To consolidate our stories and bits of info about the RISD community on fewer platforms, we’ve stopped posting to this blog.
Keep tabs on what’s going on in studios and with faculty and alumni through the stories we post in the NEWS + EVENTS section of our primary website and @risd1877 on Insta.
images top to bottom:
Aleksandra Azbel MArch 14 integrates methods of hand weaving into her architectural practice and has won a Fulbright to work in Sri Lanka this year
Architecture students installing an urban rain garden they designed for a neighborhood in Providence
The spring/summer issue of RISD XYZ is reaching most alumni and other readers this week.
Focused on various interpretations of the notion of freedom, it features Martine Gutierrez 12 PR on the cover—as Tlazolteaotl ‘Eater of Filth,’ just one of the Aztec Demons she created for a solo show called Indigenous Woman, which is also the focus of one of the feature stories.
Throughout the magazine you’ll find stories about members of the RISD community who show through their work and choices in life what creative freedom means to them.
In one piece, Jaime Wolfond 13 FD talks about changing course with his startup to give him the freedom to design again, while in another octogenarian painter Maurice Burns 72 PT (above) explains how he has always put freedom in the studio above all else.
And take a moment to read some of the other interesting freedom-focused stories that surface in this issue—from the Listen commentary from Emma Shapiro 10 PT (on pp 8–9) to pieces by Ken Carpenter 75 Arch and Paula Martiesian 76 PT (pp 66–67), Doug Morris 85 GD (p 71), Lina Sergie Attar MArch 01 (p 89) and Ricker Winsor 77 PH/MFA 78 PT (pp 96–97), among others.
Contact risdxyz@risd.edu if you’d like a copy of the magazine.
In a spring Architecture studio called Trash, Professor Gabriel Feld invited students to consider the long history of humans generating disposable stuff—dating back to Monte Testaccio, which, as he puts it, was “nothing but a gigantic pile of garbage from imperial times—big enough to rival the legendary hills of Rome!”
Since our tendency to produce ever more trash hasn’t diminished in millennia, Feld prompted students to consider: “What’s in it for us architects?”
In mid May those participating in the studio produced an interesting installation in RISD’s Market Square as the last of four group projects during the semester.
The primary materials in the totems to trash included discarded commercial fishing nets from the port town of Galilee, RI filled to bulging with thousands of plastic bottles.
Leading up to the final project, students combined research, design and construction in exploring questions about the possibilities of trash from the perspective of architecture.
Grad students have been buzzing in and out of the Rhode Island Convention Center since Sunday—getting ready for the big graduate thesis exhibition that opens this evening (May 22) from 6–8 pm.
With 214 students exhibiting, the Grad Show is by far the biggest one of the year organized by Director of Campus Exhibitions Mark Moscone 88 PR and his team.
Students and staff build intimate gallery spaces within the massive 28,000-sf hall and then fill it with phenomenal work, creating a marvelous experience for the thousands of visitors who come to the show over its 10-day run.
The exhibition is free and open to the public and is on view at the Convention Center from 12–5 pm daily from Thursday, May 23–Saturday, June 1.
I saw this recently on the brick wall overlooking Gil Franklin’s Daybreak sculpture and the wee Beach where students gather on a nice day to sketch and chat: a couple of pigeons perching on a Camel cigarette logo with a flock of doves migrating underneath.
By the time I had gone to fetch my old-time camera, it had vanished. But eventually I found out that first-year student Connor Kay 22 PT created this salute to the Middle Eastern dromedary as part of an assignment to make use of a commercial sign.
It’s also a nod in the direction of the RISD Pigeon Club (there’s a dovecote on the terrace around the corner and I served as the group’s original faculty advisor).
My late dad was profoundly dedicated to the cult of Camel cigarettes, and when my office was across the street in Carr Haus I used to display such logos as the newborn chick for Bon Ami and the original Old Dutch cleanser with its stylized silhouette (in the good old days before you had to replace anything “old” with the word “new”).
I even placed my pop’s white-wall tire in my balcony window.
So kudos to Connor, with hopes that he chooses one of my classes come September.
On Thursday (May 2) Alex Rosenberg 06 GL will be scaling the exterior wall of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia as part of the opening reception for the 2019 series of art installations at the historic site.
Several other pieces on view center around the history and practice of environmentally conscious “clean climbing.”
A glass artist whose practice extends to interdisciplinary investigation across mediums, Rosenberg lives in Philadelphia and says that his latest project “aims to provoke discussion about conservation and preservation between nature and artifice in the built and ‘natural‘ worlds.”
Last Sunday (April 28) the Main Gallery at the RISD Museum was alive with students making music and art at the same time.
Called Sketching Sound, the annual event brings together Music majors from Brown, who perform chamber music surrounded by classical paintings hung salon-style, and RISD Illustration students, who make sketches as they listen and absorb the ambiance.
“Activating all senses can inspire new approaches to creating art,” says longtime Illustration faculty member Lenny Long MFA 83 PR (above right), who has been spearheading the event for the past few years.
