Assignments:
RISD Museum Assignment:
Gravestones and Furniture

**DUE OCTOBER 14, 2004** On Thursday, October 7, class will meet at the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design at 224 Benefit Street. Prof. Emlen will split the class into two sections so that everyone will have a chance to see the artifacts up close. Both sections will meet at the Farrago Wing entrance of the RISD Museum, near the corner of Waterman and Benefit streets. The first section will meet at 10:30, and the second at 11:00. Assignment for your first paper: Compare the gravestones carved in late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century New England with the wooden chests made in the same time and place. In class and on field trips we have observed that the gravestones carved in early New England share distinctive design elements in any given period. On our field trip to the RISD Museum we will see that contemporaneous objects made in wood also are decorated. It may be just coincidental, but knowing what we know about Puritan culture in early New England, we also might recognize the same ideas being expressed in different media. The purpose of this exercise is to see if these artifacts can be recognized as manifestations of a shared mental structure. For background reading, please consult Fairbanks "American Furniture 1620 - the Present," on reserve at the Rock. Please report your conclusions in a 3-5pp paper (5-7pp for graduate students) due in class on October 14.