LOOK WELCOME BEAUTY (2019)
installation
collaboration with Josephine Devanbu and Debra Harris
RISD Museum
Look at Art. Get Paid. (LAAGP) is a socially engaged art project that pays people who don’t visit art museums to visit one as guest critics of the art and its institution. After hosting community critiques, the LAAGP team then collaborated with 4 of the guest critics to realize interventions at the Museum. This intervention responds to the following critique:
[The Museum] feels like it’s something exclusive and tucked away just for certain people. If it were to be more visible I think that would be helpful.
Many people have driven past the museum hundreds of times, not knowing it was open to the public or what they could expect to find inside. This intervention into the RISD Museum’s signage aims to make the Museum more visible, legible, and approachable to those who aren’t already familiar with it. The installation uses feather flags—tall nylon flags commonly placed outside storefronts and businesses—to interrupt the cryptic and minimalist aesthetics of signage in elite art institutions. The phrases printed on the flags are often used by auto-dealerships, pawn shops, and beauty salons. They also happen to apply to the art museum.
Find all the interventions here.
“Critic’s Choice” is organized by Maia Chao and Josephine Devanbu—the artists behind Look at Art. Get Paid.
Assistance from Hanna Exel, Ruby Stenhouse, Kevin Wiesner, Gabby Widjaja, G Cha, and Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez, and Bo Won Keum
Photo Credits: Norlan Oliva, Jon Gourlay, and Selene Means
This activity is made possible in part 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. Additional support provided by the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism.
