This graduate seminar provides an intensive study of current critical issues in contemporary art. Each Fall a visiting curator or critic is invited to lead the course. While the themes covered each semester will vary with the visiting instructor, the structure of the course will remain the same. The class is divided into two segments: a seminar and a studio. Each week the seminar lasts for three hours followed by studio visits with each student. This course helps students carry the dialogue of contemporary art issues into the studio more effectively.

This course is a requirement for Graduate Glass students. Non-major graduate-level students may enroll pending seat availability. Email the Department Head and instructor jointly to request permission.

Major Requirement | MFA Glass

This class serves as an interface between the new technologies of digital and the old technologies of optics. New digital technologies are given alternative possibilities with the addition of specific projection apparatus (in terms of both, projection optics and projection surfaces), plays with reflection (such as the construction of anamorphic cylinders, zoetropes, and other optical devices), and in the fabrication of project specific lenses. Given the hands-on nature of the glass department, the actual making and/or subversion of traditional optics is possible. The class encourages collaborative work between students of varying experience levels and fosters the incorporation and dialogue between students of the two differing areas of expertise.

This course is open to Graduate students. Non-majors may enroll pending seat availability. Email the instructor to request permission.

Elective

This experimental hands-on class will explore the incredible history and potential of projection techniques evidenced in early alchemical texts all the way into contemporary art practices. The class will begin with the study of pre-cinematic devices (shadowgraphy, pin-hole cameras, anamorphic cylinders, thaumatropes, praxinoscopes, zoetropes, magic lanterns...). Working from these analogue models, students will alter and redefine projection techniques - tailoring both the handmade with 21st century tools like smartphones and various digital recording technologies. Students will discover and create alternative projection methods by working with simple hot cast glass parts in combination with found and/or constructed elements and adapting them into alternative projection/optical devices. Weekly demonstrations, group discussions and critiques will foster an atmosphere of experimentation and exploration.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 

This course is open to first-year students only. Contact the Department Head for permission to register.

Elective

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. Partial requirement for Certificate in Collegiate Teaching in Art + Design Conferred with Teaching Experience.

Elective

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. Partial requirement for Certificate in Collegiate Teaching in Art + Design Conferred with Teaching Experience.

Elective

This seminar is for graduate students who are preparing their written thesis. Within the context of this writing-intensive course, we examine the thesis form as an expressive opportunity to negotiate a meaningful integration of our visual work, how we think about it, and how we wish to communicate it to others. In support of this exploration, weekly thematic writing sessions are offered to open the imaginative process and to stimulate creative thinking as a means of discovering the underlying intelligence of our work. In addition, we also engage in individual studio visits to identify and form a coherent 'voice' for the thesis, one that parallels our actual art involvement. Literary communications generated out of artists' and designers' processes are also examined. The outcome of this intensive study is the completion of a draft of the thesis.

Elective

This course will focus on the graduate level inquiry of wood-based construction designs and commensurate skills. Lighting and upholstery techniques, as well as outside vendor protocols, may also be employed pursuant to the graduate student's design needs. Graduate students will develop a multi-lateral skill set applicable to their area of study. Thesis concepts are often explored within this class. Students concentrate, in sequence, six weeks of Studio Based Learning of techniques and skills followed by six weeks of dedicated, full scale, designed and executed piece. Located in the Center for Integrated Technologies, CIT Bldg, the Graduate Studies Wood Studio will focus on contemporary and traditional: joinery, shaping, and vacuum lamination construction techniques. In addition, metal (cold working) techniques and manipulation are also covered. Surface treatments and finishing methods for metal and wood will be covered throughout this class.

