Meet the RISD Museum: home of this year's Looking/Learning images.

This May, The Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence celebrates 125 years of bringing people and art together. With nearly 80,000 objects ranging from ancient Egyptian and Sumerian artifacts to works just made, the depth and breadth of the museum's holdings make it one of the largest academic museums in the country and the third largest art collection in New England. However, the domestic scale of the galleries and facade give it an intimacy that provides visitors with up-close and personal encounters with works of art. The Looking and Learning section of SchoolArts this past year has sampled this collection, which includes particularly strong examples of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, 19th-century French painting, European master drawings, Asian textiles, modern Latin-American art, and American furniture and decorative arts on display in Pendleton House, the first American wing of any art museum.

The leading art museum in Rhode Island is also a primary resource for study and inspiration for the students at Rhode Island School of Design, one of the nation's premier colleges of art and design. As such, living artists have an active role in the life of the museum. Faculty, visiting artists and academics, and students present tours, gallery talks and lectures, and professional development opportunities for local teachers. Artists are also active participants in outreach activities to libraries and community centers throughout the state.

The museum's education department works closely with K-12 teachers in the development of programs that serve over 30,000 young people each year. These include workshops, family days, museum tours, and Wheels of Wonder, a former bookmobile transformed into a rolling work of art that brings art and reading programs to schools and libraries (see the December 2001 Looking and Learning feature). To discover more about The RISD Museum, visit the website at www.risd.edu/ museum.cfm.