This J+M elective offering is an intensive technical course that focuses on the subject and material investigation of Stones + Gold. The course will be divided into two segments: the first half focuses on the working with gold as material and the second on intermediate and advanced stone setting. Technical demonstrations will discuss and outline material properties, preparation and proper handling, alloying, soldering/fabrication, finishing, etc. Lectures and discussion will address the history of the materials, their mining and sourcing, environmental impacts and concerns, and methods for establishing an ethical practice. The course aims to address and prepare students with the practical knowledge, experience, and the necessary specialized skills to launch professionally into industry, produce independent commission work, and/or advance their personal creative practices.

Major elective for Junior, Senior, and Graduate Jewelry + Metalsmithing Students. Experienced non-majors may enroll pending seat availability. To request permission, email the instructor and include images of past work.

Elective

This course focuses on Indigenous conceptions of gender and sexuality, centering Native feminisms by privileging the knowledge of Native women, girls, Indigi-queer, and Two Spirit People. With core focuses on memoir, poetics, and felt theory -- which understands the body to be an important site of knowledge formation -- this class aims to draw attention to embodied experience, positionality, and spatiality. The class will foreground relationships between bodies, minds, spirits, and lands as vital methods of knowledge creation and cultural production. We will focus on how Native creators remap and reimagine gender, sexuality, colonial violence, and the relationship between people, kin, communities, temporality, and the land. Authors might include, but are not limited to: Terese Marie Mailhot, Deborah Miranda, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Tommy Pico, and Joshua Whitehead.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

The use of light-based print processes is ubiquitous in contemporary printmaking. Light to Ink will lay a foundation of knowledge within the printmaking medium for using light as a part of the image-making process. The class is designed to introduce students to the basics of Printmaking using either hand made, digital or photo-made matrixes. The class will learn to make prints using the traditional print methods of intaglio, lithography and screenprint and build a base of information about the production of the film transparencies from which the matrix is made. Students will be taught the skills necessary to take the photo, computer, or handmade image from a one or a series of positive transparencies to a finished print. From Light to Ink is a starting point for growth and exploration in photo printmaking and an introduction to printing in intaglio, lithography and screenprint. No prior knowledge of printmaking is required. This class is most appropriate for sophomores, juniors and first semester seniors.

Elective

Sustainability is an important consideration for artists on many levels. We shall explore the many ways sustainability affects us as artists including choosing and sourcing art materials to work with and their physical or conceptual longevity. Sustainability is also a growing concern for art conservators and museums in general. What are both domestic and international museums discussing regarding sustainability? This course will delve into the materiality of art, and its component source materials. We will discuss how art and art materials break down and why. We will also discuss the sustainability of art materials used by art conservators in the preservation of art displayed in the museum context. This course will hopefully empower you, the art student, to make more informed decisions while creating and preserving their artwork. Restricted to THAD concentrators or MA candidates in Museum Education.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

Illustration, along with painting, printmaking and many other visual art practices, is continually intertwined with music. From illustrators collaborating on videos, packaging and promotion, to creating graphic novels and picture biographies of musicians and musical movements, the tradition of connecting the visual to the acoustic has a rich history. Music is often celebrated in larger and in a more tactile ways than on a screen-and we are seeing the enduring inventiveness of the gig poster, and even the 12 inch LP cover is still alive as a canvas. Projects in this class will explore promotional, interpretive, and investigative approaches as they relate to musicians, lyrics and titles, as well as parallels between music and visual art. Students will have the chance to interpret musical works in a number of ways, including through narrative approaches, using sculpture, animation and GIFs, and other less conventional means. There will be exploration of analogous aspects of music and visual art-sound and color, time based works, performative aspects and related ideas (e.g.: the movements of the hand while drawing/painting as analogous to playing an instrument). There will be some focus too, on genres and movements where music and art have close relationships, ie: psychedelia, pop and op art, comics and set design. Lectures and discussion will also be devoted to learning about artists who create both visual and musical work.

This course fulfills the Illustration Concepts Elective requirement for Illustration Students.

