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Posts Tagged ‘rhode island school of design’

Three Little Pigs & Other Photos

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 17, 2016| 4 Comments »

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Here’s my latest photo round-up.

The three cheerful and unsuspecting little pigs are hanging out at Chez Pascal in Providence. French-inspired, the restaurant features wurst and local produce. The horse dancers grace a wall of AS220, an arts powerhouse. The Roy Lichenstein POW! art is on a Rhode Island School of Design Museum banner. I think the iris-like banner is of a vase.

The “Bed Early” mural is part of a longer thought at the charming Dean Hotel. The skinny windows are just skinny windows. The fork, which I just noticed after several years of walking past, is on a Wayland Square restaurant called the Red Stripe.

Providence is not all food and fun. If anyone can tell me what church was behind the Assumption of the Virgin parade on August 7, I’d be much obliged. It was impressive. I Googled everything I could think of. I can at least tell you that the guy waving the hat is George M. Cohan at Fox Point. A king of parades, he nevertheless probably composed no music for the one I saw.

From Concord, we have a typical lichen-covered stone wall near the North Bridge, a garden ornament in the shape of a mushroom and grapes hanging on a blue fence.

Sometimes KerryCan tells me which photo she liked best. I’m always grateful for signs that someone’s reading.

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This Docent Is 102

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 21, 2016| 1 Comment »

I gravitate to stories about older people who keep on truckin’ and don’t let age keep them from doing what they love.

Here’s one about a 102-year-old museum docent, who is being honored with a café in her name.

Chuck Hinman of Rhode Island Public Radio reported, “There’s something new at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence … . Visitors to the [Rhode Island School of Design] Museum have been unable to use its Benefit St. entrance since mid-April, but that entrance now has been re-opened, as RISD unveils what it’s been working on these past few months: its first café, called Café Pearl, after one of the museum’s most dedicated and long-serving docents, Pearl Nathan.

“RIPR’s Chuck Hinman talked to the 102-year-old Nathan at her home in East Providence, about her long association with the RISD Museum.”

Hinman goes on to say Nathan is bemused by the café and her new fame. She tells him her “emphasis was on my art collection,” not the food.  She graduated with a degree in art history in New York. When she came to Providence, a friend got her involved in “touring with the children,” and she stayed on. For 70 years.

When Hinman asks who Nathan’s favorite artist is, she says she thinks she will surprise him: “I adore Francis Bacon!”

Now, that takes a certain kind of person, I’d say. A person open to experience. Listen to the audio here and see a photo of Nathan leading a tour in 1962.

Photo: Chuck Hinman / RIPR

Pearl Nathan, 102, a guide at the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design.

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Southern New England Photo Update

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2016| 2 Comments »

Here are some recent Rhode Island and Massachusetts photos. (Connecticut is also considered Southern New England, but I haven’t been there in ages.)

I wonder if other people have preferences for seeing certain kinds of photos on certain kinds of social media. For example, unless it’s a picture of one of my grandchildren, I really don’t like seeing people pictures on Instagram, but on Facebook, people pictures are the only kinds of photos I want to see. I’m still figuring out Ello, which is more likely to have art or gifs. I like almost any kind of photo on twitter or on blogs.

My own pictures are mostly from my walks. I’m starting off here with the plant sale at the New Shoreham library fundraiser and a typically short-lived scene on the island’s famed painted rock. Also in Rhode Island, an intensely serious heavy-equipment operator in a sandbox, the alley beside the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, fancy church architecture, and a plaque commemorating H.P. Lovecraft, a popular Providence-based horror writer with some regrettable character flaws.

From Massachusetts, yellow iris in a meadow that is more often than not under water — or ice. Also a clematis, a remnant of a once-spectacular garden at a house that got sold. (Too spectacular for the new owners to live up to. Kind of like the garden in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.)

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The Food in Fiction

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 27, 2016| 2 Comments »

Over at the Brain Pickings blog, Maria Popova has a review of a book that features photos of famous meals in fiction.

“Food and literature have a long and arduous relationship … But nowhere does that relationship come alive more vividly and enchantingly than in Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals  … an ingenious project by designer and writer Dinah Fried, who cooks, art-directs, and photographs meals from nearly two centuries of famous fiction. Each photograph is accompanied by the particular passage in which the recipe appeared, as well as a few quick and curious factlets about the respective author, novel, or food.

“The project began as a modest design exercise while Fried was attending the Rhode Island School of Design a couple of years ago, but the concept quickly gripped her with greater allure that transcended her original short-term deadline.

