RISD Museum probes how ancient cultures regarded nature

Hippopotamus, 2040-1638 B.C. Museum Appropriation Fund. RISD Museum, Providence, R.I.

Hippopotamus, 2040-1638 B.C. Museum Appropriation Fund. RISD Museum, Providence, R.I.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The RISD Museum is hosting Being and Believing in the Natural World: Perspectives from the Ancient Mediterranean, Asia, and Indigenous North America in its Metcalf Galleries through May 7, 2023. Highlighting different perspectives across cultures and time, the artworks in this exhibition consider complex and evolving relationships with, and beliefs about, nature. In more than 100 objects drawn from the RISD Museum’s collections, makers from 2000 B.C. to the present day explore human relationships with the natural world. Their responses span a wide range of media and processes to express awe and reverence for nature’s abundance, beauty, and powers of destruction; to intercede with the divine; and to document the willful extraction of resources. Many of these objects have never been on view before.

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Three American museums return Benin bronzes to Nigeria

Nigerian 18th century, Court of Benin, ‘Fowl,’ mid 18th century, brass with cast iron supports, overall with base: 52.3 by 18 by 46.9cm, 30.391 kg (20 9/16 by 7 1/16 by 18 7/16in., 67 lb.). Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art
Nigerian 18th century, Court of Benin, ‘Fowl,’ mid 18th century, brass with cast iron supports, overall with base: 52.3 by 18 by 46.9cm, 30.391 kg (20 9/16 by 7 1/16 by 18 7/16in., 67 lb.). Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art
Nigerian 18th century, Court of Benin, ‘Fowl,’ mid 18th century, brass with cast iron supports, overall with base: 52.3 by 18 by 46.9cm, 30.391 kg (20 9/16 by 7 1/16 by 18 7/16in., 67 lb.). Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

WASHINGTON — On the morning of Tuesday, October 11, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) held a ceremony to mark the transfer of ownership of the National Gallery of Art’s sole Benin bronze to the Nigerian National Collections along with 29 sculptures from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) and one sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum. These 31 objects from the National Gallery, NMAfA and RISD Museum are among the first Benin bronzes to be repatriated to Nigeria by American institutions on the basis of the 1897 British colonial raid of the Royal Palace of Benin.

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