On the occasion of the 275th anniversary of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, renowned artist Adam Silverman will premier The Newport Amphora Project. The site-specific, multi-venue installation considers the contemporary stakes of Neoclassicism: that is, the Enlightenment esteem for Classical order and symmetry which continues to dominate architecture, and to some degree, ceramics too. As a RISD-trained architect and ceramicist, Silverman places these media in dialogue, stationing a pair of monumental five-foot glazed ceramic amphoras outside each of the public buildings that eighteenth-century architect Peter Harrison built in Newport, Rhode Island: the U.S’s first purpose-built library (Redwood Library and Athenaeum, 1748-1750), its first synagogue (Touro Synagogue, 1759-1763) and the Brick Market Building (1762-1772), all among the earliest Neo-Palladian structures built in the American colonies. Additionally, Silverman will exhibit a collection of smaller amphoras inside a fourth structure designed by Harrison in 1763: Abraham Redwood’s summer house, the oldest extant garden structure in the U.S. which was relocated to the Redwood’s grounds in 1916.
The Newport Amphora Project, three years in the making, emerges out of Silverman’s exhaustive process of historical and material research in Newport, part of which will be documented in a case exhibition at the Redwood featuring the artist’s small working models and ceramic prototypes, complemented by examples of European historical vase design engravings from the Redwood’s special collections. Silverman’s designs for the amphorae are derived largely from rare, historic pattern books in the Redwood collection, which he explored knowing that Harrison, too, had pored over such published designs. Like Harrison, he decided to make the amphorae following a prescribed set of rules of proportion, balance and symmetry, which are remarkably consistent between the media of architecture and ceramics. But for Silverman, a guiding principal of The Newport Amphora Project has been to explore the radical contradictions between Neo-Palladian formal ideals of symmetry and order, and the material realities of Newport, then and now, as a radically asymmetric society.
