DigitalCommons@RISD

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  Manual / Issue five

  Amy Pickworth, Editor; Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor; S. Hollis Mickey, Editor; Jen Bervin; Jean Blackburn; Gina Borromeo; Laurie Brewer; A. Will Brown; Bolaji Campbell; Dennis Congdon; Jeremy Diller; Jan Howard; Kate Irvin; Maureen C. O'Brien; Emily J. Peters; Siebren Versteeg; Elizabeth A. Williams; and C. D. Wright

  Manual, a journal about art and its making. Unfinished. Loose threads unknotted. Ideas unrealized. Outlines left bare. Function unperformed. Patterns uncut. Luster removed with time and wear. We rarely examine unfinished things. The unfinished is easily overlooked in favor of the fully rendered and complete, but consider those sketchy lines, those fraying ends: the unfinished has potency. The unfinished offers evidence of process, reveals traces of technique, trembles with latent possibility. The essays, images, and projects presented in the fifth issue of Manual attend to the fluid potential of objects that are in some way incomplete.

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  Manual / Issue four

  Amy Pickworth, Editor; Sarah Ganz Blythe, editor; S. Hollis Mickey, editor; Lawrence Berman; A. Will Brown; Linda Catano; Spencer Finch; Jessica Helfend; Kate Irvin; Dominic Molon; Maggie Nelson; Ingrid Neuman; Margot McIlwain Nishimura; Karen B. Schloss; Anna Strickland; Louis van Tilborgh; Oda van Maanen; and Elizabeth A. Williams

  Manual, a journal about art and its making. Blue.The fourth issue. Indigo blue, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, cerulean blue, zaffre blue, indanthrone blue, phthalo blue, cyan blue, Han blue, French blue, Berlin blue, Prussian blue, Venetian blue, Dresden blue, Tiffany blue, Lanvin blue, Majorelle blue, International Klein Blue, Facebook blue. The names given to different shades of blue speak of plants, minerals, and modern chemistry; exoticism, global trade, and national pride; capitalist branding and pure invention. The fourth issue of Manual is a meditation on blue. From precious substance to controllable algorithm to the wide blue yonder, join us as we leap into the blue.

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  Manual / Issue three

  Amy Pickworth, Editor; Sarah Ganz Blythe, editor; S. Hollis Mickey, editor; Gina Borromeo; Alison W. Chang; Michelle Clayton; Jim Drain; Daniel Heyman; Andrew Martinez; Ellen McBreen; Thangam Ravindranathan; Rebecca Schneider; Susan Smulyan; and Gwen Strahle

  Manual, a journal about art and its making. Circus. The third issue centers on the theme of "Circus." Includes analyses of various pieces in the museum's archive, a fold-out poster by Jim Drain, and a selection of artworks owned by the museum that loosely address said theme.

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  Manual / Issue two

  Amy Pickworth, Editor; S. Hollis Mickey, editor; Sarah Ganz Blythe, editor; James Allen; Alison W. Chang; Kenneth Goldsmith; Daniel Harkett; Cyrus Highsmith; Jan Howard; Kate Irvin; Antoine Revoy; and Nancy Skolos

  Manual, a journal about art and its making. Lorem ipsum.The second issue. In potently meaningful and deliberately meaningless ways, this issue, “Lorem ipsum,” celebrates text. The standard placeholder text used by designers and printers, lorem ipsum isn’t really Latin. Mangled over centuries of use, the passage has become meaningless and untranslatable—and yet it is highly useful in that in its incomprehensibility, it occupies space. Over the centuries and across many inventions and innovations in type and printing, lorem ipsum has acted as a space filler and form shaper in conventional printing, desktop publishing, and electronic typesetting. Join us as we read and read into calls to action, incantations, prayers, portrayals, missives, notes, proclamations, and musings.

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  Manual / Issue one

  Amy Pickworth, Editor; S. Hollis Mickey, editor; Sarah Ganz Blythe, editor; Robert Brinkerhoff; Maureen O'Brien; Sheila Bonde; James McShane; Elizabeth Williams; and Kate Irvin

  Manual, a journal about art and its making. Hand in Hand. The inaugural issue of The Manual, a twice-yearly publication by the RISD Museum. The theme of this first issue is “hand in hand,” a phrase first recorded in the 16th century. Its early usage described the clasping of palm to palm, but the term has since come to encompass more than this literal meaning. To be hand in hand is also to be connected, joined, concurrent, well matched. Thumb through these pages to find rigorous, imaginative musings as artists and academics make solid contact, gesture wildly, and put their fingers on the pulse of new ideas. In your grasp, an open invitation to explore objects and materials, and the meanings and makings of things.

