Art and Design Commons^™

Manual / Issue 14 / Shadows, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor-In-Chief, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Andrea Achi, Emanuel Admassu, Anita N. Bateman, Makeda Best, Gina Borromeo, Rashayla Marie Brown, Shuriya Davis, Akwaeke Emezi, Tayana Fincher, Melanee C. Harvey, Kate Irvin, Sade Lanay, Dominic Molon, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Kevin Quashie, Matthew Shenoda, Kelly Taylor Mitchell, Leslie Wilson

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Shadows. This anti-visibility is not the same as being invisible, rather it is the power to operate against systems of imperial domination, including the gaze. It asks: How do we force the gaze to surrender? What if explanation were off the table? By enabling a petit marronage that can be expressed in the visual and symbolic use of shadow, the gaze is challenged. This issue of Manual and the accompanying exhibition (opening at the RISD Museum Fall 2020) posit that the right to opacity de-burdens contemporary work by artists who identify as …

Manual / Issue 13 / Storage, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor-In-Chief, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Christina Alderman, Isaac M. Alderman, A.H. Jerriod Avant, Matthew Bird, Hannah Carlson, Wai Yee Chiong, John Dunnigan, Maria Morris Hambourg, David Hartt, Elaine Tyler May, Claire Mccardell, Denise Murrell, Ingrid Schaffner, Holly Schaffer, Tanya Sheehan, John W. Smith, Mimi Smith, Sassan Tabatabai, Allan Wexler, Fred Wilson

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Storage. Manual 13 opens with an introduction by Fred Wilson, who confides, “You can look at all the opulence on display in a museum and begin to understand that something nefarious might be behind it. Storage, for me, is where the action is.” "Museums usually make choices for viewers, their curators presenting what they think most important within a category. They can be so good at doing this that visitors sometimes don’t realize there’s anything else to see: they don’t realize the nature of the decisions behind an exhibition, and they accept …

Manual / Issue 12 / On Further Review, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor-In-Chief, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Anita N. Bateman, Laurie Anne Brewer, Elon Cook Lee, Becci Davis, Jessica Deane Rosner, James Gabbarelli, Ronnie Goodman, Bethany Johns, Kevin Mcbride, Walter Mettling, Nell Painter, Allison Pappas, Pamala A. Parmal, Susan Scanlan, Lorén M. Spears, Shiyanthi Thavapalan, Nick White

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. On Further Review. This issue uncovers narratives once central to objects’ histories but that now have been systematically obscured, inadvertently overlooked, or otherwise lost. Softcover, 96 pages. Published 2019 by the RISD Museum.(On Further Review) contributors include Anita N. Bateman, Laurie Anne Brewer, Becci Davis, Jamie Gabbarelli, Bethany Johns, Elon Cook Lee, Kevin McBride, Walker Mettling, Jessica Rosner, Suzanne Scanlan, Nell Painter, Allison Pappas, Pamela A. Parmal, Shiyanthi Thavapalan, and Nick White.

Manual / Issue 11 / Repair, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor-In-Chief, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Markus Berger, Gina Borromeo, Linda Catano, Thomas Denenberg, Daniel Eatock, Brian Goldberg, Ramiro Gomez, Kate Irvin, Anna Rose Keefe, Olivia Laing, Steven D. Lubar, Lisa Z. Morgan, Maureen C. O'Brien, Barry Schwabsky, Sharma Shields, Jessica Urick, Liliane Wong

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Repair. "Can we find in the detail, in the stitch and the weave, an ecology of care, a model for activating new forms of life, ones that might reject or reimagine an economic and cultural order based on novelty, disposability, and the monadic self? Can they help us learn to live together in a broken world?"
—Brian Goldberg and Kate Irvin, from the preface to Issue 11

This volume complemented the exhibition Repair and Design Futures, on view at the RISD Museum October 5, 2018 through June 30, 2019. Softcover, 96 pages. …

Manual / Issue 10 / Polychrome, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor-In-Chief, Amy Pickworth, Editor, David Batchelor, Gina Borromeo, Nicole Buchanan, Catherine Cooper, Darby English, Mara L. Hermano, Elon Cook Lee, Josephine Lee, Dominic Molon, Maureen C. O'Brien, Risd Museum 2017 Summer Teen Intensive Students, Elizabeth A. Williams

