ROSE ISLAND

35% bigger at low tide in 1898

In early September I was packing to spend a week at a lighthouse. Or to be more specific, to live in a room that formerly housed all of the mechanical parts of the one-time steam driven foghorn attached to the Lighthouse on Rose Island, off of the coast of Newport, RI. The foghorn room has neither water nor electricity. I was to be at this lighthouse as an artist in residence with half a dozen or so other artists, most of whom would live in the actual lighthouse with electricity and water and mostly modern plumbing. But both because I longed to be a little bit outside of the fray and because the windows of this room are mere feet away from the water at high tide, I had actually been hoping to get to be nestled in the foghorn room. The children who I had been telling about this adventure had been asking about where I would go to the bathroom. It turned out that they had been imagining that I’d be pooping right down into the sea. An outhouse I told them, which I think was slightly disappointing. I didn’t mention showering, because I didn’t actually plan to shower. A thinly veiled excuse to swim everyday and wash up in the ocean. It occurred to me as I attempted to make decisions about what to fold up into what bag, that I might be too old for these kinds of roughing-it adventures, but then my phone dinged with a message from an artist who had done this residency before telling me about how magical it would be.

Rose Island is 18 acres and if you glimpse it from the Newport Bridge you might assume that it was named Rose Island because it looks like a rose with a long stem jutting out to the north. The problem with this theory is that the hunk of land has been called Rose since the 1600s, long before the Newport Bridge or aerial photography. But the shape of the island is still the leading theory in regards to its appellation, which leads me to wonder if there was a time in human consciousness where people were more adept at traversing perimeters and intuitively understanding shapes. The stem itself, and accordingly the whole island was significantly larger before the Portland Gale of 1898 when it lost about 7 acres. The Portland Gale struck the coast of New England on November 26th and 27th with 10 foot storm surges and hurricane force winds. 150 boats sunk, about 400 people died and geography was forever altered in a variety of coastal areas. The name of the island before settlers was Conockonoquit, which roughly translates to place of the long point, so again concerned with the stem. At low tide I walked around the whole of the island and put one foot in front of the other on the still wet stretch of stones and shells crackling beneath my feet along the thin and delicate stem. At high tide there is still a stem, but it is much shorter, stubby almost. I took long strides thinking that if I threw my arms forward with enough momentum they might grab hold of a bridge girder and I could slide easily into trapeze moves. An arabesque alongside the cormorants. Alas the bridge was not quite close enough to grip, but I was convinced that I could hear bridge-y sounds, like the rattle of cars driving over slabs of metal.

I went to a different lighthouse the week before my Rose Island journey, but it was a lighthouse that guides by smells. An olfactory lighthouse. I wasn’t sure if it would help to prepare me for my week of lighthouse living, which I hoped would include thinking about the lighthouse from all of the vantage points humanly possible. But it reminded me that part of my job as an artist is to loosen my grip on perception and experience in general. The lens of this scented lighthouse was not fresnel, the ridged glass that magnifies light and is found in most lighthouses, but rather unicorn horn moving in a slow rotation that counters the spiral traces of its growth, thus producing a natural secretion of the color topaz.

This lighthouse, in the shape of the medicinal cuttlefish, emits not photons, but scattering of molecular oscillations as it conveys the time of day by way of odor. Visitors luxuriate in the ever-changing bouquet of; fresh baked pumpkin pie, hot buttered popcorn, cinnamon buns, band aids, canned corn, old lady hands, chicken Tikka Masala and sugar cookie.

This lighthouse was part of the Musée Pataméchanique, which may or may not exist in a historic village on the water, but I assure you, if it does exist, it is 100% Rhode Island in its ability to break your heart with how beautiful it is. Longing and metaphysics interspersed with fart jokes and rubber chickens. I don’t usually try to peer behind the curtain at the mechanics of things that are magic, but I couldn’t help to imagine flavored jelly beans being tucked into each arm of the lighthouse like an easter octopus chewing and burping the aromas back at the sniffer through its tentacles. Plus aren’t there actually jelly beans in the flavor of band-aids in these deranged times?