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  RISD Business: Sassy Signs & Sculptures

  Alejandro Diaz and Judith Tannenbaum

  Exhibition Notes, Number 42, Fall 2012. Ranging from quaint stereotypes of Mexican identity to current socio-economic and art-world commentary, Alejandro Diaz’s text-based works and installations use language as a form of cultural critique and resistance. Conceptual and campy, his humor infused politics and choice of everyday materials are emblematic of his ongoing involvement with art as a form of entertainment, activism, public intervention, and free enterprise. His projects take place outdoors on city streets as well as inside galleries and museums.

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  The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Rhode Island

  Alison W. Chang

  Exhibition Notes, Number 41, Summer 2012. RISD Museum was the recipient of fifty contemporary works from the celebrated collectors Dorothy and Herb Vogel. Both worked as civil servants throughout their lives so they never had extraordinary means with which to build a collection, but acquired more than 4000 works since their marriage in 1962. Their commitment to minimal and conceptual art is well-known, but their taste was much broader and included work rooted in Abstract Expressionism as well as figurative compositions. Most of the collection was given to the National Gallery of Art. The gift to Rhode Island is part of a broader effort to spread their collection across the United States with fifty works going to one institution in each of the fifty states.

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  Dan Walsh | Uncommon Ground

  Judith Tannenbaum

  Exhibition Notes, Number 40, 2012. Dan Walsh has been devoted to abstract painting since he arrived in New York in the early 1980s. Naturally his work has evolved over the past three decades, but he has remained consistently attached to Minimalism’s basic language of geometry and grids.

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  Painting Air: Spencer Finch

  Spencer Finch and Judith Tannenbaum

  Exhibition Notes, Number 39, Winter 2012. Spencer Finch, an artist known internationally for artwork that captures fleeting or intangible natural phenomena and sensory experiences, received his MFA in Sculpture from RISD in 1989. In the two decades since, Finch has created drawings, watercolors, photography, and video as well as sculpture and installations—selecting mediums and methods that seem best suited to conveying his fascination with light, color, and atmosphere. His focus of attention ranges from a speck of dust seen in a shaft of light in his studio to grand glaciers in New Zealand.

  As a graduate student Finch worked in the RISD Museum's department of Painting and Sculpture with then curators Daniel Rosenfeld and Ann Slimmon Woolsey and spent many hours absorbing the art of the past and present on view in the galleries. In subsequent years Finch renewed his relationship with the collections from time to time as a visiting artist and lecturer. Last year, in her position as Interim Director, Woolsey invited Finch to create an exhibition of his own work in the new large Chace Center gallery.

  In a subsequent site visit and conversations with Judith Tannenbaum, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art, Finch's interest in choosing works from the Museum's storage vaults emerged, and the project expanded to include the adjoining gallery. Like many museums, the RISD Museum is only able to display a small percentage of its rich holdings at any given time; many objects remain inaccessible to visitors due to limited gallery space and a variety of other reasons. The precedent for inviting an artist to serve as curator and delve into storage dates back to Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol. Mounted at the RISD Museum in 1970, this seminal exhibition inspired similar projects nationally and internationally in more recent decades.

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  Pilgrims of Beauty: Art and Inspiration in 19th Century Italy

  Crawford Alexander Mann III

  Exhibition Notes, Number 38, Spring 2012. In the 19th century Italy was the most desirable destination for travelers from every corner of Europe and beyond. Thousands crossed mountains, even oceans, to go there, leaving their "barbarous” homelands to study and admire Italy’s unsurpassed aesthetic and cultural riches. A poem in the New England Magazine in 1831 described the goals and ideals of visiting Italy on a European Grand Tour, calling those who did so "pilgrims of beauty.” Like religious pilgrims of centuries past, these lovers of art participated in a ritual journey, a powerful shared experience of Italy’s magnificent landscape, history, architecture, and museums. In response to everything seen, felt, and imagined while exploring Italy, 19th-century artists and tourists created and purchased a variety of new works of art. Many visited repeatedly or settled for extended stays in Rome, Florence, Naples, and Venice, making Italy an important meeting point for artists and patrons. The vibrant atmosphere enriched the careers of many of the era’s great artists.

  This exhibition presents the vast array of media and materials in which they worked, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, furniture, and jewelry. Furthermore, the diversity of themes and styles among these objects, from Neoclassicism through Post-Impressionism, demonstrates that Italy remained an important center for artistic training and a consistent source of inspiration throughout a century of revolutionary changes in the worlds of politics, science, and art.

