Students pursue individual work under advisement of resident faculty, visiting artists and critics during the semester. Individual objectives are clarified and professional practices are discussed. Group interaction and discussions are expected.

Students are pre-registered for this course by the department; registration is not available in Workday. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Sculpture Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Sculpture

Textiles: On Intersectional Being & Thinking is an intensive study of critical issues in textiles. This hands-on experimental & hybridized course introduces senior undergrad students and graduate students to key figures, texts and concepts, interweaving studio visits, critique and various forms of visual culture together. Bi-Weekly modules are designed to help students build hybrid art practices. The course asks students to look at the weird and untenable, odd, and often unconsidered crossovers found at the intersection of textiles, performance and everyday life. As such students will hybridize their studio & research practices while engaging a wide variety of synthetic & natural materials such as burial attire, cybernetics, installations, runways, and anything and everything interdisciplinarily textile. In this course students explore variety and diversity as a way of processing and ultimately as a way of seeing their work in plurality. The course is hybrid. The material is too. Part Studio – Part Seminar – students are asked to think and be intersectional.

Open to Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

This Graduate Studio course attends to three foundational texts Edward Glissant: Poetics of Relation, Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space, and Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, and is an exploratory course in which graduate students from various Fine Arts departments across RISD pursue and discuss their existing practices in a setting that reflects, as closely as possible, the interdisciplinary and intersectional conversations taking place around advanced art practices today. The course is broken into three, four-week modules situated along these texts as inter- / trans- / multi-disciplinary forms of research and production. This Studio-based course focuses holistically on a balance of seminar components (readings, screenings, and discussions) interwoven with studio visits, and critique, in order to grow graduate students' understanding of how their work functions across a variety of disciplines. The course is intended to allow students to challenge how their work will make meaning in art worlds in which a variety of intersectional discourses and disciplinary histories inform, resist and reshape one another, as well as to provide an opportunity for all students whose work bridges multi disciplines (including performance and post-studio approaches) to learn from one another and from faculty capable of addressing these sorts of practices.

Offered as PAINT-230G and IDISC-230G.

Please contact the instructor for permission to register. Preference will be given to Graduate Painting, Sculpture or Textiles Students.

Elective

This Graduate Studio course attends to three foundational texts Edward Glissant: Poetics of Relation, Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space, and Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, and is an exploratory course in which graduate students from various Fine Arts departments across RISD pursue and discuss their existing practices in a setting that reflects, as closely as possible, the interdisciplinary and intersectional conversations taking place around advanced art practices today. The course is broken into three, four-week modules situated along these texts as inter- / trans- / multi-disciplinary forms of research and production. This Studio-based course focuses holistically on a balance of seminar components (readings, screenings, and discussions) interwoven with studio visits, and critique, in order to grow graduate students' understanding of how their work functions across a variety of disciplines. The course is intended to allow students to challenge how their work will make meaning in art worlds in which a variety of intersectional discourses and disciplinary histories inform, resist and reshape one another, as well as to provide an opportunity for all students whose work bridges multi disciplines (including performance and post-studio approaches) to learn from one another and from faculty capable of addressing these sorts of practices.

Offered as PAINT-230G and IDISC-230G.

Please contact the instructor for permission to register. Preference will be given to Graduate Painting, Sculpture or Textiles Students.

Elective

This is a course in which first-semester seniors who have already demonstrated unusual commitment, ambition and initiative within their majors will pursue and discuss independent work in a setting that reflects, as closely as possible, the interdisciplinary conversation that actually takes place around advanced art practice today. The course is intended to allow those working within medium-specific vocabularies to test how their work will make meaning in an art world in which a variety of disciplinary histories and conventions coexist, clash, and inform one another, as well as to provide an opportunity for students whose work bridges two or more disciplines (or involves performance/new genres/post-studio approaches) to learn from one another and from faculty capable of addressing all of these sorts of practices. This is a demanding critique course with additional seminar components (readings, screenings, discussions, slide presentations, etc.), and as such students can expect a workload equivalent to a core studio requirement within their major.

Acceptance into the course will be based on a GPA of 3.25 or greater as well as the recommendation of faculty and department heads from the student's major and on review of previous work. Candidates will be identified in discussions between the instructor and department heads during the preceding spring semester. Successful completion of THAD-H490/PAINT-4507 (Contemporary Art & its Discourses) or equivalent coursework is a prerequisite, ensuring students have a shared understanding of the art historical context for interdisciplinary. The maximum enrollment is limited to seminar-size (c. 15 students) in order to provide sufficient attention to each student's work in group and individual critiques while still allowing for seminar-style discussions.

Please contact the instructor for permission to register.

Elective

Advanced Critical Issues Seminar 2 introduces a rigorous theoretical framework for thinking and writing about contemporary sculpture practice. Each seminar develops from a specific theme drawing on research from Grad Critical Issues 1, current debates in the field and contemporary events. Past seminars include: Artificial Natures, Precarious Relations, Frankenstein and Crime, Vanishing Points, as examples. Trespassing across sculpture, performance, cinema, fiction, feminist, queer, race and political theory and back again, we will address writings by Walter Benjamin, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Jacques Rancire (as examples) in conversation with contemporary artists writings and projects to cultivate a conceptual grammar to extend to our studio practice. Approaching issues in contemporary sculpture through these discursive perspectives generates new strategies simultaneously material, conceptual, and critical.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Graduate Sculpture Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Sculpture