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Polychrome. "In art, especially, polychrome invites us to the dialogue that colors are always having amongst themselves. A history of polychrome could be a series of poems exchanged among colors. The exchange might exhibit something like perpetual newness, again and again revealing differently bent hues and movingly novel blends. It would be a short-line poetry, excruciatingly sensitive to tone. Its speakers would have no names, so it would confuse the psychology of human orientation. In this connection, a warning against rendering polychrome as a pure positive seems in order: the parties to …

Manual / Issue 9 / Out Of Line, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor-In-Chief, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Fida Adely, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Stefano Bloch, Mimi Cabell, Namita Vijay Dharia, Douglas W. Doe, Jared A. Goldstein, Lucinda Hitchcock, Jan Howard, Kate Irvin, Douglas Kearney, Amber Lopez, Jeffery Moser, Sheida Soleimani, Craig Taylor

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Out of Line. The nineth issue. This issue of *Manual*—themed Out of Line—is a collection about the way that lines disrupt, point outward. In poetry, the attention to detail one takes in crafting a line is all about making the line disappear, making something it holds to take front stage. . . . The space between the lines creating the image . . . the space around that argues for the importance of all that the lines hold. Manual 9 (Out of Line) complemented Lines of Thought: Drawing from Michelangelo to Now, …

Manual / Issue 8 / Give And Take, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor-In-Chief, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Mary-Kim Arnold, Emily Banas, Pia Camil, John Dunnigan, Claudia J. Ford, Kate Irin, Josie Johnson, Dom Molon, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Alexandra M. Peck, Robert W. Preucel, Wendy Red Star, Jessica Urick, Kelly Walters

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Give and Take. The eigth issue. Manual 8 (Give and Take) explores interaction, transaction, and social exchange and indebtedness.

"The earliest known use of the expression “give and take” can be traced to horse racing. It referred to races in which larger, stronger horses carried more weight, and smaller ones, less. Implied therein is an accounting for relative capacities. In such a race, the goal remains the same—crossing the finish line first—but introducing this variable highlights the relationship between the competing horses. A win is only meaningful if each horse can be …

Manual / Issue 7 / Alchemy, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor-In-Chief, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Markus Berger, Rachel Berwick, Stephen S. Bush, Ca Conrad, Florence Friedman, Doreen Garner, Michael Grugl, Kate Irvin, Mimi Leveque, Dominic Molon, Douglas R. Nickel, Emily J. Peters, Elizabeth A. Williams, Bryan Mcgovern Wilson, Diming Stella Zhong

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Alchemy. The seventh issue. Manual 7 (Alchemy) prompts the unexpected and emergent to manifest.

"To engage as an alchemist/artist is to be the perpetual student of the present moment, to synthesize culture, so-called science, and the implications of existential borders into a discipline that is repeatable, a practice. Art and alchemy are not singular, unified pursuits. Their practitioners are trans-disciplinary, disjointed, and solitary in their practice, and their labor and the ordering of their lives become porous, overlaid in the pursuit of other-than or beyond-dominant modes of understanding.

"Alchemy and art are …

Manual / Issue 6 / Assemblage, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor, S. Hollis Mickey, Editor, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Eric Anderson, Taylor Elyse Anderson, Bob Dilworth, Christina Hemauer, Roman Keller, Mariani Lefas-Tetenes, Simone Leigh, Leora Maltz-Leca, Ingrid A. Neuman, Tara Nummedal, Todd Oldham, Britany Salsbury

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Assemblage. The sixth issue. An assemblage is both an act and a result-the work of gathering and conjoining as well as the state of having been gathered and conjoined. This issue of Manual pieces together works made out of practical necessity and others that marry dazzling embellishments for optimal effect, examining how history (or one version of it) was (and is) pastiched from disparate sources, how fashionable textile samples were collected, and more (always more). An assembly of assemblages, an assortment of intended and unintended interrelationships, Manual issue six is the sum …

Manual / Issue 5 / Unfinished, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor, S. Hollis Mickey, Editor, Jen Bervin, Jean Blackburn, Gina Borromeo, Laurie Brewer, A. Will Brown, Bolaji Campbell, Dennis Congdon, Jeremy Diller, Jan Howard, Kate Irvin, Maureen C. O'Brien, Emily J. Peters, Siebren Versteeg, Elizabeth A. Williams, C. D. Wright

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Unfinished.The fifth issue. Loose threads unknotted. Ideas unrealized. Outlines left bare. Function unperformed. Patterns uncut. Luster removed with time and wear. We rarely examine unfinished things. The unfinished is easily overlooked in favor of the fully rendered and complete, but consider those sketchy lines, those fraying ends: the unfinished has potency. The unfinished offers evidence of process, reveals traces of technique, trembles with latent possibility. The essays, images, and projects presented in the fifth issue of Manual attend to the fluid potential of objects that are in some way incomplete.

