This Is a Thing

Recent Gifts to Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, 2020–2025
August 23, 2025 - February 15, 2026
Museum Galleries
A close-up photograph of the bottom half of a huma face with a large tongue sticking out and touching three wooden stamp blocks, held up by the person's hand on a totally black background.
Cang Xin 蒼鑫, Untitled, 1999. Gift of Larry Warsh and Museum purchase: gift of Mark Pollack (RISD BFA 1976, Textiles).

Museums of art and design are, at their core, a great variety of things collected in different ways over time. Including more than 40 objects made between 1774 and 2022, This Is a Thing explores a selection of works on paper recently acquired by the RISD Museum’s Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Department. These works present playful to critical examples of thing-ness: object studies, built creations, still-lifes, figures posed with or as objects, and things from the natural world. This Is a Thing draws attention to how works make their way to the RISD Museum. It also celebrates the support of those who help us do the things we do by highlighting some of the great things recently entrusted to us.

RISD Museum is supported by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and with the generous partnership of the Rhode Island School of Design, its Board of Trustees, and Museum Governors.

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