Art | RISD Museum

Year in Review 2024 / 2025

Art

Exhibitions
New Acquisitions
Loans
Publications

Our collection currently contains more than 100,000 works of art and design dating from ancient times to the present including paintings, sculpture, photography, prints, decorative arts, costume and textiles, and furniture from all over the world. Objects enter the collection via purchases with our acquisition funds, as well as gifts and donations from collectors, artists, and others.

Sharing our collection with the public is central to our mission, and this section outlines all of the work involved in acquiring, documenting, displaying, interpreting, protecting, and storing these objects to make that sharing possible.

Exhibitions

The RISD Museum presents several temporary and traveling exhibitions as well as new collection displays each year, which are shaped by insights from curators, educators, artists, students, and neighbors. These projects often include associated publications, symposia, programs, and/or other virtual and in-person events.

A large brown wall titled “The Art of French Wallpaper Design” introduces an exhibition of multi-colored, decorative wallpaper samples arranged within the open gallery space behind it.

Large wall-sized painting in muted earthy tones features the question “What’s something you wish you could say outloud?” above five seated figures, covered below with bright sticky note responses.

A pale green, smooth jade carving resembling mountain peaks dotted with clustered tree and a small waterfall in the center.

A horizontal mint-green beam and raised yellow cluster adorned with colorful gems and protruding orange rods.

New Acquisitions

The RISD Museum actively collects art and design objects representing global artistic traditions from ancient times to the present. In FY 2025, the RISD Museum acquired 424 total objects through purchases and gifts.

Ceramic disk with a cracked colorful surface showing a fragmentary frowning face with features made up of disjointed shapes and various symbols such as a blue baby and a red hand.

Abstract composition with textured overlapping strokes in muted purples, blue, and greens, creating a textured, hazy atmospheric surface.

Vibrant painting of a bathroom scene with a black oval mirror, patterned blue wallpaper, folded towels, and red flowers, surrounding a white sink with toiletries scattered atop it.

Close-up of a mannequin wearing a garment of overlapping holographic strips that shift in pink, yellow, and blue hues, each riveted in place to form a shimmering scale-like pattern.

Loans

The RISD Museum regularly loans objects from our collection to other museums and institutions. These may be short-term loans (for a time-limited exhibition, for example) or long-term (such as a gallery reinstallation that may last several years). Lending objects from our collection for display in other places supports our mission to share important works of art and design with the public, and it also helps to raise awareness of the museum and the collection.

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Publications

Seated visitor interacting with a touchscreen table display exploring “The Art of French Wallpaper Design” set up before a wall of colorful floral, geometric, and decorative wallpaper samples.

The Art of French Wallpaper Design: The Huard Collection at the RISD Museum

The comprehensive digital publication The Art of French Wallpaper Design: The Huard Collection at the RISD Museum discusses the history, making, and conservation of French wallpapers from the 1700s and 1800s, collected by Charles and Frances Wilson Huard and now in the care of the RISD Museum. Edited by curator Emily Banas, this free online publication includes additional essays by Andrew Raftery and Brianna Turner. It complemented the exhibition The Art of French Wallpaper Design, on view at the museum November 15, 2024 through May 11, 2025.

Liz Collins: Motherlode

This groundbreaking volume positions Liz Collins as a singular figure who not only synthesizes fine art, craft, and fashion and textile design, but also fiercely advocates for queer and feminist politics. This book complements the first major survey of the artist’s work in an American museum, on view at the RISD Museum July 19, 2025 through January 11, 2026.

Contributors survey Collins’s life and career, address her unique relationship to craft and labor, and celebrate vital resonances in her work. Edited by curator Kate Irvin, the publication includes additional essays, interviews, and contributions by Glenn Adamson, Octavia Bürgel, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Zoe Latta, and Eileen Myles.

Manual

Manual: a journal about art and its making, the museum's journal, uses our collections, exhibitions, and collaborations as an impetus for essays and interviews, artist interventions, and archive highlights. A fusion of academic arts journal and design magazine, Manual is a resource for conversations about art, design, and the impact of creative making by artists and designers, curators, educators, and scholars.

Manual 20: Technologies

This issue of Manual considers the history and future of art and technology by examining artworks that combine manual techniques and handiwork with non-human productive agents associated with industry or technology. Manual 20 complements the exhibition Process Work: Intersections of Photography and Print ca. 1825 to Today, on view at the RISD Museum February 1–July 20, 2025. Mellon Fellow Sarah Mirseyedi, the curator of that exhibition, was this issue’s guest editor.

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