Softcover, …

Manual / Issue 4 / Blue, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor, S. Hollis Mickey, Editor, Lawrence Berman, A. Will Brown, Linda Catano, Spencer Finch, Jessica Helfend, Kate Irvin, Dominic Molon, Maggie Nelson, Ingrid Neuman, Margot Mcilwain Nishimura, Karen B. Schloss, Anna Strickland, Louis Van Tilborgh, Oda Van Maanen, Elizabeth A. Williams

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Blue.The fourth issue. Indigo blue, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, cerulean blue, zaffre blue, indanthrone blue, phthalo blue, cyan blue, Han blue, French blue, Berlin blue, Prussian blue, Venetian blue, Dresden blue, Tiffany blue, Lanvin blue, Majorelle blue, International Klein Blue, Facebook blue. The names given to different shades of blue speak of plants, minerals, and modern chemistry; exoticism, global trade, and national pride; capitalist branding and pure invention. The fourth issue of Manual is a meditation on blue. From precious substance to controllable algorithm to the wide blue yonder, join us …

Manual / Issue 3 / Circus, Amy Pickworth, Editor, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor, S. Hollis Mickey, Editor, Gina Borromeo, Alison W. Chang, Michelle Clayton, Jim Drain, Daniel Heyman, Andrew Martinez, Ellen Mcbreen, Thangam Ravindranathan, Rebecca Schneider, Susan Smulyan, Gwen Strahle

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Circus. The third issue centers on the theme of "Circus." Includes analyses of various pieces in the museum's archive, a fold-out poster by Jim Drain, and a selection of artworks owned by the museum that loosely address said theme.

Softcover, 62 pages. Published 2014 by the RISD Museum. Manual 3 (Circus) contributors include Gina Borromeo, Alison W. Chang, Michelle Clayton, Jim Drain, Daniel Heyman, Andrew Martinez, Ellen McBreen, Thangam Ravindranathan, Rebecca Schneider, Susan Smulyan, and Gwen Strahle.

Manual / Issue 2 / Lorem Ipsum, Amy Pickworth, Editor, S. Hollis Mickey, Editor, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor, James Allen, Alison W. Chang, Kenneth Goldsmith, Daniel Harkett, Cyrus Highsmith, Jan Howard, Kate Irvin, Antoine Revoy, Nancy Skolos

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Lorem Ipsum.The second issue. In potently meaningful and deliberately meaningless ways, this issue, “Lorem ipsum,” celebrates text. The standard placeholder text used by designers and printers, lorem ipsum isn’t really Latin. Mangled over centuries of use, the passage has become meaningless and untranslatable—and yet it is highly useful in that in its incomprehensibility, it occupies space. Over the centuries and across many inventions and innovations in type and printing, lorem ipsum has acted as a space filler and form shaper in conventional printing, desktop publishing, and electronic typesetting. Join us as …

Manual / Issue 1 / Hand In Hand, Amy Pickworth, Editor, S. Hollis Mickey, Editor, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor, Robert Brinkerhoff, Maureen O'Brien, Sheila Bonde, James Mcshane, Elizabeth Williams, Kate Irvin

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Hand in Hand. The inaugural issue of The Manual, a twice-yearly publication by the RISD Museum. The theme of this first issue is “hand in hand,” a phrase first recorded in the 16th century. Its early usage described the clasping of palm to palm, but the term has since come to encompass more than this literal meaning. To be hand in hand is also to be connected, joined, concurrent, well matched. Thumb through these pages to find rigorous, imaginative musings as artists and academics make solid contact, gesture wildly, and put their …

Risd Business: Sassy Signs & Sculptures, Alejandro Diaz, Judith Tannenbaum

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 42, Fall 2012. Ranging from quaint stereotypes of Mexican identity to current socio-economic and art-world commentary, Alejandro Diaz’s text-based works and installations use language as a form of cultural critique and resistance. Conceptual and campy, his humor infused politics and choice of everyday materials are emblematic of his ongoing involvement with art as a form of entertainment, activism, public intervention, and free enterprise. His projects take place outdoors on city streets as well as inside galleries and museums.

