An Artsy Visit To Providence, Rhode Island—‘The Creative Capital’

Providence considers itself “The Creative Capital.”

“Capital” is straightforward enough as Rhode Island’s capital city. “Creative” requires more explanation.

Start by thinking about the Rhode Island School of Design, one of America’s leading art schools for more than 100 years.

James Franco (“Spiderman”), Seth McFarlane (“Family Guy”), Martin Mull (“Roseanne),” Jemima Kirke (“Girls”), and Gus Van Zandt (“Good Will Hunting”) have gone to Hollywood from RISD.

David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, and Chris Frantz founded the Talking Heads after meeting as freshman at RISD.

Graduate Chris Van Allsburg wrote and illustrated “Jumanji” and “The Polar Express.”

Fashion designer Nicole Miller.

Shepard Fairey, originator of the Barak Obama “Hope” campaign poster. The world’s most famous glass artist, Dale Chihuly. Kara Walker, one of visual art’s most provocative creators over the last 40 years. Rose B. Simpson, who’s taken Native American ceramics to new heights. Julie Mehretu, one of the most prominent contemporary artists in the world.

A partial list of prominent former RISD students.

For visitors to Providence, the school’s museum of art is a highlight. Not as large as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 50 miles to the north, pound-for-pound, its encyclopedic collection measures up in quality. This is no ordinary college art museum. RISD Museum doubles as the civic art museum for the city and state. Among college art museums, it is fourth largest in the country after Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.

From contemporary paintings by RISD graduates to an exquisitely preserved mummy and the largest wooden Buddha in America, the museum’s permanent collection has signature items that would be cherished at any institution in the world.

RISD Museum displays a delightful, small Van Gogh oil painting produced the year he died. A signature Manet portrait of contemporary Berthé Morisot featured in the “Manet/Degas” exhibition hosted in 2023 and 2024 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso. Good ones.

The Japanese woodblock prints and kimonos gifted by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller are as fine as can be found anywhere. She grew up just down the block from RISD, a daughter of Rhode Island senator Nelson W. Aldrich and the wife of John D. Rockefeller Jr.

In true “Creative Capital” spirit, museum wall text emphasizes how each item was made–tools, techniques, process, intention–over trivial details. This is rare among American art museums and reinforces a commitment to RISD students and other creatives who want to learn from the pieces, not simply admire them.

“We really like to teach creativity,” RISD Museum Director Tsugumi Maki told Forbes.com. “We like to show how creativity is unlocked and discovered and demystified for the students, and we try to apply that same philosophy to our audiences in the community.”

The museum is equally enjoyable for anyone whose interest goes no further than appreciation.

“I meet people all the time who are like, ‘Oh, you work in a museum. I don’t go to museums. I don’t understand art.’ I’m like, ‘What’s there to understand about art’” Maki said. “They’re like, ‘I never took art history classes. I don’t have any experience.’ I’m like, ‘Art is supposed to make you feel something.’ So, if you feel something, ask yourself, what are you feeling? Does it make you angry? Does it make you sad? Does it make you happy? Because that’s a reflection of yourself and the artwork, and that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. Then you can ask the questions of: why am I feeling this way, where did this come from that it speaks to me. Those questions people don’t ask enough.”

With a nationwide public education system terribly unbalanced to prioritize STEM–science, technology, engineering, and math–at the expense of the arts and humanities–music, painting, drawing, writing, literature, film–American society has suffered. Two generations of children have had their lives directed toward securing good paying jobs crunching numbers. Amoral tech bros are held up as heroes. Cruelty has been confused with toughness and is applauded. Empathy considered a weakness. One hundred and forty characters considered writing and reading.

In a STEM world with right answers and wrong answers, knowing takes prominence over thinking.

“There isn’t enough critical thinking in the world these days. People aren’t curious enough, they don’t know how to be curious in all ways,” Maki said. “We’re in this information, fact-based world where we don’t have to ask questions. We automatically have something like the Internet telling you exactly how things work, and what we want to do is let people unfold things for themselves.”

AS220

RISD exists to nurture the most promising budding creatives from around world. AS220 is the spunky, scrappy, punk rock, local’s only, come one, come all counterpart. “Unjuried, uncensored, and all ages.”

“Unjuried” is a word made up by AS200 reflecting its all are welcome regardless of ability or means DNA.

Anyone in Rhode Island who has a band and needs a stage, AS220 has one, free of charge. Want to take a dance class? AS220 has them. Woodworking, printmaking, screen printing, sewing, photography–with dark room–AS220. A black box theatre. Improv and stand-up. AS220. Poetry. Open access art exhibitions.

All of that plus a bar and restaurant, affordable housing, artist studios, youth programs, festivals–you name it.

Art for all. All the people and all the arts. Unpasteurized.

Anyone in New England looking for their people who hasn’t found them, look at AS200.

On any given Wednesday through Sunday night at the organization’s 115 Empire Street main building, visitors experience the weirdest and most wonderful grab bag of performances and presentations imaginable. The public is welcome to drop in on classes and use the workshops. Just show up with a good attitude.

AS220 celebrates its 40th year of operation in downtown Providence in 2025. It serves as a model for how community focused arts organizations operating on shoestring budgets can revitalize urban areas and act as connective tissue for cities. It has grown to encompass three enormous historic buildings where it also acts as landlord to local businesses.