Elective

Join a community of thesis writers, whether as a first-year graduate seeking to unearth a direction for the Master’s written document or as a second-year graduate engaging the completion process. In an atmosphere that allows you to open up, “stretch out” in reflection, and dynamically gather in exchange, this writing-intensive seminar will enable you to explore relevant ideas, themes, core values, and conduct research in support of the inquiry process. Sessions involve scrutinizing various angles of your perspective as an artist/designer and to write from these angles to discover the emerging aspects of solutions that matter. Each class will suggest a specific theme or principle of inflection to precipitate what is needed for the work’s progress. Included will be several forms of writing: narrative essay, poetic formations, lists, annotation, review, extended caption, as well as several levels of research: bibliographic, archival, fieldwork, dialogue, interviews. Emphasis will be on maps of meaning that will be used as a way to further processes of ideation and understanding. At the conclusion of the seminar, you will have a conceptual focus for your thesis that is clearly formulated visually and verbally. The writings and insights from this time can then be used productively to further the breadth and depth of your ideas through open-ended exploration and self-generated work.

For this Professional Practices course, we will look at the practical possibilities for your life after art school. Emphasis will be on balancing your artistic practice with the financial demands of everyday life, on integrating your career path(s) with your artistic values and integrity, and on developing “branching paths” that open new possibilities. 

We will explore various avenues, such as exhibiting in galleries and museums, starting a business, working on commissions, art writing, social practice, and forming a collective, a publication, or an independent gallery. We will look at the current financial, practical, and ethical ramifications of each of these avenues. We will explore what matters when deciding where, geographically, to begin your career. 

We will learn such skills as developing proposals, presentations, artists’ statements, and resumes; and of obtaining grants, residencies, commissions, art-related employment, studio space, and representation. We will also touch on art law, copyright, budgeting, and taxes for artists.

We will meet RISD alumni who are currently developing their careers as artists and designers, hearing about their paths from graduation to living as artists. There will be guest speakers from galleries, public art agencies, and design businesses. There will some readings and course resources. 
 

Elective

The course aims to create sufficient awareness of what yields life on earth, and a complementary biocentric view of the world. New ethical and critical challenges are continually presented to human society with the growth of material science and its implications for design; the course introduces sources and research references to assist with our understanding of these challenges. We explore aspects of human knowledge of living systems, providing a research-based approach to such topics as BioDesign; biomimicry in materials, processes, and structures; functional morphology and the cognitive phenomena of Biophilia. The 'affinities and aversions' we as humans have regarding natural living systems are in everything: from the spaces we inhabit to the metaphors we employ in order to understand complexity in general, including issues connected with health, recuperation and resilience. Using the recently extended facilities and resources of the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab, faculty and graduate students together create opportunities to experiment, observe, and learn about the networked aspects of living systems, materials, structures and processes. Theoretical frameworks associated with the biology of living systems, the growth and formation of natural materials including the contemporary revolutions in evolutionary theory are introduced and examples discussed with visiting specialists.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $30.00

Elective

This course frames contemporary art as a set of conversations, arguments and counterarguments that have been proposed in key exhibitions, works of art, and critical writings produced across multiple continents over the past three decades. We will identify and critique the ideas that have shaped contemporary art, discuss their impetus, and examine their assumptions. Through such conversations, the course presents contemporary art as a form of processing a present and a past in which the artwork is indivisible from the dialogues and conversations that create, define and continue to change it. The title of the class alludes not only to the idea of making and reading contemporary art as cognitive, rhetorical and dialogic activities, but also to the art world as a series of geographically dispersed and temporally promiscuous processes, deeply resistant to modernist systems of order, periodization and mapping. The course combines lectures by the instructor, as well as by visiting critics and art historians, which outline some of the key issues and historical pressures of contemporary art, alongside seminar-type discussions where we process the lectures and select readings as a group.

Elective

The course offers graduate students a forum for exploring historical and theoretical foundations of contemporary design and craft arts. Readings, discussions, lectures, and writing projects address a range of contexts for the practice of design, from materials and making, to ways that objects are encountered, consumed, and lived with, to design's promises and limitations for dealing with global crises of climate, poverty, conflict, disease, and displacement. Weekly meetings are structured around critical themes selected through student input. Readings and case studies offer points of departure for discussion and writing. Guest lectures by designers, curators, and critics provide viewpoints on contemporary practice. Culminating with a final artist statement and presentation, the work undertaken throughout the term will be oriented toward developing historical and critical frameworks in which to situate students' own studio and research practices.

