Photo by Richard McCaffrey

The art work of faculty members at the Rhode Island School of Design, most notably Ted Weller's oversized orange-and-black encaustic of an oriole set against a light blue sky, highlights Roger Mandle's fourth-floor office in a stately brick building near downtown Providence. Still, from his black ergonomic chair to the muted tone of the walls, nothing marks Mandle's office quite so much as the sense of elegant design and unstudied cool. For the president of one of the nation's top art schools, it seems like an appropriate mix.

It's a heady time at RISD. The school, which has started an ambitious push into the city's downtown, is celebrating its 125th anniversary. RISD has also played an important part in attracting students who have remained in Rhode Island while contributing to the state's cultural life. Asked about his future plans, Mandle says, "I feel like I'm just getting started."

The trim and youthful 60-year-old New Jersey native became RISD's president after serving as deputy director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and director of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. Mandle comes from a family of artists and his wife, Gayle, is a painter who has exhibited in New York and elsewhere.

RISD's downtown plans include opening a library in 2005 in part of the majestic Hospital Trust building, and building a new six-story building between South Main and Benefit streets that will feature a new entrance for the RISD Museum. Last fall, the school opened RISD Works, a store selling items made by RISD grads and faculty on Westminster Street, and a Weybosset Street building is being renovated to make room for classrooms, studios, and other uses.

Mandle spoke with the Phoenix earlier this week in his office at 20 Washington Place, which offers a view of the eastern edge of downtown. This is an edited version of our conversation.

Q: How did you become interested in the arts?
A: I had no choice. My mother and father both went to Pratt. My father was an industrial designer and my mother was an apparel designer. My mother was an apparel designer until the day she died, at the age of almost 80. My sister is an apparel designer and a jewelry maker. She's now getting her master's in textiles at university. So, I mean, I was sort of trapped. It was either in my genes or in my environment.

And I moved from being an aspiring artist or designer, and I've become a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none, to being an art historian and working in an art museum, and now, coming back to RISD, I feel that I am rebalancing my soul and my life by having the responsibility for both the art museum and the academic program. And I love that combination. It's very fulfilling to me.

Q: What's most noteworthy about RISD as the school celebrates its 125th anniversary?
A: I don't think there's any one single thing I could state as an umbrella for that. But a group of the things center around the fact that RISD has stayed true to its mission, which is to train artists and designers and to create a climate for their success in our region, by raising the sights of the region for the quality of the cultural life and the products they create in the business community as well. I think RISD has stayed very true to those principles. Our work on behalf of the economic development of the city, the state -- our work to enhance the museum as a primary cultural site for tourists and people in our community to learn about the best of art and design throughout history and all cultures -- I think that has helped a great deal, too.

And our continuing education program, the third leg of this mission that we have, is also really part of the mix of services we provide. We have over 7000 people, adults and children, who take CE courses throughout the year, which is a huge number for a community of this size.

Now, the fourth leg of the stool, I think, is our connection to the community in general. We as professionals and staff people here, and students, volunteer in this community and we're very much involved with community service. In addition to the good work we do as artists and designers, we're also trying to put our shoulder to the wheel to help enrich the community. It could be volunteering in an AIDS center, it could be helping AS220 to build its new building, working in Hasbro Children's Hospital to decorate the walls with works of art. It could be the tile project that the graduate students in ceramics do every year that is at the bus station right over here, any number of different projects we've been involved with. City Arts has been very connected to RISD over the years and there are a lot of others.

Q: How would you describe the significance of RISD's move into downtown?
A: I think it's very significant, but it's not unexpected or even unusual. Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, [California], is thinking about taking some major space in downtown Pasadena. The Maryland Institute is moving out in new directions in their city. The Chicago Art Institute has purchase a number of buildings that were former office buildings in downtown Chicago. So I think it's timely for us, but it's also not unusual.

But I think it may be perceived by people in Providence as somewhat novel because they've always come to think of RISD as somehow plastered on the side of the hill. But originally RISD was downtown in its first building. It was in the Hoppin Head Building. I think that's the name of the building, the Hoppin Homestead Building, and that was where the first classes were held. And now, of course, it's moved up to the Waterman Building, after a first couple of years of operation and then it spread out from there.

There have always been students living downtown, there have always been experimental galleries, or exhibitions, or even classes that have been meeting downtown in space that at first was abandoned and is now being renovated. It's not unlike what's happened in New York, in Chelsea or in SoHo, where artists move in and gentrify a space and suddenly other people catch the wave of imagination and see what the value of that place is and move in. So as artists and designers, we're there first to try to help to revitalize the community, along with Johnson & Wales, and Roger Williams, and now, I gather Brown is even thinking about expanding there as well.

