& ART CULTURE

Mellow Yellow

Beloved studio returns to Hope Artiste Village

A few years ago there was a lot of buzz surrounding Gira es and Robots, the instantly recognizable pop art created by would-be astronaut Atabey Sánchez-Haiman. Her yellow, orange, and red renderings of landmarks, brands, figures, and text sometimes playfully layered with images of toys, seemed to be everywhere – both locally and internationally – until they weren’t.

When the pandemic hit, the Brown University grad with a biology degree-turned-artist understood the coronavirus was serious stu . The world shut down and eventually so did her studio. “I told my son, we’re going to be inside for a while. Let’s pretend we’re someplace like Mars where we can’t leave the building because there’s no oxygen outside.” During this time, Sánchez-Haiman began to revisit the science part of her brain and enrolled in the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at Brown with the intention to pause her art career to teach MBSR. The program provided new insights and led to her changing the G&R tagline from “Pop Art That Makes You Smile” to “Pop Art is Good for You.” Explains Sánchez-Haiman, “I don’t want to advocate for happiness all the time because it’s impossible. I’m cultivating calm.”

Meanwhile, she kept getting calls from someone asking her to confirm the location of the studio. Unbeknownst to her, Gira es and Robots was listed in the Fodor’s New England guidebook under “things to do” in Pawtucket. “I took that as a sign,” says Sánchez-Haiman. A request from the curator of the Brown Arts Initiative for her work to be part of the campus collection was further validation that the time was right, and within two weeks, Gira es and Robots was back at Hope Artiste across the hall from its original digs – lock, stock, and dinosaurs. Gira esAndRobots.com | By Elyse Major

Stories Told in Leaves

Local artist uses an unexpected medium for her watercolor and printed works

Throughout her life, art has been a constant for watercolorist and oil painter Karen Drysdale Harris. Channeling the challenges she’s overcome and her Jamaican roots, Harris’ most recent body of work uses banana leaves to tell her story.

Harris immigrated from Jamaica to Rhode Island when she was nine, a number of years after her mother had moved to the US to find work. “That experience of coming to the US was definitely shocking and di erent – it was jarring for me,” Harris recounts, explaining the di culty of living with a mother she hardly knew at the time and being bullied in school for her di erences. “I didn’t want to talk, so I did a lot of drawing in my classes,” she recalls.

Harris threw herself into weekend art classes and found mentors at local high schools who encouraged her to apply to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). There, she landed in the late illustrator and painter Tom Sgouros’ class, where his hands-on instruction left a lasting impact on her work. “What I loved about his class was that when something was not perfect, Tom could always see the edge of something that was good about your drawing, and he always encouraged you to push it a little further,” says Harris.

After she graduated, Harris began a rollercoaster of a career. “Knowing that I had to figure out how to survive with an art degree, I took on the personality of trying everything and jumping right in,” she explains. Harris worked as a teacher, colorist, graphic designer, and art director, among other occupations. She and husband David also founded Harart Designs – a jewelry business influenced by Native American petroglyphs – before finding her current job at RISD, where she is now an internship manager and career advisor.

All along, Harris continued creating art on the side, noting, “I’m one of those artists who needs to keep painting for sanity.” She has shown her work in several spaces over the years. In her recent exhibit held in North Kingtown, Watercolors and Banana are both her canvas and her subject, serving as an ode to her love for nature, her late mother, and her Jamaican childhood, where she spent years in her grandparents’ banana fields.

The series began when her husband gifted her a banana tree for their 25th anniversary. Harris was captivated by the way the leaves played with the light, changing into sculptural shapes, and soon began to experiment with printing and painting. Rather than aiming for a realistic portrayal, she explains, “I’m more painting the texture, or the shadows, or the feelings it evokes inside of me.” While she wants viewers to enjoy the visuals she creates, her compositions are also a way for her to express her origin story and the feelings of displacement that she and many others have experienced as immigrants.

Harris is a board member of The Steel Yard, and encourages others to support non-profits that bring under-represented populations into the industrial arts. Learn more at KarenHarrisArt.com.