Eli Nixon
Eli Nixon (they/them) builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist, or exist but call for creative intervention. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of plays, puppets, pageants, parades, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. They’re a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett land.
Eli is the author and illustrator of BLOODTIDE- A New Holiday In Homage To Horseshoe Crabs; 2nd edition, available through The 3rd Thing Press. Eli has been celebrating this new/primordial holiday in a wide range of ways including through leading a massive public sculpture installation at The Providence Public Library. Eli and 300 Modern Humans (ages 0.3-83) built a 450-million-year timeline of flora and fauna (mostly out of recyclables) over 9 months of asynchronous but collaborative organism building workshops. Their installation is on view until December, 2024. Now Eli is basking in intertidal naturedrag, flotilla scheming and DIY festoonery. Eli organizes with Showing Up for Racial Justice-RI and is a supporting member of DARE’s (Direct Action for Rights and Equality) Behind The Walls committee. They are a New Georges affiliated artist, a member of the 2023-2024 cohort of The Public’s Devised Theater Working Group, and part of the clown collective, ‘brotherdykes unlimited.’ Eli parents a 14-year-old human and tends a small menagerie of succulents and moss balls.
Shade Structure
At the watering end of Public Street, Eli Nixon (and a team led by Fatema Maswood) are installing a thatched shade structure. The structure will provide desperately needed shade; a respite for anyone navigating the hot and hazy pavement off Allen’s Ave. The Big Blue Bug gazes out on the humble structure, maybe encouragaing those steaming in 95 traffic to follow their pixilated eyes out to the blue slice of water sparkling between the salt mountain and the rust heap. The structure commemorates the humanity and survival of current neighborhood residents, and their ongoing efforts for public acess to the shoreline. It commemorates the plants, birds and human communities that once thrived in that area before it was zoned for lust and L.U.S.T. (leaking underground storage tanks). We invite you to this spot to gather or rest. May this shelter made of trees, bamboo, reeds, and the labor of friends honor the ancient organisms that existed here before the petrochemical and scrap metal takeover of our urban coastline. May it celebrate and amplify the legacy of all the people who continue to need, and to fight for, safe public right of ways to the Bay.
On view:
Thursday, July 10 – Thursday, August 28, 2025
Public St and Allens Ave, Providence, RI 02903