Students work on a drawing for only as long as each musical piece is played, and at the end of the performance they display their work.
Since the Museum is also open to the public at the same time, visitors are invited to either grab a pencil and join the sketching—or just listen and watch as musicians and artists do their thing.
For the past couple of years, Ryan Richard-Scro 97 GD has been running Say It Out Proud, a greeting card line and Etsy store offering a simple graphic approach for celebrating major milestones.
The writer/designer says he has received warm feedback from the LGBTQ+ community about the cards, which focus on key life events like coming out, same-sex parent adoption and gender reassignment surgery.
Ryan lives in Massachusetts with his husband and family of pets.
In a lovely nod to spring, two recent series by Jane Kim 03 PR are on view this weekend at Andra Norris Gallery’s space at the annual Art Market San Francisco (April 25–28) at Fort Mason.
Kim’s series Rise Home explores native botanicals of Northern California and is a play on the word rhizomes, those cool underground plant stems that grow horizontally by sending out roots and shoots.
Kim is best known for her environmentally focused, large-scale naturalist murals—which she paints both indoors and out. By making these paintings in a style evoking vintage botanical illustrations, she focused on the unique anatomy of each plant.
In both Rise Home and her other new series, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall (above and below), Kim is taking an artistic approach to scientific illustration and developing her own interpretation of naturalism.
Each painting shows the accuracy and attention to detail of a field guide, yet is meant to address broader concepts of form, diversity and interdependence.
On Saturday (April 27) Kim will speak about her work at 1 pm at the Art Market’s Andra Norris booth.
After years of research and writing, Associate Professor and Head of Illustration Susan Doyle 81 IL/MFA 98 PT/PR happily traveled to Washington, DC last week to accept the Popular Culture Association’s Ray and Pat Brown Award for her monumental book History of Illustration.
The nearly 600-page book includes 950 images and offers an expansive view of illustrative communication around the world from prehistory to now. Assistant Professor of Illustration Jaleen Grove served as an associate editor, while several other faculty members contributed new scholarship to the inviting tome.
The PCA presented the award at its national conference, recognizing History of Illustration as the Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture.
Artsy calls out the current Jessi Reaves 10 PT show at Bridget Donahue—the lower Manhattan gallery that represents her—as among the top “5 standout” shows to see in NYC this month (or early next since it continues through May 12).
Reaves’ wonderfully odd and intriguing works are both sculpture masquerading as furniture and furniture unconcerned with functionality—a beautiful thing.
A couple of years ago, she made an impact at the 2017 Whitney Biennial with several pieces, including a commission to create functional furnishings for the exhibition space. “Rejecting the sleek craftsmanship of iconic midcentury design, Reaves exaggerates markers of construction to an almost aggressive abundance,” noted Whitney co-curators Christopher Lew and Mia Locks.
“In her new show, [Reaves] pushes her trash-chic aesthetic into weird and welcome new directions,” the Artsy editorial notes.
And as the reviewer concedes, “There’s also beauty in all of Reaves’ wreckage.”
The multiracial interdisciplinary artist explained how she balances her own need to make studio work with her family life and current position as assistant director of studios at NYC’s Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, a nonprofit that provides subsidized studio space for 100 artists in midtown Manhattan.
Workshop participants—students like me who are thinking about how to maintain our artistic practices after RISD—discussed intersecting identities and challenges and then brainstormed possible solutions. For me, the workshop offered a rare opportunity to slow down, sit back and take stock of larger life issues.
Nakazawa offered personal insights about the importance of seeking support—from institutions and elsewhere.
“There is a lot more space for families and artists who are parents,” she pointed out. “And it’s not all Ab Ex anymore,” she added, referring to the preponderance of enthusiasm for Abstract Expressionist work in recent years.
Nakazawa reminded us of how important it is to tap into joy as creative practitioners and says that one way she finds it by working with young people.
She also loves working in textiles, which allows her to weave in intergenerational notions, women-centric ideas and themes of migration.
“If you ask [for what you need],” Nakazawa concluded, “sometimes you get answers.”
Print and paper enthusiasts packed into the Fleet Library at RISD on Saturday, April 6, for RISD UNBOUND, a daylong fair for artists and designers who make books, zines and other experimental printed matter.
Zines by senior Zola Anderson 19 PT celebrate Vine, the now-defunct social media platform. One of her wares features “the LeBron James kid,” whose 2014 Vine—a simple compilation of him saying the basketball star’s name over and over again—racked up a mindboggling 45,976,110 views.
Among the dozens of exhibitors, Providence-based graphic designer and RISD faculty member Anther Kiley MFA 13 GD was selling fish cards and foldable paper products in anticipation of launching a wonderful new line of Card Kits(above) later this year.
Artist/educator Aly Maderson-Quinlog MA 16, who runs the micro-press and community arts studio Magik Press in Connecticut, sold zines inspired by
xer teaching practice and the need for social justice. “Zines and queerness go hand in hand,” xe notes.
By all accounts the exhibitors at this third iteration of UNBOUND did a brisk business and enjoyed sharing and talking about their work with a steady stream of visitors throughout the day.