Elective

Ceramic Sculpture will cover a range of concepts, traditions and techniques that are specific to the disciplines of both ceramics and sculpture. Projects will revolve around the topics of space, structure and form and the development of ideas. Techniques and processes including hand building, surface treatment and glazes will be covered. Clay is a subtle material allowing an exchange between the medium and the self. Through making, your skills and confidence will develop giving you more control over the objects you wish to realize. Students will approach these dynamics through installation, large construction and small-scale object making. Designed for students at an advanced level, using clay as a primary material and involving a variety of processes and forming methods.

Prerequisite: 6 credits of college-level ceramics or equivalent experience.

Major elective for Junior and Senior Ceramics students. Experienced non-majors may enroll pending seat availability. To request permission, email the Department Head and instructor jointly and include images of past work.

Major Requirement | BFA Ceramics

In this course, students will study horror through different modes—the uncanny, the strange, and the fantastic—that defamiliarize reality and transform the way we perceive the world around us. Through close reading, academic and creative writing, discussions, oral presentations, and a student-created horror festival, students will explore how Latin American writers engage with or challenge the conventions of horror, while examining gender and racial stereotypes, disgust, sensoriality, and the effects of fear on the body. Familiar and seemingly safe spaces and experiences—such as the home, childhood, and the family—can become sites of anxiety, disturbance, and terror, exposing both intimate and collective fears. The course also explores the idea of haunting, understood not simply as the presence of ghosts, but as the return of unresolved political and historical issues: traces of violence, injustice, and loss that continue to shape the present and call for reparation.

Ecohorror emerges as a key strand of contemporary Latin American horror, highlighting how environmental destruction—extractivism, pollution, and agrotoxins—generates new forms of ecological dread. These works imagine worlds in crisis, where nature—animals, rivers, and viruses—acts as a powerful agent of warning, revenge, or resistance, revealing what it means to inhabit a damaged planet. As a final creative project, students will create a “horrific artifact” in the form of a text, installation, video, or soundscape, reflecting on the course themes and experimenting with horror as a mode of critical and aesthetic inquiry. Readings and films might include works by Quiroga, Ocampo, Davila, Enriquez, Schweblin, Freud, Todorov, Lovecraft, Ahmed, Santos, Bastericca et al.

Elective

Ceramics and printmaking have a shared ethos in the production of multiples and process-driven technical methods. This is reflected in industry but is not often explored in an academic context. This course would be the first at RISD to explore the rich resources of the Ceramics and Printmaking Departments to promote research into innovative ways to combine the disciplines. For almost three centuries ceramics have been enhanced by printed elements. The combination of ceramic and print technologies have tremendous potential for new applications in functional and sculptural approaches to ceramic multiples and printed editions. RISD has all the facilities in ceramics and printmaking required to pursue research in this field. Students will learn ceramic techniques such as hand-building and slip casting to create forms to hold screen printed, intaglio, relief, and digital images. Historical techniques will be presented and new methods and combinations will be developed.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $200.00

Major elective for Junior and Senior Ceramics students. Experienced non-majors may enroll pending seat availability.

Prerequisite: 6 credits of college-level ceramics or equivalent experience. To request permission, email the Department Head and instructor jointly and include images of past work.

Elective

With the publication of Society of the Spectacle in 1967, Situationist theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord famously declared that images had entirely replaced lived existence. In the decades since, spectacle's domination of everyday life seems only to have intensified. Yet how exactly might we understand spectacle today? How has its role been affected or redefined by radical changes in media, technology, labor, and politics? In this class, we will consider these questions in broad critical perspective. Foregrounding contemporary art but looking as well at film, architecture, design, and new media, we will trace the development of spectacle from the postwar period to our present moment, emphasizing in turn the ways that politics, violence, sexuality, racial difference, and everyday cultural life have all been increasingly mediated and spectacularized. Against this background, we will examine the diverse aesthetic and political counter-practices that have arisen to confront, challenge, or otherwise disrupt spectacle in its varied forms. In so doing, we will attempt not only to rethink the effects and function of spectacle today but also to understand how --in response to the growing spectacularization of culture --visual artists, filmmakers, theorists, and others have attempted to reimagine and remake contemporary life itself.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

