Last week my one full day in Rhode Island turned out to be a rainy one so we decided that we should find something to do that was indoors. I didn’t really have any ideas but my travel companion suggested we poke around Providence for the day. We looked up what to do in Providence and found the RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] Museum. The photos of it made it seem very random and if there’s anything we both love it’s really random things.
The cost was steeper than most of my entries here at $17 per adult so it had to have something interesting, right? Well, we were off to find out! I was just hoping there was parking nearby, preferably a garage but alas there was only parallel parking along a busy street. Joy. There’s three things I haven’t learned how to do in life: tie my shoes like normal person, tell my left from my right, and parallel park. Luckily some ways up the road there was a park and I found three empty spots in a row. My travel companion says when this happens it’s not parallel parking, it’s just parking, but I’m not going to let his cynicism cloud what is clearly a win for me.
The museum was surprisingly ordinary for being dedicated to design… Just a big plain brick building. Though the lobby by itself was as big as most of the museums I have visited here in New England. It even had a coat room with lockers and a bucket for wet umbrellas. Impressive. This was going to be good…
We entered the museum which… seemed to be a huge mostly empty gallery. There were a few creative dresses on display in one corner, some sort of holographic water fountain in another, and a neat selection of tiles made to look like hands were coming out of the walls. Besides that there was just a ton of white empty walls. The only full display we saw was another student exhibit talking about life in the US as a person of color. It was interesting… but still clearly the early work of students. It was something we were both happy to support buuuut…. we thought maybe there was something more to this? If not we both felt as if $17 was a bit steep. After this we entered another empty gallery that was huge and only contained a set of hand drums. They were curious things and I wanted to read the plaque on the wall but there was a security guard standing next to them with an intense energy that made me way too uncomfortable to want to stay in the room long enough for that so we both wandered off.
From here we finally stumbled into a gallery with something in it. It was mostly full of seemingly random things – a really dangerous looking toaster from the early days of electricity, a bunch of weird chairs, a flapper dress, a TV set from the 1960’s that looked like an astronaut’s helmet. And on the walls a small Jackson Pollock was mixed in. for seemingly no reason.
“I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either.”
“I could barf that up in ten minutes. Maybe he was really good at networking. And selling useless shit to rich people.”
Not too far away there was also a small Georgia O’Keefe painting. At least it looked like something. But didn’t really elicit any emotion from me. Which is probably a good thing. I’d been nearly brought to tears while visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam… which distressed everyone around me.
Martine Gutierrez
I thought this room was the end of the museum but it was actually just the end of this section. Beyond it was where things finally got interesting. We suddenly found ourselves wandering into what looked like a proper art museum. An enormous hall with giant portrait paintings surrounded by two rooms of medieval things. My travel companion finally felt like this was worth the trip. The paintings all seemed to have weird things going on in the background. I fell in love with the bored expression of this one boy and was alarmed by a swarm of Cherubs ripping a hare apart in the corner of another. Well… they do say children and animals don’t mix… and I always have been super creeped out by Cherubs. Maybe even more so than dolls and that’s saying something.
From here there was just a totally random mix of pretty much one or two items from every art movement jumbled with a lot of dishes. I enjoyed the Grecco Roman artifacts (including an ornately carved sarcophagus) and my travel companion seemed to be more keen on the Egyptian mummy complete with canopic jars. Both of us were impressed by the one sweet little Van Gogh they had in the same room as a Picasso. By now even the building was taking on character – most of it emanating from a massive glass bubble chandelier that was a spectacle all on it’s own even without the tentacles that slithered out of it.
When we came back down we realized we missed a room where this photographic portrait of the Aztec “filth-eater” god was. It was the perfect bizarre way to end our visit. By now we both agreed it was totally worth the $17 even if we were a bit skeptical at first…
