The Museum of Art’s, Chace Center, the largest gallery at Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), was filled to the brim with an astonishing array of architectural scale models and tiny figurines, fashioned entirely out of clay. The mash-up of small male figures – the sculptor’s version of Everyman with strikingly similar facial and bodily characteristics–brings to mind countless crowd scenes found in Hollywood-version, Depression Era movies. A collaboration of New York ceramicist Arnie Zimmerman and Lisbon architect Tiago Montepegado, the convoluted twists and turns of this bustling model city readily invite reflections on the history of man. Think Balzac’s La Comédie humaine or the densely populated panels of Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch: here mankind is seen variously at work, daydreaming, carousing, or marching off to war–in short, going through the daily grind of an industrialized society.

Before turning to figure modeling, Zimmerman, a mid-career artist with a master’s degree from New York State College of Ceramics, at Alfred University, was drawn to large ceramic pots and container forms. During his early college years, he spent his summers carving monumental blocks of limestone in the south of France. In graduate school, he began to build large, thick-walled hollow pottery forms. When the clay became leather hard, he carved the surface, giving it the appearance of worked stone. In 1996, he put the large, totemic vessels which first brought him to public awareness on the back burner. Zimmerman, whose studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn boasts it own kiln, switched his attention to modeling the human figure.

The RISD installment, its third and most comprehensive to date, was first exhibited at the Museu da Electricidade, in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2007. On that occasion, Montepegado and Zimmerman–whose partnership began with a figure-only exhibit in 2005–decided to employ industrial archetypes to add narrative weight to the overall montage. Using cement blocks of varying heights and dimensions as their foundation, they started constructing a complete miniature city, whose dramatically-lit towers and other buildings served as backdrop to the activities of its Lilliputian inhabitants. At Leeuwarden’s Princessehof Museum the following year, again playing at city planning, they added scaffolding, walkways and a street-like grid, conjuring a vibrant city surging uncontrollably ahead.

Cobbled together from hundreds of handcrafted figurative and architectural elements, all situated on or astride the white pedestals and walls, this installation teams with mazes of buildings, chimneys, industrial pipes, I-beams, stairs, a giant ladder and an army of assorted, downtrodden masses, seen either alone or in groups. Everywhere Zimmerman’s colorfully glazed men, when not involved in real work, can be seen arguing or fighting amongst themselves. Most are carting heavy loads, carrying industrial tools, and in some cases weapons of war. A number meld into the very loads they’re hauling, while others have jugs or tubes for heads. Crowning the lot is a large ominous black bridge and an elevated viewing platform, an arresting coda to this exercise in clay-nation.

Taken as a whole, Inner City is a window on the human condition, engendering a hypnotic, if crushing experience. Think of the urban dystopia of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Here too, the viewer is left contemplating the fate of humanity.

Illustrations represent various scenes from the installation, Inner City 

by Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer

Inner City

Rhode Island School of Design

At the Museum of Art, Chace Center

Providence, RI

Learn more about Chace Center’s upcoming exhibits: www.risdmuseum.org