Please Don’t Cut Me Down:
Donna Bassin’s “Portraits of a Precarious Earth”
at The Newport Art Museum, Newport, Rhode Island
Through May 5, 2025
Review by Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein
A golden lit Fachwerk building stands welcoming guests as the sun sets over the ocean in gilded Newport in Rhode Island. The landscape is captivating on the drive to the museum, where elegant and impressive bridges cross marshes and sparkling bodies of water in the surrounding bays. As the sun sets over the glistening waters and lush vegetation, I am awestruck by the natural beauty interwoven with mansions built with the wealth of early industrialization. Yet, I am told, that Newport is a place of contradictions, where extreme wealth meets poverty and underfunded schools, where development projects threaten the pristine environment. These contrasts met me in both Donna Bassin’s environmental photography collages and in conversations at the opening of “Portraits of the Precarious Earth”.
Donna Bassin has built a career surveying her reactions to a range of injustices internationally through photography and collage. Her work is emotionally provocative integrating her perspective as a psychologist as well as historical events. Its range includes Japanese, Burmese, and US-American societal reparations through photographic collages and mixed-media, often cross-referencing themes and traditions to visualize overarching hopes of healing societal inequities and woes.
Tackling environmental degradation in the “Portraits of a Precarious Earth” Bassin's uses assemblage, color, and repurposed golden frames to contrast historical and contemporary images of the US environmental landscape. The historic photographs portray thriving ecosystems mounted onto monotone depleted landscapes with red embroidery thread or Japanese Washi mending techniques. It is meant to evoke “themes of repair, renewal, and resilience in the face of ecological challenges… (that) intertwine loss and recovery, encouraging reflection on the human impact on the planet”. The series is an extension of her global perspective and work as a trauma therapist. Speaking with Bassin, she emphasized the larger scale images of sequoia trees on four of the museum’s walls. For her, their incredible age, size, and international abundance embody the consequences of human-made devastation and the passage of time that her series focuses on.
The changing tides of history seem ever present in the museum rooms, where Bassin’s paintings mix alongside selections from the Newport Art Museum’s historical landscape collection in a salon-style curation. They also interact directly with other industrial-era symbols. Alone the wooden architectural embellishments that define the museum’s interior provide foundations for conversation surrounding the wealth and exploitation extrapolated from Bassin’s sacrificed landscapes.
Speaking to the Museum’s Interim Director, Ruth Taylor, who has lived in the area for several decades, she tells me stories about whole beaches full of lobsters “so many you could just reach down and pick them up”, and of the inconsistent oyster harvests, and how local mismanagement of resources has led to diminished wildlife presence on the island overall. Clearly Bassin’s environmental reflections hold true in Newport, just as they do elsewhere. Ruth introduces me to Danielle Ogden, the Creative Director of the museum and curator of the show, who greets my questions about her plans for the traditionally historical museum enthusiastically. Passionate about both contemporary response to their historical collection, local history and environment, and photography, Diane has a whole series of environmentally focused exhibitions planned for the coming year and a half. In fact, the museum now has a residency program that provides month-long housing for accepted artists to make response work for exhibition in their spaces.
Lively museum halls bustle with multi-faceted conversations surrounding the environment as a local Land Trust meeting empties from one of the rooms into the exhibition space. A large scroll depicting an ocean-scape embraces the rows of chairs, just as the Aquidneck island where Newport sits is embraced by the ocean. At the entrance of the room, several Aquidneck Land Trust employees patiently respond to my flurry of questions. From preserves to farmland, the Land Trust conserves both the local landscape as well as prepare the island for resilience in the face of storms and other natural events. Efforts have been made to build natural infrastructure to help mitigate fresh water salination from ocean storms while using nature-based solutions to decontaminate the marshes and regenerate native wildlife.
Still, they explain, other challenges like ground water contamination from new developments and extreme weather mean that the finite fresh water resource on the island needs a lot of treatment to be safe to drink; since this makes the water taste strange, many on the island decide to drink bottled water instead and I am told the landfill is almost at capacity. These are understandable choices that perpetuate the destructive cycle leading to the changing landscape. Bassin’s work shines a colorful spotlight on these changes on the neighboring walls.
Bassin struck an important note when underlining the future as a result of the past, where a next generation in our nation struggles to find footing on eroding ground. Though the museum is situated in the historical district of Newport, full of mansions and large estates, the contrasts between this pristine environment and the realities of many of its residents is ever-present. Behind its embellished face, many locals struggle with underfunded public schools, strange tasting water, and growing economic uncertainty. The island struggles like many places globally with little industry or local economic opportunity beyond the service industry and tourism.
Partnering with local schools, the Newport Art Museum makes efforts to integrate the next generation in the art-making process through workshops and programming. Students from several grade levels worked with Donna Bassin and responded with artwork to her exhibition on display in a second building on the museum site. Their response works feature industrial smokestacks, landfills, extreme weather events, and bad air quality juxtaposed with colorful sunsets and beaches.
These are contemporary challenges that Bassin’s and the museum’s historical landscapes could not have imagined, yet they are the first things that come to mind to these young people. It is an awareness that makes me shudder, after a striking evening presenting the changing times on the world we live, through history, and efforts for a better future. As we say goodbye, Donna Bassin stands between one of her proud and resilient sequoia trees and a green painted wall with quotes from the kids written in chalk. The writing on the wall begins with, “Please don’t cut me down”.
