ART! Tory Fair, Protest Flowers – Odd-Kin Gallery

Tory Fair: Protest Flowers has run from June 1 to September 7, 2025.  As the exhibit prepares to close, there will be a closing talk and reception on September 7th during the hours of 2-5pm with Tory, the artist. The Gallery is at 89 Valley Street in East Providence.

Protest Flowers reimagines the language of ecofeminism to meet the complex urgencies of this moment, transforming cast
sunflowers into kinetic, robotic sculptures that oscillate between humor and grief, action and stillness. Tory Fair’s sculptural work draws from an evolving ecofeminist ethos, one that questions extractive systems while embracing interdependence, care, and embodied knowledge.

Her ongoing engagement with the histories of feminist abstraction—particularly through her research on Susan L. Stoops’
landmark 1996 exhibition More than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 70s at the Rose Art Museum—grounds her
practice in a rich lineage of artists such as Mary Miss, whose work blurs the boundaries between architecture, land art, and
ecological intervention.

Fair’s sunflowers, cast in silicone rubber and embedded with dirt at the end of their life cycle, embody both resilience and
contradiction: they protest their own artificial materiality while insisting on the beauty and absurdity of endurance. These sculptural forms do not settle—they sway, teeter, roll, and tremble. In their mechanical movement, they mourn, they jest, and they offer an elegiac yet buoyant response to the precarious state of the world.

The installation takes over ODD-KIN with towering 10-foot flower patches, clusters of animated blooms, and remote-controlled “support flowers†that viewers are invited to walk with—transforming the space into a surreal and tender field
of motion, resistance, and entanglement.

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Tory Fair lives and works in the Boston area, where she is also deeply involved in arts education and mentoring. Her recent solo exhibitions and projects include presentations at Wild Knoll Garden at Surf Point, ME; A.D. Gallery in NY; ICA at MECA, Portland, ME; AreaCode Art Fair, Boston; Drive-By Projects, Watertown; and gallery VERY, Boston. Fair’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Paper Town at the Fitchburg Art Museum, You are Here at the Worcester Art Museum, The Intuitionists at The Drawing Center in New York, and Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City. She was a recent artist-in-residence at RAIR (Recycled Artist In Residency) in Philadelphia, PA, and a featured artist in VoCA Talks (Voices in Contemporary Art). Fair has received major awards and fellowships from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the LEF Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

About Odd-Kin: ODD-KIN is an artist-informed space in East Providence that responds to the unique needs of our region. Inspired by the legacy of alternative art spaces rooted in social change, as well as the term that is our namesake, we create space for unexpected collaboration. Recognizing that our world, and the role of art within it, is rapidly changing, ODD-KIN invites artists and their audiences to explore and adapt together. Through inclusive and flexible programming, we uplift unheard perspectives, host interdisciplinary conversations, and envision what art can build within Rhode Island’s cultural landscape, and beyond.