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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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  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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  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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  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.

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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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  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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  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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  Rethinking the Romans: New Views of Ancient Sculpture

  Georgina E. Borromeo

  Exhibition Notes, Number 13, 2001. This gallery guide has been created to accompany the exhibition Rethinking the Romans: New Views of Ancient Sculpture at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). The installation presents RISD’s exceptional Roman sculpture collection in light of new scholarship, which stresses meaning, use, and context within Roman culture. Includes six short essays.

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  Art Context: Free not Free: An Installation by Indira Freitas Johnson

  David Henry and Indira Freitas Johnson

  Exhibition Notes, Number 14, Spring 2001. What Is Really Free? Acts of kindness and the stories people tell: an Interview. Between February and June of this year, Indira Freitas Johnson traveled each week from the Chicago area to work with a literacy group at the Knight Memorial Branch of the Providence Public Library. Starting with these students, recent immigrants learning English, Johnson began to collect stories of occasions where people had given "freely” of their time and spirit for the nourishment of others. With the assistance of five graduate students from Rhode Island School of Design, Johnson expanded her collection to include personal stories from throughout the community. David Henry, Head of Education at The RISD Museum, posed the following questions to Johnson.

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  Art ConText: On This Ground: An Installation by Rebecca Belmore

  David Henry and Rebecca Belmore

  Exhibition Notes, Number 11, Summer 2000. On getting acquainted with a community and making art in strange places: An Interview. Between March and June 2000, Rebecca Belmore was the Art ConText artist-in-residence at the Providence Public Library’s Smith Hill Branch. She participated in the transformation of an empty lot behind the library; worked with a group of immigrants in a library literacy program; and engaged students at the nearby Camden Avenue Elementary School; all while creating the artwork that now dominates the Museum’s Farago Entry Gallery. Following are her thoughts on questions posed by David Henry, Head of Education, The RISD Museum.

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  Art ConText: Memory of Surfaces: An Installation by Ernesto Pujol

  David Henry and Ernesto Pujol

  Exhibition Notes, Number 9, Fall 1999. The Esthetics of Knowledge: A Conversation between David Henry and Ernesto Pujol. The following conversation took place between David Henry, Head of Education, The RISD Museum, and Ernesto Pujol, Art ConText artist in residence.

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  Art ConText: This, and my heart: An Installation by Lynne Yamamoto

  David Henry, Lynne Yamamoto, and Stephen Oliver

  Exhibition Notes, Number 10, Spring 2000. On collaboration, the inner lives of young women, and teaching artists or artist teachers: An Interview. As Art ConText artist-in-residence between January 8 and March 9, 2000, Lynne Yamamoto worked with students from Providence’s Mount Pleasant Public High School and a group of six students from Rhode Island School of Design in the development of This, and my heart The following are her thoughts on questions posed by David Henry, Head of Education, The RISD Museum, and Stephen Oliver, Art ConText Project Coordinator.

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  Drawn from the Collection: Part of the Fabric

  Holly Hughes

  Exhibition Notes, Number 4, 1998. Artists who use fiber as their medium have offered up images to artists with paint on their hands for millennia: images of human beings, propositions about the natural world, and an abstract formal language of potent and unrelenting power. The rotating exhibitions of Asian textiles in The RISD Museum’s collection offer the opportunity to visit an extraordinarily well stocked and organized attic of collective memory. These textiles are tickets to travel through time and space. Through them we can meditate in a Zen garden, embroider the afternoon away, accept a dinner invitation from a high official, examine a palace paradise, fly with a dragon. The depths, the surfaces, the rhythms, the stories, the colors, the iconography, the implications as source and inspiration all seem unlimited, overwhelming.

  Ten artists were asked to look, to study, to feel, to respond, to be part of the fabric. They have individually selected works from The RISD Museum’s Asian textile collection and in dialogue with their choices have produced their own artwork. Each artist’s selection and the resulting creation are displayed together in this exhibition. As a teaching method and an adventure, I hope that this show encourages every student and every viewer to see the Asian textile collection, decorative arts, and the Museum as an irresistible set of experiences upon which to draw.