Fellowship of Ideas Members of the 2023–2024 Society of Presidential Fellows cohort push their disciplines forward. Leonardo da Vinci had the Medici family. Artemisia Gentileschi had Philip IV of Spain and Jackson Pollock had Peggy Guggenheim. The members of the Society of Presidential Fellows have RISD alumni and friends.
Now in its fourth year, RISD is home to 21 students with presidential fellowships, including the recently created Vikram Kirloskar Presidential Fellowship, named in memory of Vikram Kirloskar P 12, a former member of the Board of Trustees. The fellowships provide recipients with financial support and additional resources that allow them to focus fully on their studies for the duration of their program. Gifts have made it possible for 32 promising graduate students to attend RISD, regardless of their financial background. Thanks to generous donors, Presidential Fellows come to RISD, bringing with them an influx of creative practices and new ideas. You might even say we’re in a perpetual renaissance.
26
ALFONSO VICENCIO MFA 25 PR
→
It can mean many things to be a patron of the arts, but one meaningful act of support for artists is providing funding for education and training. That is why RISD launched the Society of Presidential Fellows in 2019. Making the school accessible and attractive to the boldest, most talented applicants ensures that RISD remains a home for intellectual and creative rigor.
Alfonso Vicencio is a multidisciplinary Black-Latino printmaker and painter from the Washington, DC, area. His work explores the synthesis of analog and digital production processes as methods to navigate the use of images in a world of new media and mass information. Vicencio received his BFA in Printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021.
“One of my primary objectives in pursuing my studies at RISD is to expand my knowledge of global histories and post-digital theories to better develop the narratives of my work and build on my past mixed-media experiments synthesizing printmaking processes with paintings.”
