When Now Is Night Martin Boyce: When Now Is Night, a major exhibition now at the RISD Museum, marks Scottish artist Martin Boyce’s first solo museum show in the US. In the past two decades, Boyce has produced a remarkable body of work — sculpture, installations and photographs — that has established him as one of the foremost figures in contemporary art. “Martin’s thoughtful observations on the intersections of art and design and the tension between our natural and manmade environments, as well as his multidisciplinary approach to art making, feel very much at home in the RISD Museum,” says Director John Smith. The Boyce retrospective continues through January 31.
MAKE YOURSELF VISIBLE Writer, critic and honorary degree recipient Adam Gopnik delivered an inspiring keynote address at RISD’s 2015 Graduate Hooding Ceremony on May 29. A few excerpts from his talk follow.
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“Make art, take chances, delight in the act of making… since all the other acts that follow… turn out to be arbitrary and unfair….” You’ve spent this time as graduate students toiling hard and learning how to do things that are very hard to do—and you’ve learned to do them well. Knowing how to actually accomplish something—play a guitar riff, a guitar chord or build the guitar itself or make an etching or take a great portrait—all of those things are worth far more than ever having passed a test or gotten a good score on your GREs. You’ve spent the past few years learning that you never waste your time when you are making something. As my son Luke said simply and truly last night, “people who know how to do something well usually do other things well, too.” You have all learned how hard it is to do things well, and now you know how to do something well. So I wish you well. Go—and do it.
photos by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH
I wish you all today, if I may be perverse for a moment, what I think of as happy obscurity. The one line that is unbreakable is the line between invisibility and obscurity. We are all obscure by the standards of the greatest accomplishments that have ever been—all obscure in the eyes of eternity. But the moment we make something—the moment we commit ourselves to writing a song, to digging a garden, to drawing a picture, to building a house—our invisibility ends. So, make art, take chances, delight in the act of making for its own sake, since all the other acts that follow—success, applause, failure—turn out to be arbitrary and unfair in ways that the act itself is not. And one other thing I can guarantee: small communities of readers and watchers and listeners turn out to be far more meaningful in your life than the largest imaginable anonymous audiences. Fifty people in a coffeehouse you are singing to will always count far more in your life than the largest audience you can possibly imagine.