Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change
Opening June 21 at the Newport Art Museum
Everything is Change is the first museum solo exhibition celebrating the groundbreaking work of Bobby Anspach, emphasizing the late artist’s unique ability to create a sense of connection and community through his immersive, interactive sculptural installations. The exhibition is curated by Taylor Baldwin, an artist and professor who once served as Anspach’s advisor at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Baldwin’s approach is deeply personal, providing an intimate look into Anspach’s artistic practice and emphasizing themes of connection, transcendence, and reflection.
As an extension of the exhibition, Lauren Rottet will design a room for relaxation and connection with pieces from her Rottet Collection, reinforcing the Anspach’s ethos of creative communion and sensory engagement. The room will reflect Rottet’s holistic approach to design—one that seamlessly integrates art, architecture, and sensory experience.
About Bobby Anspach
Bobby Anspach was an American artist whose work centered around the creation of sculptural installations designed to deliver transcendent experiences to viewers, all part of a series titled Place for Continuous Eye Contact. As much a sculptor as an inventor, these devices are currently undergoing a patenting process. Employing a DIY-technique through all of his work, Anspach was focused on creating brilliant, unexpected, and sublime experiences that blend common objects with high craft, ranging from pom-poms to hand-blown glass to medical beds, aiming to inspire viewers to look within and discover everyday beauty and the natural world. These works create an experience that at first appears scrappy and chaotic, and quickly blends into a seamless, all-encompassing, and otherworldly space. His work was informed by a deep respect for the environment and meditation, and founded on a belief of the interconnectedness of all things that was aimed to create a cared experience between all viewers of his work.
During his lifetime, Anspach’s work was celebrated and exhibited across the United States, most notably at the Spring/Break Art Show, New York, 2018 and 2020, the 2019 BRIC Biennial: Volume III. Brooklyn, NY, and the 2019 Governor’s Island Art Fair, as well as in numerous gallery exhibitions across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and California. In the public sphere, he presented his Place for Continuous Eye Contact installations and made them available for visitor experiences at a pop-up space in Beacon, NY in 2021; in a Walmart parking lot in Newburgh, NY in 2022; and on Fifth Avenue outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2022.
Bobby Anspach was born in 1987 in Toledo, OH, and died in 2022 in Beacon, NY. He received his BA from Boston College in 2011, studied at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and received an MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. There, he produced the earliest versions of the Place for Continuous Eye Contact series of sculptural works.