ANDREW RAFTERY
risd connection: Associate Professor, Department of Printmaking; at RISD since 1991
about his work: Drawn from everyday life,
Raftery’s contemporary narratives — of people in
conversation, in bed, vacuuming the living room, shopping for cosmetics
— draw the viewer in to the immediacy of the situation, evoking a gentle
irony. It isn’t “necessary to know how brilliantly these works revive
and carry on honored traditions [of narrative art],” notes curator
Richard West, “to be fascinated by the artist’s skill as narrator and
depicter of modern manners and mores.” The artist himself explains: “My
paintings... allow me to study my environment as I select and recreate
elements essential to each picture. In the end, they satisfy me when
they become fully realized, independent entities. I never write my name
on the frontÉ because they are not ultimately about me personally or any
skills I bring to them. They must stand alone... .”
the road to risd: After earning his master’s
degree at Yale, Raftery taught there part-time in the late 1980s and
early ’90s. He also worked as assistant director of the Yale Summer
School of Art in Norfolk, CT, and taught as a member of the printmaking
faculty. Raftery first came to RISD in 1991 as a visiting faculty member
in Printmaking, a relationship he continued with the department
throughout the early ’90s. In 1995 he joined RISD’s faculty full-time as
an assistant professor and the following year became head of
Printmaking, a position he held until 2005.
selected exhibitions
2001 Biedermeier 2001, Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2001 An Engraved View, Lenore Gray Gallery, Providence, RI
2001 Media/Matrix, George Mason University Art Gallery, Fairfax, VA
1998 Andrew Raftery: The Narrative Impulse, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA
1998 Solo Exhibition, Hackett-Freedman Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1998 Drawings and Prints, Lenore Gray Gallery, Providence, RI
1998 Drawn from the Collection: Part of the Fabric, The RISD Museum, Providence, RI
1997 Figuring Memory, Wheeler Gallery, Providence, RI
1995 National Invitational Print Exhibition, Kreft Center for the Arts, Ann Arbor, MI
1994 Solo Exhibition, Contemporary Realist Gallery, San Francisco, CA
awards
2004 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award
curatorial work
1998 Working the Stone — Process and Progress of Lithography, RISD Museum, Providence, RI (co-curated in commemoration of 200th anniversary of the invention of lithography)
public collections
Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA
The RISD Museum, Providence, RI
education
Yale University School of Art, MFA, 1988
Boston University School for the Arts, BFA, 1984
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