I went on a preparatory visit to the Rose Island lighthouse on an evening in August about a month prior to the residency. The lighthouse is managed by a local not-for-profit that runs tours and historical programs on the site as well as hosts guests for overnight stays in the old lighthouse keepers quarters, former army barracks on the island, or in the fog-horn room. The organization’s director (recognizably) does many things, including sometimes ferries guests to the lighthouse. He’s also a first class historian and great story teller. As I anticipate most of my readers know, my day job involves running an arts organization (The Dirt Palace) with a facility that is a historic house that doubles as a bed and breakfast and artist residency (The Wedding Cake House), so I anticipated that there would be many moments where I felt an uncanny sense of reversal. Where I would be doing the thing that I do all of the time but from the flip side as a participant rather than facilitator, as a guest rather than as a host.

It was only after the residency when I dug into the Jeremy D’Entremont book The Lighthouses of New England, and read a more detailed account of the preservation of the lighthouse that it struck me that the pattern of the Dirt Palace renovation of the Wedding Cake House aligned with the Rose Island preservation project in myriad way. If I were a person in the 1600s whose brain could envision the shapes of things intuitively or by walking around them, I would see parallel lines like the steel waggon tracks that run across Rose island with intermittent cut backs, a couple of swoops like the line of flight of a seagull diving for a fish being pushed into shore by a sandshark or the like.

I had started this Substack newsletter about 6 months before I applied for the residency at Rose Island, and as my heart had gotten more deeply into the project of traveling close to home, deeper rather than wider, into histories and forgotten pasts, down quiet roads, believing that the specialness of Rhode Island is most often just out of site and slightly underground, I had become obsessed with Despair. And by that I mean Despair Island, which is located in Narragansett Bay just to the north of Hope Island. My understanding is that Despair is mostly just a collection of rocks that are barely visible at high tide, but I was fully knocked off my feet at the audacity of naming a place Despair. And so I started spending my evenings zooming in on maps of Narragansett Bay. What other strange things might I find if I read into enough fine print? I knew that there was an artist residency on Prudence Island, which seems incredible, but I feared its schedule would be a little hard to pull off between my work life and dog parenting, and so when I saw that there was a residency on Rose Island that was just a week long I jumped. I had read enough on the Rose Island website to understand that the lighthouse had been an epic preservation project after it sat empty from the time when the Newport Bridge opened in 1970 through the mid 80’s. But I didn’t know the details.

In 1967 Joan Didion wrote an essay about Newport titled The Seacoast of Despair. I don’t think that she knew about Despair Island though, I think that the title is all metaphor. In this essay she famously calls Newport ugly: “mean without the saving grace of extreme severity, a landscape less to be enjoyed than dominated.” It feels a little cheap, taking a blow at the basic looks of the place, but most of what is rankling her ire is the gross display of economic disparity and patriarchy. But also if I’m to be completely honest, Newport gets under my skin on the level of aesthetics too, which feels petty, where there is so much of actual substance to discuss.

Didion writes “What Newport turns out to be, then, is homiletic, a fantastically elaborate stage setting for an American morality play in which money and happiness are presented as antithetical. It is a curious theatrical for these particular men to have conceived, but then we all judge ourselves sometime; it is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built “The Breakers” he damned himself.”

What gets to me about Newport is the ubiquity of a certain preppy style, the rigidity of landscaping that forecloses the possibility of any sweet smells that might come out of a stray honeysuckle vine. Much of the excess of chinos and investment banker casual I realize comes via daytrippers and mansion ogling wealth tourism, which if we’re being real about it, has propped up the local economy in an interesting inversion after Nixon moved the Navy base. As someone who came up in Providence at the time right when the Jewelry industry was heading out the door, I’m endlessly fascinated by moments when regional economies are forced to reinvent themselves. I can’t help but think that there is something interesting, and maybe even cosmically restorative about these obscene monuments to income disparity becoming nodes on glossy tourism maps that swooped in to support a working/middle class service economy after 14,000 jobs were lost and unemployment topped 20% with the relocation of the Navy base to Virginia in 1973. While Newport has a reputation for old money wealth and being a summer playground for the ultra rich, unlike other coastal regions in Rhode Island there has actually been affordable housing built in Newport and the Median Household income is in the 80-something thousand range, which is pretty middle of the road in the US these days. That said, for a few hours on September 10th a bump in Oracle stock moved a certain Newport mansion owner into the place of “The richest person in the world”. Yes, ahead of Elon Musk. But the ultra wealthy, much to their chagrin, never get to fully define culture, even when they occupy all of the land on one side of the waterfront. And Newport has always had layers of salty tattooed cultures and subcultures.

