Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year Undergraduate Students.

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.
Transfer and sophomore and above students should register into the evening section offered in the fall. 
 
For schedule conflicts during lecture times, please contact the Academic Programs Coordinator in the Liberal Arts Division office. For issues with registration, contact the Registrar's office for assistance. 
 

Major Requirement | BFA

What is proof of antiblackness in a world that is built upon it? What is evidence of conquest when empire is everywhere? Some of the questions these realities raise were posed profoundly by Alexis Pauline Gumbs when she asked, “What if l can never find evidence of what the people did to break the silence? Am I looking to the past in vain? Am I depending on evidence to confirm what my soul has evidence enough for?"

In this course, students will utilize techniques from their degree programs to create projects/works that reckon with archives. monuments, and maps as a way of unsettling dominant and unearthing radical imaginings of evidence, memory, and conquest. If we take seriously Christina Sharpe’s proposition that we indeed exist in "the ongoingness of the conditions of capture”, how may a rearticulation of evidence allow for more expansive expressions of Black life that are not required to provide proof for their existence. Though focused primarily on blackness through a Black Studies framework, we will unpack the question of evidence as it is taken up by decolonial Xicanx, Latinx, Native American, and Asian scholars, writers, artists, creatives, activists, and cultural workers. 

This course is an invitation to undertake a series of speculative arguments within, against, and beyond multiple archives; to use radical research methodologies to accept Saidiya Hartman’s task to "tell an impossible story and amplify the impossibility of its telling” no matter the evidence or supposed lack thereof. During this semester, not only will we be taking apart monuments, maps, archives, but by the end of it, we may be taking apart ourselves.

Open to Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

What is proof of antiblackness in a world that is built upon it? What is evidence of conquest when empire is everywhere? Some of the questions these realities raise were posed profoundly by Alexis Pauline Gumbs when she asked, “What if l can never find evidence of what the people did to break the silence? Am I looking to the past in vain? Am I depending on evidence to confirm what my soul has evidence enough for?"

In this course, students will utilize techniques from their degree programs to create projects/works that reckon with archives. monuments, and maps as a way of unsettling dominant and unearthing radical imaginings of evidence, memory, and conquest. If we take seriously Christina Sharpe’s proposition that we indeed exist in "the ongoingness of the conditions of capture”, how may a rearticulation of evidence allow for more expansive expressions of Black life that are not required to provide proof for their existence. Though focused primarily on blackness through a Black Studies framework, we will unpack the question of evidence as it is taken up by decolonial Xicanx, Latinx, Native American, and Asian scholars, writers, artists, creatives, activists, and cultural workers. 

This course is an invitation to undertake a series of speculative arguments within, against, and beyond multiple archives; to use radical research methodologies to accept Saidiya Hartman’s task to "tell an impossible story and amplify the impossibility of its telling” no matter the evidence or supposed lack thereof. During this semester, not only will we be taking apart monuments, maps, archives, but by the end of it, we may be taking apart ourselves.

Open to Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective

A Master's Thesis is a substantive, research-based scholarly essay of at least 60 double-spaced pages that involves original research and makes an original intervention in the field. The culmination of the Master's Degree, the Master's Thesis is of publishable quality. This course supports the completion of the Master's Thesis. Students are required to work independently, in conversation with peers, and in individual consultation with their MA Thesis Committee to develop, complete, revise, and finalize the Master's Thesis. The Master's Thesis will be housed in the RISD Library in both print and electronic forms. Students are also expected to present work related to the Master's Thesis at the GAC MA Symposium. Please see the GAC MA Thesis Timeline for a clear sequence of required deadlines. Please see the GAC MA Thesis Guidelines and Policies for clarification of the goals and expectations of the GAC MA.

Prerequisite: Successful completion of GAC-798G and approval of the prospectus are required for enrollment.

Enrollment is limited to Global Arts and Cultures Students.

Major Requirement | MA Global Arts and Cultures

Studio: Drawing is pursued in two directions: as a powerful way to investigate the world, and as an essential activity intrinsic to all artists and designers. As a primary mode of inquiry, drawing is a central means of forming questions and creating knowledge across disciplines. Through wide-ranging drawing approaches, students are prompted to work responsively and self-critically to embrace the unpredictable intersection of process, idea and media. To pursue these larger ideas, the studio becomes a laboratory of varied and challenging activities. Instructors introduce drawing as a dynamic two-dimensional record of sensory search, conceptual thought, or physical action. Students investigate materiality, imagined situations, idea generation, and the translation of the observable world. Formal and intellectual risks are encouraged during a sustained engagement with the possibilities of material, mark-making, perception, abstraction, performance, space and time. As students trust the drawing process, they become more informed about its uncharted potentials, and accept struggle as necessary and positive; they gain confidence in their own sensibilities.

Enrollment is limited to first-year undergraduate students.

Major Requirement | BFA

A Master's Thesis is a substantive, research-based scholarly essay of at least 60 double-spaced pages that involves original research and makes an original intervention in the field. The culmination of the Master's Degree, the Master's Thesis is of publishable quality. This course supports the completion of the Master's Thesis. Students are required to work independently, in conversation with peers, and in individual consultation with their MA Thesis Committee to develop, complete, revise, and finalize the Master's Thesis. The Master's Thesis will be housed in the RISD Library in both print and electronic forms. Students are also expected to present work related to the Master's Thesis at the GAC MA Symposium. Please see the GAC MA Thesis Timeline for a clear sequence of required deadlines. Please see the GAC MA Thesis Guidelines and Policies for clarification of the goals and expectations of the GAC MA.

Prerequisite: Successful completion of GAC-798G and approval of the prospectus are required for enrollment.

Enrollment is limited to Global Arts and Cultures Students.

Major Requirement | MA Global Arts and Cultures

This course is designed to be a deep-dive into the liberatory archaeologies of racialized, gendered, and sexual memory(s) articulated by Xicanx, Latinx, Native American, and Africana scholars, artists, creatives, activists, and cultural workers that resist the epistemic regimes of antiblackness, colonialism, and white supremacy. Students have the opportunity to engage scholarly and artistic works that exemplify how Blackness rejects while simultaneously marking in many ways, the limits and logic of gender and sexuality, exposing the colonial underpinnings of "Man" and modern ideas of "human." This course focuses on monuments, maps, and archives as three distinct sites where antiblackness, colonialism, and white supremacy are both sanctioned and defied in the public sphere. Students will examine research from multiple scholars that troubles the assumption that becoming assimilated and included as "human" and "citizen" in the eyes of the State is progress for Black and Native communities. Using the Black Digital Humanities, students will demonstrate their comprehension and command of the thematic foundations of the course by creating their own narratives of memory and resistance via spatial visualization and/or auditory digital software.

Open to Sophomore, Junior, Senior or Graduate Students.

Elective