“As she continued to read and cook, a different sort of self-transcendence took place. [Although] a near-vegetarian, she found herself wrestling with pig kidney for Ulysses and cooking bananas eleven ways for Gravity’s Rainbow. …

“All of Fried’s photographs are immensely thoughtful (Ishmael’s austere dinner from Moby-Dick is not only a nautically appropriate serving of clam chowder, but also appears lit by candlelight), and some bear a distinct undertone of cultural meta-satire (representing A Confederacy of Dunces is the ultimate edible Americana, a hot dog on a classic All-American diner tablecloth).”

Check out Popova’s review here, and revel in photographs that include Sylvia Plath’s avocado and crabmeat salad, Oliver Twist’s request for “More,” Proust’s petite madeleine, Alice’s Mad Tea Party, and Heidi’s toasted cheese.

Photo: Dinah Fried
“On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold.” — The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925

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A Carrot Clarinet Is Just the Beginning

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 11, 2015| Leave a Comment »

Gotta love MIT. There is always something crazy going on over there. And when MIT and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) ideas come together, watch out.

At WBUR radio, Fred Thys explains about a new, multidiscipline design program.

Matt “Kressy has put MIT’s first-ever integrated design and management (IDM) students in a kind of boot camp. He wanted to immerse the engineers, designers and business school students in a project where they would have to work in concert. …

“The task: build instruments from found materials. And boy did the students find materials. Mechanical engineer Maria Tafur, from Bogota, made a clarinet from a carrot. Engineer Tammy Shen, from Taipei, has made an instrument that includes glass bottles. …

“Kressy was teaching a course at the Rhode Island School of Design when he got the idea for the new IDM master’s program. He was also teaching engineers and business students at MIT — but it was the design students from RISD that caught Kressy’s attention by asking a critical question:

‘How does this product enhance our lives?’ …

“Kressy says it took 13 years for his idea for a design program to get traction at MIT. When it did, he was able to pick 18 students with completely different criteria from what MIT typically uses.

“ ‘And that rubric had crazy metrics, such as the metric love,’ Kressy says. ‘And the love metric was basically: Does this candidate have a large capacity for love and compassion? …

“ ‘When I showed the rubric to my colleagues here, let’s just say it got mixed responses,’ he says, laughing.”

To get at the love-and-compassion metric, he asked applicants to submit a portfolio indicating their efforts to make the world a better place.

You can read here about the impressive portfolios, struggles to get to MIT from poor countries, and inventive ideas for the future.”

Photo: Jesse Costa/WBUR
MIT integrated design graduate students Maria Tafur and Masakazu Nagata play their homemade instruments along with Brave Sharab, 7, on Main Street in Cambridge.

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Recreating the Coral World

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 6, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Some posts at Andrew Sullivan I only need to glance at briefly and bells go off: for example, this entry about an artist who works with coral.

Andrew quotes Amelia Urry writing about Courtney Mattison, who became enamored of coral while studying conservation biology at Brown University and moonlighting at the Rhode Island School of Design.

“Mattison’s newest piece, Our Changing Seas III,” says Urry at Grist, “depicts a hurricane-spiral of bleached corals coalescing to a bright center. You can read it as a message of hope or one of impending doom, depending on your disposition …

“At the heart of Mattison’s artwork is her desire to inspire real-life changes in how people view and treat the world’s oceans and environments. Similar to the Our Changing Seas series, Courtney Mattison’s Hope Spots collection comprises 18 vignettes, each of which represents a vital marine ecosystem in its ideal form (that is, protected from various threats such as global warming or pollution).” Read more at Grist, here.

Art: Courtney Mattison
“Our Changing Seas III,” a ceramic coral reef

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Providence-Based Artist

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on April 18, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Nancy L. urged me to take a look at the work of Providence-based artist Anne Spalter. I found fascinating, kaleidoscopic videos and stills at various online locations.

From her artist statement: “Anne Morgan Spalter creates art works that explore her concept of the ‘modern landscape.’ The works depict modern landscape elements or ways of viewing our surroundings and use traditional materials as well as digital imaging, printing, and video.

“Spalter takes hundreds of digital photos and videos each year, often from the windows of moving cars and planes, that capture both technologically advanced ways of moving through the landscape and the modern structures that are in it …”

She is the author of The Computer in the Visual Arts, which former RI School of Design president Roger Mandle described as, “a seductively articulate and illuminating introduction to the rapidly expanding world of the computer and art, design, and animation.”

She and her husband are collectors of early computer art. “In early 2011, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA,  exhibited works curated from the collection,” notes Spalter’s c.v. MoMA has shown pieces from the collection, too.

This video, called I95, will amaze anyone who has driven that daunting thoroughfare.

Find some stills from videos by Anne Spalter here.

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