The Dorothy And Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works For Rhode Island, Alison W. Chang

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 41, Summer 2012. RISD Museum was the recipient of fifty contemporary works from the celebrated collectors Dorothy and Herb Vogel. Both worked as civil servants throughout their lives so they never had extraordinary means with which to build a collection, but acquired more than 4000 works since their marriage in 1962. Their commitment to minimal and conceptual art is well-known, but their taste was much broader and included work rooted in Abstract Expressionism as well as figurative compositions. Most of the collection was given to the National Gallery of Art. The gift to Rhode Island is part …

Dan Walsh | Uncommon Ground, Judith Tannenbaum

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 40, 2012. Dan Walsh has been devoted to abstract painting since he arrived in New York in the early 1980s. Naturally his work has evolved over the past three decades, but he has remained consistently attached to Minimalism’s basic language of geometry and grids.

Painting Air: Spencer Finch, Spencer Finch, Judith Tannenbaum

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 39, Winter 2012. Spencer Finch, an artist known internationally for artwork that captures fleeting or intangible natural phenomena and sensory experiences, received his MFA in Sculpture from RISD in 1989. In the two decades since, Finch has created drawings, watercolors, photography, and video as well as sculpture and installations—selecting mediums and methods that seem best suited to conveying his fascination with light, color, and atmosphere. His focus of attention ranges from a speck of dust seen in a shaft of light in his studio to grand glaciers in New Zealand.

As a graduate student Finch worked in …

Pilgrims Of Beauty: Art And Inspiration In 19th Century Italy, Crawford Alexander Mann Iii

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 38, Spring 2012. In the 19th century Italy was the most desirable destination for travelers from every corner of Europe and beyond. Thousands crossed mountains, even oceans, to go there, leaving their "barbarous” homelands to study and admire Italy’s unsurpassed aesthetic and cultural riches. A poem in the New England Magazine in 1831 described the goals and ideals of visiting Italy on a European Grand Tour, calling those who did so "pilgrims of beauty.” Like religious pilgrims of centuries past, these lovers of art participated in a ritual journey, a powerful shared experience of Italy’s magnificent landscape, …

Collision, Judith Tannenbaum

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 37, 2010. Collision is an experiment in exhibition-making. It began when painter Jackie Saccoccio invited a group of artists (seventeen, including herself) to contribute works of their own choosing to a show in which paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, prints, videos, and various hybrid forms would literally collide: butting up against each other, overlapping, and even altering one another in an improvisatory fashion. Depending on their placement in the gallery as determined by the individual artists, the works could become entirely subsumed in the larger communal cacophony.

Most often group exhibitions in museums are conceived and organized by …

Tristin Lowe Under The Influence, Tristin Lowe

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 36, 2010. The moon, Earth's only satellite, has been a source of mystery and wonder since the beginning of recorded history, and probably before that as well. Inspired to understand its powerful presence and effects— from gravitational pull, tidal flow, and magnetic fields to its impact on animal and human behavior— artists and writers as well as scientists have studied the moon for centuries.

Using low-tech but labor-intensive methods and materials, sculptor Tristin Lowe has created an interpretation of the moon to fill the Museum's Lower Farago Gallery. Lunacy is an inflatable sphere, about twelve and a …

After You're Gone: An Installation By Beth Lipman, Judith Tannenbaum, Beth Lipman

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 33, Fall 2008. In July 2006, RISD Museum director Hope Alswang and curator Judith Tannenbaum encountered Beth Lipman’s 2o-foot-long glass tableau entitled Bancketje (Banquet), then on exhibit at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. This tour de force, created in 2003 (now in the permanent collection of the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.), inspired The RISD Museum to invite the artist to visit its galleries, as well as collections in storage, in order to create an exhibition here. In October 2007, Lipman visited the Museum and was particularly excited by its American period …