I don’t want to get too led astray talking about Newport, or Robber Barons when what I really want to tell you about is Rose Island, but technically Rose Island is located in Newport, and the specter of Newport speculative real estate was a core ghost in the story of Rose Island’s reimagination, and there is something that I can’t quite put my finger on about how the clean cut aesthetics of a watercolor perfect ship shape lighthouse makes potentially radical elements of the Rose Island project slide right under the radar. So in short the context of Newport, particularly Newport in the 1980s is relevant.

At the Wedding Cake House we occasionally have guests who come to Rhode Island on account of lighthouse tourism. Save The Bay offers a Lighthouse tour where you can see 20 lighthouses in one day. We have so many guests come through the Wedding Cake House that it is rare that I remember any of the specific conversations that I have while I serve them coffee and donuts. But I remember the first lighthouse enthusiast well. She was traveling alone and young, maybe in her 30s. I was making small talk and inquiring about what brought her to Providence. She seemed embarrassed, hesitant at first, but eventually said something to the effect of, well I’m obsessed with lighthouses and go travel around and see them, and its kind of a big deal to get to see 20 lighthouses in one day. I am always drawn to people with very specific passions: collectors, researchers, people compelled to know every single thing on a topic, even topics that I might be bored out of my mind by or adverse to like baseball or weapons collecting. She told me about the lighthouse passport and a subculture of people who base their traveling around collecting stamps for said lighthouse passports, most of them are retired she said, but I’ve just always loved lighthouses. And because I am a book nerd, I mentioned that I really like the character of the lighthouse keeper in the Southern Reach Trilogy. And she says that she thought that she had read most novels with prominent lighthouse plots, but that she had never heard of the Southern Reach Trilogy. So by the time that I cleared her breakfast tray, I think that I had convinced her to read Jeff VanderMeer and she had convinced me to think more about the shoreline beacons that perhaps I had been dismissive of because of their ubiquity on magnets and other kitschy posters or trinkets littered with motivational slogans or vaguely christian affirmations.

And also whenever something becomes ubiquitous, it is worth wondering symbolically what space it is holding in the popular imagination, why are there so many songs about rainbows? Why are there so many nick-nacks with lighthouses? And also so many HR approved office posters with lighthouses and the text SERVICE or LEADERSHIP or FOLLOW YOUR LIGHT in big block letters attempting to inspire something in someone who is trapped in a dystopic office where only HR approved art can be hung in the cubicle. A lighthouse might lead the way home or away. Escape or return. Architecturally they are unique: maybe like grain silos or fire houses, structures with a purpose so specific that to look at it for more than a moment can transport you quickly to thinking about what a life doing a job in said structure might be like. A flex of wonder. And in the case of the lighthouse keeper, the purpose is social, for the good of society and the safety of marine traffic, and yet solitary to an extreme. To leave society, but for the good of society. The light house keeper has their cake and eats it too, though likely there was not actually that much cake being eaten in lighthouses because a cake is a food to share amongst many. Could the one or two people stewarding a lighthouse eat an entire cake before it went moldy? To be surrounded by the sea and the squawk of gulls and to feel more connected to the ebb and flow of tides than to the ebb and flow of human history, who amongst us does not need to sit in this place from time to time. Whose nervous system would not benefit from the cadence of crashing waves? And then there are all of the metaphors about lights in darkness, which maybe are less potent to me because I have not seen a sky not hazed over with the resonant hum of light pollution for quite some time. But this light/darkness metaphor is a variation on hope, whose necessity and cruelty Rhode Islanders are intimate with in all of the forms of flag, motto, and ruggedly comedic sensibility.

