A continued examination and development of drawing skills. This course is coordinated with Painting II.

Students will be registered by the department in the corresponding Drawing II studio taught by their Painting II instructor.

Major Requirement | BFA Painting

A continued examination and development of drawing skills. This course is coordinated with Painting II.

Students will be registered by the department in the corresponding Drawing II studio taught by their Painting II instructor.

Major Requirement | BFA Painting

This course presents the graduate student with a series of problems intended to develop drawing as a tool for inquiry into a terrain outside the well-known beaten paths of his/her past studio practice. Expanding the role for drawing in studio experimentation is a goal. Work will be done outside class. There are critiques each week.

Major Requirement | MFA Painting

Critical Curating will offer an in-depth and immersive introduction to curatorial practice, examining the art of exhibition-making from cultural and theoretical perspectives. The course looks at current and historical exhibitions that engage a range of public platforms, as well as artist practices invested in exhibition-making. The course also has a practical component, which will be an opportunity for students to develop and implement a public exhibition. 

The first half of the course will introduce students to the critical analysis of the curatorial field. We will experiment with writing for various curatorial activities including exhibition reviews, curatorial proposals, and research presentations; as well as conduct site visits to different exhibition platforms. The second half of the course will focus on the production of an exhibition collectively conceived and managed by the student cohort, which will take place in the President’s House and Memorial Hall’s gallery. Coursework will involve workshopping curatorial proposals, soliciting an on-campus open call for work, and overseeing the installation and design of the exhibition. Additionally, visiting curators and artists will give lectures throughout the course, as well as activities such as studio visits, screenings, and research.

Open to non-majors pending seat availability and department permission.

Elective

This course would address many practical issues to do with becoming a professional artist after graduation. Some of these issues are: the commercial gallery, the not-for-profit gallery, museums, graduate programs, auction houses, grants, documentation of work, archival storage of work and restoration of artwork. Professionals from the gallery, museum and other fields will be invited to the class to share their expertise with the student. Artists will be invited to talk about their professional experiences. It is a seminar class addressed particularly to the senior painting student.

Elective

This is a comprehensive course designed to test the student's ability to create, complete, and document a Degree Project of his or her choosing. The Degree Project should be a distinct, carefully conceived, exhibition-ready body of work which reflects the issues and objectives of your art. The Senior Degree Project is distinct from your Woods-Gerry Gallery exhibition, although its work can overlap with that exhibition.

Major Requirement | BFA Painting

This is a comprehensive course designed to test the student's ability to create, complete, and document a Degree Project of his or her choosing. The Degree Project should be a distinct, carefully conceived, exhibition-ready body of work which reflects the issues and objectives of your art. The Senior Degree Project is distinct from your Woods-Gerry Gallery exhibition, although its work can overlap with that exhibition.

Major Requirement | BFA Painting

This is a comprehensive course designed to test the student's ability to create, complete, and document a Degree Project of his or her choosing. The Degree Project should be a distinct, carefully conceived, exhibition-ready body of work which reflects the issues and objectives of your art. The Senior Degree Project is distinct from your Woods-Gerry Gallery exhibition, although its work can overlap with that exhibition.

Major Requirement | BFA Painting

This is a comprehensive course designed to test the student's ability to create, complete, and document a Degree Project of his or her choosing. The Degree Project should be a distinct, carefully conceived, exhibition-ready body of work which reflects the issues and objectives of your art. The Senior Degree Project is distinct from your Woods-Gerry Gallery exhibition, although its work can overlap with that exhibition.

Major Requirement | BFA Painting

This is a comprehensive course designed to test the student's ability to create, complete, and document a Degree Project of his or her choosing. The Degree Project should be a distinct, carefully conceived, exhibition-ready body of work which reflects the issues and objectives of your art. The Senior Degree Project is distinct from your Woods-Gerry Gallery exhibition, although its work can overlap with that exhibition.

Major Requirement | BFA Painting

This is a comprehensive course designed to test the student's ability to create, complete, and document a Degree Project of his or her choosing. The Degree Project should be a distinct, carefully conceived, exhibition-ready body of work which reflects the issues and objectives of your art. The Senior Degree Project is distinct from your Woods-Gerry Gallery exhibition, although its work can overlap with that exhibition.

Major Requirement | BFA Painting

This period is designed as an advanced critique course which involves visits by resident faculty, visiting artists and critics, with special reference to current issues and concerns in contemporary art.

Major Requirement | MFA Painting

This period is designed for development and presentation of a body of work supported by a written thesis in consultation with resident faculty, visiting artists and critics during the semester. A final exhibition of work will be evaluated by a jury of Painting Faculty Members.

Major Requirement | MFA Painting

Three Critics will offer graduate students the opportunity to get inside the art critic's head and learn how writers think about the visual. Students will be exposed to a wide range of viewpoints and discourse on contemporary art issues as defined by the interests of three different, practicing critics. Each critic will become part of the RISD community for approximately one month, conducting 3 sessions on campus and one in New York or Boston. On-campus meetings will consist of lectures, reading and writing assignments, group critiques and one-on-one studio visits. Off-campus trips will include visits to museums, galleries and artist studios. Small groups of students will be expected to lead several classes. Outside coursework and full participation in class discussion required for successful completion.

Major Requirement | MFA Painting

Photography is often tethered to evidence and truth, and thought of as a recording device to describe the world. However, photographs are shaped by subjectivity, memory, and belief, and can be used to deceive, distort, and conjure. In this course, we will explore photography as a medium for mythmaking, one capable of shaping belief, fabricating narrative, and giving form to what feels invisible or difficult to name.

