Since it's creation over 100 years ago, landscape architecture has expanded beyond horticultural preoccupations to a discipline that engages natural, political and cultural systems to build ecological and social resilience. This professional practice seminar explores contemporary practices of landscape architecture through the exploration of six current trends in practice: operating, researching, engaging, constructing, programming, and sustaining. These topics are explored and discussed through student research initiatives, in-class lectures, readings, case study presentations from a wide range of practitioners, office visits, and site visits. The goal of the course is to expose students to the variety of ways to practice landscape architecture today. Students are encouraged to ask questions, bring their own experiences to class, and be open to new ideas and perspectives.

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

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

Since it's creation over 100 years ago, landscape architecture has expanded beyond horticultural preoccupations to a discipline that engages natural, political and cultural systems to build ecological and social resilience. This professional practice seminar explores contemporary practices of landscape architecture through the exploration of six current trends in practice: operating, researching, engaging, constructing, programming, and sustaining. These topics are explored and discussed through student research initiatives, in-class lectures, readings, case study presentations from a wide range of practitioners, office visits, and site visits. The goal of the course is to expose students to the variety of ways to practice landscape architecture today. Students are encouraged to ask questions, bring their own experiences to class, and be open to new ideas and perspectives.

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

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

All Landscape Architecture graduate students at RISD are required to submit a Thesis Book that is the culmination of the work undertaken in the Advanced Design Research Studio (Thesis). The Thesis Book class is designed to support the written and graphic component of the Thesis Book. The course will provide resources to support the framing and reflection of the thesis work through writing. In addition, the graphic layout of the book will be used as a tool to help structure the inquiry into student's thesis topics.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $200.00

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

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

Spring Site works is a grounded, creative space for a more attentive and reciprocal relationship between people and local biodiversity. Our weekly classroom will be an outdoor test plot at RISD’s Tillinghast Farm, where we will listen to visiting speakers, tend to plants and soil with our hands, and draw our close attention to the many life forms, forces, and surprises in the landscape. Each student will have the creative freedom to design an experimental land-based practice, installation, or event within the plot. Our work will be respectful of diverse ethics, from climate resilience to symbiosis and beauty. However, our learning direction will be focused on topics like the labor of caring for a landscape rich with relationships, local material sourcing for habitat creation, and community stewardship building.

Elective

The course delves into the world of maps through a critical lens, examining the role of maps beyond the conventional utilitarian purpose of navigation and exploring them as tools of representation of power, space, and society within the built environment. Drawing from history, theory, and contemporary scholarship the seminar explores key concepts and methodologies of critical cartography, including power and representation, semiotics and symbolism, spatial narratives, countermapping, and the role of technology. From traditional hand-drawn maps to contemporary digital mapping technologies, the course interrogates how maps mediate architectural knowledge production, design, and social interaction.

The course examines maps as sites of contestation, imagination, and social transformation. Moreover, it also explores contemporary representational tools of mapping and data visualization. The students will engage in directed research project and produce story maps as final outputs for the course.

Elective

It is estimated that since the early 1600’s, North American land in the United States has lost half of the wetland habitat that provided essential areas for wildlife, held water on the land, hydrated soils, and supported vast areas of wetland vegetation. Wetlands provide essential fish and wildlife habitat, supporting rare plants, animals, and birds. Wetlands also store carbon, filter pollutants from water, and retain floodwaters. However, the legacy of viewing marshes and swamps as wasteland, continues to result in the degradation and destruction of many freshwater wetlands by human activity. In this field-oriented seminar students will spend class time within these important habitats, learning to understand them for their varied forms, their biodiversity, and their ability to store carbon and water with the potential of ameliorating on-going climate changes. Through field emersion, students will learn to see the landscape for the evidence it holds of what wetland habitat once was. They will identify the plant species that depend on wetlands for their survival, and will become intimately familiar with the water and soil that support these plant species. Extensive reading will support field observations and conversation in the field. The policies that brought about wetland destruction as well as protection, will be topics covered, along with wetland banking and restoration. Final projects for this class will offer students an opportunity to explore how their studio work can inform salient aspects of these watery worlds.  