This graduate level wintersession studio course is comprised of one external faculty member who is a well-established professional artist working in the field of painting. This course is designed to support second-year painting students in continuing to grow towards their culminating Spring Thesis work. Students will develop their individual works alongside rigorous guidance and feedback from the Professor. They can expect to both expand and focus their inquiries and methods. Activities will include long-form studio visits, group discussions, reading assignments, collaborative assignments and group critique. There will also be at least one field trip to New York City.

This class is largely structured around intensive 1:1 long-form studio visits with whole group meetings to engage in discussions around studio work, assigned readings, collaborative activities, and a final group critique. Students should expect to spend a significant amount of time working in their studios outside of class periods. Sign up sheets for Studio Visits 1-2 hours long will be emailed each week, please check your emails regularly.

This course is open only to second-year Graduate Painting Students.

Elective

The junior studio expands and interprets the skills and concepts introduced in the sophomore studios. The primary focus of the semester is an experimentally based investigation of bending and forming techniques - molded plywood, bent lamination, steam bending, and vacuum-formed plastic. While focused on the use of wood and plastic materials, an experimental approach is expected in the studio. Students are encouraged to conceptually explore skills and materials to develop a personal design approach and studio practice. The semester culminates in a final design, in which students utilize learned techniques to create one-offs, objects intended for batch production or prototypes designed for production.

Prerequisite: FD-2502

Major Requirement | BFA Furniture Design

The junior studio expands and interprets the skills and concepts introduced in the sophomore studios. The primary focus of the semester is an experimentally based investigation of bending and forming techniques - molded plywood, bent lamination, steam bending, and vacuum-formed plastic. While focused on the use of wood and plastic materials, an experimental approach is expected in the studio. Students are encouraged to conceptually explore skills and materials to develop a personal design approach and studio practice. The semester culminates in a final design, in which students utilize learned techniques to create one-offs, objects intended for batch production or prototypes designed for production.

Prerequisite: FD-2502

Major Requirement | BFA Furniture Design

Michel-Rolph Trouillot proclaims, The past-or, more accurately, pastness-is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past. What is the relationship between history and haunting? How does the narration of troubling and troubled memories (or images of the future) draw attention to the gaps, assumptions, and limits of historical representation? Who is granted the power to tell stories and who is worthy of having stories told about them? How might texts, films, and other creative mediums not just represent about the dead, but actually conspire with them? The past has an ever-deepening relevancy to contemporary life, and the intimacies that structure our understanding(s) of the past, present, and future produce powerful terrains for study. This course engages these fraught terrains of historical narration; the absence presence of figures of the past; and the vexed representation of traumatic memory in social life. This course will center a wide range of texts, films, and other modes of cultural production that examine how history, haunting, and memory are contoured by of race, gender, sexuality, queerness, diaspora, colonialism, and temporality. Tacking between historiographic theory and literary, poetic, documentary, and ethnographic accounts of relations with the dead and other uncanny forces, we will wrestle with the silences, gaps, and erasures within particular historical sites and problematize representations of the past. We will pay particular attention to texts that highlight the incoherence and instability of the historical record; engage processes of suspension, seep, and spill; and demand nuance, in-betweenness, and queer temporality from our analyses.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

This course offers an introduction to the art and practice of the no longer taboo world of tattooing, merging the student’s unique visual language with technical mastery of the medium. Students will explore the history and cultural landscapes of tattooing, considering its roots in ancient traditions and its evolution into one of the most compelling and accessible contemporary art forms, transforming the human body into a dynamic canvas of personal expression and cultural dialogue. As an immersive experience into the tattoo industry, this course combines theory with hands-on practice, giving students the ability to create original designs that translate into tattoos that consider practical, real-world applications. Students will hand draw their tattoo designs to create a collection of unique imagery that will enhance their illustrative skills and problem-solving abilities. Projects will be designed to challenge students, in order to build a body of work that not only draws upon existing tattoo styles but blends, adapts and advances these styles to make distinctive, individual pieces of art.

