LOCALLY MADE

by Anya Ventura

Jane Masters, Control Freak, 2005.  Museum purchase: Gift of the Artists’ Development Fund of the Rhode Island Foundation.

RISD Museum of Art
Through November 3, 2013

I was greeted by a man in pancake makeup and told to grab a goodie bag filled with a comb, a pencil, and a piece of bubblegum. Inside the packed gallery, several performance art pieces were being enacted at once. I watched as a man in drag swayed softly alone, encircled by a talismanic array of potato chip bags. Bubblegum wrappers were piled on the floor like a Gonzalez-Torres installation. This was “After School Special,” an event part of the RISD Museum’s exhibition, Locally Made, in which different local artists are given free reign in the museum’s experimental installation space, School House Long House.

Such creative chaos appears to be the charter of Locally Made, the museum’s first show in over 20 years to survey the broad range of artistic activity in Providence and its surrounding towns. A bridge between the museum and the local community, Locally Made is at once celebratory, motley, and encyclopedic in scope, as the vast index of participating artists listed prominently on the gallery wall can attest. In short, it’s a giant party.

While programming is conventionally viewed as ancillary to the exhibition itself, Locally Made cannot be separated from the lively, educational One Room series that animates it. Through One Room, the museum’s reach is extended beyond what its walls could ever accommodate. It showcases time-based, relational and social-based practices ––from sustainable food to poetry to theater to apparel design—in a spirit of radical inclusiveness. While expanding traditional definitions of art, One Room offers visitors the prospect of experiencing creativity in real time.

Locally Made features 300 artists in the course of four month—including everything from painting, sculpture, new media, sound art, theater, and off-the-wall happenings (not to be missed also is the new Spalter Media Gallery curated by the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum’s Dina Deitsch). Amid such bounty it’s hard to fix on any one single work, but individual vision is not the driving narrative of this exhibition. The show instead celebrates a collective genius, reveling in the act of making itself and making it in Providence as a creative community.

Anya Ventura is a frequent contributor to Art New England.