A few weeks ago I went to the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. I had never been to the state before and the city was appealing – I can only imagine how it looks even more attractive when all the college and art students are back in town.

RISD is, I think all agree, one of the best art schools in the country. The current exhibit of select members of the 2019 graduating class delivered proof of that.

The show was fresh, irreverent, thought provoking and testament to a lot of technical skill in addition to a lot of creative ideas. Works with and on paper, glass, installations, fabric arts with some phenomenal weaving, painting, and photography – all convinced. Here are some samples. (I was bad, I did not record titles and names, put it down to jet lag. Here is an overview.)

For me the most impressive work (and that name I noted) was a wall of large photographs hung in a floor to ceiling grid, all 15 seemingly depicting the same head and neck, photographed from the back. Only on closer inspection did you realize slight variations, like, for example, a different necklace, or the absence of the necklace. More minute variations revealed themselves only if you kept staring and comparing and evaluating.

Note it is the head of a Black person. The back of the head of a Black person. The fact that we don’t easily recognize people cross-racially (Whites are horrible at correctly identifying Blacks, and vice versa, and true for other cross racial identification as well) is brought home in spades. It is conveyed by the fact that we have to look really hard to proclaim they “Don’t look all alike to me.” The real-life implication are of course most painfully felt in the legal system, where mistaken identifications lead to verdicts that incarcerate innocent people.

We also, ironically, feel free or even compelled to look at the back of a head, we are in a museum after all and searching for meaning or understanding of the installation, when in real life we do not look, sometimes actively avoid looking. Staring at a person is not socially acceptable and staring at a person of a different race can be misinterpreted and lead to tension. “Made you do it!,” I could almost hear the artist muttering in the wings…

The face is never revealed, another representation of the chasm of not knowing between viewer and subject, the mostly White museum patron and the Black model. Why should he look at us when we don’t look at him?

The name Azimuth is also in no way explained. I hope it is an art history joke (it would be exceedingly clever) referring to two artists who for a short while in the 1960s published an art review called Azimuth and ran a gallery called Azimut. For these two, Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, White was central to their art, in color and materials. 4 years ago an exhibit at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice revived the work. (Details here.)

In any case, I had a blast being challenged by this work. The photographer is surely a young man we do want to keep an eye on – his ships will come in.

Music today shall be by offspring of the city of Providence: a Roomful of Blues