ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the past and the shifting expectation for the role of museum objects in the training of artists and designers, from seventeenth-century models of emulation to late twentieth-century acts of appropriation and intervention. The relationship between art schools and art museums seems like a natural one the gallery an artist's instructor, or studio. Learning from original works of art as opposed to engraved reproductions was a privilege for advanced students and they did so in public, performing the act of becoming an artist fashioned in homage to the past. The centrality of perception and imagination, otherwise known as creativity, to the production of art became the cornerstone of avant-garde discourse and progressive pedagogies. In a winning toss-up between erecting a public drinking fountain and investing in art and design education, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum was founded in 1877 with the dual mission of public museum and teaching museum for art and design students.
