Cy Gavin

Seven Paintings

IYRS School of Technology & Trades, Newport

25 July - 29 August 2025

photography credit: Michael Osean

Cy Gavin presents a series of site-responsive paintings that fuse maritime tradition with his gestural painting style. Installed in a historic 1831 stone building in Newport Harbor that is home to IYRS School of Technology & Trades, the exhibition explores the enduring links between seafaring and the stars.

Rendered on actual boat sails, the works resonate with the harborfront setting and the material history of shipbuilding. More than 50,000 hand-painted stars appear throughout the paintings, far exceeding the 4,500 visible to the naked eye. These stars function as both navigational symbols and references to ancestral knowledge, global trade, and the ocean’s magnetic pull.

Created specifically for IYRS’s Restoration Hall, a cavernous space where IYRS students repair and restore boats, the series includes Gavin’s largest painting to date—46 feet tall by 26 feet wide.

Gavin employs translucent materials and plays with light in innovative ways: color emerges both from reflected surface paint and silhouetted marks that block light from behind. Inspired by cyanotypes of boat schematics found in the IYRS library, the works evoke the relentless rhythm of ocean travel and the Atlantic’s shifting hues.

This body of work continues Gavin’s exploration of colonial legacies, ecology, and site-based memory, bringing past and present into luminous conversation.

Cy Gavin: Seven Paintings is presented by Art&Newport in collaboration with the artist and IYRS and organized by Dodie Kazanjian, founder of Art&Newport.

About the Artist

Cy Gavin (b. 1985, Pittsburgh, PA) creates powerful paintings that merge landscape, history, and memory. His work often explores sites shaped by historical trauma or cosmic significance,using vibrant brushwork and unconventional materials to create deeply personal and political narratives. After receiving his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2016, Gavin traveled to Bermuda to research his heritage, creating works that traced the island’s colonial legacy and Black history. Since relocating to the Hudson Valley, he has turned his attention to the natural world surrounding him, painting glacial boulders, eclipses, meadows, and forests in evocative, sometimes monumental formats. His work was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, and he was recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum. Gavin is represented by Gagosian Gallery

About IYRS School of Technology & Trades

IYRS School of Technology & Trades is a non-profit, post-secondary experiential learning institution in Newport, Rhode Island and is the premier marine trades and modern technology school in the United States. IYRS was founded in 1993 as the International Yacht Restoration School on the Newport harbor front. Since that time, IYRS has grown into a world-class learning institution offering four full-time, ACCSC-accredited programs. IYRS offers education & training programs for people with a passion for thinking and working with their hands. IYRS students go on to careers across a wide range of industries including marine, automotive, aerospace, consumer goods, wind energy, and composites.