Art and Design Commons^™

Maternity Dress, Risd Museum, Deborah Johnson, Hilary Treadwell, Judith Tannenbaum

Channel

1966

Rock Head, Risd Museum, James Montford

Channel

One of contemporary art’s most compelling and elusive figures, David Hammons draws upon his identity as an African American for his sculptures, performances, and installations. He was also inspired by the 1960s Italian Arte Povera (Poor Art) movement with its use of everyday materials to create metaphorical imagery. Rock Head embodies a strikingly elegant human form with remarkable simplicity, roughness, and asymmetry. Reminiscent of both archeological remains and Brancusi’s Modernist ovoid heads, the smooth boulder is thatched with hair swept up from the floor of a Harlem barbershop. Hammons began using human hair from barbershops in the 1970s for installations …

Under The Willow Tree, Talia Connelly, Fleet Library, Special Collections

1st Student Artists' Book Contest 2015

No abstract provided.

Sugar Bowl, Risd Museum, Caroline Frank

Channel

ca. 1800

Lady’S Writing Table And Chair, Risd Museum, Ben Blanc, Elizabeth Williams

Channel

Commanding as much attention now as when they debuted at the 1904 World’s Fair, this writing table and chair were conceived as showstoppers in a crowd of stunning objects made by Gorham’s competitors. More than 10,000 hours of labor, 47.5 pounds of silver, and a panoply of exotic materials make up this unique set, which deftly melds sinuous European Art Nouveau floral and figural motifs, 18th-century French Rococo forms, and traditional Hispano-Moresque designs. Intricately wrought symbolism—seen in the daytime poppies and the night owl below the mirror and the decoration of the legs, each representing one of the four seasons, …

Saucer, Risd Museum, Andrew Raftery

Channel

ca. 1840

Elastic Armchair, Risd Museum, Alicia Valencia, Matthias Pliessnig, Rosanne Somerson

Channel

Based on the ancient Greek klismos form, this chair incorporates bentwood lamination, a technique using steam to shape wood into graceful curves. Patented in 1808, Gragg’s design and construction process benefitted from his experience using this technique to make Windsor chairs, an example of which is on the right. Inspired by the proportions and lightweight construction of the Windsor chair, Gragg fused the classical past with the industrialized future. The chair is adorned with motifs that date to antiquity, such as the painted peacock feathers along the chair back, the acanthus leaves on the seat rail, and the carved hoof …

Goddess Maat, Risd Museum, Gina Borromeo, Ingrid Neuman

Channel

This depiction of Maat appears to be cast in three pieces: the altar, the figure, and the feather. Smooth, highly polished surfaces contrast with the concentrated detailing of the feather, wig, broad collar, and openwork altar. The goddess embodying truth, balance, and proper action, Maat pervaded all aspects of Egyptian culture. Traditionally represented as a woman with an ostrich feather headdress, Maat here sits in a characteristic pose. Similar bronze figures of Maat suggest that this piece is incomplete, and was most likely part of a group composition in which the goddess was juxtaposed with a larger figure of the …

Valentine Portable Typewriter And Case, Risd Museum, Perry A. King, Khipra Nichols, Kate Schapira

Channel

Introduced on Valentine’s Day with a flurry of advertising, the Olivetti Company’s bright-red portable typewriter was an instant sensation of the Pop Art movement. Ettore Sottsass and Perry King designed valentine to be the “anti-machine machine,” meaning that it functioned as a typewriter but also had a humanized quality lacking in most office equipment. Sottsass noted that his seductive red typewriter was for use “in any place except an office … rather to keep amateur poets company on quiet Sundays.” To further differentiate valentine from workaday equipment, Sottsass’s early designs lacked both uppercase type and the bell signaling the end …

Ise Annual Report 2013-2014, Intercultural Student Engagement Office, Anthony Johnson

Intercultural Student Engagement (ISE) Annual Reports

The ISE Annual Report 2013-2014 is a year in review containing a message from the director, staff updates, community programs, statistics and general report of the work of this office. Our Mission: The office of Intercultural Student Engagement (ISE) promotes cultural awareness, dialogue, and interaction while serving as a hands-on resource for specific RISD communities. Primary target communities include: students of color, international students, students identifying within the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning (LGBTQ) spectrum, religious and/or spiritual students; and those dedicated to inclusive community.

This office provides leadership in the areas of student success, retention programs, campus education and …

Material Potential | Recontextualizing Material Libraries, Diana Wagner

Masters Theses

Material libraries are growing resources that offer an opportunity for artists and designers to discover a variety of materials. These collections are composed in a traditional taxonomy, pairing materials based on composition. Samples are typically commercially made and are displayed independent of context, means of production, cultural significance, and application.