And so then, there I was, arrived, surprised by how quickly my breathing was synching up with all of the ocean sounds. How quickly my neural network was letting its guard down. How easy the salt air felt. Every journey involves planning, and some running around in preparation. And then suddenly I was on a small island with nowhere to go, even if I wanted to. But it didn’t take long to realize that what I had been longing for, for a while, was to stay in one place and draw. Not forever, but for a solid few days. No errands or emails. None of my usual patterns or responsibilities. As a residency admin, I often tell artists that the work that they might make during a residency is great, but the formation of new patterns is often the most lasting and valuable piece of the experience. The strand to attempt to hold onto after the residency is over.

Artist residencies are something that I have in some ways devoted my career towards making happen, believe in fully, have personally benefited from greatly, and yet I would be lying if I did not admit to having mixed emotions about the history of their ascendence in the arts sector, which ultimately stems from reactive federal policies regarding direct payments to artists.

I am often surprised by how frequently the story of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Culture Wars of the 1990s get left out of American Art History. In the last couple of lectures that I’ve given at art schools, barely any students had heard of the NEA and once none could even extrapolate what the letters stood for. My guess is that this is because the NEA does almost nothing in regards to directly funding artists, and so even in professional practice symposia or classes focusing on building a career in the arts, the NEA is left off of the of the curriculum, despite the fact that they are (or at least until the chainsaws of this administration came out, were) the single largest funder of the arts in America. The reason that the NEA does not fund individual artists anymore traces back to the culture wars of the 1990s when the conservative movement realized that there was a goldmine of political capital to be harvested in outrage over what so-called degenerate artists in NY were doing with government money. Mostly what artists in NYwere doing with government money was attempting to eek out meager existences, grieve their friends and lovers who were dying of AIDS, and occasionally lashing out at institutions like the Catholic Church whose advocacy beyond any shadow of a doubt had contributed to the deaths of thousands of gay men. Occasionally they were doing provocative things like taking photographs of crucifixes suspended in a jar of urine. For nearly a decade questions of obscenity as they intersected with arts funding echoed through the talk radio airwaves. The right learned critical lessons about how cost effective and valuable cultural outrage was at galvanizing its base, lessons that the left has still not figured out how to strategically maneuver around or to get ahead of. On a more micro level, in an effort to preserve arts funding overall, changes were made to how the NEA distributed its funds that completely cut grants to individual artists out of the picture and cut out general operating grants to organizations. NEA grants would now be awarded only on a project basis to organizations. The short version of the story is that Artist Residencies rose up as a way of supporting artists less directly out of a political fear of putting actual cash dollars into artists hands.

And so in summary, I love artist residencies. I love getting to focus on my work. I love that the field has exploded. I love the care that has gone into conversations about accessibility and access within the field. But also what I wouldn’t give to go back to a time when the federal government paid thousands of artists decent wages. In lieu of hitching any wagons the unlikely stars of renewed federal investment in the arts, I am trying to wrap my head around ways to grow the field from the ground up, and my hunch is that this has to do with cross sector collaboration and also maybe with some new cracks in the economy. When I was coming up as an artist in Providence, there was so much empty warehouse space. Jobs were few and far between, so it could still be a pain to hustle the mind-bogglingly low rent but this access to extremely low cost of living in the 90’s into the early 2000’s should also be understood as a critical underwriter/enabler of the arts. Now obviously the whole economy has shifted particularly with the short-term-rental-ification and private equity extractions of the housing sector. But there have to be new cracks and alliances that weren’t visible before. And I have a hunch that small organizations, like the Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation, that are outside of the arts, but that get the potential value of working with artists are key to the next phase.

And so to loop this thread back to Rose Island, as an artist I wanted to spend consecutive days with a bottle of ink and reset my practice. As an arts administrator I was also so excited to see this local organization that focused on history be engaging with artists, that I wanted to see it first hand. I know how much it takes to implement a whole new program, to design it, to fundraise for it, to pull it off with grace. Which without question the Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation does with its Artists Residency.

