The Redwood Library & Athenaeum, the nation’s first purpose-built library, and Rhode Island’s first art gallery, announces the opening of two new exhibitions.
Arrangements and Other Photographic Maneuvers:
Daniel Lefcourt Arranges the Trevor Traina Collection
In Daniel Lefcourt’s Arrangement series, composite photographs from 2004-5, the artist arrays a multifarious collection of texts, images and objects in precisely ordered compositions that interrogate how a world can be compressed into a single image. The Arrangement series is rife with “tautological references” to image making and image solving: they tinker with perspectival conventions and the effects of trompe l’oeil to prod what is real and what is artifice, and why we might value one over the other.
The Redwood’s summer 2023 exhibition departs from Lefcourt’s signature Arrangements to explore more broadly how photographs reveal the way that we think about and structure the world at specific moments in history. The exhibition is titled for Michel Foucault’s 1966 book, Les mots et les choses, translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, where he proposed that the epistemic assumptions of a time and place can be read through the ways that we choose to pattern or arrange ideas, whether through perspectival modes of painting, structuring metaphors of language, or dominant scientific paradigms.
All photographs are “arranged,” but some highlight their compositional structure to strongly proclaim a certain order as crucial to their meaning. Whether Walker Evans’ tightly cropped showbill fragments, Roe Etheridge’s striations of text, or Ryan McGInley’s vertiginous perspectives, certain photographers order “things” in the visual field to articulate a specific understanding of the modern and contemporary world. The exhibition is drawn from the collection of Trevor Traina, the foremost private collection of contemporary photography in the US today.
The word “arrangement” only came into usage in the late eighteenth century – soon after the establishment of the Redwood – and its coining reflects the Enlightenment’s modern, secular effort to rationally systematize the chaos of the universe through dictionaries, maps, or libraries. On the occasion of the Redwood’s 275th anniversary, Lefcourt revisited his iconic Arrangement series from two decades ago to create a new composite photograph that meditates on the Redwood, its archives, and the idiosyncrasies of collecting. The exhibition contextualizes Lefcourt’s new commission alongside his original Arrangement photographs. It also
features a dazzling selection of the work of sixteen other photographers from the iconic collection of Trevor Traina, including photographs by Walker Evans, William Eggleston, and Lee Friedlander, alongside contemporary artists like Alec Soth, Andreas Gursky and Christopher Williams.
Curated by the artist Daniel Lefcourt and writer Dr. Leora Maltz-Leca.
The show is open now through October 1st in the Van Alen Gallery.
EXPANDING HORIZONS: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE CLOUDS HILL HOUSE MUSEUM
A near in-country estate situated on the shore of Greenwich Bay at Cowesett in southern Warwick, RI, Clouds Hill was constructed in 1872-77 by Providence textile manufacturer William Smith Slater (1817-1882). His uncle Samuel Slater (1768-1835), “Father of the American Industrial Revolution”, brought English cotton spinning technology to America and in partnership with younger brother John Slater (1776-1843)–William S. Slater’s father–founded a network of cotton mills and mill towns throughout New England. The new country estate was intended for Mr. Slater’s eldest daughter Elizabeth Ives Slater (1849-1917) on the occasion of her marriage to Alfred Augustus Reed, Jr. (1845-1895) whose family were traders in the Dutch East Indies colony of Batavia (Jakarta) prior to retiring to New England.
The estate descended to the senior female in the family over four generations and passed through the Reed and Allen families by marriage. In practice, it functioned for years as both a working farm and seasonal residence, once comprising 500 acres, now reduced to just less than 30. The main house, built of rough hewn local granite, was designed in a transitional Gothic Revival-Italianate style by Providence architect William R. Walker. The interior decoration was created by William McPherson & Co., with furnishings by Doe & Hunnewell, both of Boston.
Built when McPherson was simultaneously executing the interiors of Chateau-sur-Mer, Newport, under Richard Morris Hunt, the house was never substantially altered and retains all of its original contents together with those of subsequent generations. Emblematic of America’s evolving and trailblazing pursuit of new horizons–technological and social–Clouds Hill today retains its authenticity, not only physically, but also in the preservation of its residents’ personalities and spirit.
Curated by Paul Miller.
The show is open now through January 7, 2024 in the Peirce Prince Gallery. Generously supported by BankNewport.