RISD Museum
224 Benefit Street
Providence, RI 02903
T 401 454 6500
[email protected]
Manual: a journal about art and its making, a new twice-yearly journal, uses the collections, exhibitions, and collaborations of the RISD Museum 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 engaged conversations about art, design, and the impact of creative making by curators, artists, scholars and educators.
“Hand in Hand” is the inaugural issue of Manual. The phrase was first recorded in the 16th century, and 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 this issue to find rigorous, imaginative musings as artists and academics make solid contact, gesture wildly, and put their fingers on the pulse of new ideas.
In this issue: From the Files, curator Elizabeth Williams pries open the archive to reveal Gorham Manufacturing Company’s production designs; Double Take looks at a medieval ivory diptych from the points of view of illustrator Robert Brinkerhoff and art historian Sheila Bonde; for Artist on Art cartoonist James McShane traipses through the entanglements of the intaglio printing process; in Object Lesson, curator Maureen C. O’Brien exposes John Singleton Copley’s portraits of Moses Gill and his wives; Portfolio presents loose linkages and clear couplings on the theme “hand in hand”; and How To explores Bauhaus artist Gunta Stölzl’s proposal for a double-weave textile as described by curator Kate Irvin.
Manual launch
Thursday, September 19, 2013
7–8pm, RISD Museum
In an evening devoted to words and things, celebrate the debut of Manual: a journal about art and its making. Meet the artists and authors, mingle with writers and makers. Take in hand a copy of the inaugural issue.
RISD Museum director: John Smith
Manual Editor-in-chief: Sarah Ganz Blythe with S. Hollis Mickey
Editor: Amy Pickworth
Graphic designers: Derek Schusterbauer and Colin Frazer
Photography: Erik Gould
Printer: Meridian Printing
ISSN 2329-9193
About the RISD Museum
Southeastern New England’s only comprehensive art museum, the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design—also known as the RISD Museum—was established in 1877. Its collection of more than 87,000 objects includes paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, costume, furniture, and other works of art and design from all over the world, from ancient times to the latest in contemporary art. More information: risdmuseum.org
