Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design is an art museum in Providence affiliated with the Rhode Island School of Design, in the U.S. state of Rhode Island. The museum was founded in 1877 and is the 20th largest art museum in the United States. In September 2008, a new addition to the RISD Museum was opened to the public. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jose Rafael Moneo of Spain, the Chace Center connects the four old buildings of the RISD Museum with a glass bridge. The $34 million center was built on a parking lot, and named in honor of the late Malcolm and Beatrice Happy Oenslager Chace. The Chace Center serves as the main entrance to the museum and includes an auditorium, a retail shop, and exhibition and classroom spaces. The RISD Museum' s collection of about 100,000 objects contains a broad range of works from around the world, including ancient Egypt, Asia, Africa, ancient Greece and Rome, Europe, and the Americas. Among the prominent international and American artists represented are Picasso, Monet, Manet, Paul Revere, Chanel, Andy Warhol, and Kara Walker. The collection also features notable works by Rhode Island artists and designers, including 18th-century Newport furniture makers Goddard and Townsend and 19th-century Rhode Island painters such as Anglo-American impressionist John Noble Barlow and portraitist Gilbert Stuart. The department of Ancient Art includes bronze figural sculpture and vessels, an exceptional collection of Greek coins, stone sculpture, Greek vases, paintings, and mosaics, a fine collection of Roman jewelry and glass, and teaching examples of terracottas. A number of objects represent the most outstanding examples in their categories. Among these virtually unique works of art are an Etruscan bronze situla, a fifth-century B.C. Greek female head in marble, and a rare Hellenistic bronze Aphrodite. Among the Greek vases are works by some of the major Attic painters, including Nikosthenes, the Brygos Painter, the Providence Painter, and the Pan, Lewis, and Reed Painters. The cornerstone of the Museum's Egyptian collection is the Ptolemaic period coffin and mummy of the priest Nesmin. Among other highlights of the Egyptian collection are a rare New Kingdom ceramic paint box, a relief fragment from the temple complex at Karnak, and a first-class collection of faience. The RISD Museum's Asian Art collection contains ceramics, costume, prints, painting, sculpture, and textiles. One of the highlights of the collection is the peerless group of more than 700 19th-century Japanese prints that were collected by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, considered among the finest assemblages of such work held outside Japan. The Japanese prints are shown, in rotation, in a gallery dedicated to their exhibition. A major attraction is the important 12th-century wooden Buddha Dainich Nyorai, the largest historic Japanese wooden sculpture in the United States. The Buddha is on permanent exhibition in its own gallery. The Japanese textiles are the core and glory of the Asian textile collection. The kesa, or Buddhist priests' robes, are the most numerous, with 104 examples. The 47 Japanese Noh robes, meticulously documented, form a comprehensive collection of nearly every type of costume in use in the Noh drama of 18th-and 19th-century Japan. Their spectacular colors and patterns, embellished with gold and silver, express perfectly the splendor of the traditional and highly stylized Noh theater. The Museum's collection of Indian saris and Chinese ceremonial robes is superb. The Islamic and Indian collections include works of art in all media that celebrate the artistic heritage of the Arab, Indian, Persian and Turkish cultures. Created in 2000, the Department of Contemporary Art oversees an eclectic collection of painting, sculpture, video, mixed media, and interdisciplinary work, dating from 1960 to the present. In addition, the department regularly organizes exhibitions that highlight important issues, trends and individual explorations in recent art. Represented in the collection are significant paintings by Richard Anuszkiewicz, Sam Francis, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Ronnie Landfield, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, Wayne Thiebaud, Larry Rivers, and Andy Warhol, among others. The collection also includes important sculptural work by Richard Artschwager, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, Tom Otterness, Lucas Samaras and Robert Wilson. The museum's video collection features experimental works by such pioneers in the field as Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Bruce Nauman, Martha Rosler, Richard Serra and William Wegman.