Painting
Painting majors at RISD engage in an individual search for meaning and cultural representation by honing strong visual skills, critical reasoning and an understanding of broad historical and social contexts. Faculty embrace a wide range of aesthetic attitudes and offer flexible programs, while openly examining, exchanging, challenging and refining ideas rooted in painting traditions.
Degree programs
The BFA in Painting provides an engaging means for developing the critical and technical skills you need to express your ideas across a variety of media, forms and scales.
Drawing from historical and contemporary approaches to visual art, the Painting MFA program teaches you to balance content, form and context in the making of evocative and insightful artworks.
In the studio
Throughout the program, the conceptual and expressive aspects of painting remain central as you build on your skills through intense technical training and concentrated hands-on effort.
Student work
“I’d like to tap into a universal human experience but know there’s no such thing,” says Brooklyn-based artist Nicole Eisenman. “We all experience the world differently.” Adhering to this belief in her studio practice, the 2015 MacArthur Award winner has created eye-opening figurative paintings, prints and sculpture teeming with social significance. Through allegory, satire and stylistic references to art history, Eisenman explores issues of equity, justice, gender, sexuality and family dynamics.
Taking traditional forms of making as a conceptual point of departure, Pakistani-born artist Shahzia Sikander works across several mediums to push the possibilities of visual expression. In 2006 she won a MacArthur “genius grant” and, in 2012, she was the inaugural recipient of the US Department of State Medal of Arts. “For me art is not just an impulse to make aesthetically pleasing objects,” says Sikander, whose work is widely exhibited and collected around the world. “It has been from the very beginning an instinct to think and imagine.”
When Do Ho Suh first left Korea to study at RISD, he didn’t realize that the experience would inspire an ongoing body of work focused on questions of cultural and personal identity. Now he creates profound site-specific installations that are in high demand throughout the world. Suh’s work is included in almost every major museum collection, from the Whitney, the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York City to the Tate Modern in London to Artsonje Center in Seoul and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
Featured stories
Offered through the Painting department, Games We Play facilitates a range of unexpected approaches to making art.
Off-campus exhibitions showcase the exceptional work graduate students make in RISD’s Ceramics, Painting, Photography and Sculpture departments.
RISD alum Do Ho Suh explores memory, migration and the concept of home.