Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) has been a keystone college for the arts in Rhode Island since 1877. Established as a coeducational institution by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, RISD has had an outstanding reputation as one of the Northeast’s best art and design schools since its inception. The RISD Museum, which is situated in the Center of Fine & Decorative Arts building, has a vast collection in excess of 100,000 works and objects. One of its current exhibitions features the art of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890–1960), a woman of both African and Narragansett heritage who graduated from RISD in 1918.

The exhibition, “I Will Not Bend an Inch,” features a concise survey of Prophet’s work consisting of finely carved representational busts of men and women in various media, two decorative reliefs in painted wood that bring to my mind the work of Paul Gauguin, a number of informative preparatory drawings, and a series of striking watercolors. What becomes immediately obvious when first entering the exhibition is Prophet’s main talent as a sculptor, obvious in her ability to move from carving various wood types to white marble all while exhibiting great finesse.

The first two sculptures one encounters when entering the exhibition are titled Silence, both executed in 1926; one is carved in white marble and the other is cast in bronze using the “marble version,” to create the form. This bronze head has a near black patina, creating an effectual contrast with its near white counterpart. Additionally, the softness of the features, which reminds me of the veil-like surfaces common to the sculptures of Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), informs all who enter this space that these works present a palpable connection with the subject, while simultaneously evoking a reality of the socio-emotional state of a prideful woman of color in the early 20th century.

Shortly after Prophet graduated from RISD, she traveled to Paris where she continued to work and build her legacy. Head of a Negro (1924), which is exquisitely carved in maple, shows Prophet’s dexterity in working with wood. Maple wood is a medium that changes quickly and often problematically—a troublesome knot can range from unexpectedly brittle to near unmanageably dense. One particular knot the artist encounters in the carving of this work looks both brittle and hard, yet Prophet handles it with an experienced and cautious hand. As a result, the positioning, color, and texture of the carefully integrated knot in the center of this male subject’s forehead adds to the intensity of the features, which are a mix of piercing, pride-stricken, and sorrowful. Seeing this, one has to wonder if Prophet planned this all out before making that first mallet to chisel strike.

The most intriguing sculpture in the exhibition is Head in Ebony (1926–29, altered later). Carved in ebony wood, which is known for its extreme hardness and density, Head in Ebony exists in a current state where a large portion of the face is missing. Once owned by the renowned W.E.B. Du Bois, whose thoughts on Prophet are quoted on the sculpture’s wall label: “She never submitted to patronage, cringed to the great, or begged of the small. She worked. She is still working.” Also on the title panel is a mention that the reason for the missing facial features of the sculpture is unknown, which brings to mind many scenarios relative to how the damage occurred. Given this, and the fact that more than 20 of the artist’s major works have been lost or destroyed, one wonders what is missing in the story here. Perhaps, like many works of art left in Europe from the late 1930s to 1945, her sculptures may have been damaged, lost or destroyed during World War II.

Not far from the RISD Museum is the Chazan Gallery at Wheeler, where the work of another RISD graduate, Triton Mobley (b. 1979), is featured. The exhibition, “Coloured.Aesthetica,” has a powerful and poignant message that looks at systemic, ingrained, generational racism that in many ways appears to be getting worse by the day. Mobley is a thought-provoking artist working in sculpture, installation, video, and mixed media with narratives that have an initial, somewhat familiar entrance point. In various ways, the artist portrays the depth and intensity felt by people of color on a daily, minute to minute basis. On the other hand, Mobley’s respectful approach to materials and media adds a distinct formality, whereby color, texture, shape, sound, and form are combined in a highly skillful way.

This deliberate and well planned process for fabrication adds reverence, while demanding our attention. For instance, in the diptych FATHER FATHER FATHER (2023), there are two large, leaning, shallow boxes split in half. Mug shots appear in the upper sections as the profile of a man’s head on the left and one front face view on the right. Tinted crimson, this person of color, perhaps the artist’s father, reminds us of such realities as the dangers of racial profiling. Simultaneously, these two life-sized, rectangular, vertical boxes become coffin-like, iconic statements.

Across the room are another pair of structures, Your Land pt. i and Your Land pt. ii, both from 2024. They feature the shape of a Levittown Ranch home and a picket fence completely covered in a close-up scan of the artist’s and his son’s skin printed on Lycra. Immediately recognizable as the skin of a Black person, the message here is clear: if a home in a white neighborhood is inhabited by an African American family during “The Great Migration,” that home would be branded as such, and be subjected to all the poison and pain that comes with racism and hatred.

The Levittown suburban developments that started being built shortly after World War II to house the families of returning G.I.’s in states like New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey were originally meant to be segregated and for whites only. By the late 1950s, black families that could afford to buy a better home to improve their lives found anger, hostility, and violence instead of the advances and improvements of upward mobility. In addition to the previously discussed elements of the installation, Mobley adds Channel Surf (2024), an LCD screen to the floor of the veiled house. I’m not sure if it was me, the lighting in the room, or the feed, but I had a hard time seeing what was on the screen. Given this visual dilemma, I was told by the gallerist that there were clips from old episodic television shows such as “Amos and Andy” recorded in a loop. “Amos and Andy” was a sitcom from the 1950s that featured two African American friends, who despite their supposedly happy-go-lucky minstrel-like lives, understood their place in white society. As a whole, Mobley’s exhibition reminds us of the 1849 quote by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr: “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

The exhibition at Rhode Island School of Design Museum opened on February 17 and will be on view until August 4, 2024.

D. Dominick Lombardi is a visual artist, art writer, and curator. A 45-year retrospective of his art recently traveled to galleries at Murray State University, Kentucky in 2019; to University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in 2021; and the State University of New York at Cortland in 2022.