ANDIAMO!: The RSA John Kinross Scholarship Collection

11 September - 17 October 2021

in Florence…their particular collection of artworks and the historical and contemporary importance/popularity of the city allowed me to be at once fully surrounded by history and connected to the current heartbeat of social interaction and artistic innovation.
Gregori Mora, 2018 scholar

The John Kinross Scholarship Collection is the RSA’s largest survey collection, and its most significant outside of the core Diploma Collection of artworks deposited by RSA Academicians. Containing over 800 individual works by around 450 scholars, it is of unique importance in capturing and representing work of emerging artists and architects who have graduated from the main schools of art and architecture in Scotland over the last forty years.
Although the Kinross Scholarship began in 1981, it was not until 1985 that the first works were deposited, and deposits by the majority of scholars did not happen consistently until 1987. Early deposits comprised journals, sketchbooks, drawings and paintings on paper.

From its early years, the collection has grown annually and has evolved alongside emerging art practice in Scotland. It has tracked the development of printmaking, and the growth of photography and film as media in their own right; media that have also been used to document performance and installation works, undertaken by scholars while in Italy. In architecture, one sees the prevalence of computer aided design; but drawing remains dominant, and the lines between art and architecture are often blurred in the Kinross Collection.

As a body of emerging art, the Kinross Collection sometimes has a rough, experimental feel, but these aspects, and its revealing of Italy through a kaleidoscope of eager artistic eyes give it a particular vitality and inventiveness
It is a difficult task to pick a small selection from so many fantastic works, but the Andiamo collections gallery has been curated to provide a flavour of the subjects, themes and media found across the Kinross Collection.

Scholars’ inspiration inevitably flows from discovering wonders of the seat of the Renaissance, but is tempered as tradition merges with tourist culture in contemporary Florence. One finds Italian town and landscape, and the great vistas of Florence from Boboli Gardens, meeting Florentine histories and its great arterial river Arno. Curiosities in La Specola meet the sights and sounds of marketplaces and artisan workshops. Visible in everything is the scholars’ freedom to discover and develop their practice in a place of true marvel and inspiration.

Surrounded by the Kinross Collection in Andiamo is to be connected to art and Florence through scholars like Gregori Mora, and the many who have travelled before him and since.

Sandy Wood, RSA Collections Curator
Selected works from the RSA John Kinross Scholarship Collection
- Abigail Dryburgh
  The Bargello, 2015
  Film
  03m:33s
- John Kellock
  Shall Not Lovers Weep, 2011
  Film
  07m:00s
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View ANDIAMO! Forty years of the RSA John Kinross Scholarships to Florence.

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