RISD Museum Object Information

How do I find information on works of art owned by the RISD Museum?

Begin by looking in the Handbook of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design located in the Reference section. The Museum owns over 84,000 objects; this handbook highlights only 290 of them.

RISD Museum exhibition catalogues are often thematic and feature objects from the RISD Museum's collection alongside works from other museum & private collections. Follow this link to an alphabetical list of all RISD Museum publications owned by the library. These exhibitions catalogues are another source for information on museum objects. Some of the exhibition catalogues contain indexes to the title of the artwork, artist's name, and RISD Museum registration number.

RISD Museum Object Registration System
The Museum's registrar assigns each work of art a unique series of numbers. Registration numbers look like this: 30.166. The first number corresponds to the year the work was acquired by the museum. The numbers following the decimal point refer to the work's order of accession within that year. Knowing the museum registration number of your object can help in locating it in an exhibition catalogue. Ask a librarian at the Reference Desk to access our searchable database of RISD objects in RISD Museum Exhibition Catalogs.