Glass
At RISD students approach glass as both an expressive artist’s material and a practice imbued with limitless potential, incorporating sculpture, architecture, design, craft and decorative art.
As a Glass major you discover a discipline built on a unique history that dovetails with expanding dialogues around innovation and creative practice. The department emphasizes a commitment to both material and conceptual investigations, helping you refine an individual perspective through experimentation and critical inquiry.
Degree programs
As a major in the Glass BFA program, you will develop the wide range of skills you need to create well-made conceptual and functional objects, and discover the limitless possibilities of the versatile, dynamic medium of glass.
The Glass MFA program provides the context for you to realize your own creative vision through research, experimentation and constant exploration of glass as a historically rich, culturally significant material.
Offering both conceptual and technical concentration tracks, the post-baccalaureate in Glass is an immersive, one-year program that lets you pursue a personally meaningful experience with the medium.
In the studio
Both undergraduate and graduate students have full access to a hot shop, cold shop, kiln and casting rooms. In addition, you are given individual studio space and access to refined installation spaces both within the department and elsewhere on campus.
Student work
Alumni
Glass alumni tend to remain closely connected with the department, helping to influence new generations of artists by returning as visiting artists and critics or providing internships. The department’s many accomplished alumni push the boundaries of the medium and advance the role of glass in contemporary art and design.
Multimedia artist and 2006 MacArthur Award winner Josiah McElheny is fascinated with space, time and the notions of infinity and purity. While at RISD in the mid-1980s, he studied in Rome through the school’s European Honors Program and worked with master glassblowers such as Ronald Wilkins in London. McElheny now lives and works in Brooklyn, where he’s represented by James Cohan Gallery.
Bahamian-born Tavares Strachan explores environment, materials and the limits of the human body in his work, often on a massive scale: For example, he harvested a 4.5-ton block of ice from the Arctic Circle for The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want and “showed” nine years of work in a 20,000-sf space for the closed exhibition seen/unseen. An artist who challenges the idea that place delimits identity and experience, Strachan was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
Featured stories
Students in a fall Glass studio taught by Sean Salstrom MFA 06 GL use movement and choreography as a starting point for experimentation.
Seven artists and designers will advance cross-cultural dialogue across Europe and Asia during the 2022–23 academic year.
RISD students working across disciplines explore the relationship between nature, art and design in third year of synergistic partnership.