NEW AMERICAN SCENERY: The Art of Paul Scott

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of its exhibition Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol, the RISD Museum is engaging contemporary artists and designers Pablo Bronstein, Nicole Eisenman, Pablo Helguera, Beth Katleman, Simone Leigh, Sebastian Ruth, Paul Scott, and Triple Canopy to create new bodies of work or create a unique curatorial project using the museum as a site for critical, creative production and presentation. Employing the galleries and digital platforms as well as spaces beyond the museum walls, these artists will question dominant narratives and highlight the strengths and idiosyncrasies of the museum’s collection, which includes more than 100,000 works spanning ancient times to the present. A landmark example of artist-curated museum exhibitions, Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol (1970) presented entire sections of objects as they appeared in storage, with little or no connoisseurial regard for their condition, authenticity, or art historical status. It remains one of the most celebrated and subversive exhibitions in contemporary art history.

Raid the Icebox Now is made possible by a lead grant from the National Endowment for the Arts with additional support from the RISD Museum Associates, Judy and Robert Mann, Taylor Box Company, and a generous in-kind gift from Meyer Sound Laboratories.

In the early nineteenth century, imported Staffordshire blue-and-white printed transferwares formed part of the new media of their age. Collected at the beginning of the twentieth century as iconic depictions of the early, independent United States, many were later donated to public art museums inspiring a new wave of pictorial wares.

Over the last five years, Paul Scott has been investigating these transferwares as well as the contemporary landscape of the United States. An ongoing dialogue between documentary, historical, travel and artistic research has led to the creation of a new substantive body of artwork, New American Scenery.

In it, Scott references archives, objects, the motives, and thinking of original collectors as well as the post-industrial landscapes of twenty-first-century America. The new work deals with issues surrounding globalization, energy generation and consumption, capitalism and immigration, and other legacies of history. The artwork includes antique tablewares re-worked by selective erasure, re-glazing, and the addition of newly printed decals. Others involve the re-use of cut, broken fragments using collage and traditional restoration processes, as well as prints and other works on paper.

– RISD installation photography by Erik Gould. All other photography by John Polak.

• RISD K-12 VIRTUAL CURRICULUM

• FC IN CONVERSATION | MELTING POINT, RISING WATERS: Courtney M. Leonard, Paul Scott, Norwood Viviano, and curator Jami Powell, PhD

• FC IN CONVERSATION | RAID THE ICEBOX: Paul Scott, Beth Katleman, and curator Elizabeth A. Williams

• Founders’ Hour featuring Paul Scott introduced by Mint Museum’s curator of decorative arts, Brian Gallagher

• LECTURE & TOUR: presented by The Pottery and Porcelain Club at RISD, Providence, RI

• LECTURE: Paul Scott, Artist: New American Scenery, Transferwares for the 21st century presented by American Ceramic Circle 2019 Symposium