Elective

Theories of NatureCulture is a graduate-level critical and cultural theory seminar with a focus on environmental justice approaches that lays the foundations for advanced study in the interdisciplinary field of nature-culture-sustainability studies, introducing students to vital topics, theories, and perspectives in the environmental humanities.

Why does mainstream US environmental thought conceive of nature and human culture as separate? Are they really a dichotomy? What does it mean to describe something as “natural”? What do the humanities and arts have to contribute to environmental studies and environmental justice? This iteration of Theories of NatureCulture asks students to engage with a variety of cultural production, including poetry, essays, short fiction, film, music, and critical theory to analyze how the concept of nature is represented in different cultural imaginaries, as well as the embodied and material consequences of its representations. The course will expand and complicate students’ understandings of environmentalism by asking them to carefully and thoughtfully engage with a variety of ecological modes of thought, including: queer ecologies, ecofeminisms, Black ecological imaginings, Indigenous environmental thought, anticolonial environmentalisms, eco-crip theory, and Black feminist ecologies, among others.

In this seminar, we will carefully read and discuss a range of texts centered on environmental issues and concepts. Our readings and discussions will be complemented by field trips, writing assignments, group projects, and site visits. Close engagement with theoretical material will enable us to consider how different styles and disciplinary practices encourage particular forms of comprehension and interaction with the environment. This course is open to all graduate level students and to junior, senior/fifth year undergraduate students, with priority given to those in the NCSS and other Liberal Arts concentrations pending seat availability.

Elective

The unknown gap of the 'betwixt and between' is a space of great curiosity and charge. It is a space that has captured the imagination of many artists, designers and writers throughout time. The main interest in this course is to investigate the nature of this space, how it is experienced, understood and given meaning from multiple viewpoints in art, design and literature, and ways in which it can become a space of significance for our practice as artists and designers. As background to our own research, we examine features of the betwixt and between as it is evoked in the writings of the pre-Socratic thinkers, the theories of anthropologist Victor Turner, the lectures of composer John Cage, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin's book titled The Third Mind, and philosopher Gaston Bachelard's view of spatial poetics. Artists also walk us to that space, as is the case with Eva Hesse's threshold Works on Paper, Anselm Kiefer's preoccupation with ambivalence, and Anish Kapoor's sublime voids. Most importantly, we will make and write as a way to see and understand the various forms and ways the betwixt and between presents itself in our own work.

Elective

Anyone holds the power to publish. Publishing has long been a tool for communities to reach one another, share urgent information, educate and delight. Translating the personal to the public is not only a powerful way of finding solidarity with others, but creates new paths for disseminating counternarratives. In this course students will learn how to work with archives and generate new content to create a publication from ideation to production—playing the roles of designers, writers, photographers, editors and illustrators.The first half of the course focuses on gathering and generating content through a series of design projects of increasing complexity, designed for students with limited or no experience to gain familiarity with designing for print and the production process. Projects will be supplemented by lectures on the history of self-publishing, guest speakers and a trip to the Fleet Library’s zine and magazine archives to ground students in existing examples of independent and small press publications. The second half of the course will culminate in a collaborative publication produced in multiples and prepared for distribution both physically and digitally. The key takeaways of this class are to develop practical and resourceful ways of creating publications, learn the history of DIY communities and self publication, gain confidence generating original content from personal experiences and interests, and understand how design choices inform how publications communicate to audiences.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $125.00

Elective

“Reading the room” is both a social skill and necessity in producing contextual work in public and private environments. In this course we will explore the intersection between art, design and architecture through the lens of spatial interventions—public art, wayfinding, and placemaking. We will learn how to understand a site, its stakeholders and constraints, and how to respond to a brief, open call, or request for proposal. Students will develop a framework for creating narrative, site-specific proposals that move beyond disciplinary silos. As a studio course we will demonstrate through lectures and workshops how both low and high fidelity techniques, from napkin sketches to renderings and physical scale models, can be incorporated into a creative practice. By combining these techniques with their existing toolkit of verbal and visual communication skills, students will learn to translate initial ideas into compelling professional proposals. Working on their own, and in groups, students will develop proposals that respond to sites in Providence. The course functions as a laboratory for spatial storytelling. Alongside skill building we will analyze what makes an effective proposal, study real-world Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and meet with fabricators, designers, artists and decision makers to understand how speculative concepts become built work. By the end of the semester students will leave with a refined proposal, a clearer understanding of the proposal process and tools to visualize their ideas and pursue opportunities beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $45.00