Visit the RISD Museum to see one of Eduard Manet’s greatest paintings. Visit AS220 to hear a death metal band playing its fourth gig. Visit the Providence Art Club to meet Edward Mitchell Bannister.

Providence Art Club

The Providence Art Club was founded in 1880. It was both integrated and open to women, long before women could vote and not long after people were held in slavery in America. One of its founding members was Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828–1901), a Black Canadian who moved to Boston in 1848 before finding his way to Providence alongside his mixed-race, Narragansett Indian wife, Christiana Cartreaux (1822–1903).

In 1876, Bannister, self-taught, took first place in a painting competition at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. When he came forward to accept the award, organizers were nonplussed. They resisted handing over the certificate until Bannister’s fellow artists stood in support, demanding they do so.

Sculptor Gage Prentiss moved to Rhode Island in 2011. He’d never heard of Bannister. Over the course of years, however, Bannister’s name kept coming up.

“When you meet someone, you just have a chemistry; I know he’d been dead for a very long time, but when I first saw an image of him, a photo, I just had this connection,” Prentiss told Forbes.com. “I felt his charisma and I wanted to know more. He just was always kind of running in the back of my head.”

At an exhibition of Bannister’s work in 2018 at the Gilbert Stuart Museum south of Providence, the painter moved to the front of the sculptor’s head.

“I was overwhelmed. I felt like his ghost was in the room,” Prentiss remembers. “Right there I decided I need to share this feeling with other people somehow, and the only way I could think to do it was by doing what I do which is very traditional and figurative (sculpture).”

Shortly after the exhibition, a member of the Providence Art Club commissioned Prentiss to produce a bust of Bannister. That work can be seen at the Club. The patron then encouraged Prentiss to scale up his passion and pitch the idea for a public Bannister monument locally.

Not wanting to be accused of cultural appropriation, Prentiss visited local Providence African American cultural organizations Stage of Freedom and the Black Heritage Society. Both suggested he try the Club considering the resources required and Bannister’s historic connection to it.

Despite Prentiss not being a prominent figure in the Providence art scene, the Club was immediately interested. A committee was formed to raise more than $200,000 needed to produce the artwork as well as to provide additional research into Bannister and an educational program about the artist.

“When we came together as a group to start talking about (the sculpture) and coming up with a vision for it, the purpose (was) installing the sculpture, but it became a community building art project,” Jennifer Davis-Allison, co-chair of the Bannister Community Art Project, told Forbes.com.

As more and more people learned about the Bannister Community Art Project, more and more people wanted to come on board, join the community. The city. The state.

“One of the things that I always love when Gage talks about the impetus for dealing with Banister was how it lit a fire in him, both in terms of his art, but also in terms of him as a man,” Davis-Allison said. “That same fire was passed, almost from person to person, throughout the process. What made it a community building project was every person that we engaged with became a part of the story and caught that fire.”

In September of 2023, Prentiss’ Bannister sculpture was unveiled along the channelized Providence River a block from RISD Museum and two blocks from the Art Club.

Bannister is seated, sketching. Be sure to look at his sketch pad. That’s his wife, Christiana Cartreaux, the hairdresser and entrepreneur who funded her husband’s art career.

“Something about the Bannisters wakes people up and makes them excited,” Prentiss said. “It doesn’t just have to be about art. They’re catalysts. They were in their life, and this was the right time for them to come back into focus.”

Visit Providence

From the Bannister monument and RISD Museum, bibliophiles will get a charge out of the Providence Athenaeum kitty-corner from the Museum’s back entrance. A hundred yards up the hill is Ivy League Brown University’s free Bell Gallery for contemporary art. Dispersed across the school’s idyllic, tree-filled, brick and stone campus are sculptures from Henry Moore and Maya Lin. Enjoy the stroll.

The Providence Art Club sits two blocks from the RISD Museum. It’s wild. Member produced artworks fill every nook and cranny of discombobulated historic rooms. Free admission. Look for Edward Bannister’s silhouette #1. A fine landscape painting of his also hangs, along with his certificate from the 1876 Philly show.

The Club hosts exhibitions with work for sale. Anthony Tomaselli sells his spectacular Rhode Island landscapes from the bananas Fleur de Lys Building next door to the Club’s main entrance. Be sure to step outside and regard the building’s fantastical façade. If you’re timing is right, you’ll catch Tomaselli painting in one of America’s oldest art studios.

Visit Stages of Freedom African American history museum/bookstore/gift shop across the canal from the Bannister monument. Providence’s multi-cultural vibes continue with a new Asian American Pacific Islander history museum, a Cape Verdean festival–celebrating 50 years July 6, 2025–and one of the country’s best known Little Italy’s: Federal Hill.

Good food there. To a person, locals rave about the city’s restaurant scene. To sample, try Track 15 food hall opened this spring with locally-owned, family eateries offering everything from lobster rolls to Indian.

On Tuesday nights during the summer, head to the Michael S Van Leeston Bridge for a free performance by the Providence Dance Troupe. The public park was once part of Interstate 195. Anything at the Trinity Rep is worth the time. Regard the city’s exceptional mural program.

It could be assumed Providence lives in the shadow of Boston, or in daydreams of nearby Newport or Cape Cod. Nope. “The Creative Capital” has its own thing going on, an arts and culture destination in its own right.

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