Any distance between us
Curated by Stephen Truax and Dominic Molon, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art
RISD Museum of Art, Providence
July 17, 2021 – March 13, 2022
This exhibition explores the power and significance of intimate relationships in a selection of artworks made between 1954 and 2021. From quiet, unassuming expressions of affection to the openly erotic, these works foreground the relationships between artists and their subjects. By presenting their lives, loves, and chosen families, these artists reveal and articulate private worlds of vulnerability, tenderness, and desire.
Any distance between us recognizes the extraordinary importance of all expressions of intimacy as fundamental and equal. Charged with memories of relationships current and past, many of these objects and texts are significant statements of resistance and affirmation for LGBTQ+ artists and artists of color, reflecting 75 years of cultural shifts in representations of sexual orientation, gender identity, class, and race. Shaped by numerous historical events and political movements of the time, these works reflect or transform our understandings of how we become close to and care for one another.
Intimacy reveals something deeply human in us. We need each other on a practical level, which means having to trust strangers. It’s analogous to what I understand prayer requires and what writing poems requires: an openness to the unknown, coupled with trust, a belief that we won’t be hurt. It’s at once akin to and the same as devotion. — Carl Phillips
The RISD Museum’s sixteenth issue of Manual touches on the bonds of intimacy and its many expressions. This issue complements the exhibition Any distance between us, co-curated by Stephen Truax and Dominic Molon, on view at the RISD Museum through March 13, 2022.
Stephen Truax lovingly documents the lineage of recent queer figurative painting in Any distance between us in “To You.”
The publication commissions new works by the poet Carl Phillips, the artists Christopher K. Ho, Laurie Simmons, and Angela Dufresne, and the curators Dominic Molon and Judith Tannenbaum, among many other contributors.