At 19, Umberto Crenca was roaming the streets of Providence in a leather jacket, often with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He was a parochial school graduate so disruptive in school that nuns bragged about how often he appeared in their penance books — and when he wasn’t on his knees asking for God’s forgiveness, he says, those nuns were whacking him around in the back office. To hear him tell it, he was a kid who knew where the line was, and man, did he like to test it. After graduating, he helped run encounter groups — a form of group talk therapy — for people recovering from substance use. 

The Federal Hill native came with a tough exterior, to say the least.

When one of the people in the group asked him what he did for a living — besides being a wise guy — he told them without hesitation: “I’m an artist.”

He had been calling himself an artist for years. During a class exercise in sixth grade, a nun passed out art supplies to all the students except for him, saying he “wouldn’t be interested.” He took the bait and spent all night perfecting his art project — a small elf drawing to be used as a blackboard decoration — with a dozen different versions spread out on the living room floor. From that day forward, between the knuckle-raps and penances, his teachers gave him art projects that he could channel his energy into.

But when he told the members of the encounter group that he was an artist, he wasn’t actually making art at all. He’d never even set foot in a proper art supply store in his entire life.

“They said, why don’t you go down to the art store, get some supplies, and start making art,” Crenca remembers. So he zipped up his leather jacket, lit up a new cigarette, and made his way down to Block Artists’ Materials, which would have just moved into the Hay Building on Dyer Street in 1970.

“Instantly, I started getting anxiety,” he said. He left without buying anything, and at the next encounter group, they pulled it out of him. He had been intimidated by the store: colored pencils, paints, oil pastels. “This place was a treasure chest of things, but I had no idea where to start,” he said. One of the group members, sculptor and RISD alumni Gail Whitsitt-Lynch — who would later design The Eagle sculpture in Roger Williams Park for the nation’s bicentennial — offered to take him herself.

“Gail — I could get very emotional talking about her,” Crenca says. No longer the 19-year-old in the black and white photograph on the wall in his home, Crenca is 75 now. He has a white goatee trailing a few inches below his chin and he’s traded in his leather jacket for a paint-covered denim smock. Whitsitt-Lynch died a few years ago in September 2017.

“She not only took me to the art store, but she took me to the RISD Museum, which I didn’t know existed, [and] said I could come there anytime I want,” Crenca said. “And then [she] took me to RISD studios, and I was blown away — like, young people get to do this?” He started renting a studio and has always had a place to make art since.

Crenca’s early life seems to be full of these moments, this balance between making art because people told him he couldn’t and making art because they told him he could. It was the nun who underestimated him in sixth grade who sparked his interest in the arts, and it was people like Whitsitt-Lynch who nurtured and sustained it. After a particularly nasty review of one of his art shows in The Providence Journal in 1983, it was a combination of encouragement and spite that inspired him to help create AS220. The art organization, intended to be an unjuried space for artists to show their work and improve their skills, has since undoubtedly become the most influential art organization in Providence and has inspired similar models across the country and abroad.

After decades at the helm of AS220, Crenca retired just before the COVID-19 pandemic. He describes his stewardship of the organization as an artistic project — one that took up so much of his time it became difficult to focus on the other forms of art that had inspired him to begin with. His retirement has been a fruitful return to his origins in painting and drawing.

Now, he’s either walking around the city or spending time painting in his home, a squat former Italian-American social club off Charles Street. The rooms inside, including a bocce court in the basement, have been transformed into a lively space for Crenca, his wife and fellow artist Susan Clausen, and their cat Rocco. Papier mâché sculptures dangle from the ceiling in the kitchen over a gallon-sized container of olive oil and dishes stacked eight inches high. The walls — painted brightly in orange, green, and blue — are covered in framed photographs and paintings, garlands, prints and posters, masks, and other sculptures. One windowsill is piled about three inches high with little matchbox cars, and the top edge of one picture frame holds a small collection of the toys dispensed from a gumball machine. The concrete trim around one doorway is inlaid with hundreds of found objects: screws, toys, bottles, shells, and tiles. An enormous oil painting of a raven watches over the kitchen, and a magnet on their refrigerator — itself a gallery of memorabilia and artwork — reads “EXCUSE THE MESS, BUT WE LIVE HERE.”

In this explosion of color and ephemera, one hallway stands out from the other rooms: Nearly 100 canvases, mostly identical in size and outfitted with the same nondescript black frame, depicting frank, unfussy views from around Providence. The neat, precise rows of paintings span the wall from floor to ceiling, end to end. 

Once he was able to fully sever himself from running AS220, Crenca started devoting time to a growing opus, one that has become his other claim to art fame: Divine Providence. The selection in this hallway is just a small sample of this expansive body of work; when we spoke with Crenca in early March, his paintings of the city numbered near 300.

“The whole idea was really kind of a pedestrian perspective of the city,” Crenca said, adding that he seeks to elevate the common experience. “People who walk to the bodega, who walk to church — what their experience is.”

