Overview
Graduate Studies at RISD is an immersive, focused and connective context in which to study art and design, to examine the role of the artist and designer in society, and to consider – from a panorama of perspectives and positions – why culture matters, what art and design can do for people, and why we should care about their potential for the future.
RISD offers a generous range of courses and opportunities to help you clarify your ideas, develop your work, and deepen and ripen your commitment to ongoing practice. The process of independent inquiry, if never infallible, is an intellectual investment in the cultural worlds that now exist and will emerge in the future. Globally, two of today’s most urgent issues – sustainability and social justice – are ideas with significance for artists, designers and critics. How do we create responsible, ethical and sustainable practices? How do we develop and perpetuate critical inquiry and the abiding curiosity required of adaptive practices? And through our work together, how do we reinforce the idea that art and design are continuous and dynamic – moving, stirring, transitional, transformative – anytime and everywhere?
Working with dedicated and accomplished teachers, visiting artists, designers, scholars and extremely perceptive peers, you will be challenged and inspired by the questions involved in making and critical analysis. You will be encouraged to embrace the compelling dimensions and complex pleasures of art and labor, conviction and doubt that stimulate adaptive, proactive practices. Through the work you do here, you will broaden your ideas and confirm your commitment to pursuing searching, consequential work that affirms why art, design and culture do, indeed, matter.