NEWPORT, RI.- The Redwood Library & Athenaeum announces the award of the National Academy of Design’s prestigious Abbey Mural Prize, presented to Andrew Raftery for his custom, block-printed wallpaper that is now permanently installed in the Library’s vestibule.

In an age of deskilling, machine printing, and mass production, master printmaker and graphic artist Andrew Raftery is rare both because of his esteem for outmoded and labor-intensive craft traditions, especially those of the eighteenth-century, and because of his unparalleled mastery of these technically exacting practices. Through his commitment to historical materials and methods, Raftery pays homage to the Redwood’s eighteenth-century origins, offering a material matrix through which particular period motifs and narratives can be seen and felt. In this way, he proposes a conception of contemporary art as formed by, and deeply embedded in, its ‘prehistory.’ His wallpaper – a monumental contemporary print – was made by hand-carving segments of the design into individual wooden blocks, test printing these images in various configurations, and eventually combining them into larger units that could be printed using the historical woodblock technique and distemper inks.

Raftery’s installation reinscribes the Redwood’s commitment to contemporary art that is both historically located and in dialog with the present. Conceived in partnership between the artist and Redwood curator Dr. Leora Maltz-Leca, head of the RCAI (Redwood Contemporary Arts Initiative), the wallpaper continues a program of notable acquisitions: Per Barclay’s large color photographs of the oil-filled eighteenth-century Redwood Summer House (2019); Nari Ward’s meditation on time, Anchoring Escapement: Ithaca (2021), Daniel Lefcourt’s address of the Enlightenment archive in The Docent-Shoggoth’s Stone (2023), and Fred Wilson’s monumental Murano glass chandelier, No Way But This (2023). These works are strategically located in the public spaces of the Redwood to re-engage with the extractive legacies of colonialism; with repressed histories of race and enslavement; with the epistemic assumptions built into an institution such as the Redwood; or here with the enduring viability of the graphic and decorative traditions of Newport, long a city of artists and makers.

Raftery’s dedication to historic materials and methods demands extraordinary patience, and a conceptual embrace of the drawn-out temporality of the eighteenth century. His method follows the “domino” method for making wallpaper, popular in eighteenth-century France. This is a process embedded in time, demanding multiple rounds of drawn sketches, painted watercolors, and color studies, then requiring hundreds of hours to hand carve the six 18” x 24” wooden printing blocks (here over fifteen hundred hours). Or as Redwood Executive Director Benedict Leca told The New York Times in anticipation of this project: “Andrew is slow food in an age of McDonald’s. For example, I don’t know if there is another person in the world that can create a ‘grand manner’ [traditional old master] burin engraving like he can.”

The wallpaper takes its key motif from the Redwood’s distinctive exterior, reprising the building’s rusticated façade of wood carved to mimic stone. The tripartite pattern of Raftery’s design is moored by three key images, all framed by a lively border of beech leaves. In the first “brick” an oval wreath encloses an open book upon which the artist has inscribed “RLA.” The second segment features the famous “block and shell” motif associated with eighteenth-century Newport furniture and reprises the carved molding above the Redwood’s original entrance on Bellevue Avenue. Here, accentuated by the greens of the paper and the trim, which reprise the distinctive olive shade of the original library interior, stylized beech foliage curves around the radiating semi-circle of a clam shell, a motif emphasizing Newport’s maritime history and long association with the Redwood. The trio is completed by a keyhole, surrounded by an ornately carved escutcheon plate, its elaborate, unfurling curlicues mimicking the spread of the foliate leaves in the previous block. Superimposed on these images of knowledge and its “unlocking,” a veil of Fernleaf beech leaves falls across the images in syncopated waves, homage to the Redwood’s iconic tree fronting the Library.

Framing the North entrance of the Library, Raftery’s installation in this way functions as a threshold embodying local memories and their transformation, marking a mediating space between public and private, between the street and the book; between past and present.

The installation is made possible by the generous support of Cornelius Bond & Ann Blackwell and the Hartfield Foundation.