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  Collision

  Judith Tannenbaum

  Exhibition Notes, Number 37, 2010. Collision is an experiment in exhibition-making. It began when painter Jackie Saccoccio invited a group of artists (seventeen, including herself) to contribute works of their own choosing to a show in which paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, prints, videos, and various hybrid forms would literally collide: butting up against each other, overlapping, and even altering one another in an improvisatory fashion. Depending on their placement in the gallery as determined by the individual artists, the works could become entirely subsumed in the larger communal cacophony.

  Most often group exhibitions in museums are conceived and organized by a curator, who selects the works of art and decides how they will be displayed in the gallery space. If the exhibition includes living artists, the curator consults with them about requirements for presenting their individual work, but the overall installation is determined by the curator. In the case of Collision, the RISD Museum took a leap of faith, giving up a significant amount of its normal control, as the exhibition became a collaborative effort among Saccoccio, the participating artists, and the RISD Museum’s staff. Several artists added another layer of collaboration by inviting still more artists to assist them in making their works for the show.

  The RISD Museum has a tradition of inviting artists to “guest curate” exhibitions going back to Andy Warhol’s legendary Raid the Icebox I, in which the artist made a wonderfully quirky selection and installation of objects from the Museum’s storage vaults in 1969. More recent examples of artists creating exhibitions here by juxtaposing their own work with objects from storage include Jim lsermann’s Logic Rules (2000), Betty Woodman’sII Giardino depinto (2005), and Carl Ostendarp’s Pulled Up (2009), while projects by David Wayne McGee and Alexis Rockman featured their own paintings placed within the context of the Museum’s permanent collection galleries. Collision, however, represents the first time an artist has invited other artists to participate in creating a group exhibition at the Museum.

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  Tristin Lowe Under the Influence

  Tristin Lowe

  The moon, Earth's only satellite, has been a source of mystery and wonder since the beginning of recorded history, and probably before that as well. Inspired to understand its powerful presence and effects— from gravitational pull, tidal flow, and magnetic fields to its impact on animal and human behavior— artists and writers as well as scientists have studied the moon for centuries.

  Using low-tech but labor-intensive methods and materials, sculptor Tristin Lowe has created an interpretation of the moon to fill the Museum's Lower Farago Gallery. Lunacy is an inflatable sphere, about twelve and a half feet in diameter, that is covered in white felt, an ancient fabric, formed through a process of matting and pressing, that absorbs energy, light, and sound. The felt surface, composed of fourteen sections sewn together, is astonishingly hand-worked. Myriad raised craters and rings approximate rather than replicate the moon's terrain.

  Lowe's previous interpretations of animate and inanimate objects, often made from unexpected materials ranging from bourbon and smoke to fabric and fur, are characteristically comical and absurd. In contrast, his current work, which focuses on outer space, planets, satellites, black holes, gravity, and orbital motion, seems more subdued and contemplative but equally surprising.

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  After You're Gone: An Installation by Beth Lipman

  Judith Tannenbaum and Beth Lipman

  Exhibition Notes, Number 33, Fall 2008. In July 2006, RISD Museum director Hope Alswang and curator Judith Tannenbaum encountered Beth Lipman’s 2o-foot-long glass tableau entitled Bancketje (Banquet), then on exhibit at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. This tour de force, created in 2003 (now in the permanent collection of the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.), inspired The RISD Museum to invite the artist to visit its galleries, as well as collections in storage, in order to create an exhibition here. In October 2007, Lipman visited the Museum and was particularly excited by its American period rooms in Pendleton House and the decorative arts collections. She returned in March 2008 to work with students in RISD’s Glass Department. With their assistance in the hot shop, she produced several topiary sculptures and parts of the full-size glass settee featured in this installation, which she decided to entitle After You’re Gone. From her home base in Wisconsin, Lipman created glass “wallpaper” based on an 18th-century French pattern sample in The RISD Museum’s collection, two “ portraits” in glass, 500 snails, and two squirrels. The installation also incorporates Laid Table (Still Life with Metal Pitcher), a large circular sculpture, which she made in September 2007 with this exhibition in mind.

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  Designing Traditions: Student Explorations in the Asian Textile Collection

  Kate Irvin, Laurie Anne Brewer, and Anais Missakian

  Exhibition Notes, Number 32,Summer 2008. RISD’s newest generation of textile designers source the RISD Museum’s vast Asian textile collection in this popular collaborative project and biennial exhibition. Traditional craftsmanship sparks contemporary creativity as objects inspire innovative new textiles and garments.

