Convening
June 20, 2018
The RISD Museum is proud to launch its multi-year Raid the Icebox Now exhibition project with a convening of participating artists and curators on June 20, 2018.
Raid the Icebox Now will be presented throughout the RISD Museum beginning fall 2019 and remaining on view until summer 2020. The project celebrates the 50th anniversary of the RISD Museum’s exhibition of Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol, which has arguably become the template for inventive impulse in reimagining museum collections through artist-curated exhibition. Raid the Icebox Now will engage the contemporary artists and designers Pablo Bronstein, Nicole Eisenman, Pablo Helguera, Beth Katleman, Simone Leigh, Opening Ceremony, Adam Pendleton, Sebastian Ruth, Paul Scott, and Triple Canopy to create new bodies of work or unique curatorial projects using the RISD Museum as a site for critical creative production, and presentation. The June 20 convening will feature participating artists as well as guest critics and artists such as Ingrid Schaffner (curator of the Carnegie International 2018, Carnegie Museum of Art), and artist Fred Wilson—along with the RISD Museum’s John W. Smith (director) and Dominic Molon (Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art)—to critically assess the legacy of Raid the Icebox I with Andy Warhol and how it has transformed artistic and curatorial practice, critically exploring relationships between museums, artists, collections, and their publics.
Raid the Icebox Now extends the legacy of Warhol’s radically subversive original project, which developed from then-RISD Museum director Daniel Robbins’s frustration with the number of works languishing in storage. Acting on a conversation with John and Dominique de Menil, Robbins extended an invitation to an artist to make a show from the museum’s collection as a departure from traditional approaches to selection and display. Warhol defied expectations in Raid the Icebox I by exhibiting entire sections of items as they appeared in storage, with little or no connoisseurial regard for their condition, authenticity, or art historical status. The exhibition catalogue followed suit with essays, an inventory of the objects, and Warhol’s impromptu Polaroids of museum storage. The dynamic and surprising nature of his installation continues to have a profound impact on artists, curators, and cultural institutions to the present day.
Employing the galleries and digital platforms as well as spaces beyond the museum walls, the artists featured in Raid the Icebox Now will question dominant narratives and highlight the strengths and idiosyncrasies of the RISD Museum's collection as they develop a series of projects and exhibitions that will be realized from fall 2019 through summer 2020. The project reflects the RISD Museum’s central role as a resource for artists, designers, and other makers as a place for research, discourse, and exchange. An updated reprint of the original catalog, long out of print, is also being planned.
RISD Museum is supported by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and with the generous partnership of the Rhode Island School of Design, its Board of Trustees, and Museum Governors. Additional promotion for Convening: Raid the Icebox Now provided by Alliance of Artists Communities.
