This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.  

Registration process:

First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.  

Major Requirement | BFA

This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.  

Registration process:

First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.

Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.  

Major Requirement | BFA

Historic and contemporary industrial design legacies are contributing to changing our climate, threatening our ecosystems, and harming our non-human relatives. Human centered approaches to design and sustainability will not get us out of this planetary catastrophe. Many global Indigenous nations have urged western countries to shift their worldviews from individualistic to kin-centered as a way to prevent planetary disaster. What does this mean for industrial design which plays a major role in how our species interacts with the Planet? How can our design systems embody kinship? These questions will be the guide for our thinking as we seek to imagine and create systems and infrastructures that center the wellbeing of many species within an ecosystem, and conceive design interventions that support trans-species co-habitation of the world around us. This course will exercise students’ imagination as we engage what habitable structures could be that might welcome the insects, the rodents, the cats, the dogs, the birds, the plants, and so on. Students will engage a range of texts, media, guest speakers, and non-human observation activities to nourish their understanding of trans-multi-species design. Students will look at how other species design and exist in trans-multi-species kinships as well as other human groups who have been including other species in their systems. The course will result in students making habitable structures that take up the tasks of being trans-multi-species inclusive. Students will leave the course with an understanding of how the emerging future can be grounded in kinship designs, doing away with human exceptionalism. 
Key Words: Human Centered Design, More than human design, Design for Adaptation, Design for Kinship, Planetary Design, Global Indigenous Designs Thinking.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Preference is given to Industrial Design Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Industrial Design

This course helps prepare graduate students to be effective educators while fostering a community of shared ideas while teaching at RISD. Designed to support graduate students while they are teaching in RISD's Wintersession, the course is a practicum in which participants discuss practical and theoretical concerns related to collegiate teaching and learning. As a forum, the course provides a space for group reflection on teaching experiences and challenges in addition to developing effective learning and assessment strategies. Through structured feedback from faculty, students evaluate their teaching effectiveness and document their development as teacher- scholars through refining, expanding and updating the teaching portfolio. In an immersive teaching and learning experience, graduate students will have an opportunity to share and apply knowledge of diverse learning styles and methods, and an awareness of how social identities produce systemic hierarchies in the classroom to their own discipline-focused art and design instruction. Each participant is required to be teaching or co-teaching a Wintersession course. Each participant is required to be teaching or co-teaching a Wintersession course. Partial requirement for Certificate in Collegiate Teaching in Art + Design Conferred with Teaching Experience.

Please contact the department for permission to register.

Elective

Continuing from critical frameworks established in H101: Global Modernisms, the second semester of the introduction to art history turns to designed, built, and crafted objects and environments. The course does not present a conventional history of the modern movement, but rather engages with a broad range of materials, makers, traditions, sites, and periods in the history of architecture and design. Global in scope, spanning from the ancient world to the present, and organized thematically, the lectures explicitly challenge Western-modernist hierarchies and question myths of race, gender, labor, technology, capitalism, and colonialism. The course is intended to provide students with critical tools for interrogating the past as well as imagining possible futures for architecture and design. 
Required for graduation for all undergraduates. 

First year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.

Transfer students should register into the evening section offered in the Spring semester. Pre-registration into this section is managed by Liberal Arts Division.

Major Requirement | BFA

Exploring the ways in which the arts is a consistent arena for community healing, growing and liberation efforts is the focus of this course. Rooted in a hands-on approach to learning, students will be oscillating between seminars and onsite workshops to create a robust learning opportunity. For onsite work students will visit local arts organizations as well as participate in specific youth programs running at Aunty's House, a local arts community studio, which will allow students to learn and develop their own workshops. Students will have the chance to curate two art workshops that they will conduct at Martin Luther King Elementary School and Aunty's House for elementary to high schoolers. Through immersive learning, students will better understand how community art systems work within a holistic framework, as well as cultivate arts programming skills for elementary to high school students. The materials students will be engaging will braid western educational pedagogies and global indigenous educational pedagogies. We will be exploring a range of organizations, practitioners and community arts practices from the Black Panther Movement’s educational programs to Avenue Concept’s mural projects. Students will leave this course with a more robust and embodied understanding of how the arts and community intersect and create opportunities for wellness, justice and liberation interventions. This course is meeting two imminent needs: RISD students' need to engage and participate with the local Providence community, and the needs the Providence youth have in regards to accessing arts resources, learning and collaboration opportunities. This course provides real world experience and involvement of how art and design is utilized in efforts for liberation, social justice, healing and working towards a healthy future.

Elective