BAY WINDOWS November 27, 1998 (Boston)
"Providence, on the Nile" (unedited version)
by John Ruggieri

“Gifts of the Nile: Ancient Egyptian Faience,”
@ Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

“Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry,”
@ David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI

Providence is in a state of creative rebirth, sprurred by the ahhh-at-last completion of the downtown Waterplace canal renovation and an energetic arts community. The colorful and hometown-proud Mayor Vincent “Buddy” Cianci is working on a cultural exchange between Providence and Florence, Italy, which will include a sampling of Florentine artisans and art from the Ufizi Gallery. The RISD Museum’s new director, Phillip Johnston, is admirably seeking to hire a first-ever curator of contemporay art.

I am a grateful offspring of one of the city’s most renowned colleges, Rhode Island School of Design, as a child attending museum classes and later as a frazzled full-time art schooler. These days I can cross the MA/RI border and see what’s happening on the East Side with a kind of sappy joy searching for the New. During recent weekend trips, I have enjoyed the smokey yet monumental installation “WaterFire” (with gondolas gliding by) that attracts droves of people from May through November. And, as usual, I found some exhibitions that were well worth the trip.

The RISD Museum is the place I saw my first sketchy Cezanne and small, sweet Monet. Surrounded by choice Colonial architecture, it is anchored elegantly on a steepish slope of land deemed the East Side of Providence. The modest facade of the Museum may not adequately hint at the truth that it houses 65,000 objects from every art epoch on several floors. Climb every marble-white staircase, walk every hardwood plank in this huge house of many collections.

It is fitting that a major traveling exhibition of ancient Egyptian culture — Gifts of the Nile — was borne by RISD’s own curator of Ancient Art, Dr. Florence Dunn Friedman, and that its subject, beautifully colored faience ceramic, is all about the lush, continually reborn Nile landscape. About 200 works of art from important Egyptian art collections — The Louvre, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — are all gathered here. The delight I found in this show is the incredible range of color and objects made with faience, a usually blue-green ceramic that mysteriously glazes itself with brilliant color when fired.

Pre-pyramid Egyptians scooped up desert sands and salts and created sacred sculptures meant to ward off bad vibes in this life and the afterlife. The blue-green coloring of faience apparently had a magical meaning for ancient Egyptians and may have imitated the prized mineral turquoise and lapis lazuli rock. For those used to “paint-a-pot” instant-art shops, the exhibition video illustrates the more primitive and delicate processes that the faience-makers may have used: building a bonfire of dried patties of buffalo dung for firing and grinding up bones to make dry-powder pigments. The care involved in carving and molding these magnificent wall tiles, ritual objects, figurines, and tiny animals such as a hedgehog charm speaks volumes about a craftsmanship that one ancient culture cultivated over 3000 years, with interesting pieces created during Greek- and Roman-enhanced periods.

One self-described “average” museum-goer I spoke to summed it up well: “I like the idea of being buried with these pieces.” Move over, King Tut.

My sojourn on red-brick-laden sidewalks took me up one block to a more direct route to the subject of death. “Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry” is an exploration by five well-established photographers of the living stories of hospice patients and their dying outside of hospital walls. Hospice is the taking care of the whole person, allowing doors of unresolved emotional issues to “fly open.” An accompanying video, a film commissioned by HBO, presents the stories of three hospice patients, one being an illustration of the limitations of faith. A pious black woman is admonished to be Pollyanic by her church-going friend in the face of death, “You know you’re healed,” ignoring the turbulence that might reside within her cancerous sistah. The traveling exhibition, now at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, features the commissioned work of Jim Goldberg, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Jack Radcliffe, Kathy Vargas, and was launched by the Corcoran Museum of Art and the National Hospice Foundation.

Goldin’s name sprung out at me, as I have experienced her edgy-yet-somehow-serene and color-heightened vision at the ICA in Boston and in New York. She has been linked with the Boston School of photographers, which chronicled gender-bending lives in this fair city and included the awfully talented Jack Pierson and Mark Morrisroe. Though I was able to take in most of the exhibition, I had to rush by her grouping of large images rendered in saturated colors as the gallery closed late one Sunday afternoon.

Some exhibits with social content “themes” never really get beyond a cursory treatment of Big subjects and do not always have much to say artistically. What is most significant about this show for me is the blending of expert photography and conceptual vision given mostly free reign. Sally Mann’s black-and-white work, in particular, is one of the more original tacklings of death and dying, within vast, sumptuous, people-free abstractions of the landscape. She takes her immediate experiences with hospice patients and then steps back, goes off, and just makes art. The images might well stand on their own, but reading Mann’s personal story in the wall text lends a powerful emotional blow to the act of looking.

Once you realize that Jim Goldberg is documenting his own father’s demise, you no longer question the voyeuristic quality that each image is laced with. This is his Dad’s cranky battle with colon cancer at home, seen under Goldberg’s quirky focus on details and moments of malaise, ennui, and clinical fact. Here is Dad’s “Piss Bottle,” appropriately titled. Here is Dad’s Foot, his Hand. Here is a great blurry look out into the sky for some goddamn form of escape. Here is Dad getting his physical therapy. Here is Dad on the can. There is Mom, applying makeup the day of the funeral. All shot in a nonchalant-Polaroid-moment kind of way.

Jack Radcliffe worked with journal-writer Barbara Ellen Wood to play back some of the more moving images they found in an AIDS hospice. Flesh-and-bones Sheila, all bulging white eyes framed within ebony skin, is described as “not a passive subject in these pictures. She directs and stages scenes that, for her, describe the daily dread of having AIDS.” An androgynous, emaciated child, Boo Boo, whose family has already seen too much death, wears a lethargic scowl, but bears it all with a little help from a relative’s touch. In “Randy’s 33rd Birthday,” it is disturbing to see the amount of dignity heaped upon one homeless man who seems to have at least one foot already stuck in death’s doorway. He is pictured wheelchair-slumped, with his long-lost parents and hospice worker, all never-minding his pitiable state or social status, just waiting for his head to rise to blow out the candles.

Copyright © 2007 John Ruggieri. All rights reserved.