revealing tonal and textural shifts between the front and back side of the skins.

Barbara Owen also offers works that are enmeshed. In contrast to Baldwin’s raw edges, Owen’s work often features crisp lines and bold, flat shapes. She slices collage elements from hand-painted paper to flesh out a visual vocabulary that includes perpendicular bands of color, grids, elongated oval-shaped contours, and irregular solid masses. Arranged on ambiently painted surfaces, the shapes intertwine and overlap, sometimes appearing to defy gravity as they float in and out and near each other. In other instances, Owen creates these shapes as objects and arranges them on the wall or on pedestals, creating installations and groupings that mirror these investigations into repetition and space. Through their divergent approaches to shared interests, Olivia Baldwin and Barbara Owen’s works enjoy an elevated conversation about process, abstraction, and perception.

About Olivia Baldwin

Olivia Baldwin is a visual artist whose practice interweaves painting, drawing, and sculpture. Baldwin received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Connecticut and her BFA in Painting and BA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Her work has appeared in national and international exhibitions, including Collar Works (Troy, NY), Badr El Jundi (Madrid, Spain), Goodyear Arts (Charlotte, NC), A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), White Columns (New York, NY), Boston University (Boston, MA), Miami University (Oxford, OH), and Jane Lombard Gallery (New York, NY). Her work has been featured in Maake Magazine, Friend of the Artist, Art New England, and other publications.

Residencies, fellowships, and grants from Assets for Artists (MASS MoCA), Ox-Bow, Vermont Studio Center, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the University of Connecticut, and others have supported Baldwin’s research and creative work. As an extension of her practice, Baldwin teaches studio art at Babson College and organizes and curates exhibitions for Brandeis University’s Kniznick Gallery. She lives and works in Providence, RI.

About Barbara Owen

Barbara Owen received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY, and an Interdivisional BA in Sculpture and Poetry from Bennington College, VT. Her recent exhibitions include Art Cake (NY), Spring/Break Los Angeles (CA), Untitled Miami (FL), Tiger Strikes Asteroid GVL (NC), Chelsea Walls (NY), Jamestown Art Center (RI), SVA Flatiron Gallery (NYC), Dedee Shattuck Gallery (MA), Redwood Library and Athenaeum (RI), Collar Works (Troy, NY), LabSpace (Hillsdale, NY), Bristol Art Museum (RI), Newport Art Museum (RI), UMass Dartmouth (MA), and Art-in-Embassies (Papua New Guinea and Suriname).

Her artistic and curatorial projects have been reviewed or featured in Art in Embassies Collection Catalogue; Studio Visit Volume 9; New Visionary Magazine; ArtScope Magazine; Take Magazine; Big Red & Shiny; Art New England; The Providence Journal; Newport Mercury; The Record Review; South Coast Today; the NetWorks Rhode Island Artist Video Portrait Series; and Repair: Sustainable Design Futures, edited by Markus Berger and Kate Irwin (Routledge), among others.

Owen has served as a visiting artist critic at Rhode Island College (BFA Painting, 2022), the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (BFA, 2022), The Teaching Gallery at HVCC (2017), and RISD’s INTAR Summer Program (2016, 2017). In 2018, she was awarded the Evelyn Danzig Haas ’39 Visiting Artist Program at Wheaton College. She has held residencies nationwide, including Millay Colony (Wintertide) (2019, 2021), Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts (2023), Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, CA (2000), Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, NY (2002), and MASS MoCA/Assets for Artists, MA (2015).