The Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art held the Rhode Island Architecture exhibition 1939 June 18-December 5. Architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr. developed the exhibition under Director Alexander Dorner with Museum Assistant Barbara Wriston. The exhibition surveyed three hundred years of Rhode Island buildings with much of the photographic material coming from Antoinette Dowling's 1937 work "The Early Homes of Rhode Island" and the Historic American Buildings Survey. Dowling, Norman M. Isham, and others provided assistance in gathering materials and photographs.
The exhibition's photograph panels came under the purview of the Museum's Education Department, which loaned them to local and national educational and civic institutions. Additional visiting architecture exhibitions administered by Writson were held at the Museum, particularly during Education Director Lydia Powel's tenure, 1943-1944. The Rhode Island Historical Society acquired the panels sometime after 1953 and transferred them to the RISD Archives in 2011.
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Architecture Exhibition records, Department of Museum Education, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Archives.
The records document architecture exhibitions held at the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum of Art, 1939-1943, and the use of exhibition materials by the Museum's Department of Education, 1940-1953. The bulk of the records document the 1939 Rhode Island Architecture exhibition and its subsequent use as a loan exhibition by the Department of Education. Records include correspondence, photographs and exhibition photograph panels, printing blocks, and publications.
Organized into four series:
Records were transfered from the Museum of Art and the Rhode Island Historical Society.
The Museum of Art Exhibition photograph collection holds twenty-four negatives taken by Nicholas Romano in 1939. There are fourteen 8x10 installation negatives and eighteen negatives (5x7 and 8x10) of labels.
The Fleet Library at RISD holds lantern slides of Rhode Island buildings and maps prepared by architect and historian John Hutchins Cady during the 1930s, some of which were used for a lecture titled "The Architectural and Civic Development of Providence," given under the sponsorship of the Community Art Project. See the Community Art Project records, 1932-1943.
The administrative files, 1939-1943, 1952, include correspondence between Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr. and Museum Assistant Barbara Wriston regarding the 1939 Rhode Island Architecture exhibition, essays, loan correspondence between Wriston and colleges and universities, catalogues and correspondence for architecture exhibitions loaned to RISD, and publications including catalogues for "Ante Bellum Houses of the Mississippi Valley" and Exhibition of Early Ohio Valley Architecture, Taft Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio." The file for Architectural Designs - MIT, 1940-1941, includes four photographs of I. M. Pei's "Standardized Propaganda Unit."
Material collected by Lydia Bond Powel, Education Director, 1943-1944, includes postcards and brochures with an architectural theme and a copy of "Sketch of the Life of George Berkeley - Bishop of Cloyne," annotated by members of her family. The collection contains a copy of "Colonial Williamsburg: The First Twenty-five Years," 1952.
A set of black and white photographs mounted on 8x11 paper with typed labels identifying each photograph. The photographs are duplicates of the exhibition photograph panels (series III). The photographs are arranged chronologically by century.
The series contains 226 large format black and white photograph panels (30x40 and 24x30 inches) and seven wall label panels created for the Rhode Island Architecture exhibition, 1939. Each photograph is mounted on a panel with a grommet in each upper corner. The photographs are numbered and labeled for identification. The panels were rebound in 1953. There is a small collection of architectural photograph panels created for subsequent exhibitions and one wall label panel for an Egyptian architecture exhibition.
The RISD Archives maintains a database of all photograph panels.
The collection contains fifty of eighty-one halftone copper printing blocks created by Thomas H. Devlin to print the exhibition catalogue photographs for "Rhode Island Architecture" published by the Rhode Island Museum Press in 1939. Most of the blocks are 11.75 x 9 inches (30 x 22 cm.). Devlin taught Textile Printing at RISD, 1933-1943, and worked as a photo engraver. There are three small blocks of unknown purpose. The block numbers correspond to the catalogue's numbered photographs.