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’t 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 Touro Park in the city’s 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.
Na Kim, the renowned book designer and painter, had never been to Newport when curator and longtime Vogue writer Dodie Kazanjian invited her to make a project for Art&Newport, the organization Kazanjian founded in 2017 to bring contemporary art into the city’s historic buildings and landscapes.
It 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.
