This late fifteenth-century Virgin and Child was created with subtlety, flexibility, and portability in mind. These features were central to its medieval use—and its use at the RISD Museum.
During the Fall of 2015, Sheila Bonde’s graduate students in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University undertook an investigation of the wood sculptures in the RISD Museum collections. This multi-author paper includes some of their findings.
The future is an abstract concept, hard to decode and difficult to predict. A summer intern reflects on fashion and future in this creative writing piece.
Ceramics student Lindsay Savoie subverts traditional hierarchies that value painting and sculpture more highly than utilitarian art forms like pottery and photography.
Curatorial intern Sam Nehila uses collage to create abstracted forms and explore the trans experience of engaging with the museum’s collection of male nude bodies.
Digital Initiatives intern Ariel Hirschhorn explores the “Maker” field in the museum’s database to examine the collection from a programmer’s perspective
In 1971, a group of radical students in Providence produced stirring silkscreen posters. Their images contributed to the vibrant visual culture of antiwar protest.
Luca Cambiaso used iron gall ink and a quill pen to create this drawing in about 1570. RISD professor Andrew Raftery walks us through the making of iron gall ink and a quill pen, and explains how he copied Cambiaso's drawing.
In earlier decades, retouching (or “inpainting”) using reversible painting materials would have been employed where compositional elements were missing.
"Raid the Database with Natalja Kent" is the first installment in an ongoing project in which artists bring new curatorial perspectives to the museum's extensive collections.
Marking the Museum’s entrance into online publishing, Altered States: Etching in Late 19th-Century Paris combines a scholarly collection of essays with a video glossary of printmaking techniques.
Richard Merkin was for decades the go-to authority for all things dandyish. As we see in the ephemera from his life and his tailored clothing on view in the exhibition "Artist/Rebel/Dandy", his personality and fashion sense live on at RISD.
In 1969, artist Andy Warhol was invited to curate an exhibition at the RISD Museum using works from the permanent collection that were not on view, but in storage.