Art Beat: "Art and Design from 1900 to Now" at RISD Museum

Oct 29, 2023

Spanning across three galleries on the third floor of the RISD Museum, "Art and Design from 1900 to Now" is an ambitious and thoroughly engaging exhibition which focuses on the areas of study taught at the Rhode Island School of Design. It makes for a diverse showcase of painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, fiber arts and more, with an emphasis on the conversations that happen across disciplines and over the passage of time.

Grace Hartigan's "Homage to Matisse," from 1955, finds the great New York School abstract expressionist nodding to Henri Matisse's 1915 "Still Life after Jan Davidsz de Heem's ‘La Desserte,’" itself an homage to the Dutch painter's 1640 "A Table of Desserts."

Hartigan embraces Matisse's tendency to develop composition with strokes of color, which encapsulate elements of a still life. In her energetic and frantic yet deliberate painting, a virtual explosion of bold gestures and vibrant hues, a teapot, a bowl of fruit and a few eggs make their presence manifest.

"Suit," a 1999 mixed media work by Carroll Dunham, depicts a man, existing somewhere in the cartoon realm between Rocky and Bullwinkle and Beavis and Butthead. His face is featureless save for the piano ivory teeth, exposed by a threatening sneer. He brandishes a phallic handgun, with the handle and trigger decidedly testicular. And with that tabula rasa face, it's the gun that makes the man; making one wonder about his shortcomings.

Delicacy, finesse and an unfathomable devotion to the end product are the hallmarks of Luci Jockel's "Bee Wing Lace Neckpiece." Created in 2021, it is exactly what it sounds like. Utilizing nothing but water soluble glue and the wings of honeybees that died of natural causes in hives on the RISD campus, Jockel, a 2016 RISD MFA grad in Jewelry and Metalsmithing, took inspiration for the work from the lace collars worn in Dutch portraits from the 1600s. She honors the bees in particular, and the animal kingdom as a whole, with this exquisite work.

As far from delicacy as could be is the glossy garish grotesquerie that is Penelope Umbrico's "Sunset Portraits (from 9,539, 955 Flickr Sunset Pictures 8/8/11)." And that is not a bad thing.

Curious as to what the most photographed singular subject was, the artist searched Flickr and found more than half a million photos of sunsets. When she began to display those images on walls in different locations, viewers began to photograph themselves in front of them, leading to an unforeseen second part to her exploration.

Despite the technicolor magenta, yellow, pink, lavender, blue, orange and even green sunsets, with couples or individuals in silhouette in front of them, there is a mind numbing and slightly nauseating aspect to it all. Umbrico questioned what it meant to share images with an anonymous viewing public, wondering what it says about "our relationship to photography, technology, and each other." The answer is oddly discomforting.

The time span of the exhibition is 122 years. There is much to see and there are some works of particular interest, including Jordan Seaberry's mixed media painting "Hallmarks," from 2018, with collaged elements that include what-might-be family photographs and snippets of Marvel Comics; Akio Takamori's 1989 "Equality," a three-dimensional stoneware work of a warm, multi-person embrace; and Leonara Carrington's painting, "Stella Snead and Her Cat," from 1941, as spooky as it is unfinished.

And then there is "The Autobiography of a Garden on Twelve Engraved Plates" by RISD Printmaking Professor Andrew Rafferty, completed in 2016, in collaboration with the late RISD Ceramic Professor Larry Bush, of the same institution.

A dozen plates (transfer-printed engraving on glazed white earthenware) are mounted on the wall and are handsomely illustrated, telling the tale of a man, Rafferty himself, watering his Providence garden, or planning his garden, or bemoaning his garden in the cold of winter.

Rafferty's engravings are charmingly old school, depicting himself as a figure who might have stepped out of an Edward Hopper painting, sometimes in a fedora or a sharp vest. Each plate corresponds with a month: in January, he lies in bed, pursuing seed catalogs; in February, he is in his bathrobe at a tiny kitchen table, planting seeds; in May, he cultivates lettuce.

In June, he is down on one knee, training a passion vine, with all the adoration and earnestness of a man about to propose marriage. It is a simple lovely tale of one man's obsession.

"Art and Design from 1900 to Now'' is on display at the RISD Museum, 200 N. Main St., Providence, until June 9, 2024.