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  From Dürer to Van Gogh: Gifts from Eliza Greene Radeke and Helen Metcalf Danforth

  Emily J. Peters

  Exhibition Notes, Number 30, Summer 2008.The Museum of Art was founded simultaneously with the Rhode Island School of Design in 1877 by a group of women led by Eliza Radeke's mother, Helen Adelia Rowe (Mrs. Jesse) Metcalf. RISD’s stated purpose was to educate artists in drawing, painting, modeling, and design for the benefit of industry and art, and to educate the public so that they could appreciate and support art and design. The creation of a museum collection was inseparable from these objectives. Both Eliza Radeke and Helen Danforth, as heirs to those aspirations, made extraordinary individual gifts to all departments of the Museum, especially to drawings, prints, ancient art, textiles, American furniture and decorative arts, and European and American painting. Drawings and prints were essential components in the overall educational goals they set, as well as being personal passions for both women. Between them, they presented over 1,300 works on paper to the Museum. In concert with the Museum’s directors and curators and with dealers overseas and at home, these women made truly remarkable contributions to the holdings of 19th century French drawings, but the collection is also decidedly rich in Old Master and American drawings.

  Although both women had wide-ranging tastes and purchased exceptional drawings of all types, a few broad generalizations may be made about the kinds they sought and favored. Eliza Radeke was inspired by works on paper as germinations of artistic ideas, seeing in them instructive potential. Sketches, including figure studies, animal studies, landscapes, and portraits, all fit this ideal. She often selected a notable subject or exquisite technical example over a well-known artistic name. Helen Danforth's gifts reflect her interest in acquiring works by the most important artists and thereby increasing the prestige of RISD and its Museum. She enhanced the holdings with many finished presentation drawings by the greatest names in the history of art. Both approaches have enriched the collection in innumerable ways.

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  Styrofoam: From Industrial Invention to Artistic Transformation

  Judith Tannenbaum and Amy Pickworth, Editor

  Exhibition Notes, Number 29, Spring 2008. Ubiquitous in our culture, styrofoam is used to insulate buildings, package computers and other consumer products, and produce picnic coolers and containers for fast food and take-out. For decades, artists have employed styrofoam in the making of models and molds for casting. Today, however, more and more artists are exploring it as a primary material or a subject in its own right, using it in new and ingenious ways to create sculpture, paintings, and installations.

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  Evolution/Revolution: The Arts and Crafts in Contemporary Fashion and Textiles

  Joanne Dolan Ingersoll and Amy Pickworth, Editor

  Exhibition Notes, Number 28, Spring 2008. Evolution/Revolution brings together the textile work of designers from the U.S., Britain, Europe, South and Central America, and Japan, and draws philosophical parallels between these contemporary artists and those of the Arts and Crafts Movement of 19th-century Britain.The exhibition is organized around the themes of Storytelling, Experimentation and Materials, Collaboration, and Art and Life—key ideas that spring from the Arts and Crafts spirit.

  One of the most widely influential art and design movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Arts and Crafts Movement was an aesthetic and political response to a world stripped of meaning by the Industrial Revolution. It sought to right this wrong by championing beauty and truth in everyday objects, and in the process profoundly changed architecture and the decorative arts. Members of the movement were especially appalled by the inhumane work conditions created by the factory system. By celebrating the honesty and authenticity of hand work and the traditional arts, they sought to reconnect the makers and users of objects through a more holistic approach to work itself. The movement offered a model for reform; work would be more meaningful if factories did not dominate production, and life would be better if cheap machine-made goods were replaced by objects that were carefully designed and crafted. The movement, abhorred badly designed goods but did not necessarily reject technology out of hand. Rather, it sought to use it in ways that facilitated, rather than fragmented, the process of making.

  Arts and Crafts philosophy has continued to influence new generations, as we see in the work of the contemporary artists and designers of Evolution/Revolution. Like their predecessors, these new designers grapple with mass production and consumerism. Using state-of-the-art technology as well as traditional methods, they are redefining what “handmade" means. By developing humane and ingenious solutions to contemporary problems such as sustainability and cultural preservation, they, like the Arts and Crafts artists of the 19th century, are the creators of a new tradition.

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  Feathers, Flowers, Talons and Fangs: Power and Serenity in Japanese Nature Prints

  Deborah Del Gais and Judith A. Singsen

  Exhibition Notes, Number 26, Winter 2007. Fierce tigers and awe-inspiring dragons—these subjects hardly seem to fit into the same category as delicate songbirds like the nightingale and blossoms as ephemeral as the cherry. Even so, a wide array of flora and fauna and bugs and beasts appears in Japanese prints of the genre traditionally called “birds and flowers” (kachō). These Edo-period prints (1608-1867) reflect the profound Japanese appreciation for the natural world.

