Manual / Issue 15

New life is always shown to us through mokingpu, the color green—the light green stems of rabbitbrush, one of the few colors seen the winter; the tender green shoots of new corn that emerge in the spring against the backdrop of the dry brown earth. Green offers hope. Green represents life.

–Susan Sekaquaptewa

A welcome splash of color after a long winter, the RISD Museum’s fifteenth issue of Manual is awash in shades of green, celebrating the color's myriad associations with nature and growth, environmentalism and sustainable practices, newness and hope (as well as poison and currency) and delving into the histories of specific pigments and processes. Manual 15 opens with an introductory essay by Hopi grower Susan Sekaquaptewa, who details the soft hues of the flora of Northern Arizona. “You appreciate plants more when you develop a relationship with them,” she explains.

From the Files

Gina Borromeo and Ingrid Neuman examine the rich patina on the surface of an ancient Etruscan bronze stamnos.
 

Artists on Art

Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie, a farmer and poet, digs in with Fertility Is Not Green.

Kyle Green offers an exchange with bitcoin in The Times.

Elizabeth James-Perry commemorates an experience in wampum.
 

Double Takes

Tayana Fincher and Simon Rettig discuss green’s presence in a vibrant Persian tomb cover

Paul Crenshaw and Pedro da Costa Felgueiras peer into the green screen backing a late fifteenth-century portrait of a cleric

Rebecca Bedell and Ananda Martins venture deep into Martin Johnson Heade’s lush Brazilian Forest

Nicole M. Merola and Timmons Roberts marvel at “And ice, mast-high, came floating by / As green as emerald”
 

Portfolio

Loose links and clear couplings from across the RISD Museum’s collection
 

Object Lessons

Wai Yee Chiong spotlights the fading beauties of the Green Towers in Suzuki Harunobu’s Ehon seirō bijin awase

Emily Banas uncovers arsenic in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wallpapers

Sean Nesselrode Moncada documents Enrique Chagoya’s The Pastoral or Arcadian State: Illegal Alien’s Guide to Greater America

Conor Moynihan offers up notes on Gravity’s Dream by Chitra Ganesh

Taylor Rose Payer recounts Ojibwe survivance in a bandolier bag

How To

Kajette Solomon lays out how to tek yuh hand tun fashion as revealed in a scrapbook by Jamaican makers from the late 1800s