{"id":2076383,"date":"2026-08-03T17:08:43","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T14:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2076383"},"modified":"2026-08-03T17:08:43","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T14:08:43","slug":"na-kim-brings-cloud-paintings-to-newports-old-stone-mill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2076383","title":{"rendered":"Na Kim Brings Cloud Paintings to Newport\u2019s Old Stone Mill"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tThe Old Stone Mill in Newport, Rhode Island, is an odd little building. Eight thick stone legs support a circular tower pierced by arched openings. There aren\u2019t exactly windows, nor is there a roof. Stand in the middle and look up and all you see is sky.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe structure, which sits in Touro Park in the city\u2019s center, is often called a 17th-century windmill, though its exact origins have inspired theories and debate for generations, which have cycled between calling it the Newport Tower, the Touro Tower, and even the Viking Tower. Whatever it once was, today it looks like a ruin dropped into the middle of an otherwise orderly New England town.<\/p>\n

\n\tNa Kim, the renowned book designer and painter, had never been to Newport when curator and longtime\u00a0Vogue<\/em>\u00a0writer Dodie Kazanjian invited her to make a project for Art&Newport, the organization Kazanjian founded in 2017 to bring contemporary art into the city\u2019s historic buildings and landscapes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was unusually good timing: Kim, best known for her paintings of faces, had recently begun painting clouds. Her portraits, including those shown at White Columns and Nicola Vassell Gallery in New York, live in the slippery space between figuration and abstraction. Faces interested her because they are instantly recognizable and constantly changing. Clouds, she discovered, act in much the same way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFor\u00a0\u201cPortraits,\u201d on view through August 10, Kim has placed a group of small cloud paintings in weatherproof frames around a central column inside the mill. Visitors can circle them, looking from painted clouds to real ones above, depending on the day. A second, horizontal cloud painting is installed across the street at the Redwood Library & Athenaeum.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exhibition is the first half of Art&Newport\u2019s summer program, which will continue later this month with Austin Eddy\u2019s\u00a0Hope Deferred<\/em>, an installation of 107 bird sculptures at the Norman Bird Sanctuary in nearby Middletown.\u00a0Later this year, in September, Nicola Vassell will host Kim\u2019s second solo show with the gallery,\u00a0\u201cBlue,\u201d\u00a0which will similarly show the artist\u2019s current interest of blurring landscape and portraiture.<\/p>\n

ARTnews<\/em>\u00a0spoke with Kim, who in addition to her painting practice is art director of\u00a0The Paris Review<\/em>\u00a0and creative director of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, about painting clouds, taking art outside the white cube, and what happens when a picture of the sky is placed directly beneath the real thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

ARTnews: You had never been to Newport before this project. What happened when you first saw the Old Stone Mill?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Na Kim:<\/strong>\u00a0Dodie and I had first talked about doing an Art&Newport project, but we hadn\u2019t decided on the space. Because I had actually never been to Newport before, we went up together to visit a couple of different spots, like the Vanderbilt mansion and all these other places. But there was something I immediately connected with when I saw the Mill. You can stand in there and see the clouds above it. I had never seen anything like that, and I thought this would be the one opportunity to install a show like this. That\u2019s why we said we should try to go for the Old Stone Mill.<\/p>\n

Were the paintings made specifically for the space?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019ve been working on these paintings since the beginning of this year, and I\u2019m still working on them. I do serialized work, so I try to paint every day. I started these before we found the space, then made some after we found it, and I\u2019m continuing to make more for my September show [at Nicola Vassell].<\/p>\n

What can a painting of a cloud do in a place where the viewer can also look up and see the actual sky?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tFor me, at least, the more I paint these, the more I look at them, the more I notice actual clouds in the sky. Being able to pause and see a cloud for what it is in that moment feels quite special. If you look at the sky, it\u2019s constantly moving and disappearing. I guess it\u2019s a way to somehow have the viewer be a little more present. And obviously, when you think about Newport, you think about the ocean and the sea and these beautiful horizon lines. In a way, these are in response to that as well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Old Stone Mill itself has this strange, slightly mysterious history. Did that become part of the appeal?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI think it\u2019s safe to say it\u2019s at least mid-17th century, but the history behind it feels a little mysterious. People can\u2019t seem to place exactly when it was built. They have so many names for it, too. I call it the Old Stone Mill, but it\u2019s also called the Newport Tower, the Touro Tower, the Viking Tower. It\u2019s kind of cool that it\u2019s just standing there in the center of the town. And all the little windows and pockets in it are so specific. As we were installing the show, I was inside looking at all the different stones used to build it. It\u2019s just very cool.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Na Kim, dodietad <\/em>(2026)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

