NEWPORT, RI.- This summer, the
Newport Art Museum presents 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, sculptural installations. The exhibition, titled Everything is Change, features Anspach’s Place for Continuous Eye Contact sculptures, known for their transformative use of light and sound, as well as a selection of his other innovative works.
This exhibition offers an artist’s perspective on an artist, shaped by Taylor Baldwin. His approach is deeply personal, informed by his first-hand understanding of Anspach’s evolution as his former professor and advisor at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), as well as his own artistic practice, providing an intimate look into Anspach’s work and emphasizing themes of connection, transcendence, and reflection.
Everything is Change centers around two of Anspach’s signature Place for Continuous Eye Contact sculptures—one designed as a solo experience for deep introspection, and another facilitating a shared experience between two people making eye contact. These works use carefully crafted optical and lighting effects to create an altered perception of space and time, immersing participants in a heightened state of presence. By fostering direct human engagement, these pieces highlight Anspach’s belief in connection as a means of healing and transformation. His approach, rooted in DIY aesthetics and high craft, blended common materials with a profound conceptual rigor, creating works that initially appear scrappy and chaotic but ultimately dissolve into seamless, otherworldly environments. Anspach’s work underscored the importance of shared experience and human intimacy, aligning powerfully with the Museum’s historic home setting.
“Bobby Anspach had an unfailing belief that art was capable of creating a sense of unity, empathy, and understanding in viewers,” said Taylor Baldwin, curator of Everything is Change. “That is the kind of optimism and faith in creative expression that the art world - and indeed the world beyond it - really needs more of in this exact moment."
Complementing the Place for Continuous Eye Contact sculptures are several works made in concert and conversation with these central pieces. Colorful paintings, preparatory drawings, a stop-motion animation, and surreal sculptures describe Bobby's vision of extravagant sensory experience, productive disorientation, and urgent social imperatives. The exhibition also features a new, ten-minute documentary film from Julia Barrett Mitchell. Debuting as part of Everything is Change, the film uses archival footage to illuminate the life, inspirations, and creative vision of Anspach in his own voice.
Additionally, Eluvium, Anspach’s longtime collaborator and the composer behind the immersive soundscapes in his Place for Continuous Eye Contact sculptures, served as the sound curator for the exhibition. Eluvium created an ambient soundscape for the relaxation room designed by Lauren Rottet which is an extension of Everything is Change, reinforcing the Anspach’s ethos of creative communion and sensory engagement. The room reflects Rottet’s holistic approach to design—one that seamlessly integrates art, architecture, and sensory experience. Influenced by the Light and Space movement, Rottet carefully considers materiality, form, and illumination to craft an environment that transforms with shifting light, offering visitors a space to rest, reflect, and connect before and after experiencing Anspach’s work. Featuring pieces from her Rottet Collection—thoughtful products that can stand alone as functional works of art—the room embodies a symphony of design, where every element is composed with intention.
Set within the Museum’s historic John N. A. Griswold House—one of the first American Stick Style buildings and a National Historic Landmark—the exhibition underscores the synergy between the Museum’s architectural heritage and Anspach’s focus on human engagement and healing through art. The intimacy of a domestic space provides a compelling backdrop for a body of work centered on connection, reflection, and shared experience.
“With Everything is Change, the Museum invites visitors to consider how art reflects and reshapes human connection,” said Danielle, Artistic Director of the Newport Art Museum. “Bringing Bobby Anspach’s work into this historic space underscores our mission to explore how contemporary art can spark deeper connections within our community. His work pushes the boundaries between technology and human intimacy, reminding us that even in a digital age, person-to-person connection remains essential and irreplaceable.”
The Museum will host a dynamic series of programs engaging the community and featuring leading voices across art, design, music, and wellness. Major programs include the events for Newport Design Week, a sound bath performance by Eluvium, and lectures from the exhibition’s curator Taylor Baldwin and Dr. Stephanie Hartselle, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University.
Bobby Anspach was an American artist whose work centered around the creations 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.
