Written by Taylor Baldwin, Guest Curator for ‘Everything is Change’ at the Newport Art Museum (June–September 2025), this letter offers an intimate look at the life and creative vision of Bobby Anspach (1987–2022). In “Vulnerability and Vision,” Baldwin reflects on his time working with Bobby and explores how his art invites us to slow down, connect, and be changed.

From fall 2015 to spring 2017, Bobby Anspach was a graduate student in the MFA sculpture program at RISD that I ran. Because of this, for a time, I knew Bobby very well as an artist. Also because of this, I did not know Bobby as a whole person; at its beginning, our relationship was shaped by the roles of teacher and student.

These roles meant that for a sustained period of years, he and I had weekly conversations about nearly every facet of the creative life of an artist, and his specific vision as an artist in particular. It is these conversations I am relying on to curate this exhibition, using them to help to organize this exhibition in a way that channels his vision as faithfully as I can, and to help viewers better know the compassionate, thoughtful, and principled human who made the work in this exhibition.

Bobby Anspach was a serenely implacable, deeply committed artist. He and his art had a special intensity reserved for true believers of a creative path. These are people who are willing to meet their talent with a tireless effort, their vision with openness and fluidity, and meet their insecurity with a fearless willingness to venture far, far out to the edges of experience, perception, and consciousness and report back.

Bobby went truly far out. And he brought back something he thought we urgently needed to know; he brought back something he believed would help us. His work is shaped by this joyful belief in the visionary experience: that if we all allow ourselves a special type of freedom, of vulnerability and risk, of connection, that we—and maybe the world—could be forever changed. In an often cynical and difficult world, Bobby tried—with sincerity and care—to give us that experience.

The first time I met Bobby was at an in-person interview for graduate study in the RISD MFA Program. I was in a shabby critique room behind a folding table with several of my faculty colleagues. Bobby walked in for his interview with us, sat down on the opposite side of this table, and proceeded to listen very intently to our questions, and answer all of them, all while leaning slightly forward with an open-mouthed smile, and making direct, sustained, and unblinking eye contact with everyone throughout the entire interview.

This would not be the last time I would experience, or talk about, continuous eye contact with Bobby. Afterward, one of my colleagues leaned back in their chair, let out a breath and said, “Well, that was intense.” It was clear to everyone that this was an artist of a particularly focused presence. The vulnerability and immediacy in that type of eye contact is not something that everyone is ready for, and I remember the effect it had in the room.

We were deeply interested in whatever was going on with this young artist. I had a colleague who had taught Bobby the prior year, and I called her as a reference for him. She told me that she thought Bobby was a genius, and that we were lucky to have him study with us. I would learn that we were.

I worked closely with him over the next two years. I found Bobby to be more deeply connected to his artistic vision than almost any artist I’ve known—out of hundreds. During his time in graduate school, he made artwork like his life depended on it. I think if you had asked him, he might have said he felt it did.

As I said, our relationship was shaped by the roles we occupied when we met—student and teacher—though we were likely closer in age and experience than those titles suggest. Over time, especially after he graduated, those roles began to blur. But for most of our relationship, my job—and my genuine interest—was to have long, regular conversations with Bobby about what he was making, how and why he was making it, and what mattered to him. If you knew Bobby, you know that meant a series of profoundly intense, far-ranging, and deeply felt conversations.

At that point in my life as an educator and an artist, I was very ready for this. We had many wild conversations.

A few notes from that time:

1. His was the only artist talk I ever saw that left some members of the audience openly weeping.

2. He is the only student I have had to ask to wear shoes in class.

3. He made an absolutely incredible stop motion animation.

4. He made scrappy, deeply engaging psychographic experiments.

5. But mostly, he made one amazing sculpture, over and over and over again.

As I understood it, he was only ever trying to make this one sculpture. In fact, as he put it, he was trying to make “the most beautiful sculpture in the world.” His “place for continuous eye contact.” He made it again and again, with different formats and materials, for an audience of one person, then two people.

Slight adjustments in how viewers would approach and interact with it, or in how the colored pom poms would hang, or how the sound and light would sync. Once for a museum, once for a parking lot, once for an art fair. He never seemed fully satisfied with any of the outcomes, but he was never deflated either. Each was one more step towards actually making this one sculpture.

He once told me that if he finally made this one sculpture right, he wouldn’t ever need to make another one. He would be done. He told me that this sculpture, if he was ever finally able to fully make it right, would save the world.

His unfailing belief that art was capable of creating a sense of unity, empathy, and understanding in viewers is the kind of optimism and faith in creative expression that the art world is in desperate need of.

I say “unfailing belief,” but that isn’t quite right; I had many conversations with Bobby about doubt. He did have doubts and fears. He talked with me about his doubt that anything—let alone something as feeble as a work of art—could connect deeply to anyone at a broad scale. Or that anything would be capable of changing and opening the minds of powerful people in position to address existential world problems in time. Or that what he was doing as an artist was anything but self-focused and ineffectual.