Through making we learn a material’s potential: the transformation it can make, the form it can take, and the new composites we can create. This generative experience lives in the studio and workshop. But how can we introduce this language of process, critical thinking, and making to activate and challenge …

Not Not Real : Exercises In Styling, Sophie Mascatello

Masters Theses

As a generative process of visual form, styling and artifice are co-dependent. Styling mediates visual and sensorial elements for aesthetic benefit, and artifice produces a fantasy otherwise unattainable. Together they are a rebus — an orchestration of symbols and shifted realities — that impacts modes of representation and subsequent shifts in taste.

In Not Not Real, the logic of “real” life is moot. Relevance and subjectivity are the only fixed parameters that govern stylistic intuition. The image produced — however candid or authentic it may appear — is artificial. But this imagery supersedes reality in provoking aspiration, rendering the …

Learning To Live In Thick Interface, Jonathan Hanahan

Masters Theses

As media platforms shift towards more dynamic interfaces, the separation between user and content grows infinitely. While advertised as thin, light, and seamless, these platforms mask a thick and complicated space in which society must navigate. This is what I call the “Thick Interface.” The Thick Interface is the portal we use to toggle back and forth and through which we communicate. It is solid and porous, physical and digital, enhancing and diminishing. It may also be a combination of these things simultaneously, or none at all. My work highlights—rather than masks—the complexity of this space through interaction, participation, and …

Speculative Archives : An Index, Sameer Farooq

Masters Theses

Building an official archive, a comprehensive depository of cultural memory, is an impossible pursuit.My work centers around the question: what gets lost in the capture ? Responding to this problematic, I create “speculative archives”— setting the practice of archiving against the archive. In doing so, my display systems (including photography, film and writing) reveal countless ruptures, even blind spots, in the smooth surfaces of the archive: the invisibility of the archivist, the challenge of capturing ephemera, the inherent value bias in collecting, and the inexhaustibility of documenting a subject.

Speculating on the archive has consequence for design practice. From the …

2014 Program Booklet, Rhode Island School Of Design

Collection (annual runway show) 2007-2017

Official Collection 2014 Program distributed at the event.

Risd Pod 2014 Alumni Research Report, Project Open Door

Publications + Documents + Videos

Research and report by Craig Dreeszen, Ph.D., Dreeszen & Associates with Dr. Paul Sproll, Head, Department of Teaching + Learning in Art + Design (TLAD) and TLAD MA research assistants, Karina Esperanza Yanez, En-Ling Lu, and Lauren Allen, Rhode Island School of Design Funding for the research provided by the Surdna Foundation. Dreeszen & Associates was commissioned to work with the Department of Teaching + Learning in Art + Design faculty and graduate research assistants. The research objective was to identify, find, and collect data and stories about the paths taken by Rhode Island teens (RI POD alumni) who …

Re-Inscribing History, Yoonkyung Kim

Masters Theses

Most images and informational data from historical records and databases remain unseen because there is a massive over-saturation of visual material. This material has not been thoroughly investigated or understood. Historical archives offer opportunities to discover stories that reposition history in more intimate terms. I explore what remains unseen by revealing new routes that these "facts" can take.

Exploring the boundaries between the public and the personal, I visit archival documents, public databases, and historical collections. Fascinated by their stories' multifaceted nature, I critically examine these primary sources that nourish generations of new histories.

My intention is to redefine our …

Procedural Pleasures: An Algorithmic Manifesto, Jerel Eugene Johnson

Masters Theses

This thesis engages with algorithms through five interlocked arguments: 1) algorithms are an operating condition of our current era; 2) algorithms are the engine of scripted systems; 3) designers create verbal, visual, and scripted systems; 4) there is procedural pleasure in the creation and execution of systems; 5) algorithmic acts are political acts.

The algorithm in its various forms is the subject and verb of this thesis investigation. Therefore, the projects in this thesis pivot on both strict and loose definitions of the algorithm. Projects move from narrowly-scoped, tightly controlled algorithms to open, search-based algorithms. Furthermore, I set out to …

In And About: Investigating Graphic Design In And About The Digital Landscape, Brienne Jones

Masters Theses

Book 1 : Projects as texts, pgs. 1 - 54 -- Book 2 : Projects as images, pgs. 55 - 128 -- Book 3 : Projects as links, pgs. 129 - 148

The web continuously increases our capacity to access to high fidelity representations of the real world. The forms of these representations are manifold: from high resolution photographic imagery to interactive panoramas that simulate walks; from static-yet-infinitely- customizable-maps to geolocational mobile apps; from blog posts and news articles to cinematic, multimedia narratives. These tools often position themselves as proxies by which one may experience a location or an event. …

Reconsider Everything, Hyunjin Kim

Masters Theses

This thesis is composed of three overarching chapters that exploit conventions as a tool to reexamine our social and cultural habits. Observing commonalities in our everyday experiences, this body of work explores subjectivity of rules of convention, questioning assumptions and common values.