From Dürer To Van Gogh: Gifts From Eliza Greene Radeke And Helen Metcalf Danforth, Emily J. Peters

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 30, Summer 2008.The Museum of Art was founded simultaneously with the Rhode Island School of Design in 1877 by a group of women led by Eliza Radeke's mother, Helen Adelia Rowe (Mrs. Jesse) Metcalf. RISD’s stated purpose was to educate artists in drawing, painting, modeling, and design for the benefit of industry and art, and to educate the public so that they could appreciate and support art and design. The creation of a museum collection was inseparable from these objectives. Both Eliza Radeke and Helen Danforth, as heirs to those aspirations, made extraordinary individual gifts to …

Designing Traditions: Student Explorations In The Asian Textile Collection, Kate Irvin, Laurie Anne Brewer, Anais Missakian

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 32,Summer 2008. RISD’s newest generation of textile designers source the RISD Museum’s vast Asian textile collection in this popular collaborative project and biennial exhibition. Traditional craftsmanship sparks contemporary creativity as objects inspire innovative new textiles and garments.

Evolution/Revolution: The Arts And Crafts In Contemporary Fashion And Textiles, Joanne Dolan Ingersoll, Amy Pickworth, Editor

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 28, Spring 2008. Evolution/Revolution brings together the textile work of designers from the U.S., Britain, Europe, South and Central America, and Japan, and draws philosophical parallels between these contemporary artists and those of the Arts and Crafts Movement of 19th-century Britain.The exhibition is organized around the themes of Storytelling, Experimentation and Materials, Collaboration, and Art and Life—key ideas that spring from the Arts and Crafts spirit.

One of the most widely influential art and design movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Arts and Crafts Movement was an aesthetic and political response to a world stripped …

Styrofoam: From Industrial Invention To Artistic Transformation, Judith Tannenbaum, Amy Pickworth, Editor

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 29, Spring 2008. Ubiquitous in our culture, styrofoam is used to insulate buildings, package computers and other consumer products, and produce picnic coolers and containers for fast food and take-out. For decades, artists have employed styrofoam in the making of models and molds for casting. Today, however, more and more artists are exploring it as a primary material or a subject in its own right, using it in new and ingenious ways to create sculpture, paintings, and installations.

Feathers, Flowers, Talons And Fangs: Power And Serenity In Japanese Nature Prints, Deborah Del Gais, Judith A. Singsen

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 26, Winter 2007. Fierce tigers and awe-inspiring dragons—these subjects hardly seem to fit into the same category as delicate songbirds like the nightingale and blossoms as ephemeral as the cherry. Even so, a wide array of flora and fauna and bugs and beasts appears in Japanese prints of the genre traditionally called “birds and flowers” (kachō). These Edo-period prints (1608-1867) reflect the profound Japanese appreciation for the natural world.

Island Nations | Islas Naciones: New Art From Cuba, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico And The Diaspora, Judith Tannenbaum, René Morales

Journals

In the 1960s, the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (The RISD Museum), established an early and deep connection with the art of Latin America. In a sweeping attempt to create a broader context for our strong North American collections, money and energy were committed to the purchase of the work of contemporary artists from all over South and Central America and the Caribbean. For this pioneering foresight, we continue to be grateful to former Director Daniel Robbins (1932-95; director at The RISD Museum, 1965-71) and the family of Nancy Sayles Day, who established the Nancy Sayles Day …

Historic Wallpapers, 1750-1949, Catherine Wilkinson-Zerner

Journals

Exhibition Notes, Number 21, Spring 2003. In the 18th century, European and American interiors were transformed by the rise of a new kind of wall treatment. Wallpaper – mass-produced, affordable, and highly practical – reached a broader audience than fine prints and paintings. This wide distribution prompted wallpaper artists to heed the contemporary interests of the expanding consumer class. As a result, wallpaper often recorded social changes as they were expressed in the shifting relationship between high art and popular culture throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

Crisis Response: An Exhibition Of Art Created In Times Of Conflict And Catastrophe From The Assassination Of Jfk To 9/11, Karl Schoonover

Journals

Exhibtion Notes, Fall 2002. A group of works in this exhibition emphasizes the differing investments of individuals and groups in the icons of patriotism. Some artists borrow and transform recognizable icons and symbols to invite a dialogue with their viewers about the role of patriotism in troubled times.