Elective

The poster has been an archetypal graphic design format since the late 19th century when lithographic printing technology came of age and captured the imagination of artists, bringing their vision into Paris streets. This course will invite you to explore future possibilities and contexts for the poster-as paper and as screen-building on its singular capacity to transform ideas into iconic picture planes; and examining the dynamics of typography and image, both still and in motion. Prompts will progress from individual posters, to sequences, to site-specific installations that explore the potential for interactive discourse in public space. Studio assignments will be supported with presentations and readings about poster history and contemporary poster design.

Elective

UI/UX design is the backbone of digital experiences. It shapes how we interact with screens, transforms innovative ideas into intuitive interfaces, guides navigation through complex systems, and creates aesthetic coherence that makes technology accessible and engaging. At its core, UI/UX design bridges creativity and usability, ensuring that digital products are not only functional but also meaningful and enjoyable to use.

This workshop introduces students to the workflow and foundational knowledge of UI/UX design for smartphone applications. Using Figma as the primary tool, students will learn methodologies and tools central to app design, including researching existing forms and functionalities, translating concepts into wireframes, and developing visual aesthetics and navigation systems. In the initial sessions, students will analyze the intuitiveness and patterns of existing apps, critically assess and redefine their functionalities, and explore alternative modes of use. Subsequent sessions focus on redesigning an app by addressing existing frustrations or repurposing its intended use, creating prototypes that challenge standard user expectations, and developing high-fidelity interactive prototypes that integrate navigation and interaction design. No prior experience in UI/UX or coding is required, and coding will not be taught in this course.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00

Elective

UI/UX design is the backbone of digital experiences. It shapes how we interact with screens, transforms innovative ideas into intuitive interfaces, guides navigation through complex systems, and creates aesthetic coherence that makes technology accessible and engaging. At its core, UI/UX design bridges creativity and usability, ensuring that digital products are not only functional but also meaningful and enjoyable to use.

This workshop introduces students to the workflow and foundational knowledge of UI/UX design for smartphone applications. Using Figma as the primary tool, students will learn methodologies and tools central to app design, including researching existing forms and functionalities, translating concepts into wireframes, and developing visual aesthetics and navigation systems. In the initial sessions, students will analyze the intuitiveness and patterns of existing apps, critically assess and redefine their functionalities, and explore alternative modes of use. Subsequent sessions focus on redesigning an app by addressing existing frustrations or repurposing its intended use, creating prototypes that challenge standard user expectations, and developing high-fidelity interactive prototypes that integrate navigation and interaction design. No prior experience in UI/UX or coding is required, and coding will not be taught in this course.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00

Elective

UI/UX design is the backbone of digital experiences. It shapes how we interact with screens, transforms innovative ideas into intuitive interfaces, guides navigation through complex systems, and creates aesthetic coherence that makes technology accessible and engaging. At its core, UI/UX design bridges creativity and usability, ensuring that digital products are not only functional but also meaningful and enjoyable to use.

This workshop introduces students to the workflow and foundational knowledge of UI/UX design for smartphone applications. Using Figma as the primary tool, students will learn methodologies and tools central to app design, including researching existing forms and functionalities, translating concepts into wireframes, and developing visual aesthetics and navigation systems. In the initial sessions, students will analyze the intuitiveness and patterns of existing apps, critically assess and redefine their functionalities, and explore alternative modes of use. Subsequent sessions focus on redesigning an app by addressing existing frustrations or repurposing its intended use, creating prototypes that challenge standard user expectations, and developing high-fidelity interactive prototypes that integrate navigation and interaction design. No prior experience in UI/UX or coding is required, and coding will not be taught in this course.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00

Elective