These are insecurities familiar to any artist. Doubt is an important and necessary part of a creative life, even though it can threaten creativity. But through these moments of doubt, Bobby always seemed to choose to believe that (as cliché as it sounds, and of which he was fully aware) he would choose to believe that art could change minds.

That was not an easy choice. He came to it not without struggle. But when he had to choose, he chose to believe and to hope that the work he was making would impact people in meaningful ways. And that is what I would call artistic faith. In this sense, Bobby was one of the most faithful artists I know.

To get very specific about what I know of Bobby’s faith in the artwork in Everything is Change—I know that he had a deep belief that an otherworldly, dissociative experience, one where you were encouraged to suspend normal social rules and stare directly and vulnerably into someone else’s eyes (or maybe your own) for a long, long time, that experience could possibly leave you permanently changed.

He had faith that it was possible that you could leave with a clear and unshakable understanding that you were inherently connected to the universe around you. He had faith that you would see yourself in a stranger’s eyes, recognize that the separation you felt from the world around you was an illusion, and that you would finally understand that you and others were just different parts of the same interconnected thing. He was hoping for true empathy, and he believed that profound experience would free all of us to make the changes needed for a better world.

The work in Everything is Change is the culmination of his efforts to make these places for us. The two 'Place for Continuous Eye Contact' sculptures are nearly a decade in the making, and the result of countless cycles of trial and error, tinkering and tearing down, innovation and development, making and remaking.

Having passed through that cauldron, they are phenomena unto themselves at this point, capable of producing an experience unlike nearly anything else. In a world where social media is driving us further and further from the present moment, these works anchor you in this time and place. This is more important than ever, offering a kind of singular experience that can only be had by being here, now, and by paying very close attention to your own sense of consciousness. The paintings, drawings, sculptures, and videos that surround them act as a prism on the singular experience of the large sculptural installations, fracturing them into constituent parts, like focused individual beams of color. In total, this exhibition charts the path of Bobby's creative life, through inspiration, innovation, doubt, and ultimately belief.

After graduating, Bobby went to New York to set up his professional studio. We stayed in touch regularly and I saw him several times after, as his emerging career found traction and recognition in the city. It was gratifying to see the larger art world begin to have their minds blown open by work that we knew so well by that point. It was exactly what you would hope for someone after working with them in the special and particular cauldron of art graduate school.

The last time I saw Bobby was at the Home Depot in Red Hook, appropriately enough. I ran into him in the plywood aisle. I was caught off guard seeing him unexpectedly, but there he was in his glasses, putter vest, and sandals. He told me all about his work at the moment and what he had been doing. I asked him what his plans for the future were. He was working furiously, but also joyful and at peace. He seemed good. He passed not that long after.

Bobby Anspach's artistic faith lives in this exhibition. It lives in the objects, it lives in the images, it lives in the writing, and it lives in the people who experience them. If we are lucky, it will live on in our minds, forever changed by the experience of staring deeply and continuously into a stranger's eyes.

Bobby Anspach was someone who asked strangers to look each other in the eyes for long periods of time. He asked these strangers to be vulnerable and present with one another in a way that he believed would cause an extraordinary sense of presence and consciousness to happen for both people involved in this strange kind of eye contact. He believed it had the potential to leave a viewer's mind forever changed.

If the works in the exhibition Everything is Change are anything, they are devices to assist us users in the changing of our own minds, if only we open ourselves to it.

Everything is Change brings together a range of works from across the artistic life of Bobby Anspach (1987–2022). At its core are two large-scale experiential sculptures—what Bobby called "places for continuous eye contact"—which he refined and reimagined repeatedly over the course of his life.

Uniquely, the exhibition also features a selection of drawings, paintings, small-scale sculptures, and video works developed in parallel, offering insight into the ideas and experiments that shaped the evolution of his most ambitious pieces.  Everything is Change offers a rare opportunity to encounter these monumental sculptural installations within the context of Bobby's broader studio process—charting his vision through experimentation, persistence, and transformation.

Taken as a whole, this is a life's work on display. The exhibition offers viewers a granular understanding of how a visionary artist actually develops their work over time; step by step, through small discoveries, iterative experiments, risky bets, and patient refinement. The everyday acts accumulate over years and across many works, until they become something that a viewer might experience as otherworldly and singular. This show reveals how something transcendental and magical can come together through a series of everyday materials, ordinary decisions, and time.

In Bobby Anspach's studio practice, the transcendent possibility of his work is made possible by his extraordinary commitment to a singular vision, and by a faith that these works could catalyze important, meaningful, and even transformative experiences for someone. In this case, we hope that someone is you.