Art takes many forms and is always changing. I have never felt like drawing is the space where I do my most meaningful creative work, but it is always a place that I return to. Bullshit is stripped away and it is just you and black and white marks on a piece of paper. Just you and your fingers and eyes and ideas and lines. Upon arriving at Rose Island I felt super happy and relaxed, but after the third drawing started to move me out of a representational space, I knew that I was just warming up and had to channel something more. I remembered that I was actually trying to do something sort of hard.

Of the other artists at the residency three were working on fairly traditional landscape explorations, one a board game, one a quilt, and another experimental photographs with fresnel lenses. I actually rarely get to intersect with representational painters, so there was something slightly exotic about the oils, and acrylics, the guaches and all of the attunement to color and light. As if it were not enough to be on an island with six other artists all moving through their own questions and uncertainties in the height of abundance of time and beauty, I had decided that I was finally going to listen to Virginia Wolf’s To The Lighthouse on audiobook. So I was also in it with Lilly Briscoe, a fictional character in the book who is a painter and feminist who is painting a lighthouse to make sense of her own experience while I was painting a lighthouse to make sense of my own experience. I know that I am indebted to the work of Virginia Wolf, but sometimes she ignites a frustration in me that I am embarrassed of. All of the other artists in the mix, the non-fictional ones, were kind and lovely. Everyone was focused on their work, but made time for marshmallows and fire chit-chat after the sun went down.

I have been trying to illustrate a book that I have been writing about renovating the Wedding Cake House, that dips back into the renovation of the Dirt Palace in the early 2000’s, which is also a book about carpentry and plumbing and feminism and being very young and living in a vivid subculture and wanting to stay up all night every night in a bubble with your best friends and start a world from scratch out of the scraps left over from the churn of capital. But it is all fits and starts. Being in the middle of it, was fun all of the time, trying to corral it into something that can cross a finish line; way less fun. Thinking about hustling and trying to figure out publishing; not really fun at all. Going back to that time of working on the house, and feeling an immense pressure to pull off something basically impossible, but also stumbling into all types of kindness and support, is a weird assed type of time travel. A multi-year roller-coaster that blurs the lines between project and life. Sometimes I really don’t want to psychically revisit that time. We were cold and dirty for seemingly years, and friends of ours kept dying so called deaths of despair. And they all add up, you know. And sometimes it would feel like punch after punch and Trump had just taken power for the first time and everything about living a basic decent life if you were marginal in any way seemed to be getting exponentially harder. And we just had to keep our heads down for deadline after deadline. Demolition and repair. Over and over, and you have no idea of what will happen if you fail or miss a deadline, but you know that it won’t be good. I pulled my own guts out while gutting a house. And of course with this backdrop everything can become very funny and absurd because it is also a classic coming of middle age story, and middle age is all comedy. You are basically a teenager with topsy turvy hormones but people are taking you seriously? And so anyway…while I am breathing with the ocean, I am trying to metabolize what this lighthouse is, and what its journey has been, what the community that stewarded it into a new phase went through, while also drawing some pictures relating to a story about renovating a Victorian mansion that started to fall into disrepair at about the time when the lighthouse was coming back to life. The mansion was built between 1865 & 1867, the lighthouse went into service on January 20th of 1870.

It is hard to not be dazzled and distracted by the story of steamships going back and forth from New York City overnight into the waters of New England as this is, after all, why the lighthouse was built in the first place. Palaces floating on the sea, but like price wise more comparable to taking a greyhound bus than a private jet, or whatever today’s form of luxury transit from New York to New England would be. The boats had names like Pilgrim, Puritan, Commonwealth and Priscilla. And ads for them and their overnight berths cracked jokes about good ole yankee hanky panky.

There are two children’s books about kids who spent part of their childhood at the Rose Island lighthouse and both of these books are wonderful. I strongly recommend them if you have any kids in your life who like history, or if you would prefer to read about history with fun illustrations, which obviously I also strongly recommend. I am always curious about place on the level of labor and the day to day. And these children’s books gave plenty of details. I stepped into the fog horn room knowing that when it was foggy the lighthouse keeper and the assistant keeper would each take turns in 4 hour shifts shoveling coal into the steam boilers that would produce the fog-horn sounds. 10 hours of fog-horning would require 1 ton of coal. Which to say, that was some no-joke heavy duty coal shoveling.

