Manual / Issue 16

Intimacy reveals something deeply human in us. We need each other on a practical level, which means having to trust strangers. It’s analogous to what I understand prayer requires and what writing poems requires: an openness to the unknown, coupled with trust, a belief that we won’t be hurt. It’s at once akin to and the same as devotion.

–Carl Phillips

The RISD Museum’s sixteenth issue of Manual touches on the bonds of intimacy and its many expressions. This issue complements the exhibition Any distance between us, co-curated by Stephen Truax and Dominic Molon, on view at the RISD Museum through March 13, 2022.

From the Files

Gina Borromeo probes love and death in an ancient Greek alabastron

Judith Tannenbaum reencounters a series of photographs of two women dancing

Artists on Art

Christopher K. Ho and Troy Richards open up the Book of Ours

Matt Garza meditates on an untitled portrait of a same-sex couple 

Double Takes

MariNaomi and Wai Yee Chiong get cozy with Kunisada’s Bed of Awakening: Nocturnal Pillow Talk

Diane Seuss and Angela Dufresne bond with Lydia (1776)

Laurie Simmons and Marisa Angell Brown embrace the complications of Eleanor, Chicago, 1949

Nafis White and Ahmari Benton join forces over Hair Necklace 4 (Chain)

Portfolio

Familiar connections and passionate flings from across the museum’s collection

Object Lessons

Stephen Truax lovingly documents the lineage of recent queer figurative painting in Any distance between us

Vanessa and Carl Jennings sing a little lullaby to a Kiowa cradleboard

Dominic Molon spends time with Annika von Hausswolff’s Where everything begins and ends #2

How To

Jessica Urick navigates conservation’s one-way intimacy