VICTOR DE LA ROSA

risd connection: MFA in Textiles

from: the San Francisco Bay area in California

the road to risd: For Vic de la Rosa, being “out in the world” before starting graduate school sharpened his convictions about where he wants his education to lead. Unlike most first-year grad students, he enjoyed 15 promising years as an apparel designer — for Levi Strauss, Joe Boxer and a start-up designer sportswear company — before deciding to switch careers and coasts. His work had won accolades (from San Francisco Focus magazine, the CA Marty Awards and the Cutty Sark Menswear Awards), but he was uninspired by the commercial focus; a stab at documentary filmmaking, resulting in a short film that was a hit at festivals worldwide, opened his eyes to the potential of art to satisfy his creative urge while providing a forum for the social, political and cultural issues that are important to him. “I just realized I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do,” he says. “I wanted to give to people, and for me that means being a professor, which means getting another degree.”

why risd? As an art major focusing on textiles at San Francisco State University, Vic was surprised to discover that his interest in art went beyond consumer design. “I thought I’d eventually go to grad school to study commercial fabric design,” he says, but he soon fell in love with handweaving and realized his true goals weren’t in sync with the marketplace. Also motivated by cultural and political concerns, he had noticed throughout his studies that role models were few and far between — Latinos were not well represented in the arts in the US, either as artists or educators. So, he thought, “as everyone does: Who better to fill that gap than me?” At RISD he recognized the independent thinking and broad exploration of both media and content that would prepare him for a career as an educator. The deciding factor was a President’s Scholarship, which each year offers significant financial assistance to outstanding graduate candidates from under-represented groups.

creative interests: To a natural multidisciplinarian like Vic, the wealth of resources available through RISD’s many departments poses a challenge — eventually he’ll have to decide which media to employ and which specific questions to address. His current work, The Verbal Serape Project, uses the serape as a canvas to respond to long-standing stereotypes of Mexico and Mexicans. The scope of the project continues to expand as he explores new methods, and will probably involve film and digital media in addition to his first love, weaving.

personal discoveries: (1) “Less than 4 percent of students in grad school are Latino. That’s the figure that keeps me going.” (2) “For me, the fundamental question is: How do you integrate social and cultural commentary into American art? It’s clear that something [in the art establishment] has to change.” (3) “At RISD I’ve started to look for deeper meaning behind my visuals — more than just visual excitement alone.”