About the Artist
Providence, Rhode Island
Andrew Raftery is an artist specializing in fictional and autobiographical narratives of contemporary American life. Andrew loves prints for their ubiquitous role in our world: on wallpaper, ceramics, textiles, and other functional objects, such as bandboxes. He welcomes the challenge of using seemingly antiquated techniques such as engraving to treat contemporary subject matter. Andrew’s studio practice is research based, branching out into collaborations with museums and scholars. He is Professor of Printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design and is represented by Ryan Lee Gallery in New York. His home and studio are in Providence, Rhode Island.
Website: RISD.edu
Vues d’Italie by Dufour – Scene I and II | Baltimore Drinking Room
The rooms in this house-turned-museum are filled daily with the modern clothes, technology, and behaviors of the visitors and staff who walk these halls. Artist Andrew Raftery explores this collision of old and new, often adding intentional glimpses of museum life to his recreations of the scenes he observes, which he calls “a pictorial fiction.” In 2021 Raftery first visited Winterthur and, over many visits, spent hours sketching and “reverse engineering” the Vues d’Italie wallpaper in this room. He decided to make sketches “that showed how I see the room, not what it looks like.”
Visit the Transformations exhibit in the Winterthur Galleries from June 8, 2024 – January 5, 2025 to see the Bandbox Project by Andrew Raftery and a collective of printmakers.
Bandbox Collective | Galleries
As part of the Hatbox/Bandbox Collective, I covered my boxes with my own letterpress wallpapers and excerpts from my narrative engravings. I asked Benjamin Bartgis to make boxes based on classic nineteenth-century forms. These iconic volumes loved receiving the patterns. At first glance, they might be perceived as old. But the colors are very bright, and the wallpapers are modified by images culled from my engravings of contemporary life and my art historical tribute prints. The insides are articulated by issues of The New York Review of Books and the Art Newspaper from 2023.
This project opened a new way for me to combine old and new to create visual experiences addressing the past and the present. As a printmaker, I was able to move beyond two dimensions to make an object, covered with prints, that exists in the round and has an inside and outside. I found a fresh viewpoint on my work and indulged my deep love of craft.