Each painting is titled by its number in the series. “On the back of each canvas, it says what neighborhood it’s in,” Crenca said. “It won’t give the address. I think that’s kind of intrusive, in a way, for people. I want to maintain a little bit of mystery around it.”

But still, for many Providence residents, the views are instantly recognizable. Mia Market, at the corner of Elmwood Avenue and Moore Street, and City Gas just across the street. The refurbished neon sign outside Olneyville New York System, and the view of Savers in the North End from a car on Branch Avenue.

Crenca bases the paintings on photographs taken while out walking around the city, or occasionally, from a car window. His perspective is palpable — the composition of each painting at first glance can seem narrow or unconventional, but is also oddly revealing. In one painting, he’s zeroed in on a chickadee perched on the top of a street sign; in another, on a tulip blooming near the Providence River. Though Crenca is only rarely pictured in any of these paintings, it is his interests, his aesthetics, that shape each scene.

While we’re chatting in Crenca’s kitchen, fellow PPS writer Katy pulls out a photograph she’d taken of the Mr. Lemon at the corner of Hawkins and Appian Streets, almost identical to the painting he had created of the intersection — though in his rendition, completed at the height of the pandemic, a mask had been added over the mural of Mr. Lemon on the side of the building. The mural has since returned mostly to its original form — but this momentary change is captured in Crenca’s work. 

We asked Crenca if he considers himself a historian. Without hesitation, he affirmed the characterization. Divine Providence “adds a political, social message, in the sense that it’s elevating the commonplace, getting people to see differently,” Crenca explained.

“Being a historian also cements your place in the telling of the story,” he said. That’s why it’s been so important to him to focus on these overlooked places — places that the powers that be have so far not been interested in documenting or remembering. That’s why the graffiti, the alleyways, the flyers on telephone poles, and the humble residential streets all have a special place in his work, as opposed to iconic buildings. So far in his series, there’s no Industrial Trust Building, no Turk’s Head, and very little from College Hill. His paintings of buildings like City Hall and the Cranston Street Armory are commissions — when he’s left to his own devices, Crenca would much prefer the backs of houses with vinyl siding and chain link fences. Often depicted is the triple-decker, one of the most common residential building types in Providence — “they’re not going to last forever,” he said, so painting them has been his strategy to document their existence and, should they be demolished, preserve their memory. Even in the short time since he began the Divine Providence series, some of the scenes he painted have already changed, in ways big and small — as exemplified by Mr. Lemon.

Crenca emphasized, though, that the city should not be static or frozen in time. “I have mixed feelings about [preservation], in the sense that things change,” he said. “You know the old adage, nothing is constant but change, right? I think some kinds of urban renewal are positive if they’re done right. But I also think that storytelling is critical to being human, and preservation is a way of storytelling.”

Though his paintings are dominated by buildings and inanimate objects, a number of Divine Providence pieces, probably around a third of them, feature people: what looks like a girl at her wedding or quinceañera, a construction crew downtown, a woman taking a phone call on her stoop. He said he tries to avoid taking reference photographs of people too often as a matter of personal privacy. 

“In terms of copyright, stuff like that, if you’re in a public space, you have no rights to your image,” Crenca said, “but there’s ethics involved. […] There is that intrusive nature of it.” He said he likes playing with the abstraction of architectural lines and streets anyway — though it can sometimes give the impression of a ghost town.

“I also think that storytelling is critical to being human, and preservation is a way of storytelling.”

Roughly five years out from the start of Divine Providence, Crenca has begun branching out to other projects, most recently with his Blue Moon series. Continuing with scenes around Providence, Blue Moon adds an element of the fantastical — for instance, many of the paintings feature a person flying over the horizon, and one of them depicts a Buddha statue sitting in the middle of Steeple Street by the Congdon & Carpenter Building in College Hill. These scenes are intercut with fluid lines, splitting the outrageously colorful from the ordinary. More representative of traditionally iconic Providence buildings, the series so far features the Industrial Trust Building, City Hall, Turk’s Head, and the Roger Williams statue at Prospect Terrace, as well as contemporary scenes from around the city. Sometimes the focal point of these paintings, sometimes a background element, is a blue moon, often eclipsing. 

The project is an exploration and expression of Crenca’s lifelong relationship with religion, and the boundary between the physical and metaphysical world, or a dream-state and non-dream state. 

“That’s a large part of it — the juxtaposition of two very different things, two very different ideas, and yet, they can coexist,” he said.

Crenca will be exhibiting his Blue Moon paintings, as well as a few from Divine Providence, at the Providence Art Club later this year — a somewhat unusual accomplishment for a non-member. Both he and Clausen are currently showing some work at the Angell Street Galleries. 

“There is something deeply rewarding about having lived and benefited from this community as a person, as an arts administrator and as an artist all my life, and then sort of paying [it] back by this kind of documentation,” Crenca said. “It just feels right.”

By Keating Zelenke & Katy Pickens // kzelenke@ppsri.org // kpickens@ppsri.org