There\u2019s a push and pull in your work between representation and abstraction. What appeals to you about clouds as a subject?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s something that appeals to me about having clouds as a subject. It\u2019s something that we all know and can\u2019t really know at the same time. If you ask someone to draw a cloud, they\u2019ll draw a cloud. We all see something, but it\u2019s never exact. There\u2019s kind of an uncanny quality to them.<\/p>\n

\n\tBefore I was painting clouds, I was painting these portraits of faces. I think they\u2019re very similar in that way. You can know a person\u2019s face, but it\u2019s never the same. Whatever I think of your face is probably not what somebody else sees when they look at your face, and the same thing happens when you look at yourself. There are these micro-expressions that constantly change how we\u2019re perceived and what we\u2019re seeing. That creates a lot of room for exploration, even if you\u2019re exploring the same subject over and over again. There are variations and little nuances. I think they\u2019re figurative works, but they\u2019re not exactly representational. It\u2019s more like the idea of a face or a cloud. I like how open-ended that is. You can go in any direction with it. That\u2019s one of the joys of painting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also something strange about faces in that we know them extraordinarily well without necessarily being able to explain what we\u2019re seeing. We know Robert Redford doesn\u2019t look like Brad Pitt, but try explaining the differences to someone and the words get lost.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s like this weird, nonverbal, constantly shifting thing that we all know so well. It just leaves room for endless exploration, and I find that very exciting, to keep digging further and further into the same thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dodie Kazanjian has spent nearly a decade bringing contemporary art into places people might otherwise think of as historic or preservation sites. What does contemporary art add to a place like Newport?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tFor one thing, I think it brings new audiences to these places and spaces and allows people to appreciate why they need to be preserved and why they need to be there. In reverse, I think it does a lot for the art as well, to see it in that context, outside of a gallery. You see this Old Stone Mill, you pass by it every day, and then maybe you pause. You see how transformative it can be for art. I think that\u2019s pretty beautiful.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Does taking the work outside a traditional gallery space, especially the white cube, change the way people approach it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tIt totally puts the work in a new context. I like that it sometimes, or often, makes it more approachable. It becomes just a part of the world.<\/p>\n

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The Old Stone Mill in Newport, Rhode Island.<\/span>Photo Ajay Suresh<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Did being outdoors, with the changing light and the sky above you, make you think differently about the paintings themselves?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tOh my God, absolutely. To have the work outside is kind of a dream with these cloud paintings. I feel like it helped me, and maybe it will make people appreciate the work more, too\u2014just to see it out there for what it is. I thought, when else can I have these in the open air like this? They\u2019re not large works. They\u2019re very small, about 9 by 12 inches. There\u2019s a quiet to that space, too, that really holds them in a nice way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve called these paintings \u201cportraits.\u201d Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI titled the show\u00a0\u201cPortraits\u201d\u00a0because that\u2019s kind of what they are. I like being able to contextualize clouds or landscapes in that way, so they don\u2019t have to be seen in one specific way.<\/p>\n

The installation also seems to change how someone physically looks at the work. You can look at a painting, then look through the opening at the real sky, then walk around the mill. How did you think about that movement?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tAll those arches show different sides of the column. The paintings are installed on a very small column in the center of the mill, and you can walk around it, so you get a 360-degree view. The mill actually wasn\u2019t open to people going inside before. They opened it for this installation. I think that\u2019s nice, too, that people get to go inside there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot happening at once: the paintings, the architecture, the history of the space, the changing sky. What do you hope people take away from it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tI think they should just stop and look up sometimes. It might just be a cloud, but all of these things are always around us. It\u2019s worth it just to stop and look up sometimes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/newsmakers-banner.jpg?w=1024″] The Old Stone Mill in Newport, Rhode Island, is an odd little building. Eight thick stone legs support a circular tower pierced by arched openings. There aren\u2019t exactly windows, nor is there a roof. Stand in the middle and look up and all you see is sky. The structure, which sits in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2076383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2076383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2076383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2076383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2076383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2076383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}