Estimated Cost of Materials: $75.00

Elective

This seminar explores the parallels between designing and constructing the ground. It's focus is on landform - analyzing it as part of a larger natural system; understanding its inherent opportunities and limitations; altering it for human use & occupation; and building it with varying construction methodologies. The means for this exploration will primarily be through three-dimensional representations with two dimensional contour plans; however, diagrams, sketches, sections, and narratives will be necessary throughout the semester.

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

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

Building on the work completed this fall, this seminar will support the advancement of the design thesis. Through hands-on making, students will refine their design research investigations by establishing clear objectives, methods, and outcomes for their Thesis work.

Are you interested in popular culture? Do you want to explore the contexts and histories of mass media, or otherwise distinctly “un-fine” art? Do you want to make work about your interests that come from unexpected places? Do you see yourself in work that explores and appreciates the detritus of culture? Do you want to walk the line between fine art and fanart? This class may be for you.

This course uses critical theory, creative assignments, instructor feedback, and group critique to help students interrogate popular culture as a subject matter for their work. In addition to this interrogation of subject matter, students will also be prompted to question their materials, and explore the notion of “lowbrow” art mediums. This course is designed to assist students in navigating their work in areas that may feel off-limits or against the traditional “rules” of artmaking.

Students will be given a single, short, required reading each week, with recommended texts and reading as an option for students to further explore. There will be group crit/discussion every week, for both completed assignments and in-progress feedback.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $100.00

Elective

You start with sketching a nude model, move onto a grisaille, then a glaze. This is the “traditional” Western understanding of rendering a figure. In this course, we strive to embark on a journey far away from the western academic approach to figuration. Specifically in reference to the representation of Queer and BIPOC bodies in visual art. Throughout the duration of the semester, this course will examine alternatives to these traditional painting practices by discussing artists and artistic movements whose practices expand our conception of figurative work. Bouncing from Hendricks Heerschop’s Koning Casper (1659) all the way to the This Meant Nothing (2021) series of embroideries by Sophia Narrett, we will take a broad overview of marginalized identity present in art. The course will involve material investigations through maquettes, embroidery, and painting. These material investigations will be accompanied by readings, discussions and presentations. The melding of studio work, theory and art history will nurture an expansive archive and discussions surrounding the politics of representation, identity, and artistic process. By the completion of this course students will further develop their own ideology behind the figuration they choose to indulge in. Students will create their artist manifesto solidifying the ethos behind their work, as well as providing a presentation of their final artwork in support of their argument.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $20.00

Elective

In this course, we will examine the diary and the obsessive observer. These themes will be framed as preliminary sources for creating a series of paintings. Instincts like documenting, revealing, unearthing, appropriating, intervening, spying, etc are all methods of cultivating meaning that will be investigated throughout the course. We will have discussions about different approaches to these sorts of ideas, and the different ethical dilemmas that accompany them. Importantly, we will consider ways artists gather information online and in public spaces, and ultimately where public and private may blur. Some artists we will focus on are Sophie Calle, Anais Nin, Adrian Piper, and Laurel Nakadate as well as artistic movements such as Fluxus, New Media, and other contemporary niches.

Throughout the wintersession, students will maintain a diary or journal that will guide them in making a series of 4 paintings. The coursework will include in-class exercises, alongside slide lectures, readings, and class discussions. Students will use the series of paintings and their journal to deepen existing interests in their practices.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $100.00

Elective

Participants will be introduced to the medium of Fresco painting. A focus on technical and material aspects of fresco painting will be central to the course. Students will become familiar with the process of building adequate supports needed to hold lime plaster surface for the painting process.  There will be a  historical and industrial analysis of the development of fresco painting as a technology and relationship to architectural spaces. Along with learning the needed skills and technique to create a fresco, students will be encouraged to situate the medium in their current artistic practice and experiment with material, forms and painting process. 

