The Wedding Cake House open house takes place Monday, Nov. 21, 4:30-6:30 p.m., with artists’ presentations at 6:30 p.m. Learn more about their artist residency program at dirtpalace.org.
Luis Hernandez: This is The Public’s Radio. I’m Luis Hernandez, and joining me in the studio is Artscape producer, James Baumgartner.
James Baumgartner: Good morning, Luis. We had a fun tour earlier this week, didn’t we?
Hernandez: We did. We visited the Wedding Cake House on Broadway in Providence. It’s a beautifully restored, three-story historic mansion and you can see where it got its nickname. It’s all white with lots of little decorative details, like a frosted layer cake.
Baumgartner: It’s owned and operated by The Dirt Palace, a feminist arts organization that specializes in artist residencies and exhibitions. They’ve renovated the house to be a hybrid – part of the time it’s used for artist residencies, and the rest of the time it’s used as a bed and breakfast. We talked with the co-directors of the organization, Xander Marro and Pippi Zornoza. They first saw the inside of the building in 2017 after it had been abandoned for over 30 years. Here’s Xander Marro.
Xander Marro: Everything was pretty chaotic. So we’re talking tons of peeling paint, particularly on the third floor, lots of water damage. The ceilings non-existent, walls sprouting mushrooms.
Pippi Zornoza: As we were walking around, we were thinking, ‘Oh hell no, there’s no way we’re going to do this project.’
Marro: Like, what kind of suckers do you think we are?
Zornoza: It’s just – was a scope beyond anything we had ever done and it seemed unattainable.
Hernandez: But they did it. The Dirt Palace secured grants for the renovations and donations from suppliers, and got to work. Here’s Pippi Zornoza.
Zornoza: We told everyone that the renovation was going to take a year and a half, which people definitely looked at us and was like, you’re bananas. That’s impossible. But we were like, no, we’re doing it. And the renovation ended up taking three years.
Baumgartner: And what they’ve created is astounding. It’s a restored 19th century mansion on the outside, but on the inside, it’s a work of art.
Hernandez: It’s many works of art. There are the original details like the inlaid hardwood floors and the carved fireplaces done by the original craftspeople. And the renovations included dozens of artists who created custom tiles, flooring, tables, chandeliers and wallpaper.
Baumgartner: My favorite wallpaper was created by Ian Cozzens, a local artist who specializes in printmaking. The wallpaper is a toile design – a blue line drawing on white paper. At a distance, it looks like happy little houses on the hill, but when you look at it closely, you can see that the houses are being demolished.
Zornoza: …and really wanted to document these buildings in Olneyville that were getting taken down as they were making way for an affordable housing development.
Hernandez: One of my favorite things about this house is the tower room. Part of the fun of it was climbing up three narrow stairways to get to it. Then standing in a small space with a 360-degree view of the city was magnificent. There’s nothing like that in Florida. Along with the artistry of the building, there’s art hanging on many of the walls.
Baumgartner: Aside from being a beautiful home, the history of the house is important to the Dirt Palace. It was built in 1867 and the first two owners were wealthy men from the textile industry, but the third owners were sisters: Anna and Laura Tirocchi, who were couture dressmakers.
Zornoza: They moved to the States from Italy, in the early 1900s worked for other dressmakers in town, but by 1915 had accumulated enough wealth to buy the wedding cake house. So why that is significant to us is that it’s pretty astounding that at that time, two Italian women, immigrants, would come to this country – that they could have been so successful that they could run their business out of this house which is just iconic to Providence.
Hernandez: For over two decades, the Dirt Palace has run a space in Olneyville where artists can live and work together in a year-long residency program. Now with the Wedding Cake House, they’re holding shorter artist residencies that usually last about 10 days. Here’s Pippi.
Zornoza: Artists get time, you know, like setting aside some time where you’re not living in your day to day is huge. I mean, as like any of us can think of like how we spend our few moments of spare time. And then they also get to just be around each other, and learning about each other’s work, and that’s just huge. I just feel like people have been so isolated, the last couple of years… Artists coming together and being able to talk about their ideas and projects is just really exciting, because they all feed off each other.
Marro: We have a pool of artists that we know, we’re going to arrange into cohorts. And we always think like, oh, this artist might have this in common with that, that’ll be great to see them together. But the thing that’s really exciting is when there are themes and threads that we have no idea that we’ll kind of generate and seeing how they, you know, find those things and are able to build connections and relationships. And it’s super cool, when you see, you know, there have been artists who have collaborated after coming into residency or have maintained relationships. And that’s just like, the coolest, the coolest thing to see.
Baumgartner: Along with the group residencies, The Wedding Cake House offers duo residencies, where two artists can work on a project together. I talked with Mary-Kim Arnold, an artist, writer and teacher who lives in Rhode Island. She’s a former board member of the Dirt Palace and participated in a duo residency earlier this year along with her collaborator Deb Dormody.
Mary-Kim Arnold: We both have administration backgrounds, as well as creative. And so we ended up talking a lot about how to balance that, and what it meant to try to have a creative practice while also having a job and, and also, you know, getting good at the kind of stuff that is not the same as the art practice stuff. And so we ended up making a series of little zines that were kind of like, here are some businessy side of art stuff that Deb and I have been thinking about. And, you know, one is like how to say no to too many commitments and how to value your time and how to make space for your own creative work. So that was really fun.
Hernandez: Another key part of the Wedding Cake House residency is that it’s free for the artists. They get to stay in the space and work on their art and get fed for a little over a week. That’s partly possible because of the business model for the house – part of the time it’s a bed and breakfast. I asked Xander Marro what it was like to do both of those things.
Marro: Our true love is artists residencies. But figuring out how organizations can have earned income to be kind of free from the fickle winds of foundation support has been, I think, it’s been a kind of liberating business model. And, you know, there’s part of us that likes to bring visitors in, it’s awesome to have people visiting Providence, seeing it with new eyes, seeing the space with new eyes. It’s also, you know, most of the people who stay here have an interest in arts or culture. So getting to kind of show off a bit of that, but that’s encapsulated in this house is pretty fun.
Zornoza: But we’ve also found that people getting to see the house and then living amongst the art makes them really curious about the artists here. So it’s been pretty amazing to be able to share with the guests.
Baumgartner: Each residency cohort includes an open house and artist presentation. The next one is on Monday, Nov. 21. The open house is from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. and doesn’t require a reservation. But space is limited for the artist presentation. You can find the information at dirtpalace.org.
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