Heads Up! Recent Gifts to the Collection

Museum collections are built from the great generosity of donors who either make gifts of artworks or give the funds used to purchase them. This exhibition celebrates an impressive group of contemporary works on paper that were given to the RISD Museum over the past five years by seventeen benefactors. In most cases, the work on view is just a sample of the objects that came with that donation.

As a theme that could unite a diverse group of gifts, portraiture and more generalized depictions of the face stood out. The human likeness, one of art’s oldest subjects, continues to provoke intense investigation. While some of these images record physical and emotional characteristics of an individual, others use the face as a canvas for conveying the human condition.

We are deeply grateful to the donors who have enriched our collection with the works on view here, and to all the donors who since 2010 have given more than 1,700 prints, drawings, and photographs to the collection.