Description
The RISD Museum was established in 1877 and stewards a collection of approximately 100,000 art and design objects representing diverse cultures from ancient times to the present. Distinguished by its relationship to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), the museum interprets its collection with a focus on makers, to educate and inspire artists, designers, students, scholars, and the general public through exhibitions, programs, and publications. As the primary art museum in Providence, it serves nearly 115,000 visitors annually and 7,000 K-12 students from 60 local and regional schools.
The RISD Museum requests funding for Designing Innovation: The Gorham Manufacturing Company 1850-1970 , a landmark exhibition that will feature the museum’s extensive holdings of over 2,000 pieces of Gorham silver and metalwork, the largest in any public collection. The Gorham Manufacturing Company, first established in 1831 in Providence, Rhode Island, created everything from unique presentation pieces to flatware for domestic dining rooms, and in the process put American design and production practices on the world stage.
The museum received the collection in 1991 from Textron, when it sold Gorham to Lenox. In 2005, Lenox gave the museum the 953-volume Gorham Design Library and over 2,000 Gorham design drawings, positioning it to be the primary resource on the history and production of Gorham silver. The museum is collaborating with Brown University’s John Hay Library, which owns the Gorham Archive of company records dating from 1830 to 2005. In 2016, the museum began to conserve and photograph more than 1,200 of its permanent collection pieces, making them available on its public website.
Scheduled to open in May 2019, Designing Innovation will cast new light on Gorham silver, exploring the intersecting histories of design, industry, technology, labor, and culture. Particular attention will be devoted to the development of designs and innovative technology (produced by the firm’s Experimental Machine Department), and to the counterpoint of mechanization and hand-finishing, which included chasing, engraving, hammering, and embellishment. The exhibition will explore the pivotal role of the firm’s Design Library, initiated by John Gorham, and the ancillary study collection of plaster casts, medallions, Wedgwood, parian, bronzes, and natural specimens. Throughout, the curatorial team will seek to contextualize the objects through consideration of Gorham’s influence on and response to American and European taste, social customs, culinary trends, commemorative traditions, gender roles, and marketing practices.
The exhibition team will be led by Elizabeth A. Williams, the museum’s David and Peggy Rockefeller Curator of Decorative Arts and Design and a leading Gorham specialist. The accompanying catalogue, to be published by Rizzoli, will be the first in over 30 years to offer a comprehensive consideration of Gorham Manufacturing Company and will feature chapters by Williams and a group of leading American decorative arts curators. Public programming will explore design processes, as well as cross-disciplinary issues of mechanization, labor, and the environment, with a powerful focus on local history. In addition to costs associated with the exhibition, the grant would support two interns for museum diversity.
Designing Innovation , the first multi-venue Gorham exhibition, will travel to three additional venues, at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and The Mint Museum.
In proposing this grant for approval, the American Art Program hopes to demonstrate a new eagerness to support permanent-collection-based exhibitions that bring scholarly rigor and innovative thinking to bear in the presentation of significant and under-exposed holdings. Designing Innovation is a model of work in this vein, in terms of the scale and significance of the collection, the level of expertise that will be employed in interpreting it, the relevance to the museum’s primary Providence audience, and the extension of the material to new audiences through the impressive tour that has been arranged.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a two-year grant of $310,000 to the RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design for a collection-based exhibition of Gorham Silver.
Approved by the Board: March 7, 2018