In the first chapter, "Formal Conventions," I observe formal qualities and definitions of existing objects and explore alternative meanings and the performance of form. In the second chapter, Limits of Vision," I look at imperceptible subject matter to explore limitations of default modes of human perception. In "Boundaries of Techniques," I search for possibilities of expanding graphic design …

Readily Available, Ali Shamas Qadeer

Masters Theses

Today, there is a massive framework in place to share and build ideas and information, and yet the status of the public domain is being eroded legally and ideologically. In the digital age, we are constantly creating datasets, leaving physical and ideological trails of whatever captures our attention and experience. However, massive, disorganized archives are prone to becoming unnavigable storehouses of information—or worse—privately traded commodities. In opposition to the idea of our lives as privately stored and sold as imaginary capital stands The Commons — the vast network of our collective cultural memory that is readily available to the public—at …

Events Of Assembly: Exploring The Terms Of Co-Production, Chloe Lee

Masters Theses

Graphic designers, by nature, create sets of rules or conditions to establish relationships between disparate parts. The product graphic designers produce is thus an assembly of materials organized by these rules. In the context of our increasingly networked culture, there is an opportunity for graphic designers to reconsider how we orchestrate relationships. Rather than establishing conditions to make discrete objects as singular designers, this thesis proposes methods for generating new content and new form in collaboration with others.

Through rule-based design and trans-disciplinary collaboration, this body of work explores the terms of co-production. Using site-specific events, I assemble small networks …

Head Of Buddha Shakyamuni, Risd Museum, Gregory Schopen, Vazira Zamindar

Channel

The earliest images of Buddha are found in modern-day Pakistan at sites along ancient trade routes. The region once known as Gandhara was familiar to the Greeks as early as the fourth century BCE. Traces of their influence are visible in the classicizing features of this head of Buddha (top), combined with all the traditional attributes of Buddha—the skull protuberance, the spot or tuft of hairs between the eyebrows, and the elongated earlobes of ancient Indian nobility. The simplified and youthful facial features and the coiled knots of hair are typical of Gandharan representations. This head would probably have been …

Dress, Risd Museum, Kate Irvin, Pradeep Sharma

Channel

Junya Watanabe is a master of shaping and manipulating carefully chosen, often technically advanced material. This dress, designed for his Spring 2008 collection, exemplifies the designer’s keen interest in sculpting novel creations replete with historical references. Collaborating with Liberty of London, Watanabe employed yards of the English firm’s renowned Tana Lawn fabric, patterned in tribute to the Indian export textiles eagerly consumed in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. In a twist to the story of East-to-West trade, Watanabe worked with Liberty fabric produced in Japan to develop a silhouette that references the Indian dhoti, a traditional garment worn …

Nō Theater Costume (Karaori), Risd Museum, Anais Missakian, Michelle Liu Carriger

Channel

18th - 19th Century

Man's Sash (Patka), Risd Museum, Brooks Hagan, Mallica Kumbera Landrus

Channel

ca. 1700-1750

Manual / Issue 2 / Lorem Ipsum, Amy Pickworth, Editor, S. Hollis Mickey, Editor, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor, James Allen, Alison W. Chang, Kenneth Goldsmith, Daniel Harkett, Cyrus Highsmith, Jan Howard, Kate Irvin, Antoine Revoy, Nancy Skolos

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Lorem Ipsum.The second issue. In potently meaningful and deliberately meaningless ways, this issue, “Lorem ipsum,” celebrates text. The standard placeholder text used by designers and printers, lorem ipsum isn’t really Latin. Mangled over centuries of use, the passage has become meaningless and untranslatable—and yet it is highly useful in that in its incomprehensibility, it occupies space. Over the centuries and across many inventions and innovations in type and printing, lorem ipsum has acted as a space filler and form shaper in conventional printing, desktop publishing, and electronic typesetting. Join us as …

Sonnet 130, Ran Zheng, Fleet Library, Special Collections

1st Student Artists' Book Contest 2015

No abstract provided.

New Naturalists, Francie Latour, Risd Xyz

RISD XYZ Spring/Summer 2014: Natural Instincts

Artists Tavares Strachan 03 GL and Sophia Sobers MFA 13 DM tap into scientific authority in commenting on our evolving relationship with nature.

Revolutions In Making, David Rejeski, Risd Xyz

RISD XYZ Spring/Summer 2014: Natural Instincts

With bio- and nanotech breakthroughs radically changing how things are made, David Rejeski 73 ID asks what it means to be a designer in the 21st century.