The Newport Art Museum will host the second installment of its two-part InConversation panel series on April 16 at 5:30 p.m. in the Ilgenfritz Gallery, bringing together four artists from its current Members’ Juried Exhibition Springboard for a wide-ranging moderated discussion.
Voices of Springboard will be led by Julie Keyes, the show’s juror and founder of Keyes Art, a global art consultancy based in Sag Harbor, N.Y. With more than 30 years in the contemporary art world, Keyes has guided private collectors, corporations and cultural institutions in acquiring and presenting significant works.
“Springboard invites artists to put their best foot forward,” Keyes said. “In conversation with the Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition encourages artists to reflect on the past as they consider their own practice more critically and with greater ambition.”
The panel will take up questions including what distinguishes a professional artist from an emerging one, what excites artists about the current cultural moment, and what role branding and marketing play in an artist’s career.
The four panelists bring notably varied backgrounds and practices.
Karin Gielen is a Belgian artist living and working in Rhode Island whose work explores fragility, memory and the quiet transformation of materials over time. Her ongoing project This Is Not a Boat centers on delicate boat forms — stitched, mended and sometimes dismantled — that reflect on belonging, repair and the ways objects carry personal and collective histories. She is a recipient of the 2026 Creativity Award.
Tas Mahr, born in 1981 as the son of artist Batuz, grew up in artists’ ateliers and later studied at Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland. His work includes Helmets for Peace, a public art project transforming military helmets into symbols of reflection and reconciliation, presented in Chemnitz and at the German Military History Museum in Dresden. He has curated exhibitions in Berlin, Mexico and across the Americas.
Saberah S. Malik engineers flat fabric into luminous, architectural and biomorphic forms that address fractured lineages, heritage and socio-environmental injustice. A 2025 residency artist at MASSMoCA Studios, her work is held in the permanent collections of the Danforth Art Museum and Fidelity Investments, among others. She has taught her proprietary method of molding cloth at institutions including Penland School of Craft and Panjab University in Lahore, Pakistan.
Janice Smyth, a Newport resident and retired Harvard-trained physician, came to art as a self-described late bloomer. As a modern quilt artist, she explored contemporary icons — barcodes, binary code, genetic code — before pivoting to improvised designs rooted in color and form. Her quilts have been exhibited internationally, including at the Tokyo Great Quilt Festival, where she was twice a semifinalist, and the Festival of Quilts in England. She has since pivoted again — to painting cinnamon buns and hamburgers.
Tickets are $25 for non-members and $20 for members, for both in-person and virtual attendance. They are available at newportartmuseum.org/voices. Need-based financial assistance is available for all museum programs. For more information, contact Emilia Sywolski at esywolski@newportartmuseum.org.
