Happy Hour at the Museum
Every once in a while, something comes along to reassure me that for such a small city, Providence's arts and culture can hold their own with much bigger metropolises. Case in point: Music Fridays at the RISD Museum. Various cities around the country, including Atlanta, Austin, and Boston all boast art museums with regular music nights. Matthew Montgomery, the museum's Director of Marketing and Communications, experienced these nights firsthand in various locales, and sought to build on the idea both to bring more people in to appreciate RISD's 84,000 piece collection, and to contribute something new and different to Providence's cultural scene.
Beginning at happy hour on the second Friday in October, Montgomery and the museum staff turned the Main Gallery into a gathering place for three solid hours of music, art, food, and cocktails. The response was just under 300 attendees. Even better, according to Montgomery the crowd was not just erudite museum members; over half of those who showed up were not regulars.
That, of course, is one of the driving forces behind Music Fridays: to create a new museum experience that will draw in folks who might not otherwise come through the doors. It also fills in a nice little gap in Providence's social calendar: the time, the place and the atmosphere combine in such a way that there's not really anything else in town like it.
I had the pleasure of attending RISD's second Friday offering with DJ Nick de Paris spinning a breezy selection of jazzy house music, and for a precious couple of hours felt as if I was in the kind of world-class city we always fancy ourselves to be. One can't help but stand in awe of the Main Gallery's expansive, open atmosphere, with magnificent paintings stretching to the ceiling. It's an opportunity to interact with these antiquities in a whole new way, and not just because of the music (or booze). With its immense skylights, the gallery is usually awash in natural light during the museum's regular hours, but nighttime tweaks all the visual elements. Some of the paintings almost seem to glow in the softer, warmer lighting. I personally became enamored of two paintings hung in a far corner that I came to know as "The Evil Cardinal Hemlock" and "Jesus and the Wild-Eyed Appalachian Coots."
Going forward, there is much potential for Music Fridays. The turnout for the second time around topped 300, and the gallery still has yet to reach capacity. The opportunity for the concept to flourish throughout the dreary winter and eventually mingle with warm weather cultural events like WaterFire and Sound Session could make for some very exciting happy hours.
Music Fridays are the second Friday of every month from 5:30 to 8:30.
