RISD Museum opens new galleries as part of expansion project
PROVIDENCE, R.I.—Months before the opening of a new building at the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, the curators have been handed an opportunity to rethink the 131-year-old museum.
The new Chace Center, set to open in September, has freed up 4,000 square feet of space in the museum's old home, the 1926 Radeke Building, that was once used as cramped storage and offices. The space has been transformed into several galleries, a classroom and other public space that open Thursday.
The centerpiece of the renovation is a sweeping central gallery, which gives visitors a clear 300-foot view through the gallery and across a new glass pedestrian bridge to the new Chace Center.
"It was very, very interesting to decide what is seminal and important enough about who we are at RISD. What should be in this central gallery?" said Museum Director Hope Alswang.
The museum's permanent collection of 84,000 objects includes works ranging from the ancient to contemporary, from Egypt to Europe to North America.
Ultimately, curators decided to make 20th century art the focus of a permanent exhibit in the central gallery.
"It made real sense. We have the objects, luckily, the great collections, to really give that story tremendous body," Alswang said. "Art changes more in the 20th century than at anytime since the Renaissance. We think this is a great way to understand art and culture now."
The new permanent exhibit in the central gallery, "Subject to Change: Art and Design of the Twentieth Century," provides a survey of the progression of art and design in the last century and is loosely organized by ideas and date.
"We bring objects together that could have been together at that particular moment. A textile, a costume, a poster on the wall, a writing desk," said Maureen O'Brien, curator of painting and sculpture. "The same ideas are flowing through decorative arts as well as through fine arts."
The gallery includes a raised, cantilevered central platform for displaying furniture, sculpture and other works, surrounded by display cases and periodical wall space for paintings. The open design allows visitors to look across the gallery and make their own connections between different objects and periods, said Judith Tannenbaum, curator of contemporary art.
Fine arts such as paintings -- an early century Cezanne, a 1964 Hockney -- are placed alongside design and decorative arts -- a 1970 Eero Saarinen tulip armchair, a Frank Lloyd Wright library table designed in 1911, a 1960s Pucci dress, a 1936 fabric designed for the Queen Mary but rejected as too modern.
In one corner of the gallery, a 1927 silver coffee service by Danish designer Erik Magnussen is displayed. Nicknamed the "Lights and Shadows of Manhattan," the sleek, streamlined service is reminiscent of the Chrysler building.
Nearby is Lyonel Feininger's 1929 painting, "Church at Gelmeroda XII," which shares the prismatic construction of cubism with the coffee service, O'Brien said.
And not far away is the 1932 photograph of lit up New York skyscrapers from above, "New York at Night," by Berenice Abbott, which echoes the aesthetic of the coffee service.
The new space also includes a gallery for works on paper, the museum's first dedicated galleries for photography and new media, and a classroom for children and adult educational programs located between two other galleries.
The classroom is painted with a commissioned mural, "Exine," by British artist Paul Morrison, which features huge black and white stenciled plants and a distant landscape. Students aren't just surrounded by art, with works in galleries they can see through two different glass doors. They're also surrounded by a giant work of art in the classroom itself, Alswang said.
"They're in this lively, engaging museum environment, as opposed to where they were before, in the basement," she said.
The museum is now preparing to redesign its Rome, Greece and Egypt collection, putting now-separated works into a contiguous space and updating some antiquated displays. Once that's done, it will redo its Asian galleries, said museum spokesman Matt Montgomery.
The Chace Center, designed by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo, is scheduled to open Sept. 27 with an exhibit by renowned glass artist and former RISD alumnus Dale Chihuly, which he designed specifically for the museum.