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

Elective

This graduate level wintersession studio course will be comprised of two external faculty that are professional artist working in the field. Activities will include studio visits, lectures by each visiting critic, group-critique, potential field trips, all in direct engagement with graduate student practice. It will culminate a final critique at the end of the five week session. 

This course is open to second-year Painting Graduate students.

Elective

Painting from Observation is a team taught for 6 credits. The class meets on both Schedule A and Schedule B in Wintersession.

Drawing, collage, printmaking and painting will introduce students to contemporary painting as practiced by the RISD Painting Department. This course is a comprehensive introduction to painting. It is designed to develop confidence and experience with paint and painting. We will examine historical and contemporary trends and paint from life models and photo sources. Fundamental techniques for basic ground preparation, oil painting mediums and direct as well as in direct processes will be taught. Representational painting will be the primary focus but experiences in abstract painting will also be encouraged. We will learn abstract principles that organize composition, depict spatial illusion and describe form while developing a shared language for critiques. No prior painting experience is required.

This course is not available for registration in Workday. To register, please email the Registrar's Office at registrar@risd.edu. Registration will close once the course reaches capacity.

Elective

This is a hands-on course, designed for advanced painting students who are fascinated by color, surface, transformation and alchemy, DIY processes, craftmanship, invention, and the stuff of paint. It is for those who are eager to dive deep into all sorts of materials, methods and techniques. The objective of the class is to arm students with the tools and resources to figure out how to make what they imagine and to expand their practice through material exploration and information sharing. With an emphasis on experimentation, play, research and development; advanced students explore, problem solve and implement specific grounds, paints, supports, mediums and tools into their own practices. The level of specialization and expertise students may eventually desire for their work could require seeking the advice of paint manufacturers, conservators, fabricators, other artists or even experts in other fields. How to identify and acquire knowledge outside of one's comfort zone, approaching and finding a common terminology with peers and specialists is also a part of this course. Relevant art historical and contemporary methodologies, techniques and materials will be presented. Environmental Health and Safety guidelines that apply to painting practice and painting studio safety will be an integral part of this course.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00

Elective

Museums are stewards of history; the present moment is radically testing the role museums play as storytellers while also challenging how and for whom historical narratives are told. The colonial history of this region was profoundly shaped by an industry built on the systematic hunting and harvesting of whales, driving entire species to the brink of extinction. Located just 35 miles east of Providence, the New Bedford Whaling Museum tells this story and offers a challenging look into the great sacrifices made in order for American industry and culture to thrive. Through several visits to the New Bedford Whaling Museum this course asks students to reflect upon and interpret a wide range of interrelated subjects, objects, and their shared histories and relationships to both humans, whales, and the environment. From folk art to nautical culture, from colonial economies to subsistence hunting, and from natural history to curatorial practice, through research, students illuminate the stories the ocean has to tell us about ourselves so that our recognition of the past may help guide us towards a more sustainable future. With enhanced access to museum archives students address these topics with research-based projects employing a range of fine art media with specific attention to contextualizing within different modes of museum display. The New Bedford Whaling museum boasts a rich collection of unique and unusual artifacts, issuing a cautionary tale, and asking visitors to contemplate the tenuous line between the pursuit of profit and the destruction of that which is most sacred.

Elective

This first-year graduate seminar approaches painting as a technical skill, a historical practice and an intellectual project. Weekly sessions begin with group discussions of key readings about recent painting. Readings are organized in three sections. The first looks backward, to the problem of medium that preoccupied modernist painting and, residually, contemporary practices until the 1980s. The second section looks at the academy, the institution and the art market, and their effect on how painting is produced, disseminated, discussed and received. The third, the most speculative, looks laterally at a range of contemporary practices and their cultural frameworks from the 1990s to the present. Frequent studio visits will occur and drive some of the reading and discussion.

Please contact the instructor for permission to register. Preference is given to Graduate Painting Students.

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