 Throughout the course, students will not only develop their tattooing artistic abilities but also focus on equipment handling, machine setup, maintenance, and operation, as well as the proper use of specific needles and inks, in order to create smooth, clean and detailed line work and shading. An understanding of skin structure is crucial for effective tattooing and students will also study healing processes and the importance of sanitation practices to ensure client safety and comfort.  Students will create a collection of technically sound tattoos which will be applied on synthetic silicone fake skin, using actual tattoo machines and cartridge needles, ensuring a holistic understanding of both the technical and artistic aspects of tattooing. This course aims to create a community of artists who respect the tradition of tattooing while pushing the boundaries of creativity and innovation within this lucrative and thriving field.

A liability waiver (submitted on the first day of class) is required for safe use of tattoo machines and needles. Work is to be exclusively performed on simulated silicone skin, and use of the equipment on human or animal subjects is not permitted.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $80.00 - $100.00

Elective

This studio-based course will provide the foundation necessary to understand basic color theory and practice in painting, art and design. A historical and cultural perspective will be introduced to inform ongoing color studies executed in the studio. Students will acquire the vocabulary to articulate color phenomena and the means to exploit the expressive potential of color in their work. Color studies will be principally created with gouache, and a variety of other materials and means will also be explored. Lectures, demonstrations, and museum visits will supplement studio work. (An in class presentation is required).

Elective

This studio-based course will provide the foundation necessary to understand basic color theory and practice in painting, art and design. A historical and cultural perspective will be introduced to inform ongoing color studies executed in the studio. Students will acquire the vocabulary to articulate color phenomena and the means to exploit the expressive potential of color in their work. Color studies will be principally created with gouache, and a variety of other materials and means will also be explored. Lectures, demonstrations, and museum visits will supplement studio work. (An in class presentation is required).

Elective

This studio-based course will provide the foundation necessary to understand basic color theory and practice in painting, art and design. A historical and cultural perspective will be introduced to inform ongoing color studies executed in the studio. Students will acquire the vocabulary to articulate color phenomena and the means to exploit the expressive potential of color in their work. Color studies will be principally created with gouache, and a variety of other materials and means will also be explored. Lectures, demonstrations, and museum visits will supplement studio work. (An in class presentation is required).

Elective

This studio-based course will provide the foundation necessary to understand basic color theory and practice in painting, art and design. A historical and cultural perspective will be introduced to inform ongoing color studies executed in the studio. Students will acquire the vocabulary to articulate color phenomena and the means to exploit the expressive potential of color in their work. Color studies will be principally created with gouache, and a variety of other materials and means will also be explored. Lectures, demonstrations, and museum visits will supplement studio work. (An in class presentation is required).

Elective

This seminar supports the work of the Thesis Studio IV by providing a formal class setting in which to create written reflections on one's evolving studio thesis work as well as-more broadly-writings on illustration practice. Sessions will center on discussion of assigned readings as well as written responses to classmates' essays. These exercises will scaffold a more expansive documentation of their Studio Thesis Project, and to serve as a forum for discussion of critical writing about contemporary illustration practice that will support an essay to be contributed to the groups final publication.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

The ability to conceive and prepare for different future(s) is a vital human capability. Designers are frequently commissioned by multinational corporations, government agencies and cultural institutions for foresight and strategy work. But in times of uncertainty we all have to be futurists. This special topic studio will introduce students to the tools and techniques of foresight practice and discursive design. We will also examine afro-futurism, decolonised futures and participatory design to see how these practices are being used by communities and cultures rarely supported in futures practices. Students will finish the semester with designed objects and written products that support more resilient futures thinking.

If you have questions about the studio, please do not hesitate to contact Charlie Cannon via email. cccannon@risd.edu.

This studio is a Reassembling Industrial Design (REID) Special Topic Studio, which meets the graduation requirement for an SEI tagged class.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design