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Posts Tagged ‘Mike Cohea’

Working Artists Help Student Artists

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 18, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Teny Gross tweeted this nice story from the Brown University alumni magazine.

Courtney Coelho wrote, “On a snowy December evening, lights were visible through the second-floor windows of List Art Center as the visual arts department’s Critique Intensive held its last session. Mixed with the students in the large studio space were four working artists—Elise Ansel ’84, Chitra Ganesh ’96, Keith Mayerson ’88, and Rob Reynolds ’90—who’d spent sixteen weeks with the class, teaching, critiquing, and discussing art.

“The class was the brainchild of Chair of Visual Art Wendy Edwards, who hopes it will serve as a model for future classes. ‘Alumni bring a generosity to their approach to the Brown students,’ Edwards said. ‘They love coming back here, they love giving, and they’re very professional and committed to helping our students.’ ” More here.

Speaking of art education in Providence, RISD just got a new president, an artisan herself. Meredith Goldstein at the Boston Globe writes, “The Rhode Island School of Design has chosen its 17th president. Rosanne Somerson takes the title effective immediately, the Board of Trustees announced [in February]. Somerson, a RISD grad and furniture designer, has been serving as the school’s interim president since January 2014. The board says it chose to keep Somerson in the job after a nine-month international search.”

The Globe article is here. Disegno magazine has an interview with Somerson, here.

Photo: Mike Cohea
Rose Congdon ’15, left, and her classmates critique work created for the visual art department’s Critique Intensive, a class taught by four alumni artists last semester. 

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Artists Return Discarded Museum to Life

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 21, 2014| 4 Comments »

No matter how bad things get in the great world, there will always be someone who starts a quirky, individualistic project just for the love of it, reassuring us all.

In Providence recently, a few folks got together to resurrect an abandoned natural history museum partly to see what an early museum looked like, partly because it was a shame to throw it all out.

In the NY Times, Henry Founatain wrote,  “If museums are meant to preserve objects forever, then forever ended here in 1945.

“That year, Brown University’s natural history museum, which included multitudes of animal skeletons and specimens among its 50,000 items, as well as anthropological curiosities like rope made from human hair, was thrown away.

“It was a sad end to what had been a labor of love for John Whipple Potter Jenks, a Brown alumnus, taxidermist and naturalist who founded the teaching museum in 1871.

“But Jenks had died in 1894 — on the steps of the museum, no less — and what by then was known as the Jenks Museum fell into disarray. It was shuttered in 1915, and the objects were scattered or stored until most of them were hauled, in 92 truckloads, to a nearby dump in 1945.

“But now the Jenks Museum lives again, at least temporarily, in an exhibition that is as much about art as it is about science.

“A group of Brown graduate students, with help from a faculty adviser and a New York artist, has rounded up a few surviving odds and ends, commissioned artists to recreate some of the vanished objects, and installed it all in Rhode Island Hall, the home of the original museum. The exhibition, which also includes a recreation of Jenks’s office as it might have looked in the year of his death, will be on display until spring.” Read more here.

The Lost Museum will be on display in Rhode Island Hall on the Brown University campus, 60 George Street, the Jenks Museum’s original home, through May 2015.

Photo: Mike Cohea/Brown University
The office of John Whipple Potter Jenks, who founded the natural history museum at Brown University, was recreated for an exhibition called Lost Museum.

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