The villains of the story of Rose Island’s reimagination were a company of developers called CMTS who bought the land around the lighthouse at auction in 1968 and planned to build 125 condos and a marina and all of that kind of stuff on the island. I could not find concrete information about how much they paid for it, maybe $27,000? But the city of Newport had bought it from the federal government in 1960 for $2,300 and they were supposed to turn it into a park, which never happened and so it reverted to federal government ownership and the feds auctioned it off in ‘68 to CMTS. So maybe the city also has some seagull shit on their hands for not turning it into a park in the first place. And maybe the teenagers who had wild parties on the island in the 70’s and 80’s and trashed the lighthouse are also sort of villainous as were the birds who took to living inside and shitting everywhere as birds do. But partying teenagers and birds are sort of exempt from wrongdoing in my worldview so for the sake of this story CMTS were really getting in the way. In 1982 a group was formed called Citizens to Protect Rose Island, and in 1984 The Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation was officially created. Core to this organizing was Charlotte Johnson, a self proclaimed 1960’s peacenik. Jeremy D’Entremont writes in The Lighthouses of Rhode Island, “she has proven to be a peacenik with an invaluable understanding of local politics and public relations, and a knack for motivating others.” In 1985 the city of Newport took over ownership and RILF was given five years to carry out its plan for restoration. This was also the year when 100 protesters took to the island and encircled it with a mile long banner made of bedsheets. Which is interesting because it was only a year or so earlier when Christo and Jean-Claude made the work “Surrounded Island” by surrounding an island archipelago in the Biscayne Bay with pink textiles, which was later written about by David Antin in the poem “What it means to be Avant Garde”. Antin objects to Christo’s being identified as avant-garde “because the chamber of commerce is perfectly cheerful about” his projects. The bedsheet banner protesters wrapping Rose Island were likely indifferent to their status in terms of the Avant Garde, but here is the thing, it got the job done. And so the five year ticking timeline began. They hustled, and wrote grants and worked on policy that might make condo development more challenging and recruited volunteers and had work days twice a week. Having no resources to get a project done and splitting your time between writing grants and fixing everything possible with your cold gnarled hands is a story that I know too well. Our timeline was originally shorter than the Rose Island project deadlines but we were interrupted by a pandemic, so by the time that we really opened it had been about 5 years from when we wrote our first grant. By the early 1990s the Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation had managed to get the lighthouse all fixed up, every nail and shim and roofing shingle brought over by boat, much of the labor done by volunteers. In 1993 The Rose Island Lighthouse was relit as a private aid to navigation. CMTS still owned the rest of the island and it took another 6 years, six hundred and something thousand dollars, a designation as part of Newport’s Historic District zone and a DEM conservation easement to chase out the specter of condos, a fight that like a lot of the interesting aspects of the revitalization of the lighthouse is not incredibly visible from a quick visit. But there is a small brass plaque on the downstairs kitchen window that hints at this history: it reads something to the effect of “aren’t you glad that you’re not looking at condos?”

Sometimes in 2025 it can be hard to summon visions of what a hopeful reimagination of this land might be when it is clear that we are being dragged down a path that forecloses any kind of return to where the American Experiment was even just a year ago. It took a couple of days to viscerally feel the absolute radicalness of being on an island that for almost as long as settlers had been around had served military purposes, being taken over basically by birds and a couple of human rotating caretakers who are set up to recycle every drop of rainwater, and power almost everything with renewable energy. I realize that perhaps I have not said much about the military history of the island, sorry, not sorry - not my thing, look it up on wikipedia if you want perfect details, or take my word for that there are barracks and places where torpedoes were loaded with explosives, and stored, and where anti-aircraft guns were once mounted. The torpedo factory’s ceiling is now falling in. Keep out, keep out! The crumbling brick structure is circled by the spiky seed pods of Jimesonweed, the night blooming vixen of so many overgrown places that lures moths and nocturnal pollinators into its trumpet blaring silence. The quiet, a triumph. Preservation can mean so many things, but what a joy to see the skeletons of our munitions factories be saved as an arcade for egrets for a while and then fall into the sea! The goldenrod cheers for neglect amongst the feathers and the bones.