Bobby Anspach: Everything is Change

Bobby Anspach was an American artist whose work centered around the creations of sculptural installations designed to deliver transcendent experiences to viewers, all part of a series titled Place for Continuous Eye Contact.  As much a sculptor as an inventor, these devices are currently undergoing a patenting process.  Employing a DIY-technique through all of his work, Anspach was focused on creating brilliant, unexpected, and sublime experiences that blend common objects with high craft, ranging from pom-poms to hand-blown glass to medical beds, aiming to inspire viewers to look within and discover everyday beauty and the natural world.  These works create an experience that at first appears scrappy and chaotic, and quickly blends into a seamless, all-encompassing, and otherworldly space.  His work was informed by a deep respect for the environment and meditation, and founded on a belief of the interconnectedness of all things that was aimed to create a cared experience between all viewers of his work.

During his lifetime, Anspach’s work was celebrated and exhibited across the United States, most notably at the Spring/Break Art Show, New York, 2018 and 2020, the 2019 BRIC Biennial: Volume III. Brooklyn, NY, and the 2019 Governor’s Island Art Fair, as well as in numerous gallery exhibitions across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and California. In the public sphere, he presented his Place for Continuous Eye Contact installations and made them available for visitor experiences at a pop-up space in Beacon, NY in 2021; in a Walmart parking lot in Newburgh, NY in 2022; and on Fifth Avenue outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2022.

Anspach was born in 1987 in Toledo, OH, and died in 2022 in Beacon, NY. He received his BA from Boston College in 2011, studied at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and received an MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. There, he produced the earliest versions of the Place for Continuous Eye Contact series of sculptural works.

About Taylor Baldwin

Taylor Baldwin is an artist working primarily in sculpture, video, and installation and an associate professor and Graduate Program Director of Sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he taught Bobby Anspach.

Baldwin has had solo exhibitions with International Waters Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Wayfarers Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) Conner Contemporary Gallery (Washington D.C.), Land of Tomorrow Gallery (Louisville, KY), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA) as well as groups shows at the Queens Museum of Art (Queens, NY), Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Norfolk, VA), the Kentucky Museum of Arts and Craft (Louisville, KY), and P.P.O.W. Gallery (Manhattan, NY). He is currently based in Providence, RI.

He received a BFA from RISD in 2005 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. He has been a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, among others.