Our institutional zone is somewhat restricted here [on College Hill] and I think that the density we've created on this hillside is probably reaching a point beyond which we wouldn't want to go for our own comfort or the comfort of our neighbors. So downtown is a likely prospect for that as well.

Q: You mentioned how Providence has been a hospitable place for young artists. How do you feel about the concerns about threatened mill spaces and fears that some of the factors that have made the city attractive to artists are being squeezed by Providence's enhanced stature and popularity? What needs to be done to ensure that Providence will continue to be a hospitable place for artists who might not have a lot of money?
A: I'm encouraged by what Buddy Cianci has done -- coming out in favor of mill building restoration and renovation and actually putting some resources into the hands of the people that want to do that. I'm also encouraged by people, like [downtown property owner] "Buff" Chace, who have decided to become involved financially in these long-range projects. They're gorgeous, but they're also complicated to renovate.

You know, we lose those buildings at our peril, not just because of the loss of an artistic community, but because of the way in which those buildings reflect a certain kind of past history. And I think that one of the things that Providence does very well is to keep in touch with its past. We've been fortunate that we weren't like a lot of Midwestern cities. I spent 15 years in Toledo, [Ohio], and saw them completely devastate their downtown. It's like a mouthful of broken teeth, all those parking lots and empty buildings. There's no vitality whatsoever. No matter what they do now, they have a very hard time trying to pull it off.

Well, Providence has been slow, or perhaps intelligent, about banking, land-banking your buildings. Now, they're there for us to reuse and regenerate. We're doing what Europe has known how to do for centuries.

Q: You were at the dedication last summer of the Monohasset Mill project when Mayor Cianci said that that project would have a beneficial influence on the nearby mill buildings of Eagle Square. Has his pledge panned out in a way that matches what he said the impact would be?
A: I don't know all the details of the final solution, but I do think that it is a much more willing compromise on the part of the owner of that project than we could have normally expected without the success of the mill project that you mentioned.

I think it served to prove that it can be done, but on the other hand I have to say that the community of people interested in mill buildings also has begun to recognize the need to work with developers like that right from the early stages, to help them to understand the value of those things together. I think we've all learned through this.

Q: What do you think the primary barriers are to integrating the arts more fully into American life?
A: Someone called it a willing suspension of disbelief. I think that America needs to express its imagination and its spirit in a more open and trusting way with artists. I think that far too often artists are suspected of having agendas that they don't. Artists are really mirrors of society, as well as lenses through which society's view of itself can be sharpened. I think that we generally need to trust artists more.

Having said that, with trust comes support. I think we need, America needs, to begin to invest as a country in individual artists who are the wellsprings of all those great things that happen. And individuals, or a small group of individuals, have to conceive of an idea first before it becomes a sort of large community venture. And we need seed capital to do that. We need to invest in people, in the same way that we do with the National Science Foundation with scientists for experiments -- many of which don't work. We need to do the same thing in the arts, because then we're investing in the intellectual capital of our nation.

The other need we need to do, I think, is to incorporate the arts in the elementary and secondary school education. Not just art, but art and design in the elementary and secondary school education programs in our nation and make them mandatory. With exposure comes this faith and this trust and this excitement and this pleasure. And it eliminates the fear. The demagoguery that's gone on in the past decade about artists has largely been successful because of the ignorance of the public about the arts, so that these rather negative and wild ideas about the danger of the arts or the individual artist has proved to be a threat to people who don't have any other experience by which to compare those claims.

So I think a fundamental aspect of what we need to do to enliven our culture is to educate people to be receptive to it, to understand the legacy, but also to be willing to invest in the future. If we don't invest in artists of the future, we won't have a glorious past to celebrate either.

Q: What is your sense of how the artistic community has been affected by the post-September 11 atmosphere?
A: Well, I've talked to some artists, particularly those living in New York who were quite close to the World Trade towers, that were literally stunned to silence. They just couldn't make art, they couldn't write poetry, they couldn't make sculpture, they couldn't think about a theme for a movie. They were stunned to silence.

But there is, I think over time, a healing through action that artists begin to recognize and they begin to have outpourings, and who could predict how they would be? Some people will speak about the incident itself, others will do something very powerful as an antidote that has nothing to do with it. You know, a still life painting, for example, could be one artist's response whether it's intentional or unintentional.

I think artists want to do something to give back. They want to say something, they want to be heard or seen about it. I also think they're as fearful as everyone else about what this incident means for the US and the world. In Israel, right now, it's a pretty scary thing to go to a marketplace or get on a bus and think you could be blown up. I think people are worried about what that could be here, so artists are beginning to describe those things, you know, in movies and plays. Homebody/Kabul, for example, is, I think, a complicated play about a lot of issues, one of which is about Afghanistan, but it's also about separation and about the world of the mind versus the world of the body and the body being so fragile.

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: April 26 - May 2, 2002