Architecture Exhibition records (23.4.4)

The Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art held the Rhode Island Architecture exhibition 1939 June 18-December 5. Architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr. developed the exhibition under Director Alexander Dorner with Museum Assistant Barbara Wriston. The exhibition surveyed three hundred years of Rhode Island buildings with much of the photographic material coming from Antoinette Dowling's 1937 work "The Early Homes of Rhode Island" and the Historic American Buildings Survey. Dowling, Norman M. Isham, and others provided assistance in gathering materials and photographs.

The exhibition's photograph panels came under the purview of the Museum's Education Department, which loaned them to local and national educational and civic institutions. Additional visiting architecture exhibitions administered by Writson were held at the Museum, particularly during Education Director Lydia Powel's tenure, 1943-1944. The Rhode Island Historical Society acquired the panels sometime after 1953 and transferred them to the RISD Archives in 2011.