2010
Providence in 2010 had few contemporary art and music venues and a history of losing its artist-run spaces to redevelopment. The platform was founded that year to test the conditions of access to space and to use buildings in whatever condition it found them. Its first projects took place at Conley’s Wharf on the south side of Providence Harbor through a collaboration with Partnership for Creative Industrial Space (PCIS). The first exhibition was staged in a construction trailer on site, the second in the loading dock garage of the main building, the former Providence Gas Company Purifier House. After an introduction to Paolino Properties, the following project was a large group exhibition located in a vacant downtown storefront, formerly a massage parlor.
2011
At the beginning of 2011 the platform joined PCIS, Rachel Rafaelian (Butcher Block, LLC/Alex and Ani), and civic partners in a mid-construction exhibition inside the Joseph Banigan/United States Rubber Company Mill building at 25 Eagle Street. The year closed with one of the first exhibitions in the new Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts gallery designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro at Brown University.
P.U.F.F.E.R.S., the platform’s annual outdoor experimental music festival, began that year in the parking lot of the Paragon Mill Building complex in Olneyville, in coordination with city departments to secure street closures, permits, and local food and beverage vendors. The first edition headlined a duo of Tony Conrad and Eli Keszler.
Over its first year it also presented exhibitions, live music events, and a production for the release of its first publication across six commercial properties downtown and in the West End.
2012
Paolino Properties leased the platform its first fixed site on the second floor of 204 Westminster Street where it was located for one year and staged eleven exhibitions and events. At the end of that year it received a SEED grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, an unsolicited, nomination-based award of three years of unrestricted operating capital given to start-up arts organizations in regional U.S. cities to build capacity and programming.
2013
Primarily based in New York, the platform presented exhibitions in a vacant storefront in Nolita and at Martos Gallery in Chelsea, and took part in Poppositions, the off-site fair held during Art Brussels, where it exhibited works by Providence-based artists and publications.
2014–2015
The first exhibition of Richard Keller’s work took place in a private home in May 2014 in Dumbo. Later that year the founders set the stewardship of Keller’s work apart from the platform, establishing a dedicated initiative to conserve, document, and present it. The platform’s original arc, programming carried out in Keller’s name, came to a close.
Grant funds remained. Rather than dissolve the company, the founders kept R.K. Projects LLC in place as the administrative and financial vehicle for disbursing the balance of the SEED grant. An opportunity developed to collaborate on programming in a vacant ground-floor storefront at 270 Westminster Street, in a historic bank building owned by Cornish Associates as part of a downtown revitalization effort. Four Providence-based musicians and two RISD students named the venture Proxy and programmed it collectively; R.K. Projects held the lease, financed the operation, and maintained the premises. After twelve exhibitions and events the initiative completed its one year of programming at 270 Westminster in 2015.
Four of the exhibitions Proxy presented in 2015–16 were made with a publication component: work produced for print, screen, or object alongside what was installed in the exhibition. Interrupt 3 paired artists’ installations with a piece for the page or the browser; The Subject was published as a booklet with four commissioned essays.
2016
Proxy received a technical assistance grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, an addendum to the SEED award. It presented a site-specific installation and two corresponding collaborative publications for web and print by Ficus Interfaith in a vacant loft at 149 Canal Street in New York, and closed with a final iteration of P.U.F.F.E.R.S. that September, in an outdoor lot between the Paragon Mill and Cathedral Art buildings in Olneyville, the block where the festival had begun five years earlier, using the remainder of grant funds and completing a three-year campaign to support underfunded, underserved artists and creative communities in Providence.