Sculpture
At RISD, Sculpture encourages your individual growth as part of a larger community. We emphasize visual and critical literacy and intensive skill acquisition to help you build a conceptually strong creative practice. As you experiment and push beyond obvious solutions, you learn how what you make relates to the world, producing meaningful work through a command of process and informed use of materials.
Degree programs
In the Sculpture BFA program you move from basic skill building to the development of a personal artistic voice, working across diverse media and formats such as wood and metal sculpture, performance, installation, video and more.
The MFA in Sculpture supports you in developing interdisciplinary creative practices through community-engaged discourse, research and an emphasis on visual and critical literacy.
In the studio
As part of an integrated community, undergraduate and graduate students work together and individually with an extraordinary range of materials. The curriculum supports you through a series of courses that builds skills and literacies to help you make meaning using boundless materials, methodologies and media.
Student work
Alumni
After RISD, Sculpture graduates join an extensive alumni network, many of whom are established studio artists, fabricators, teachers, designers, art writers, curators, gallerists, administrators, exhibition designers, puppeteers, performances artists, software designers and more. Over the years, these alumni have created a blueprint that you can follow, reformat and tailor to your own aspirations.
New York-based artist Janine Antoni is renowned for using her body as creative instrument and site of meaning in works that blend performance, sculpture, video and photography. The 1998 MacArthur Award winner exhibits internationally and her work is collected in such major museums as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Whitney, MoMA and the Guggenheim in NYC, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. “Making something is like a fight,” Antoni has said in interviews. “Usually the material resists me all the way. If I can stay open… the material starts to speak back and tell me what it wants to be."
Best known for his exuberant, large-scale knit and sewn sculpture, artist Jim Drain also draws, paints and makes installations using colorful, quirky found and recycled objects. The former member of Forcefield—the influential art collective known for blending music, performance, film and installations—exhibits how work internationally and frequently collaborates with artists on site-specific work, including with RISD students on a sculptural piece for the US Embassy compound in Rabat, Morocco.
Through her experimental work, Andrea Zittel investigates structures and habits of everyday life—from clothing and shelter to the concept of measured time—and reveals their arbitrary nature. In 2000 she established A-Z West, a desert compound in Joshua Tree, CA, where she conducts experiments like the Wagon Station Encampment project, a “village” of pods where guests live in exchange for working on site. “You need to be able to see one’s life with a kind of perspective,” she says, “to understand how society works and how your decisions fit into that.”
Featured stories
Grad students Ann Lewis and Viraj Mithani, undergrad Yuqing Liu and recent alumna Elizabeth Meiklejohn use SPUR funding to conduct research in the US and abroad.
A Sculpture course called Complicating Social Practice helped students develop critical capacities for integrating community-oriented methodologies into their practices.
Brown|RISD Dual-Degree student Njari Anderson discusses the emotions behind Fountain, his Dorner Prize-winning sculpture now on view at the RISD Museum.