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  Island Nations | Islas Naciones: New Art from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the Diaspora

  Judith Tannenbaum and René Morales

  In the 1960s, the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (The RISD Museum), established an early and deep connection with the art of Latin America. In a sweeping attempt to create a broader context for our strong North American collections, money and energy were committed to the purchase of the work of contemporary artists from all over South and Central America and the Caribbean. For this pioneering foresight, we continue to be grateful to former Director Daniel Robbins (1932-95; director at The RISD Museum, 1965-71) and the family of Nancy Sayles Day, who established the Nancy Sayles Day Collection of Modern Latin American Art in her memory.

  Over the years these holdings have grown into an impressive body of works that are regularly seen in special exhibitions as well as within the Museum’s twentieth century galleries. For Island Nations, our curators have chosen to look beyond the Museum’s collections in order to focus on art made in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, and also by émigrés from these countries. In part, narrowing the view has allowed us to zero in on important contemporary issues — tropical paradise countered by economic isolation, sometimes desperate poverty, and emigration — that are common to this one area of the extremely broad region defined as Latin America. Judith Tannenbaum, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art, and René Morales, Curatorial Assistant, traveled to the area to visit artists’ studios and homes, following the trail of work that defies stereotype.

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  Historic Wallpapers, 1750-1949

  Catherine Wilkinson-Zerner

  Exhibition Notes, Number 21, Spring 2003. In the 18th century, European and American interiors were transformed by the rise of a new kind of wall treatment. Wallpaper – mass-produced, affordable, and highly practical – reached a broader audience than fine prints and paintings. This wide distribution prompted wallpaper artists to heed the contemporary interests of the expanding consumer class. As a result, wallpaper often recorded social changes as they were expressed in the shifting relationship between high art and popular culture throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

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  Crisis Response: An Exhibition of Art Created in Times of Conflict and Catastrophe from the Assassination of JFK to 9/11

  Karl Schoonover

  Exhibtion Notes, Fall 2002. A group of works in this exhibition emphasizes the differing investments of individuals and groups in the icons of patriotism. Some artists borrow and transform recognizable icons and symbols to invite a dialogue with their viewers about the role of patriotism in troubled times.

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  Art ConText: In Providence: Wendy Ewald

  David Henry

  Exhibition Notes, Number 19, Summer 2002. Beginning in late February and continuing throughout the remainder of the semester, Wendy Ewald visited Michelle Silvia’s classroom of special–education students at the Carl G. Lauro Memorial Elementary School in Providence. The photographs and videos of the children learning to read and the patterns used in classroom lessons are the result of a three-way collaboration— teacher, students, and artist. The following questions were posed to Wendy Ewald and Michelle Silvia by David Henry, Head of Education at The RISD Museum.

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  The Written Word

  Susan Ward and Margot McIlwain Nishimura

  Exhibition Notes, Number 20, Fall 2002. The Written Word brings together pages from medieval manuscripts and early printed works, giving a sample of the various types of books created between 1100 and 1550. Individual pages were a popular way, especially in the earlier part of the 20th century, for museums and libraries to acquire representative collections, and many of The RISD Museum’s manuscript leaves were acquired as such a group in 1943.

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  The Object of Ornament: European Design, 1480-1800

  Judith A. Singsen

  Exhibition Notes, Number 18, Spring 2002. This exhibition arose from a collaboration between participants in a Brown University art-history seminar of Fall 2001 and curators from three departments at The RISD Museum: Costume and Textiles; Decorative Arts; and Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. Studying each department's resources in the area of European ornament, the group examined how the work of artisans in materials such as wood, metal, fiber, and ceramics responded to and participated in the inventions of designers who drew patterns for prints. In the exhibition, related ornamented objects are clustered according to the themes of entertaining, study, dress, and food preparation.

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  Art ConText: 15 Minutes: The Ballad of Then and Now, Paintings by David Wayne McGee

  David Henry and David Wayne McGee

  Exhibition Notes, Number 16, Winter 2001. During the fall of 2001, McGee moved to Providence from his home in Houston, Texas, to be the Art ConText artist in residence. Given the challenge of introducing people at the Olneyville Branch of the Providence Public Library to The RISD Museum, McGee did what he does best: he painted. The following interview with David Henry, Head of Education at The RISD Museum, was conducted a month before the paintings were to be hung.