Towards a genealogy of visual culture at the Rhode Island School of Design, 1875--1900

Recent art historical scholarship has reconsidered the discipline's "invention" of the idea of the modern artist the professionalization of the artist and how the program of the American art museum has been historically constructed. But almost always the scholarship stops short of acknowledging the entwined narrative of design and the designer. Our understanding of modern visual culture will remain impoverished until we complicate or complement narratives inherited from Art History with an equally developed history of the designer, a history of design, and a greater attention to how things are made.Chapter One addresses the agency of the Centennial Women who "founded" RISD, and documents the unlikely story of how a design school won out over the competing proposal to fund a drinking fountain. Chapter Two continues this project of archival retrieval. It documents the contentious relationship between local advocates of art and design, and identifies the vision and legacy of founder, Mrs. Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf. Chapter Three pieces together the material culture of RISD's first classroom complex at the Hoppin Homestead Building, from 1878-93. RISD provided an alternative creative world to the bohemian ideal of the painter that has become such a popular cliche in the public imagination. Chapter Four presents my first work on the Jones Bequest lawsuit that led to the founding of the first Art Museum in RI, housed at RISD.This thesis maps the shifting concept of art, design and making at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) from its founding as a post-Centennial Exhibition design school until 1900, by which time it had become a unique hybrid institution. As a case study, the early history of RISD provides a critical site revealing how art and design were tacitly understood to be different kinds of cultural practices within the ecology of culture of the city, state, and nation. Fully developed, such a genealogical history will provide a powerful alternative view of what knowledge is formed as the result of privileging art over design, and what this can tell us about accepted ideas of modernity, and art as the practice of the modern self.