Manual / Issue 11

Can we find in the detail, in the stitch and the weave, an ecology of care, a model for activating new forms of life, ones that might reject or reimagine an economic and cultural order based on novelty, disposability, and the monadic self? Can they help us learn to live together in a broken world?

-Brian Goldberg and Kate Irvin, from the preface to Issue 11

Introduction: Barry Schwabsky on painting and repair

From the Files: Linda Catano on the conservation of a 700-year-old Gwaneum painting; Anna Rose Keefe on loss, grief, and a hairwork collar

Double Takes: Thomas Denenberg and Markus Berger describe nostalgia and reuse in a spinning-wheel chair; Lisa Z. Morgan and Liliane Wong parse damage and darns to Kate Kittredge’s stockings; Steven Lubar and Sharma Shields consider the life of a stapled ceramic platter

Artists on Art: Visible Vehicle Repairs by Daniel Eatock; Ramiro Gomez’s On Tenth Avenue; Olivia Laing on Larry Krone’s Then and Now

Portfolio: A gathering of patches, mends, & darns

Object Lessons: Kate Irvin explores repair in an unworn travel coat; Maureen C. O’Brien presents a cautionary tale about reviving Andromache; Brian Goldberg offers four portraits in two boots; Gina Borromeo documents the restoration-and de-restoration-of Hermes; Roberto Lugo offers a note on mattering

How To: Decide whether to repair a repair, with Jessica Urick

Manual: a journal about art and its making, a twice-yearly publication, uses the collections, exhibitions, and collaborations of the RISD Museum as an impetus for essays and interviews, artist interventions, and archive highlights. A fusion of academic arts journal and design magazine, Manual is a resource for engaged conversations about art, design, and the impact of creative making by curators, artists, scholars, and educators.

Manual 11 complements Repair and Design Futures, on view at the museum October 5, 2018-June 30, 2019. The exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from the Coby Foundation and programming support from the RISD Museum Associates. It is also made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of Assemblages, a Brown-RISD collaboration focused on object-based teaching and research. The 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 the RISD Museum Board of Governors. Additional generous support for this issue of Manual is provided by the RISD Museum Associates and Sotheby’s.

RISD Museum Director: John W. Smith

Manual Editor-in-Chief: Sarah Ganz Blythe

Editor: Amy Pickworth

Art Director: Derek Schusterbauer

Graphic Designer: Brendan Campbell, June Yoon, and Taylor Pannell

Photographer: Erik Gould

Printer: GHP

ISSN 2329-9193