Lists by Janice Lowry |
It's been a year-and-a-half since John Smith took over as director of the RISD Museum. But it's only now that his vision for the place is becoming reality.
He will soon launch a completely redesigned web site — a sort of digital wing of the museum.
And this week, visitors will take in the first traveling show Smith has brought to town — "Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists' Enumerations from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art."
List by Arturo Rodriguez. |
An oddly compelling haul of artists' shopping lists and bulleted concerns (see Janice Lowry's "50 Angry Grievances"), the exhibit was developed during Smith's tenure at the Archives — a repository of letters, diaries, scrap books, and financial records known as the Fort Knox of the art world.The show, he argues, is a perfect fit for the creative community at RISD and for Rhode Island writ large — an "interesting glimpse into process," he says, "and how artists and designers think about the world and organize the world, from the quotidian to big ideas."
Indeed, this focus on process — on the intellectual work of producing art and the materials used to execute it — is emerging as an early theme for Smith.
The museum's next major show, "Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion" — in the works before Smith arrived, but shaped in important ways by the new director — will celebrate tweed, tartan, and the crafting of artists' identities.
And "Locally Made," a summer show featuring Rhode Island work in the museum's collection, will be accompanied by talks from all kinds of area makers — visual artists, thinkers, farmers, and craftspeople.
But if process is a through-line, it's only that. The first couple of shows at John Smith's RISD Museum are richer fare.
List by Pablo Picasso. |
'Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists' Enumerations from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art,' March 15-June 16It's a small scrap of paper. Not terribly legible. And not, at first glance, all that remarkable: merely a collection of names.
But read the accompanying text and it becomes something much more. The scratch, it turns out, is in Pablo Picasso's hand: a list of European artists he recommended for the first international exhibit of modern art in the United States, the 1913 Armory Show.
On the list — Fernand Lèger, Juan Gris, and Marcel Duchamp, whose "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" caused an uproar.
Look closely and you'll see that Picasso misspelled Duchamp's name. Just one of the many imperfections that humanize the often superhuman subjects of "Lists."
Indeed, this one-room exhibit sings, in no small part, because it grounds bold-faced names in the ordinary — what could be more ordinary than a list? — without losing sight of their extraordinary talents.
Powerhouse art dealer Leo Castelli's to-do lists remind him to pick up tooth powder at the drug store and consult with "RR" — painter and sculptor Robert Rauschenberg.
Painter Philip Evergood's list of neighborhood services — picture framers, art dealers, a camera shop — is a nifty, glued-and-taped-together collage of business cards and hand-written notes.