Through image-making, writing, reading, and discussion, students will develop a practice of mythmaking, considering the camera as a tool for world building and imagination. We will engage with visual theory, folklore, and contemporary artists, asking how photographs can construct worlds, explore the porous threshold between truth and fiction, and create spaces where memory, myth, history, and obsession overlap and intersect. Texts will examine the ethics and possibilities of creation and how the lines between experience, belief, and myth have historically been defined. As image-makers, students will synthesize learnings and experiment with sequencing and presentation across multiple formats, including zines and print-based installations, considering how the two modes alter interpretation.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

This winter session class is devoted to the color blue.  Through the historical photo process cyanotype (aka the blueprint), students will create unique prints that can be used in artist books, clothing, sculpture, quilts, collages, or as stand-alone imagery. We will print on various surfaces such as fabric, objects, hand-made and store-bought paper.  Students will bring items, darkroom negatives, drawings, and digital images to convert into digital negatives in class.  Other mediums can be put on top of the cyanotype, so we will explore its multimedia capabilities. Finally, we will also change the blue by natural toning our cyanotypes.  Please bring a sense of curiosity, and experimentation.   

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

This workshop introduces students to digital video as both a technical process and a medium for constructing meaning through time. Students will learn the fundamentals of camera operation and data capture, including exposure, focus, frame rate, shot duration, camera movement, composition, and sound recording. Using Adobe Premiere, they will develop practical workflows for organizing footage, editing and sequencing images, working with sound, making basic color corrections, and exporting finished projects. Through demonstrations, screenings, and short assignments, students will consider how framing, duration, sequence, rhythm, and repetition shape the ways moving images are produced and understood. The workshop emphasizes the relationship between technical decisions and artistic intention, encouraging students to approach the camera and the edit as active tools for observation, experimentation, and expression.

No previous experience with video or Adobe Premiere is necessary.

Elective

This workshop introduces students to digital video as both a technical process and a medium for constructing meaning through time. Students will learn the fundamentals of camera operation and data capture, including exposure, focus, frame rate, shot duration, camera movement, composition, and sound recording. Using Adobe Premiere, they will develop practical workflows for organizing footage, editing and sequencing images, working with sound, making basic color corrections, and exporting finished projects. Through demonstrations, screenings, and short assignments, students will consider how framing, duration, sequence, rhythm, and repetition shape the ways moving images are produced and understood. The workshop emphasizes the relationship between technical decisions and artistic intention, encouraging students to approach the camera and the edit as active tools for observation, experimentation, and expression.

No previous experience with video or Adobe Premiere is necessary.

Elective

This workshop introduces students to digital video as both a technical process and a medium for constructing meaning through time. Students will learn the fundamentals of camera operation and data capture, including exposure, focus, frame rate, shot duration, camera movement, composition, and sound recording. Using Adobe Premiere, they will develop practical workflows for organizing footage, editing and sequencing images, working with sound, making basic color corrections, and exporting finished projects. Through demonstrations, screenings, and short assignments, students will consider how framing, duration, sequence, rhythm, and repetition shape the ways moving images are produced and understood. The workshop emphasizes the relationship between technical decisions and artistic intention, encouraging students to approach the camera and the edit as active tools for observation, experimentation, and expression.

No previous experience with video or Adobe Premiere is necessary.

Elective

This seminar will explore some of the inherent violence(s) of differing forms of representation, as well as an array of images that contend with the representation of violence, in order to better grasp some of the powerful interacting phenomena at work in our contemporary experience of social, political, sexual, racial and economic difference. This will be our task: to develop means of better grasping how both images and ideas act on us in the perpetuation and the normalization of forms of violent differentiation, and to reckon with how those self-same images and ideas might simultaneously offer means of resistance. Students will read, respond verbally in open discussion, write an essay, prepare slide presentations to deliver to class, produce an annotated bibliography and generate visual work in response to assignments in class.

We will attend to the tacit and yet essential violences that operate at the level of our conceptualization of the photographic image, as well as of the human body, in terms of its gendered expression, its sexual identity, its race, its alterity and its abjection. This work will be informed by a combination of close readings of photographic theory, but equally by trenchant political critiques of culture, and new strains of film criticism. Working outward from readings of Roland Barthes and Tina Campt, we will explore the photographic archive, and the question of whether we can bring new modes of attention to our encounters with photographic images—modes of attention that are attuned to our embodied experience of seeing and listening, and that draw on an interdisciplinary understanding of the various forces with which the photographic image is charged. We will assess the various ways in which representations of the black body—and new conceptualizations of blackness itself—free us up to perceive unstated but ongoing forms of violence and of resistance, both in representation and in the history on which images of blackness depend.

Through a reading of Afropessimist critiques of recent cinema, we will examine profoundly powerful forms of symbolic violence, opening on to a process of questioning the structural position of the black female figure, both in film and in our cultural imaginary. Working through iconic images of torture and of death, we will examine the fragile and mutable symbol of the American national body, exploring its adaptability to a process of queering, and its ongoing resistance to transformation by race. We will also examine the ways in which the refusal to represent might act as a means to embody and approximate the depth of trauma at work in genocide, debating the relative merits of withholding images as against displaying them. This will lead us back to Barthes and Campt at the semester’s end. This seminar depends upon a willingness to regularly view controversial and emotive imagery, and an equal commitment to free, responsive and principled debate. It is my hope that we will fail together often and unselfconsciously, and that we will grapple frankly with the complex relays of power that divide us, while they are held up for us to see within and beyond the reproducible image.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. This course is a requirement for Sophomore Photography students.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography