RISD Alumni Magazine Summer 2024

Time and Place Do Ho Suh explores memory, migration and home

Tavares Strachan 03 GL at the Hayward, the Black Biennial 2024, a Fulbright Scholar in Chile, a RISD professor helps commemorate the victims of the slave trade, RISD Museum’s resident researcher, RISD critic Joel Orloff honored in Dark Side of the Moon animation competition and the Smithsonian Visionary Awards

Jess Fan 14 GL and Rose B. Simpson MFA 11 CR present work in the 2024 Whitney Biennial.

The Vilcek Foundation recognizes three RISD designers.

One Beautiful Thing: A statuesque floor lamp by design studio In Common With

Class Notes

On the Street: A Sitka black-tailed deer sketch by Nellie Geraghty-Scharf MFA 24 IL

This

Features

Toy Story

For these three RISD alumni, playtime is a full-time job.

Time and Place

Do Ho Suh 94 PT explores memory, migration and the concept of home.

Odyssey in the Andes

A RISD professor, a Hyundai lab and a group of Argentinian artisans turn robotics upside down.

Sail Away

The future of yacht design with Martin Lo BID 84 and Jozeph Forakis 85 ID

In This Season

As a designer and educator, Rene Payne 83 GD works to break down social and cultural barriers.

A portrait of Do Ho Suh in his studio, 2022. ©Gautier Deblonde, all rights reserved DACS 2024

Floor by Do Ho Suh, 1997–2007, PVC figures, glass plates, phenolic sheets, polyurethane resin. ©Do Ho Suh. Courtesy of Do Ho Suh, Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London, and MCA Australia. Photo by Anna Kucera

RISD Alumni Magazine

Editor Edward Weinman

Associate Editor

Abby Bielagus

Senior Writer

Judy Hill

Manager, Institutional Advancement Operations

Rebecca Lazouras

Design

Once–Future Office

Contributing Writer Kira Goldenberg

Publisher Crystal Williams, President of Rhode Island School of Design

Amanda MacMullan, Vice President, Institutional Advancement

RISD Alumni Magazine is published by the division of Institutional Advancement.

RISD thanks the Alumni Association Leadership Council.

President Rex Wong BArch 03

Amy Cohen 76 TX

Amy Gregg 92 GD

Anjali Mody 09 ID

Becky Fong Hughes 05 GD

Charles Brill 06 FD

Georgie Stout 89 GP P 24

Greg Kanaan 02 FAV

Jarrett Key MFA 20 PT

Jen White 01 PH

Jill Greenberg 89 PH

John Chidiac 94 IL

Jon Key 13 GD

Krista Ninivaggi BArch 02

Kristin Murphy MAT 96

Leah Marchant 20 ID

Li June Choi 24 GD

Michael Gabellini BArch 81

Mindy Home 99 IL

Nelson Saavedra 16 FAV

Ryan Cunningham 02 FAV

Terry Beaty 84 GL

Tino Chow 09 ID

Todd Babick 92 ID

RISD Alumni Magazine Vol. 2 Issue 1, Summer 2024, Copyright 2024, RISD. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permissionis prohibited. Please direct Class Notes submissions to alumni@risd.edu.

RISD Alumni Magazine is printed on Rolland Enviro, certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

Burlington, Vermont.

From Rex Wong, President of the Alumni Association

As I write this letter, Commencement + Reunion Weekend is only a few weeks away. We all know that this weekend celebrates our graduates and enables generations of alumni to rekindle relationships with classmates, and with RISD, but this time of year also makes me reflect on my own transformative experience at RISD.

Even though I’m not working as an artist on a day-to-day basis, I routinely utilize the creativity and problem-solving skills I learned at RISD. This drive to look for a better way, a different perspective, different ways of talking and engaging with other people—this is still a big part of what I do now in my professional and volunteer work.

Searching for a better way forward is exactly what makes this weekend so special as it marks the first time RISD will host the Black Alumni Reunion. While there are many in the RISD community who have worked tirelessly to organize the Black Alumni Reunion, I want to personally thank Rene Payne 83 GD, who chaired the committee and who continuously strives through art and design to build stronger, more inclusive communities. You can read more about her in this issue of RISD Alumni Magazine, where we profile Payne and the work she did with the family of Emmett Till to create a website and mobile application that uses GPS technology to take users (virtually or in person) to twenty-three sites related to the murder of Emmett Till.

Like Payne, interdisciplinary artist and RISD professor Paula Gaetano Adi is also working at the intersection of art and technology. Gaetano Adi teamed up with Hyundai’s New Horizons Studio to create the first robot to cross the Andes mountains. The project, which reenacts José de San Martín’s epic 1817 Andes crossing that consolidated the liberation of South America from colonial rule, poses critical questions about the role and meaning of technology in our lives.

A profile of Martin Lo BID 84 and Jozeph Forakis 85 ID, who met at RISD, sails us around the world aboard the CLX 96 Yacht. The two reconnected after RISD and by asking a very RISD question— “What is a yacht?”— innovated to create a new style of yacht that has won numerous design awards. This story reminds us why volunteering with, and participating in, alumni clubs and affinity groups can lead to inspiring connections.

This issue also features three alumni toy makers whose boutique creations use sustainable products, raise awareness about belonging and offer long lasting playthings that enrich childhood wellbeing.

Lastly, our cover story recognizes Do Ho Suh 94 PT who, through his work, explores the global nature of contemporary identity as well as memory, migration and our ideas of home.

The idea of home is one reason I write this letter. No matter how far I travel, RISD remains a home for me. Our alumni community will always be a place to find common values. It continues to serve as an anchor in my life.

—Rex Wong BAarch 03, President of the Alumni Association

There Is Light Somewhere

Hayward Gallery exhibits a mid-career survey dedicated to Tavares Strachan.

A Tavares Strachan 03 GL exhibition at the Hayward Gallery showcases the “inventive ways in which Strachan has celebrated unsung explorers and cultural trailblazers, inviting audiences to engage with overlooked characters whose stories represent and illuminate histories hidden by bias,” according to the London gallery. Billed as the first mid-career survey dedicated to the work of the Bahamian artist, who is based in New York, Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere features monumental new sculptural commissions alongside large-scale collages, neon works, bronze and ceramic sculptures and mixed-media installations. Strachan, a RISD trustee,

is a conceptual artist who blends drawing, painting, printmaking, glass, sculpture and video with deepdive scientific and historical research and a desire to elevate people and ideas overlooked by much of society. His work bypasses boundaries, and his commitment to telling untold stories adds up to work “that exemplifies the power of human ingenuity” and “pushes the limits of what is possible in art,” according to the MacArthur Foundation, which in September 2022 awarded Strachan a “Genius Grant,” one of its most prestigious annual fellowships.

Strachan’s A Map of the Crown Himba Dreaded Knots, 2022

Bronze, human hair

Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman

Photo by Claire Dorn

Black Biennial 2024

A second exhibition showcases work by Black artists from RISD and beyond.

RISD’s Gelman Gallery was the place to be on the evening of April 18, when over a thousand visitors showed up for the opening of Sonder: The Black Biennial, a multidisciplinary exhibition bringing together Black artists from RISD and the surrounding community. The show was curated by juniors Amadi Williams 25 PT and Isaiah “Prophet” Raines 25 SC, who built on themes of access and unity that were introduced in the first Black Biennial, held in 2022.

“We’re trying to provide a level playing field for all Black artists in the area regardless of their affiliation with RISD,” says Williams of their curatorial approach. “Our goal is to weave together their different realities and highlight the phenomenal work that is happening throughout the state.”

The show’s theme, “sonder,” picks up on that idea, and its definition welcomes visitors at the entrance to the gallery. “Sonder: The realization that each individual is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, in which you might appear only once in the background of someone else’s story.”

Prophet and Williams agreed that the exhibition labels should not specify who is a RISD student, who is a faculty member, etc., leaving it up to each artist to say what they wanted in the text.

“Every piece we chose from the 160-plus submissions we received has the ability to speak on its own but also communicates with the pieces surrounding it,” says Williams. “There are also a lot of great video pieces this time around.”

RISD alum Rey Londres 22 PH and Melaine Ferdinand-King, who curated the first Black Biennial, provided helpful coaching, as did Assistant Professor Christopher Roberts. “The reputation of the first exhibition helped us spread the word and drew in a lot of submissions,” Williams notes. “When I heard the word ‘biennial’ back in 2022, I was excited that RISD was making a commitment to do another show in two years and I wanted to be involved. We want to make sure we uphold that [tradition] and build a sense of community for people of color at RISD, Brown and in the Providence area.”

The Art of Resistance

Exploring Chilean arpilleras with a Fulbright Scholarship.

In 1970s Chile, during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, women in Santiago came together to create patchwork quilts depicting life under military rule. Known as arpilleras, the wall hangings were a form of resistance, and they also helped inform the rest of the world about the regime in Chile when they were smuggled out of the country.

Now, with a Fulbright Scholarship, RISD alum and textile artist Sydney Abady Foreman 18 TX is taking a closer look at these artworks and will use her ninemonth experience as a jumping off point for a new body of work.

“Arpilleras are particularly interesting to me,” says Abady Foreman, “because my work is concerned with the personal as political as well as ideas around concepts of domesticity and community. These crafts were made typically in women’s homes, but also in communal spaces.”

For the first part of her grant, which began in March, Abady Foreman is based at the Escuela de Diseño de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where she is taking classes to learn more about the historical context of arpilleras and working with

professors to connect with some of the original arpilleristas as well as women who are continuing the craft tradition. Since the political demonstrations in Chile that began in 2019, she says, there has been a major resurgence of arpilleras, which are starting to show more contemporary issues.

Abady Foreman will also spend time at the Museo de la Memoria y los Humanos Derechos, which has the largest collection of arpilleras in the world. Even though arpilleras started in Santiago, she explains, they started to trickle out toward other parts of the country and beyond. “So, I’ll be able to compare the rural ones to the urban ones, and ones that were made by women in exile versus ones that were made by women in Chile.”

Ultimately, Abady Foreman hopes to create a collaborative work to show at the museum. “I’m interested in figuring out ways to work more communally,” she says. “I was inspired by the textile studio space setup at RISD, where I became really close with the people in my cohort because we shared such an intimate loom space. That experience has influenced my work a lot.”

Facing the Past

A new memorial comes to Bristol next spring.

Photo by Stephan Brigidi

Words by Abby Bielagus

Pull up a chair at the popular DeWolf Tavern on Bristol’s picturesque waterfront and watch the crowded dining room, blissfully unaware that the renovated warehouse in which they sit once housed slaves. Stephan Brigidi MFA 76 PH, a board director with the Bristol Middle Passage Port Marker Project, hopes to change that with the introduction of a new memorial planned for spring 2025 in the town’s Independence Park. “The memorial is to acknowledge Bristol’s role in the transatlantic human trade and to also honor the African and Indigenous peoples who suffered,” says Brigidi.

Envisioning what the memorial could look like was something the organization put in the hands of Rhode Island artists, through an open call for work. The group worked with an independent committee of scholars, historians and cultural leaders, who ultimately chose a sculpture proposed by Spencer Evans, an assistant professor at RISD.

“My process was to find out more about the community slated to be depicted in the work. I reached out to Tracey ‘Dancing Star’ Brown, the current sachem, or chief, of the Pokanoket tribe,

and Keith Stokes, the vice president of the 1696 Heritage Group. My work is not just the depiction of the likeness of people but of their psyche. When people engage with the work, no matter their background, I want them to understand and connect,” says Evans.

Evans came to RISD by way of the University of Missouri, where he received his BFA, and the University of Texas, where he received his MFA. At his heart, he is a storyteller who weaves narratives through drawings, paintings and sculpture. The story he wishes to tell with his forthcoming sculpture in Independence Park is not one of trauma and oppression but one of hope and resilience. “They’re not locked into their response to the oppression. I named it Our Ancestors Come with Us because it acknowledges what happened, not just the terror but the true spirit of those who were able to endure and persevere,” says Evans. “It’s a tall order for a city or a town to reconcile its past.”

Our Ancesters Come With Us, Spencer Evans Model of forthcoming sculpture

In Residence

RISD Museum welcomes Industrial Design alum as 2024 resident researcher.

Adam (Moy) Chuong MID 19 is one of two artists (with Renée Elizabeth Neely-Tanner) selected for this year’s RISD Museum Research Residency for Artists. The residency, as Director of Public Programs Deborah Clemons explains, invites local artists to “deepen their creative practice and share their artistic research processes.” Past residents, she says, have found the behind-the-scenes access to museum work energizing, and the museum has benefitted from these sustained relationships.

Chuong’s art reflects on the psychological and emotional aftermath of war in Cambodian, Vietnamese and Chinese communities. “My parents are from Cambodia and Vietnam,” says Chuong, “so I’ve always been processing shared family histories and how those things are represented or not represented in the narrative of the Vietnam War and the Cambodian genocide.”

For the residency, Chuong, who also serves as education director at the Steel Yard, a nonprofit art space in Providence, is focusing on two lines of inquiry relating to rites of passage and rituals in various cultures. Chuong is interested in the

museum’s funerary and bridal objects, and is also thinking about plastics and their use in ritual.

“If you go to an Asian grocery store, you’ll see, alongside food and housewares, ritual objects that are altars for ancestors or for deities, and they’re made out of plastic.”

At the museum, Chuong’s interest has been piqued by a Shari Mendelson vase (Round Blue/ Green Vessel) that references blown glass but is made of reclaimed plastic. Also within the collection are several injection-molded plastic chairs that remind Chuong of ceramic works Chuong has made mimicking the plastic stools of childhood.

“I’ve been looking at the history of plastics,” says Chuong, “both the race to create the first singlepiece molded plastic chair and now the aftermath, how plastic is everywhere, how it’s litter, but also how it’s fairly indestructible and something that immigrant communities use often.”

With the residency, Chuong is able to pore through the museum database and pick out objects to view in person. “Being able to sit with the curators and talk about these objects,” Chuong says, “is helpful.”

Wood-fired ceramic chair, Moy Chuong, 2022

Words by Judy Hill

Photo courtesy of Moy Chuong

Breathe (In the Air)

RISD critic’s video is honored in Dark Side of the Moon competition.

Words by Judy Hill Film still courtesy of Joel Orloff

Animator and RISD FAV critic Joel Orloff’s music video was selected as a winner in the Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon Animation Competition, which invited artists to create music videos for any song on the iconic 1973 album.

“Pink Floyd was a big part of my early growth as an animator,” says Orloff. “When I was 11 or 12, I remember getting The Wall movie out at a video store and being absolutely blown away by Gerald Scarfe’s animation, which is dark and grotesque and sinister, and just so different from any animation I’d seen up to that point—it really expanded my sense of what the medium could be.”

Orloff chose the song “Breathe (In the Air)” for his animated video because he was drawn to “the hypnotic sense of rising and falling that song creates.” As he listened to it and tried to imagine how he would animate it, he says, “I started to imagine these plants climbing and twisting up into the sky during the section before the first verse where the music is rising and expanding.”

From that initial image sprang the rest of the video, which transitions to languorously swaying flowers

with singing faces and a running man/rabbit pursued by teeth-gnashing dogs.

“I’m interested in the point where the mythic meets the prosaic,” says Orloff. “I imagine the gravitational center of this video to be a person lying in a field thinking about death. The rest of the action could be taking place over the space of a summer reverie.”

Orloff created most of the video with hand-drawn 2D animation, using the drawing program Clip Studio Paint. He made a metronome in Adobe After Effects to keep track of the song’s timing as he animated, and then worked his way through the track starting with a rough animatic, refining the frames and adding color. Finally, he overlaid the entire sequence with a screen print texture that changes every two frames to mimic the imperfections of offset printing.

Winners were selected for each song on the album, with Orloff’s animation nabbing top honors for “Breathe.” “There were so many absolutely incredible entries,” says Orloff of the competition. “It feels really cool to be picked out amongst those, and it’s an honor to have this opportunity to respond to this beautiful, otherworldly music.”

Film still from “ Breathe (In the Air) ” music video by Joel Orloff

Clear Winners

Glass artists Judith Schaechter and Dan Dailey were awarded the Smithsonian Visionary Award, presented annually to Americans who have achieved the pinnacle of sculptural arts and design in their respective mediums.

Words by Judy Hill

The Life Ecstatic , 2016, Stained glass, cut, sandblasted, engraved, enameled, stained and fired, cold paint and assembled with copper foil

Judith Schaechter

Judith Schaechter 83 GL works within the ancient tradition of stained glass, but her art is anything but traditional and she is recognized for stretching the medium in wildly inventive ways. Her subject matter— a beached whale, a crowd of ax-wielding maniacs, a woman writhing in agony (or is it ecstasy?)—demands attention, while the extravagant beauty of her pieces, luminous with color and packed with gorgeous detail, invites the eye to linger.

“I think a lot about beauty,” says Schaechter, though she admits that people often laugh when she tells them she is trying to make beautiful work. “I think people are really confused by the juxtaposition of a subject matter that might be hard to contemplate with an execution that’s really seductive and beautiful.”

As a child growing up in the Boston suburbs, Schaechter, who says she was prone to depression, took comfort in art, “specifically, pictures of suffering saints,” even though she was in no way religious and also loved comic books.

At RISD, she stumbled across a stained-glass class one day on the fourth floor of the Metcalf Building, and her life instantly changed course (she had thought of herself as a painter). “The minute I matched my doodles to the stained-glass materials, I became an unstoppable monster,” she says. “I was so satisfied, so completely fulfilled.”

She calls Richard Harned, who ran the Glass program at that time, her “savior,” and says his open-mindedness gave her room to breathe. “In the Glass Department no one said my work was too illustrative.” She also felt free to pursue beauty and “pure sensual pleasure” as a worthy artistic goal—not the case in her painting classes, where beauty, she felt, was viewed with suspicion.

For more than three decades after graduating from RISD, Schaechter, now an adjunct professor at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, continued to favor the figurative, developing an ever more complex, intricate and laborious technique—cutting, layering, sandblasting, engraving, enameling, firing, assembling and soldering— in service to the agonized women for which she is best known.

“They were always to me dolls that I was playing with and they were sort of acting on my behalf and experiencing all the pain and suffering that I really couldn’t tolerate very well myself,” says Schaechter. “I couldn’t draw that screaming woman enough! I was never uninspired by it. It just felt like an urgent urge to do that.”

The art world took notice of Schaechter. Her work has found its way into the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has also garnered plenty of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Crafts.

More recently, the background in Schaechter’s work has started to edge closer and the women she depicts have receded or disappeared. Currently, as artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Neuroaesthetics, she is working on a largescale 45-panel glass piece in the shape of a dome with a design vocabulary drawn from the natural world—flowers, birds and insects— that allows her to explore endless variations on a theme and, not coincidentally, produce, as Schaechter puts it, “the most enormous glut of eye candy ever.”

Schaechter has a long history with the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, which has collected her work for the past 15 years and gave her, at age 29, her first museum exhibition. “That was really my first big break,” she says, “and they’ve been endlessly supportive of my career, so thank you, Smithsonian, I’m over the moon.”

Left The Letter , 1989, Vitrolite

Bottom Left Wind , 2010, Blown glass, nickel and gold-plated bronze, aluminum, Vitrolite

Bottom Right Brilliant , 2012, Blown glass, aluminum

Dan Dailey

Dan Dailey MFA 72 CR has been drawn to making ever since he was a teenager and ran a carpentry business. A chance introduction to glassmaking as an undergraduate at Philadelphia College of Art ultimately led to a shift in medium, but the need to actualize his ideas into tangible objects only grew stronger over the years, and with it the recognition of how industry could help him realize his artistic vision.

Dailey is known for an eclectic variety of glass sculptures—vessels, lamps, blown-glass figures, Vitrolite animals, wall murals made up of glass canes—and often mixes colored glass with intricate metalwork. His pieces frequently depict people (or maybe an alligator, or a polar bear), and they wittily capture the essence of a personality or mood in a few simple, spontaneous gestures.

At RISD, Dailey happened to be the first graduate student of Dale Chihuly MFA 68 CR, who founded the Glass program in 1969. “His version of teaching was more like mentoring,” says Dailey. “He took me in as a kind of brother and we became friends. We would go out junk shopping and share experiences, go out to dinner or breakfast, and he might scribble down a couple of things on a napkin.”

It was under Chihuly’s influence that Dailey first focused completely on glass. On a Fulbright Fellowship, he went on to study at the Venini factory in Murano, Italy, and became even more entranced by the medium. “There’s absolutely nothing that rivals glass for its color capacity and its ability to define and reflect and refract light,” he says. At Venini, Dailey designed a series of lamps that proved “too weird” for general production but ended up forming the basis of a show in New York and kicking off a multi-decade career in glass.

Dailey has taught at several colleges, including Massachusetts College of Art and Design—where he founded the glass department in 1973— RISD, the Pilchuck Glass School and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. His pieces are part of the permanent collections of the Corning Museum of Glass; the Musée des Arts Décoratifs du Louvre, Paris; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, as well as the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery.

Dailey still makes lamps. “I think of it as a format to work within, not so much a functional object,” he says, and the same applies to his vases. “Some get pretty abstract and have almost no reference to the purpose of a vessel. And then with others I’ve pointedly made them appear as vessels and they even have strong links to classic form.”

Drawing has always played a central role in Dailey’s practice. “It’s like a diary of visual thinking,” he says. As he fills sketchbook after sketchbook, he refines his ideas and captures feelings and attitudes. His drawings also direct his team, which these days consists of five assistants who help him in his New Hampshire studio.

Over his career, Dailey has worked with many glass factories, including doing stints as a designer at Daum in Nancy, France, and at Steuben Glass Works in Corning, New York. Currently, he works with a handful of machine shops, electroplating and polishing companies, and foundries, in addition to his in-house team. Working with assistants and subbing jobs out to industry is essential, he says, since he has many more ideas than he could possibly realize himself and these relationships allow him to “imagine more, get further.”

Dailey says he feels lucky to be recognized by the Smithsonian.

“It’s more than an ego shot. You realize you’re not working in a void and that you can make something that is compelling to others and that you are reaching them with your thinking.”

2024 Whitney Biennial Artist Jes Fan

Jes Fan 14 GL lives and works in Brooklyn and Hong Kong. His interdisciplinary practice combines living matter with hand-blown, cellular, glass forms and casts made from areas of the human body. The abstract and distorted forms, when removed from context, suggest an experience of the human body that is entwined with technology and also examines the relationship between biology and identity.

Installation view of Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 20-August 11, 2024) Jes Fan, Contrapposto , 2023; Lotus L. Kang, In Cascades, 2023–24. Photo by Ron Amstutz

Abby Bielagus: What was your path to RISD like? Were you a creative child?

Jes Fan: More than creative, I think I was rebellious. I was notorious for always getting lost in malls and going left when directed to go right. Once I deliberately took a bus going in the opposite direction. I guess part of creativity is not just thinking outside the box, but also doing outside the box, the fence, the rule, the line that demarcates the “no.”

How did your practice change while at RISD? When did you develop the style and aesthetic that you practice now?

I didn’t go into RISD thinking I would major in glass. On arriving at the fourth floor of Metcalf as a freshman, I was immediately drawn to not only the pyromaniac tendencies of the material but also to the program’s balanced focus on both material studies and the conceptual development of their students’ practice. Also, I was drawn to this almost monk-like devotion to focusing for three years on a singular material, especially one that is so difficult to work with. That focus on a monomaterial forced me to consider process as generative, not just of form, but also of meaning. To this day, the way Rachel Berwick, Bruce Chao and Jocelyne Prince taught still influences the way I think in my studio practice.

Tell me about the piece you created for the Whitney Biennial.

It’s part of a larger body of work titled Sites of Wounding, which started in 2020 under the backdrop of COVID, Black Lives Matter and the political unrest in Hong Kong. In the wake of these painful seismic shifts and global grief, I was curious to see if we can learn from other organisms, especially those that are able to cultivate meaning and generate beauty in the sites of their injury. In the second chapter, which is what’s on view at the Whitney right now, I looked into a species of agarwood incense trees and the way the tree is farmed for its sedimentary layers of resin to use as incense. The sculptures were made by 3D printing CT scans of my body, which were then layered with pigmented resin and sanded back to reveal the layers of deposit.

How did you react to the theme? Did it feel cohesive and relevant?

There was no direct thesis to the Biennial, which I think is actually its strength. If we think of an exhibition like a paragraph of text, this Biennial didn’t offer any decisive exclamation point, which many American critics wanted. Instead, Meg Onli and Chrissie Iles end the paragraph by offering a “...” or even, dare I say, a question mark. This is one of the rare shows that is talking about identity politics, but not the identity of the exhibiting artist—it asks, identity for what? And for whom...? The show foregrounds marginalized artists working through formal as well as psychoanalytical and political concerns, offering a paradigm that America is not familiar with—these concerns are not opposite of each other, and are actually more entangled than we assume.

What has the reaction been to your sculpture at the Biennial?

The reception has been very supportive. It’s been a while since I’ve shown work in NYC, so it was nice that this body of work was shown here in the context of really great artists, among whom are dear friends, old and new.

2024 Whitney Biennial Artist Rose B. Simpson

Rose B. Simpson MFA 11 CR comes from a long line of potters who have been working with clay for over five hundred years, and her practice is informed by Indigenous tradition. She was born in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, and continues to live and work there. Her mixed-media art explores the impact of living in the postmodern and postcolonial world usually through androgynous clay figures that examine family, gender, marginality and the understanding of self.

Photo credit by Ron Amstutz

Daughters: Reverence, 2023 in Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 20August 11, 2024).

Abby Bielagus: Tell me about the piece you created for the Whitney Biennial.

Rose B. Simpson: I’ve been thinking about our relationships alongside technology. How do we truly connect with each other? What does real connection look like and mean? The piece that I made, called Daughters, is about chosen family and the people in our life who reflect and honor our existence. It’s four soul portraits of people in my life that have transformed who I am, because I really feel that is reality, reality through relationships.

When you say “soul portrait,” what do you mean by that?

I think we see each other for who we really are. I see my beloved sistren, not necessarily from their physical appearance, but for the beauty they offer from their divine truth and what that magic looks like. When I made portraits of these people, I focused on my love and what that love looks like. The abstraction that makes them not realistic portraits is the love that’s demonstrated.

Did the portraits resonate with their subjects?

I think so. Or they were shocked, like, “That’s amazing—that’s how you see that.” But the piece isn’t about the viewer, it’s about the portraits’ relationships to each other. A lot of my work is starting to investigate boundaries because we live in such an entitled world, where we feel like we should have access to everything. My work is looking for ways to demonstrate that no, we don’t necessarily have access. Art may not be for your entertainment, it may be for the work it’s inherently doing on its own.

How were boundaries put in place with this work specifically?

There are four larger-than-life figures facing each other. They’re not facing out to the viewer. They’re in relationship with each other. Technology makes us think that we have access to everything, but there are spaces that are inaccessible. And that in itself is so important to have in the world.

There’s also been a recent push to ensure that every space is accessible for everybody.

My work as a Native person is always understanding why genocide and colonization happens. It’s the belief that you have the right to take from someone else, to take a life, that you’re so self-important you feel your needs are more important than someone else’s. And as a Native person, the excess of exotification, stereotyping and the exploitation of culture has been an entitlement. There are spaces, places, beliefs and culture that are not yours to use up and take. But people may not know that, if they can’t understand that we treat others the way we treat ourselves. If we feel like we don’t have a true intimacy with ourselves and the needs that we hold deep within, then we can’t respect that for other people. This piece is about understanding and knowing that respect for self then translates into respect for others. I’m keeping the identities of the portraits to myself also. That’s not anyone’s business either.

Decolonizing Design

Vilcek Foundation recognizes Ramon Tejada, Wael Morcos and Juan Carlos Noguera.

Words by Judy Hill Photos

Every year, the Vilcek Foundation honors foreign-born artists and scientists living in the US who have made outstanding contributions to American society and culture. The New York City–based foundation, established by Jan and Marica Vilcek, immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia, casts a wide net—past winners in the arts have included cellist Yo-Yo Ma, chef Marcus Samuelsson, author Edwidge Danticat and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Two Vilcek Prizes for Excellence are awarded each year, one in the biomedical sciences and one in an artistic field. For 2024, design was the chosen arts category and the prize—which carries with it a $100,000 cash award—was awarded to RISD Associate Professor of Graphic Design Ramon Tejada. The foundation also honors emerging to mid-career immigrant professionals with six annual Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise. Of this year’s three arts recipients, two are RISD alumni: graphic designer Wael Morcos and industrial designer Juan Carlos Noguera.

Ramon Tejada, who was born in the Dominican Republic, was recognized for his commitment to

Associate Professor of Graphic Design Ramon Tejada, who works to decoloniize typography and graphic design

accessibility in design practices. During his own design education, says Tejada, he began to question the accepted canon that forms the baseline in design.

“I think design, for so long, went into this cycle of ‘This is the single way,’” he says, “and to me, there is no single way. Each of us sees things differently.” He encourages his students to think about where they came from and how their home, the neighborhood they grew up in, informs what they make.

In the area of typography, Tejada sees a particular challenge. “Typography, as we talk about it in graphic design, is coming from a completely Eurocentric, Latin-based, Western framework and approach,” he notes. “So if you speak Japanese, Hindi, Farsi or many of the non-Latin-based languages, for example, this Western framework doesn’t work.”

As well as being Eurocentric, “proper” typography frowns on such flourishes as adding strokes to make a letter thicker. “I wanted to add strokes because every street sign I saw growing up in New York City showed that, even though I was told it was wrong,” says Tejada. “Helvetica is the most ubiquitous font in the world and you don’t touch it, you don’t stretch

courtesy of the Vilcek Foundation

it, you don’t add things to it. Guess what I wanted to do? Make it fatter, make it disappear, blur it away, stretch it. But that’s wrong! Well, in some contexts that’s right. I could tell my students, ‘Don’t do that.’ Or I could say, ‘Traditionally, you don’t do that, but I can show you 50 examples where they did it and it worked beautifully for the context.’”

Ultimately, says Tejada, he wants to make sure his students’ voices are heard and to help them understand the value of where they come from. “That is your culture. That is the thing that has been handed down to you. I may not know about it, but I can encourage you to use it as a way to make something that’s valuable for you and your community.”

Wael Morcos MFA 14 GD, a graphic designer who grew up in Beirut, is also engrossed in questions of type. “Typography is very powerful,” says Morcos, whose work with Arabic letterforms has led to the co-creation of more than 10 font families. “At the core, typography and the shape of letters is just a relationship between black and white. But if you zoom out, letters become words, words become sentences, sentences become stories. We are attached to our

language more than we know. It anchors us to who we are and what language we speak. Typography is the shape of our language.”

Arabic, notes Morcos, is the third most-used language in the world, spanning all the way from Morocco to Iran, from Syria down to Yemen. “It covers a big part of the globe, which means that it’s also very diverse, with many different nuances,” he says. “There are a lot of different scripts and forms to it, and it’s very malleable, with a rich history, so it’s really a never-ending treasure trove that we can reference and reimagine and bring with us to the digital age.”

As a cofounder, with fellow RISD alum Jon Key 13 GD, of Brooklyn-based design firm Morcos Key, Morcos has developed campaigns for major players such as Nike and IBM, cultural clients including MoMa, and small startups and local schools in New York City, as well as large institutions and museums in the Middle East and Gulf countries.

“Jon is a Black graphic designer from Alabama, and I’m from Lebanon,” says Morcos. “At the beginning, we were curious and apprehensive. What is that going to look like as a partnership? It seemed like

Designer Wael Morcos, whose work with Arabic letterforms has led to the co-creation of more than 10 font families

there was a lot to unpack that might be too complex for people to approach as clients, but it turned out the exact opposite. Our personal stories permeate the kind of work that we are able to grapple with.”

Apprehension also accompanied Juan Carlos Noguera MID 15 as he made his way in the United States. Noguera had already proven himself as a promising industrial designer in his native Guatemala, working with a team to design durable, repairable wheelchairs that could navigate the local terrain.

Still, arriving at RISD in 2013, he initially felt insecure about his skill level. In time he was able to see that the way he worked could be an advantage because he was used to “not having a ton of resources at hand” and often having to find alternate construction methods. “I didn’t have access to materials that are commonplace here in the US,” he says, “so I had to solve things, I had to troubleshoot and say, ‘Yes, we can do it, but in a different way. We can’t just buy our way out of it.’ And that became really useful working in a team setting and with startup companies that have limited capital or resources to solve the problems they run into.”

For Noguera, now an assistant professor of industrial design at Rochester Institute of Technology, early projects that benefited from his resourceful approach included co-designing the world’s first 3D electronics printer, the Voxel8 Developer’s Kit, work that earned him recognition as one of the “35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT Tech Review in 2017.

“Because it was a smaller startup company, I was their entire design team,” says Noguera of the printer project. “So, it was just me as a designer and then 30 engineers that I had to somehow work with and push against and juggle.”

In a spinoff project with the same team, he helped develop the Circuit Scribe educational toy, which helps people understand electronics by drawing a circuit with a pen that holds conductive ink.

As a teacher, Noguera often references his early impostor syndrome to help international students with similar insecurities about doing things differently and trying to fit into the mold of what they think a designer should be. “I’m always trying to tell them that their diverse thinking and experiences are what’s going to make them valuable.”

Industrial designer Juan Noguera worked with a team in Guatamala to design durable wheelchairs suitable for the local terrain.

One Beautiful Thing

A statuesque floor lamp connects clay and light.

Photo by William Jess Laird

The founders of In Common With design studio, Nick Ozemba 13 FD and Felicia Hung 13 FD, met on their first day at RISD, as first-year students. Upon graduation they traveled on separate career paths until 2018, when they began to work together. In their Gowanus, Brooklyn–based studio and showroom, they create simple, striking and calm lights, often with the help of like-minded artists. The statuesque Helena floor lamp, pictured here, was made in collaboration with ceramicist Danny Kaplan, who experimented with structure and scale to “make a connection between clay and light appear innate.”

Toy Story

For these three RISD alums, playtime is a full-time job.

Words by Abby Bielagus

Meet the new breed of toy maker. They strive not for a bright, shiny trinket to distract for a flash before disappearing to the bottom of a toy box heaped with the next, the new and the now, but to be architects of fun who create playthings infused with purpose. If they can help it, their toys will never take up space on the curb on trash day, but will be cherished and reused, inhabiting a child’s memory for the makebelieve they inspired.

Yelitsa Jean-Charles 16 IL created her first doll as a symbol of the racial inequalities she found herself challenging. “I was a very passionate, feisty student at RISD,” says Jean-Charles. “There were conversations happening all the time on campus about race, gender and sexuality, and I found myself at the center of them. It fueled my work and my passion for change.” Inspired by a fellow student, she started wearing her hair natural for the first time, and in Professor Jean Blackburn’s 3D illustration class, when tasked with redesigning fairy tale characters, she turned Rapunzel into a little brown girl with long, kinky, black hair. “It was a commentary on the fact that people don’t see Black girls as princesses with long, beautiful hair,” she says. But when she stepped back and looked at the character she had created, she realized it looked like a doll—a doll that had never existed for her as a child.

Her class project went from a Kickstarter campaign to $500,000 in grants, awards and pitch competitions to a fully realized product that was the subject of a viral tweet. From there, it became Healthy Roots, a startup that has raised over a million dollars in

seed money and has placed three dolls and their accessories in Macy’s and Target stores nationwide. The name Healthy Roots came from Jean-Charles’ desire for “kids to have a healthy root with their identity and their culture and love their hair down to their roots,” she says.

“The company has been able to grow because we developed a great product, we identified a need and we found a way to market it organically through storytelling,” says Jean-Charles, who lives in Detroit. She credits her experience at RISD with teaching her how to use the digital space to tell stories “not necessarily from my classes but through my engagement with social and political issues,” she says.

As an only child growing up in Queens, NY, with parents who had emigrated from Haiti, Jean-Charles says she was not so much the black sheep as the “odd” sheep. She was the only family member who was left-handed and wore glasses, and she spent a lot of time by herself with her books, pencils and coloring books. When she arrived at RISD and learned about Tumblr and saw others making organic viral content, she began to learn the language of the internet. When the time came, she knew how to use it to amplify her mission to empower the next generation and create the diversity and representation she had lacked growing up.

She set out not just to paint a doll brown but to make something different, something that didn’t yet exist—with her nose, her lips, her eyes and her hair.

“Many Black girls don’t love their hair, and I thought that this doll could have an impact on their perception

Right Healthy Roots founder Yelitsa Jean-Charles with the three “Curl Friends” Gaïana, Zoe and Marisol.

Photo by Jasmine Sumlin at Livin For Media.

of themselves,” she says. After making sketches, spending time in beauty shops and researching toy production, Jean-Charles found a promising material and worked with a factory to create a blend that mimicked the hair she wanted for her dolls. They each have a different texture and different curls that range from kinky to loose. “It was really hard,” she says of the process, “because the toy industry is used to doing things one way.”

She has heard from plenty of customers telling her how much their Healthy Roots doll has meant to them. “People tell us, ‘My daughter hated wearing her bonnet to sleep, but she does it now because her doll has one,’” she says.

Sarah Unruh 99 FD, the founder of Maquette Kids, originally created her DIY flat-pack dollhouses out of necessity. Her daughter wanted a dollhouse, a toy not typically fashioned after a Brooklyn townhouse such as the one in which Unruh and her family lived. Rather than disappoint her child, she put on her designer hat and got to work.

“I had been doing houseware design for years, working for Martha Stewart and big lifestyle brands, so I was in that decorative-product world. I started thinking of creating a vertical brownstone, something that had a small footprint,” she says.

But instead of focusing on the eye-catching adornments she might prioritize for her professional clients, she consulted her nerdy side and fixated on functionality. “It needed to be stored easily when it wasn’t in use, it had to ship in an efficient way, be manufactured domestically to lessen the

“The simpler the better, to allow a child to impose their own creativity on it.”

Sarah Unruh

Left

environmental impact, and it had to be sustainable,” she says. Unruh knew she wanted to use a natural wood devoid of any toxic finishes. “I thought about whether to add color by using milk paint, but for the most part, I wanted it to be pretty simple. The simpler the better, to allow a child to impose their own creativity on it,” she says.

She began prototyping and sourcing manufacturers —eventually finding one based in New Bedford, MA— and Maquette Kids was born. Maquette, another word for “model,” distills the ethos of the brand: a minihome as a foundation for open play and discovery.

As Unruh’s kids, now 8 and 11, have grown, they’ve imagined new uses for their dollhouses. “My oldest has one on her desk that she uses to hold her stationery and pens. I’ve been having a lot of fun watching them evolve,” she says.

Another of the driving forces behind Maquette Kids was to create objects that seamlessly blend in and reflect a family’s lifestyle. “They had to be something visually that I wanted to live with,” she says.

Unruh, who sells Maquette Kids from her own website as well as through online retailers, wants to expand to other structures, such as a firehouse. She’s also recently introduced bedding and beds and would love to make cars and other small accessories that kids can assemble themselves. Finding the right domestic manufacturer who can consistently produce the quality she expects remains a challenge. A child’s imagination can go on forever and so should their toys.

The flat-packed Maquette Kids’ dollhouses can be easily assembled by kids in four simple steps. Photo by Lesley Unruh

“The only person who’s going to make your ideas real is you.”

Amanda White

When you’re a parent, hand-me-downs are essential. “We have three kids, and we’re constantly getting rid of things they outgrow and getting new things. We’re environmentally conscious people, and that feels really wasteful for us,” says Amanda White MFA 05 JM, one half of Big Tree Co., the toy company that she started with her partner, Brinton Jaecks MFA 06 DM.

The name is aspirational, implying a growth mindset, and also nods to the idea of a family tree. White and Jaecks met at RISD, where they honed their crafts and also learned that “the only person who’s going to make your ideas real is you. You have to just keep walking up to the idea cliff and jumping off,” says White.

Their own particular idea cliff involved making a ride-on toy that would last and look better than the mostly plastic, easily breakable options currently on shelves, which quickly end up on city curbs next to the broken baby swings and strollers with missing wheels. White made a prototype of a walker for the couple’s second child as a passion project. After seeing their son use it backward like a scooter, she and Jaecks realized this one object could be two, three or four different playthings. “We tried to figure out how long we could make it last. The ideal would be two or three years, the average gap between children. You buy it for your first kid, and then it can cycle for the second kid, and so on. It’s really about trying to reduce waste,” says Jaecks. What they created is called the Boomerang— the outside frame (made in American black walnut

or birch) is a constant, while the middle swaps out to transport it from one stage to the next. It starts as a walker to support your baby’s first steps. Change the middle, narrow the base and add a platform, and it’s a scooter. Remove the middle once more, and add a seat to create your child’s first bike. Finally, take the wheels from four to two, and it’s a balance bike.

“The wheelbase narrows as the kid gets older and learns a sense of balance. The four-wheel bike is integral because it stays still while they get on and off. And then you go down to just two wheels, and they’re gliding and balancing. It creates a sense of adventure and independence and builds their confidence,” says White.

To manufacture the Boomerang, the couple installed a custom computer numeric-controlled (CNC) machine in their garage in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. White quit her job as a jewelry designer and runs the business full-time, while Jaecks, who also works as a visual effects supervisor, helps out when he can. Though they have all the tools to prototype new things, like a play table, they want to grow consciously, not disappoint any customers, and ensure their products are safe. In the meantime, they’re also working on making smaller wooden pull toys. “There’s a real satisfaction when you see a kid learning how to walk with a thing that you made. When you give the Boomerang to a child, they know it’s for them. Their eyes light up and they instantly know what to do with it,” says White. “And when you’re building the product, that brings the fun back.”

Right The Boomerang grows with each child, transforming from a walker to a bike to a scooter. Photo by Rachel Barret

Time and Place

Do Ho Suh explores memory, migration and the concept of home.

Words by Judy Hill

When Do Ho Suh 94 PT arrived in Providence from South Korea to study at RISD, he found a place to live at 388 Benefit Street. A once-grand Victorian mansion, the imposing red-brick building, with a mansard roof and columned portico, had long since been carved up into modest student apartments, one of which became Suh’s first home in the US.

“That building still features in a lot of my work,” says Suh, one of today’s most prominent Korean artists, best known for translucent fabric sculptures that recreate buildings he has lived in while exploring ideas of memory, displacement and home.

Suh rose to international attention when he represented South Korea at the Venice Biennale in 2001 with a site-specific installation that elevated the floor of the gallery and invited visitors to walk on glass panels supported by 180,000 cast plastic human figures. Since then, his installations, sculptures and drawings have been exhibited and acquired by major museums worldwide.

In 2008, Suh created Fallen Star 1/5, a model of his childhood home in Korea colliding with a replica of his Providence apartment. Four years later, he perched a pale-blue clapboard cottage precariously atop the engineering building at the University of California, San Diego, alluding, he says, to his own sense of disorientation when he first arrived in the US.

Suh is currently the subject of a major exhibition, Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time, now on view at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh through September 1. The exhibit brings together more than 100 of Suh’s works from the past 25 years

Previous Wise Man, 2023, thread drawing embedded in STPI handmade cotton paper. Produced at STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore. ©Do Ho Suh. Courtesy of the artist and STPI Right Home within Home within Home within Home within Home, 2013, polyester fabric, aluminium. ©Do Ho Suh. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London.

Photo by Jeon Taeg Su

and is the first exhibition in Europe to explore the role of drawing in his artistic practice.

It was while living on Benefit Street, as a way of adjusting to the discomfort of his new environment, that Suh began two practices that have underpinned his art since. “I began to measure my space, and soon, whenever I moved to a new space, I produced paper rubbings of the interior,” he says. The measuring was particularly tough, he says, since he had to convert from metric to imperial in his head as he went along. “It was a breakthrough to find a dual-unit tape measure at the amazing Adler’s on Wickenden Street! I was so happy to revisit the store when back last year [to receive an honorary degree from RISD].”

By the time he began studying at RISD, Suh— whose father, Suh Se-ok, was one of Korea’s bestknown ink painters—had already earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in traditional painting from Seoul National University. This was an essential foundation, he says, but he began to break free of its strictures during his MFA, creating freestanding folding screens that challenged the idea of painting in a traditional Korean context. “It was also a play on the use of folding screens in East Asia,” he says, “which were often used to create a particular landscape background—I loved the idea of making a place portable or moveable. A lot sprung from that.” The experience also solidified his need to expand as an artist. Hence the move to the US.

At RISD, during the early ’90s, Suh’s ideas began to coalesce around the relationship between architecture and clothing. “I was reflecting on this endless

“They’re often very ordinary domestic spaces that people can relate to.”

Do Ho Suh

Left

Fallen Star 1/5, 2008–2011, ABS, basswood, beech, ceramic, enamel paint, glass, honeycomb board. ©Do Ho Suh. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London. Photo by Jeon Taeg Su

Right

Hubs series, 2015–2016, polyester fabric and stainless steel. ©Do Ho Suh. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro, London and Venice. Photo by Jeon Taeg Su

ritual, which starts from birth, of moving in and out of your clothes and built environments,” he says. “Once I had moved into a Western building in a Western context, I began to think about this movement as a series of tiny displacements. But I felt oddly prepared for it, because Korean architecture is traditionally much more porous than [architecture] in the West—walls are made of rice paper and you reconfigure the space throughout the day.”

As he began his MFA at Columbia University (he transferred after a year to Yale), Suh became absorbed with ideas of site-specificity and transportability and created a heavy muslin cloth sheath for the inside of his student studio space in Morningside Heights to recreate the bedroom of his childhood.

“I then ‘undressed’ the room and presented the muslin as an empty shell,” he says, “like the shed shell of a cicada.” When he sewed his first translucent fabric “home” in Korea a few years later, he was able to pack it into two suitcases and fly back to the US with it.

Although his art has explored many innovative avenues in a stunning variety of media, it is the ethereal architectural fabric pieces—of 388 Benefit Street, of the traditional hanok house where he was raised in Seoul, of his Chelsea apartment in New York City, of his flat on London’s Union Wharf—that have become his most celebrated pieces.

“They’re often very ordinary domestic spaces that people can relate to,” says Suh, attempting to explain their appeal. He can see why viewers find the vivid colors and diaphanous fabrics seductive, but that is also something he has struggled with. “I didn’t set

out to make a beautiful, alluring sculpture,” he says. “I was interested in the conceptual possibilities of using a transportable, translucent fabric for something we think of as solid. It’s metaphorical, and some of the visual impact is, for me, almost a by-product.”

The rubbings that Suh began in Providence have also continued as a way to explore and discover his living spaces. To create them, Suh affixes thin paper sheets over every inch of the interior walls—light switches, cabinets, door handles, refrigerators, even the bathroom sink—and then rubs across the paper with graphite, colored pencils or his fingertips to create an impression on the paper. The rubbings can help him understand the dimensions of a space better in preparation for the fabric pieces, or they can exist in their own right as photographed works of art.

Rubbing is an act of devotion for Suh. The process, he says, is intensely physical—“You have to apply exactly the right pressure, not too little, not too much, and maintain it carefully”—and also a meditative act that can unearth long-forgotten memories. That was certainly the case when Suh undertook to rub every surface of his longtime, much-beloved apartment in New York City, a project that expanded to include the entire four-story townhouse and took two years. “It remains a very interesting process to me, and exhausting,” he says. “I completely lost my fingerprints when I was doing that project.”

At the heart of his current exhibition are works on paper. Through drawing, says Suh, he can thrash out complex ideas and ruminate about ideas around movement and personal-versus-collective space.

Ever since he first arrived at RISD, he has carried small sketchbooks “religiously,” the same images recurring over three decades.

In 2009, while on a residency at STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery (formerly Singapore Tyler Print Institute), Suh began to experiment with the sculptural possibilities of paper, which led to his thread drawings. They are made by sewing onto gelatin sheets and then dissolving the gelatin in a water bath so that the stitching becomes embedded in paper pulp and the threads emerge as a shadowy image. “I then move the loose threads into the positions I want them in,” says Suh. “You have to work very fast and carefully, but it’s a very organic process.”

Collaboration is central to the practice, says Suh, who credits the STPI team and their innovative approach with making these pieces possible. At his studio in London, where he lives with his wife, Rebecca Boyle Suh, and their two daughters, Suh works closely with a team of architects. “I’m invested in doing away with this idea of the isolated artist ‘genius’ beavering away on their own in a studio,” he says. “I couldn’t realize most of my projects alone.”

London feels like home to Suh these days, since that is where his children were born and where his family life is rooted, but he is interested in the “portability or otherwise of the concept of home.” He misses New York—Chinatown’s soup dumplings, Chelsea’s gallery evenings—and ponders the question of home in relation to the three cities that have figured large in his life. His Bridge Project centers on a bridge (literal and metaphorical) that links London, Seoul

and New York. At its center, which happens to be in the Arctic, is the so-called “perfect home.” “It’s a wild thought experiment,” says Suh, “but I find it very grounding.”

Recently, Suh has been making work with the assistance of architectural modeling programs. One piece features a large, robotically engineered sculpture of Home Within Home, an earlier work that involved the Korean hanok house being engulfed by the Benefit Street house. “It will be installed so that some of its threads, which are extruded by the robot, feel like they’re burrowing through the museum walls. I want it to feel like a sort of parasite or growth within the gallery space,” says Suh.

Suh is also working on a kinetic version of Public Figures, a 1998 work that features a stone plinth supported by the outstretched arms of hundreds of miniature fiberglass-and-resin figures. The piece was always intended to move, says Suh, as a counter to the idea of static monuments.

Circling back to his New York rubbings project, Suh is realizing long-held plans to resurrect his apartment rubbings, which he has kept in storage, carefully numbered, since the building was sold, and mount them on frames to build a scale model of the brownstone interior for a future museum exhibition. “It’s technically very challenging but I am so excited to finally do it,” says Suh. “I’m not a particularly fast artist. My projects are often very complex and take years to R&D and then make, so I have these same works and series that thread through my practice from the beginning.”

Above

Public Figures, ©Do Ho Suh, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul and London / National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution,

Do Ho Suh (center, in gray) at work at the STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and STPI.

Photo by Colleen Dugan

Left

Odyssey in the Andes

A RISD professor, a Hyundai lab and a group of Argentine artisans turn robotics upside down.

Words by Judy Hill

High up in the Andes, near the Argentina-Chile border, a caravan of horses and mules laden with riders and equipment picks its painstaking way across a rugged mountain range under a deep-blue sky and a blazing sun. Leading the sprawling pack is another creature, neither human nor equine. With metal legs and a torso, neck and head fashioned from bamboo, this unlikely adventurer—which looks a lot like a llama—is Guanaquerx, the first robot to cross the Andes mountains.

Both a robotic art project and a multiday performance-expedition, Guanaquerx was envisioned by interdisciplinary artist and RISD professor Paula Gaetano Adi to reimagine the Argentine general José de San Martín’s epic 1817 crossing of the Andes to liberate South America from colonial rule.

Gaetano Adi worked on the project, which culminated in Guanaquerx’s triumphant arrival at the Chilean border on January 24, 2024, with Hyundai’s New Horizons Studio, which has offices in Fremont, California, and Bozeman, Montana, and a team of local artisans and engineers in Argentina.

Gaetano Adi, who grew up in San Juan, in western Argentina, has been working in robotics for the past decade. Most recently she has been investigating the possibilities of combining what she calls an “alternative cosmotechnics,” with artisanal crafts on the one hand and robotics technology on the other.

In 2022, Gaetano Adi taught a studio class called Robotics for the Pluriverse as part of the RISD x Hyundai Motor Group Research Collaborative, a multiyear partnership exploring the relationship

between nature, art and design. Gaetano Adi and her students held frequent Zoom meetings with Hyundai designers and engineers, and that’s where she met John Suh, head of New Horizons Studio, a unit within the Hyundai Motor Group’s US R&D Center focused on developing off-road autonomous robots.

When Suh, who launched New Horizons four years ago, showed Gaetano Adi sketches of his team’s Ultimate Mobility Vehicle, which is designed to traverse difficult terrain, she saw an opportunity. “I was like, ‘Do you have a place where you can test this?’ And he was like, ‘No, we’re in the development stage.’ So, I said, ‘Oh, I think I have a place where you can test this.’ I told him about Guanaquerx, which was really just an idea at that time. And he said, ‘Well, let’s do it!’”

Gaetano Adi was inspired by the guanaqueras makeshift all-terrain vehicles developed by amateur car mechanics that could navigate parts of the Andes previously only accessible by horse or mule—of her hometown. “I was looking at how they approached the making of those vehicles with the scarce resources that they had,” she says. “I showed John and told him that I wanted to make something like that as an autonomous machine. His studio was developing unmanned vehicles, so it seemed perfectly aligned.”

For Suh, the project was appealing partly because it would serve as an important proof of concept for his fledgling vehicle prototype. “It was obviously a very remote location with all kinds of different types of terrain,” he says, “so technically, that alone

Magazine Odyssey in the Andes

Photos by Pavel Romaniko

Odyssey in the Andes

would’ve been enough. But on top of that, what excited me was that Paula was trying to create a different kind of art project, one without walls, moving in the world.”

If you’re asking at this point why Gaetano Adi wanted to cross the Andes with a robot, that’s a fair question. Part of it, she says, was about trying to disrupt the way we think about robots. “Any science fiction narrative with robots always ends in an apocalyptic scenario with robots becoming aware that they’re enslaved forced labor and then rebelling and killing their masters to achieve emancipation,” says Gaetano Adi. “I’ve been thinking about other ways we can imagine a technological revolution.”

The Guanaquerx project, she says, was a way of using robotics not to claim a great technological achievement for space exploration or as another colonial operation to conquer worlds but instead to reimagine San Martín’s liberatory crossing of the Andes mountains.

“Growing up we knew about this major event that had happened here 200 years ago that consolidated the freedom of South America from the Spanish,” says Gaetano Adi. “San Martín’s plan was to cross the Andes in the most unexpected and difficult place, surprise the Spaniards and liberate Chile, and then to set sail and surprise the viceroyalty of Peru from the ocean. To execute the plan, he first needed to cross the Andes, which was an almost impossible task. My project was a way of reenacting this gigantic unexpected endeavor with another radical odyssey. I knew that a robot couldn’t theoretically make the

crossing, but I also knew that with the help of all of us as a collective ‘army,’ we could help this robot become liberated in a completely different sense— not going after and destroying humanity but showing that technologies can be produced and thought of in a different way, for humans and with humans.”

To get a clearer sense of whether the Guanaquerx project was even feasible, in early 2023 Gaetano Adi arranged a scouting trip with New Horizons mechanical design lead John Strong and several baqueanos (local guides) to trace the route across the Andes. “That was a crucial piece because that’s when they understood what they were up against and how vast the Andes are,” says Gaetano Adi. Up until then, says Strong, the project had felt very nebulous. “The scouting expedition not only made it real for me,” he says, “but it also put it on the radar of the whole engineering team.”

At an early stage, it had been suggested to Gaetano Adi that she could use an existing R&D prototype and turn that into the Guanaquerx. She resisted that idea and, in what felt like a huge leap of faith but also “a magical moment,” insisted that it was crucial the robot be made from scratch.

Ijlal Muzaffar, a professor of the theory and history of art and design at RISD who followed the project from the beginning and participated in the expedition, found this decision intriguing. “If they had simply bought an expensive remote-control vehicle and put the Guanaquerx on top of it and crossed the Andes with that, it would’ve validated our belief that through technology we can control anything. Instead, everyone

Left Paula Gaetano Adi (at right) with Miguel Grassii, the lead Argentinian engineer who worked on the robotic tail and vision system and New Horizons engineer Michael Webber.

Dancers and a mule led by a local guide accompany Guanaquerx at a pre-trek procession in Barreal, Argentina.

had to reinvent the wheel completely, which meant they came in with a sense of responsibility, an investment to make this thing happen.”

For more than a year, Suh had a team of at least seven engineers working on the project in Silicon Valley, while Gaetano Adi worked with her own team of artisans and engineers in Argentina and periodically visited the California lab. Everything about the vehicle was “a giant experiment,” says Suh. “We had to make it resistant to dust and waterproof and be able to control it and have it handle the terrain. It was an amazing collaboration, where we essentially built the lower part of the vehicle that could move on the ground and then jointly figured out the mechanical and electrical connections to put a body on top with its own tail and its own unique design.”

The idea of making the robot resemble a guanaco —a camelid native to South America—came to Gaetano Adi early on, inspired by the local lore of the Yastay, the mythological guanaco protector of Andes ecology. “We didn’t want a reincarnation of San Martín,” she says. “It had to be something else, and the guanaco is a very special animal in this region and is one of the only mammals that can live at such high altitudes.”

As the January 2024 departure date for the expedition drew near, members of the team converged on the small town of Barreal, Argentina, about two hours from the base of the Andes.

For Miguel Lastra, project manager in RISD’s Office of Strategic Partnerships, which supported the project from the outset and served as the main liaison with

Hyundai Motor Group, the trip was powerful. What struck Lastra most in the days leading up to the trek was the sense of community Gaetano Adi had built among the various collaborators. At a celebratory dinner held for the entire group on the first night, he remembers a feast not just of traditional Argentinian food but also of fellowship.

“Here we are sitting at a table and having this conversation where the engineers are able to talk to the videographer,” he recalls. “The sound designer is talking to the guy who built the frame of the robot out of bamboo. I’m sitting across from a philosopher, Paula’s research assistant, and beside one of her engineers who had worked on the robotic tail. Even her family was roaming around here and celebrating with her.”

A pre-trek procession through the streets of Barreal brought out crowds of townspeople who waved specially designed Guanaquerx flags as they witnessed a parade like no other, with the robot leading the way, followed by a retinue of mules and horses and people.

The whole town, says Gaetano Adi “was mobilized around this crazy idea.” In that sense, she notes, it aligned with San Martín’s original crossing of the Andes. Lacking support from the national government, the trek was funded and developed by the local people. Fifty percent of the army were African slaves and the other half were local mestizos or Indigenous people, who San Martín sought out and consulted with because they were the people who knew how to traverse the land. In a way, she says, her expedition

Right

The Guanaquerx robot resting at camp after a day of navigating the rugged terrain of the Andes.

Alumni Magazine

Odyssey in the Andes

“You’re just such a little thing in this enormous landscape.”

Gaetano Adi

was a way to reassert the idea of freedom, “the idea of what it will look like if technologies help humanity to truly become free of oppression.”

On the previous year’s scouting trip, Gaetano Adi and Strong had encountered rain, hail and snow, but as the group set off from basecamp on January 18, the sun shone and the air was warm. Though the weather was in their favor, crossing the Andes would still be a challenge, with 4,500-meter peaks, harsh deserts and swift-running streams—a hurdle that called for both manpower and horsepower.

Thirty people made the trip, including engineers, guides, a doctor, a cook and several horse minders and muleteers. The four-legged component included 58 horses and mules, most of which carried equipment, tents and members of the team. Two of the mules, Don Carozo and La Tortuga, were designated to carry Guanaquerx when the terrain got too rugged or impossible to navigate on robotic legs.

That the robot should ride on a mule when the going got tough held its own symbolism. Both Guanaquerx, a mix of robotics and indigenous technologies, and the mule, the offspring of a horse and a donkey, are hybrid creatures. The mule has also throughout history been an enslaved creature used specifically for its labor and crucial to any exploration of new territories.

“There’s some weird kinship there,” says Gaetano Adi. “And maybe Guanaquerx is showing the mule a possibility for emancipation as well. If we eventually have robots that can do this journey, the mules will not be needed.”

Right

Guanquerx was carried by a mule when the harsh terrain was too difficult to navigate on robotic legs. Local guides, or baqueanos, on horseback were critical to the expedition’s success.

No amount of abstract planning or virtual modeling can prepare for what happens in the field, and during the seven days of the trek, Guanaquerx fully morphed from theoretical concept to tangible, and often extremely needy, travel companion. “There was always that extra rock that could make the wheel puncture,” says Muzaffar, who was fascinated by the way the robot began to reveal its “secrets” and limits, whether that was the tail misbehaving because of windy conditions, an actuator unexpectedly breaking, a wheel not tracking properly, the entire robot toppling over or tires popping as they ran over thornbushes.

“The robot kept asking us to help it,” Muzaffar says. “It was like a child in a new environment, learning how to walk, and we were teaching it. Instead of technology giving us more power, we became emotionally invested caretakers. Later, when the engineers and baqueanos talked about the robot successfully walking, they were all in tears. Fixing a nut or tire or tail meant something so much more. I’ve never seen people interact with technology in this way. It really flipped the equation.”

Those daily exercises of troubleshooting and caretaking are what have stayed with Gaetano Adi, too, rather than the “big story” behind what they achieved. She remembers one moment in particular: “We were very, very high in altitude and the robot was not able to do it. He was just not feeling it. Everyone was exhausted because you can barely breathe there, and I started pushing the creature. Everyone was saying, ‘Paula, you’re going to faint

Magazine

Odyssey in the Andes

because it’s too high. You’re pushing too hard.’ And none of that occurred to me. I was just so into making it work, and it was like that for everyone.”

Reaching the Argentina-Chile border, says Gaetano Adi, was profoundly impactful, so much so that she finds it difficult to describe. “I don’t think words can do anything here, and even images or video cannot fully describe it. You’re just such a little thing in this enormous landscape.”

The trip as a whole was documented extensively with photos, video, social media posts and an interactive website designed by RISD-Brown dualdegree alums Phil Bayer 19 ID and Tiger Dingsun 20 GD. Since internet access was mostly nonexistent during the mountain crossing, much of the website content, which included historical context, philosophical writings and background on the culture and geography of the Andes, was preloaded. A more experiential part of the website allowed viewers to travel virtually across the peaks and ravines and swoop in on key points in the journey.

Guanaquerx itself was also taking photographs and capturing audio recordings. A nighttime camera enabled it to take images of the night sky, and a 3D-printed weather station, created by a team of rural high schoolers in Gaetano Adi’s hometown of San Juan and strapped to the robot’s back, collected information on humidity, wind speed and other climate-oriented data.

On a more performative note, as the expedition made its way along the route, Guanaquerx emitted bleating sounds similar to those of a guanaco and

also sporadically beat a chayera drum with its tail and waved the flag of its own revolutionary army of artists, engineers and baqueanos

Now back in Providence and reflecting on the trip—which she says will take a while to fully process —Gaetano Adi remains moved by the way engineers and guides alike cared for Guanaquerx’s safety and tended to its needs. When it came time to leave the robot in Argentina (it will soon be returned to the US for exhibitions), the engineers, she says, felt like they were leaving their child. Gaetano Adi’s own son, who is three, still misses Guanaquerx and asks, “What is he doing now? He’s by himself. When are we going to pick him up?”

Ultimately, she is not surprised at this level of emotional involvement. “When you work with robotics, you establish such a close relationship with the machine,” she says. “I don’t think it happens with any other object, and that’s the power of this technology. That’s why I work with robotics. Anyone can relate to it. You can be a two-year-old or an 85-yearold, you still develop some kind of relationship with this artificially living being.”

Beyond that, says Gaetano Adi, “we assign personality, we assign behaviors, we assign emotion,” to robots. “And in that projection is where artists working with robotics have a crucial role. We not only can shape the human-machine interaction through its design and intended purpose, but most importantly, we can establish the intelligence or rational and ethical accountability of the artifact itself. That’s a huge responsibility.”

Odyssey in the Andes

Sail Away

Martin Lo and Jozeph Forakis create a new style of yachts.

Words by Kira Goldenberg

“Designing a yacht was on my very, very short list of dream projects.”

Jozeph Forakis

Martin Lo BID 84 and Jozeph Forakis 85 ID were acquaintances rather than close friends back in their undergraduate days at RISD. But in the tightknit Industrial Design Department of the 1980s, proximity meant that everybody knew one another to some degree; they all labored into the late hours in close quarters.

“It was kind of this covert operation tucked away in the basement of an architecture building,” Forakis said.

The two stayed loosely in touch after graduating, as Lo took over leadership of his fourth-generation family business, Cheoy Lee Shipyards, and Forakis built a reputation as an inventive, globe-trotting designer of products ranging from cell phones to plane interiors, and started his own design company, jozeph forakis ... design, located in Milan, Italy. They reconnected in earnest about a decade ago via Facebook and began meeting up when traveling into each other’s orbits.

“It’s always great rekindling with RISD people, because it’s such a magic period,” Forakis said. “Meeting ‘risdoids’ of any stripe is always a great opportunity.” In this case, the reconnection was especially fruitful: Lo wanted to overhaul Cheoy Lee’s yacht division, then called Cheoy Lee Yachts, with a brand revamp and innovative new offerings, and he decided to ask Forakis to help him do it, even though Forakis’s long design résumé did not include any boats.

“I decided, why don’t I give Jozeph a try?” Lo said. “I needed a fresh approach.”

Forakis was on board, so to speak.

“Designing a yacht was on my very, very short list of dream projects,” he said, and “if you know industrial design, you can design anything.”

A Rich History

Bringing in such an unconventional pick was a courageous departure from tradition for Lo, who has been working in the family business since graduating from RISD. Cheoy Lee Shipyards, a 150-year-old company with building operations based in mainland China and administrative offices in nearby Hong Kong, has long enjoyed a global reputation for designing and building quality workhorse boats: tugboats, ferries, catamarans.

The company was rebuilt from scratch twice, Lo said, during the years of Japanese aggression and occupation in the Sino-Japanese War of World War II. The company branched into international operations in the early 1950s with a United Nations commission to build fishing boats to help revitalize the South Korean economy after the Korean War. Cheoy Lee first dipped a toe into yacht building with a commission in 1957, the Mah Jong, a 52-foot teak boat that, after a 2017 restoration, remains seaworthy today.

In the 1960s, the company began building yachts out of fiberglass, innovating to the point where, in the ’80s, shipbuilding quality standard-bearer Lloyd’s Register asked the company to help draft standards for the production of large fiberglass boats.

“They literally created the standards,” Forakis said.

Cheoy Lee continued building innovative work and

At the shipyard with Martin Lo and Jozeph Forakis whose partnership created the new CLX96 yacht.

Sail Away

pleasure boats throughout the following decades, innovating in fiberglass, aluminum, and alloys. But as the 21st century wound on, the company reached a stasis.

“The management spent time at the Fort Lauderdale show in late 2016 and looked at our yachts compared to others’ and realized we had an image problem. We were just getting stale,” Lo told Yacht Style in 2022.

Lo reached out to Forakis in 2017.

“My objective was to look at the company holistically—and look at our products holistically—and come up with a design proposal,” Lo said. He trusted his friend’s sensibility and skills to keep company tradition in mind while creating its next incarnation.

Reimagining Luxury

Once the two companies decided to collaborate, it was time for Forakis and his team to take a crash course on building boats.

“I don’t think it’s possible to have a better client when you’ve pretty much got to learn everything that goes into making a boat,” Forakis said. “You can say there’s no such thing as a dumb question, but some of the questions we asked or ideas we brought up—now I know how left-field or ridiculous they were,” Forakis added. “Martin never lost his cool.”

Beyond nuts and bolts, ongoing dialogue led by two industrial designers quickly became a much broader philosophical inquiry into the nature of leisure. “What started off as a very high-level conversation about the possibility of designing a yacht

or thinking about the future of yacht design kind of expanded into this more global discussion about the future of yachting experiences in general,” Forakis recalls. “What is luxury? In RISD, you’re taught to frame the problem before you go about problem-solving.”

Lo noted that their common educational background allowed him to foster effective communication between Hong Kong and Milan, Forakis’s professional home base. “I have a design background but I’m working at the yard, so I become the bridge between the company and the designer,” Lo said.

The weekly discussions, sometimes lasting up to six hours, led Forakis and his team into a deep dive into Cheoy Lee Yachts’ existing processes, branding, and company culture. That work culminated in seven design concepts, offering what Forakis called “various degrees of radical,” that his design firm submitted to Lo and his team. The concepts spanned from one that could be built with existing infrastructure to more-unconventional designs that would require reimagining the company’s entire production process. Lo and his team selected one of the less conventional designs, later named CLX96, which considered both “the tradition of the company and the trend of the yacht market,” Lo said.

But when it became clear that testing the limits meant the product would take a substantial amount of time to develop, they also started work on what became the less extreme CLB88, an 88-footer with a maximum speed of about 25 knots, which entered the market in 2020.

The boundary-pushing CLX96, which debuted in 2022, is rooted in an openness to nature, showcasing the vision that Forakis’s team brought to the project. Forakis said he wanted the yacht to truly feel like a part of the environment rather than a house that happened to be floating. The boat, which is nearly 97 feet long and can reach up to 25 knots fully stocked, features visual continuity with the outdoors, in aesthetic touches like cohesive flooring, and an engineering ingenuity that allows for thinnerthan-usual support and wiring columns, creating panoramic views.

“You always feel connected with the outdoors,” Forakis said. “There’s a saying in nautical circles: ‘When you’re out at sea, the boat gets one foot shorter every day.’ We were conscious of not just creating as much space as possible but [providing] discrete spaces all around the boat where people can be alone or seamlessly interact.”

The team’s painstaking attention to detail paid off.

“The 96 has won a good design award and an international boats and aviation design award,” Lo said. “It has won design accolades. People are in awe of the design and the built quality of the boats.”

The collaboration shows no sign of winding down. In addition to innovative yacht design, Forakis’s team helped Cheoy Lee rebrand the company’s yacht division, shortening Cheoy Lee Yachts to CL Yachts and updating the logo. And the boat designs keep coming: This year, the duo debuted a third model, the CLB80, and a fourth is under development.

“Martin and I became really close throughout the process,” Forakis said. “We had differences in background experiences and cultures, but the commonality we always kept coming back to was the connection with RISD. Our thinking principles— our design principles—were really evident as a strong foundation.”

In This Season

As a designer and educator, Rene Payne strives to break down social and cultural barriers.

Words by Abby Bielagus

For Rene Payne 83 GD, nothing is an accident. She sees life not as a series of linear paths that intersect, but as a circle that bends and revolves in and out of seasons. Her work as an educator and a designer are not merely jobs to sustain a lifestyle, but callings through which she can create real change.

One of her latest projects through her multidisciplinary design agency, included by FAVOR, is a website and mobile application called The Emmett Till Memory Project, envisioned in response to the incessant vandalism that has plagued the site on the banks of the Tallahatchie River where the fourteen-year-old boy’s body was pulled from the water. The website and app will convey the depth and significance of Till’s story to a younger generation.

The call to action that Payne routinely answers comes directly from her parents, Sylvia Watkins and William Watkins Jr. At first glance, her mother and father don’t appear to be revolutionaries. Her mother stayed at home to raise Payne and her two sisters, and her father was in computer systems at Volkswagen America. And yet, in their dogged and persistent pursuit to provide the best education for their girls, they not only challenged social norms, but raised women who carried on their legacy by continuing to question and break down barriers.

“We were raised to pioneer; we were raised to be open to creating change,” Payne says.

Born in Englewood and raised in Teaneck, New Jersey, Payne witnessed her parents fight zoning

laws for the right to give their girls an education that only one side of town had access to. Her father was active in the Urban League and a delegate for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was invited to sit on the dais when King delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech. Payne remembers as a child not wanting her father to go, feeling something she couldn’t quite put her finger on then. He offered comfort by reminding her that everything he and their mom were doing was for Payne and her sisters. Her father was also integral in the desegregation of schools, and Teaneck was one of the first to desegregate, with the Payne family one of eleven families that were impacted.

Their struggles didn’t stop there. Her father’s job took them to Andover and then Franklin, Massachusetts, where Payne and her sisters were the only Black girls in the school system. Although she had been “othered” before, her experience in high school stays cemented in her brain as the first time she experienced racism. “It was hard. Art was my escape. My teacher John MacPhee, a RISD alum, drove me and four of my classmates every Saturday to RISD to take classes. That experience gave me a taste of what I wanted,” says Payne. “My parents never told me what I couldn’t become. Therefore, I believed what I could become.”

Being an undergrad at RISD came with its own set of challenges. Payne struggled with depression. She credits one of her professors, Mahler Ryder, for saving her. He was one of the few Black faculty

Previous Seed Barn, Milam Plantation, the long-forgotten site where Emmett Till was murdered. On August 28, 2022 hundreds of townspeople attended the first ever commemorative ceremony at the barn.

Right Chicago, Illinois, September 5, 1955. The line of mourners outside Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ for Emmett Till’s funeral visitation.

Following Rene Payne and her fellow undergrads at RISD.

Photo by Francesca Scott 82 PH

“ Without the resilience of those who came before us, we would not be here today.”

at the time; sadly, he passed away at age 54 in 1992. “It was Professor Ryder who really helped me move through it and go forward. It was also my community, it was my people. And this year RISD asked me to chair the Black Alumni Reunion, and that feels like I’m coming full circle and understanding the importance of what my colleagues and people meant for me. Community, that’s what helped me outside of work,” she says.

In the decades after her graduation, Payne has established herself not only as an award-winning designer and leader—whose work has touched small community organizations and Fortune 500 companies both locally and overseas—but also as a pioneer, like her parents. She was often the only Black woman at the table in the advertising agencies she worked for, and she used her position to ensure other Black faces were seen. At one agency, she was put on the Fleet Bank account and cast a Black couple for the imagery depicting private banking. “I understood the impact that I had and that it was so important how images were depicted to break stereotypes,” she says.

Payne started her own agency, FAVOR, in 2004. She has served as a diversity fellow at RISD and currently teaches and advises in the graphic design department. She was inducted into the DesignxRI Hall of Fame and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award, the first African American designer to receive the prestigious award. She serves on the national advisory board of Studio 50/50, providing mentorship to Black entrepreneurs. In 2019, she began included by FAVOR to build on her foundation to create creative platforms that support social equity initiatives for a variety of companies. “‘Social equity initiatives’ is not a buzzword for me. It’s how I’ve always viewed the world,” she says.

The idea for included by FAVOR arose after Payne completed her diversity fellowship at RISD and was tapped by RISD to work on initiatives such as the Abled Differently exhibit, which shared the artwork and narratives of students, faculty, staff and alumni living with physical, mental, cognitive or chronic health disabilities as a means to generate dialogue about their experiences and perspectives. “The idea came to me that I would run a business that would impact social equity inclusion for the world,” she says. For the past four years, she’s been focused on the Emmett Till Memory Project, working on it with the

Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Till family. Dr. Dave Tell, a professor at the University of Kansas and the Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, commissioned included by FAVOR to reimagine the Emmett Till Memory Project. For the past two decades Tell has been focused on the legacy of Till’s murder. As a longtime partner with the Till family and the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Tallahatchie County, he has worked to develop resources such as apps and roadside markers that will help elucidate the story for generations to come. He also penned a book in 2019, titled Remembering Emmett Till. Along with Payne’s team of young designers, digital preservation experts, and support through RISD Strategic Partners, they have built an immersive and interactive storytelling platform designed to provoke deep and critical engagement with Till’s legacy.

“[Till’s death] was the catalyst of the Civil Rights Movement. I felt such a mantle to steward the project, to hold the legacy of Mamie Till-Mobley and so many who went before, to somehow bring healing and reconciliation and understanding,” Payne says. As part of the project, she has conducted oral histories with the Till family and taught a workshop at RISD during which the students traveled to Mississippi and visited the locations prominent in Till’s life.

The digital guide uses GPS technology to usher users, both virtually and in person, to the twentythree historical sites in the Mississippi Delta, Chicago and Washington, DC, that are related to the legacy of Till-Mobley and to the life and murder of Till. As each location is visited, a piece of Till’s story unfolds through narratives, archival documents and photographs, encouraging visitors to question the different versions and to think critically about the story being told. The hope is to launch the website on July 25, Till’s birthday, with the app to follow.

Payne feels only gratitude for the opportunity she’s had to share Till’s legacy and shepherd the next generation of creatives to use their talents to shift the conversation and shape their reality. “I feel exceedingly blessed for the types of things that I’ve been able to be connected to in my life. I still have the passion, not only for good design, but for how it impacts a broad spectrum of what’s happening in this world.”

Much of Payne’s work has been about honoring truths, preserving history and pushing forward. So it feels particularly fitting that Black RISD alumni from across the country will gather in Providence to attend the inaugural Black Alumni Reunion in May that she helped chair—an event that will own and celebrate the former students’ past and the work they did then to preserve their future now. She writes of the event, with help from other reunion advisors,

The inaugural Black Alumni Reunion kicked off May 30 with a weekend full of events, including:

Thursday, May 30

6-7:30

A Conversation on Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch

Join Kajette Solomon, the RISD Museum’s SEI Specialist, for a tour of the Nancy Elizabeth Prophet exhibit followed by a panel discussion with panelists Cheryl Miller 71 HD 22, Kelly Walters MFA 15 GD, Sylvia Rodriguez and moderator Alison Croney Moses 06 FD

Location: RISD Museum

Friday, May 31

1-3pm

Black Alumni Welcome Meetup

Celebrate Black alumni and students at an informal welcome. Connect over light refreshments and grab a Black Alumni Reunion swag bag to take home.

Location: Ewing House

4-6:30 pm

Black Biennial Reception

Join us for a closing reception for the RISD Black Biennial, celebrating RISD’s Black artists and designers. The first half of the evening will be a private reception for Black Alumni Reunion attendees and Black Artists and Designers students and a chance to connect with President’s Medal of Honor— recipient Dot Ford and other celebrated Black Alumni.

“Without the resilience of those who came before us, we would not be here today. We are moving through time, rediscovering and projecting new possibilities for our Black alumni. We recognize the labor and discipline it takes to overcome the systematic structures that seek to limit our access and advancement. Owning our legacy preserves our future. This is our history to remember. Our time to redefine.”

During the second part of the evening, the Black Alumni Affinity Group invites all affinity groups and members of the community to join the reception from 5 to 6:30 pm.

Location: Gelman Gallery / Moore Terrace

Saturday, June 1

1:30-4 pm

RISD Black Alumni Family Reunion & Cookout

After Commencement join us for a BBQ-style cookout with food, music by Aarin Clemens, games with prizes and a group photo.

Location: MET Upper Quad

Sunday, June 2

11 am-12:30 pm

Farewell Brunch

Our final event during the RISD Black Alumni Reunion weekend provides an opportunity to hear about the work of two Black alumni and participate in a roundtable discussion to define the “New Space” at RISD.

We will begin with an extension of the Black Alumni Affinity Groups “What Are We Up To?” event series. During the event’s second half, Holistic Student Wellness will lead a roundtable discussion on President William’s initiative, which interrogates the degree to which RISD’s environment— both academic and nonacademic—supports or inhibits the wellness of RISD students.

Location: The MET

RISD alumni question the status quo by “interrogating what is and creating something new.”

To submit class notes for possible publication, please visit: alumni.risd.edu/form-selection

1969

Bruce Helander 69 IL, MFA 72 PT

Collages by Bruce P. Helander 69 IL, MFA 72 PT were exhibited in Change Agents: Women Collectors

Shaping the Art World, a 10th anniversary show at the Southampton Arts Center. Among the collectors who loaned works were Agnes Gund, former MoMA chair; designer Lisa Perry; Beth DeWoody and Jane Holzer, who loaned Helander’s work to the museum for the show.

1974

Susan Griffin 74 PT

Susan Griffin 74 PT was part of the producing team at Houses on the Moon Theater Company, which staged the play Hotel Happy from February 14, 2024–March 3, 2024 at the 122 CC’s Second Floor Theater in New York City. A play about sexual tourism in Colombia and that industry’s close connection to the country’s ongoing armed conflict, Hotel Happy explores US-Colombian relationships using the power of absurdity to reflect how the decimating effects of war displace us all.

1976

Geoffrey Warner 76 PH

The Warner Rocker, a rocking chair by Geoffrey Warner 76 PH, was displayed at the Messler Gallery in Rockport, Maine, earlier this spring as part of Maine Wood 2024. Maine

Wood is a juried, biennial exhibition designed to showcase the breadth, creativity, and excellence of Maine’s woodworking community. The Warner Rocker won the “Best in Furniture” award. The Warner Rocker was designed by Warner, owner of Owl Furniture, in 2019. Owl Furniture uses innovative design and skilled craftsmanship to create beautiful, durable, and ergonomic furniture. The furniture design/build workshop is located in Stonington, Maine.

1982

Ilana Manolson 82 PR

A solo show, Time: in the Mountains, of work by Ilana Manolson 82 PR opened on April 12 at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. Additionally, Manolson has an exhibit entitled The River Between, opening at the Brattleboro Museum in Brattleboro, VT on June 22.

1985

Rae R. Broyles 85 IL Ceres Gallery in New York City presented Seams, a solo exhibition by Atlantabased artist Rae Broyles 85 IL from February 01, 2024–February 24, 2024. Seams features work that addresses how women are truly holding on by a thread to maintain the fabric of our society. Women are struggling to preserve their rights while still allowing themselves to be both fully feminine and yet strong enough to support important societal values. In her seminal work, Sacred and the Thread, Broyles has gathered pieces of nearly forgotten history—old French library cards written in script—which like the physical library itself will soon to be forgotten. The rag-tag skeletal structure of the garment in this work is a clear symbol of the tattered world in which we are currently living.

1987

Farsad R. Labbauf BID 87

Portrait of Joseph (2010) by Farsad R. Labbauf BID 87, in the collection of The Newark Museum of Art, is currently on view in an ongoing exhibition. The painting is from a series of portraits Labbauf made between 2005 to 2015 exploring different configurations of lines to construct his subjects while expressing a state of flux, a transient moment between completion and dissolution.

Hillary Younglove 87 IL

The Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the ARTS in Lubbock, Texas, sponsored its first nationally juried portrait competition and a painting by Hillary Younglove 87 IL was selected and exhibited from December 1, 2023–January 27, 2024. John Sheridan commissioned the painting of his late wife and furniture maker, Carolyn GrewSheridan, in 1997. The painting presents Carolyn with her T-shirt for racial equality and some of her favorite tools and completed work.

1988

Virginia M. Barrett MAT 88

Virginia Barrett MAT 88 is the guest editor of a new anthology series from Jambu Press (San Francisco) that aims to capture some of the ways poets, writers, and visual artists perceive and respond to color. The first, RED: a Hue Are You anthology, was released last fall. The second, BLUE, was published in May, 2024. Barrett’s focus on the interplay between poetry and art has been a lifelong passion, one she continues to explore and share not only as an editor and poet, but as an arts educator, a career she began at RISD in the MAT program. Barrettt’s six books of poetry include Between Looking (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Crossing Haight—San Francisco Poems (Jambu Press, 2018).

1989

Ahní L. Rocheleau

MFA 89 GL

A partial installation by Ahní L. Rocheleau MFA 89 GL, part of a larger work titled Who Decides Who Gets to Di(n)e was exhibited at Santa Fe Visual Arts Gallery from January 16, 2024–February 2, 2024. Recently selected as one of “12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now,” Rocheleau works in installation, performance art, sculpture, painting and curating at the intersection of human/ecosystem relationships and community transformation. Rocheleau teaches public space design and studio arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

1990

Franklin Einspruch 90 IL

In January 2024 the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism announced that Franklin Einspruch 90 IL was awarded one of six inaugural FAIR in the Arts Grants, “established as a fund for independent artists seeking support for professional activities that align with FAIR’s mission of advancing fairness, understanding, and humanity in the arts.” Einspruch’s award was for the Dissident Museum, a digital exhibition project emphasizing artists who are undervalued in the broader cultural climate, to complement the publishing work by his imprint, Dissident Muse.

Eric White 90 IL

Local Programming, a new solo exhibition from LAbased artist Eric White 90 IL, was on view at Grimm Gallery in New York City this spring. Set in the muted haze of the 1970s, Local Programming follows a woman enthralled by television, specifically game shows, whose actions blur the boundary between psychological delusion and metaphysical epiphany.

1991

Liz B. Collins 91 TX, MFA 99 TX

Brand new works by Liz Collins 91 TX / MFA 99 TX are on exhibit the 60th Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, on view at the Giardini and Arsenale in Venice, Italy, through November 24. The theme of this year’s Biennale is “Stranieri Ovunque –Foreigners Everywhere.”

Melissa Conroy 91 PT

The Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, NY, presented works by Melissa Conroy 91 PT and Stephanie Schechter 94 ID in its 3 Americans exhibition. Melissa Conroy combines conceptual, meditative and experiential approaches to thinking about fabrics and fashion using drawing along with knitted textiles. Stephanie Schechter is a painter known for her bold, stylized depictions of signs and architecture.

1992

Kim Kulow-Jones MFA 92 FD

Kim Kulow-Jones MFA 92 FD recently had a work included in Celebration of the Book, an exhibition at Santa Fe Community College in Santa Fe, NM. The wide-ranging show included many interpretations of books focusing on themes such as structure and concept.

1994

Stephanie Schechter 94 ID

Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts in Binghamton, New York, exhibited new paintings by Stephanie Schechter 94 ID this spring in its experimental Project Space gallery. The exhibit featured some of Schechter’s new nature-inspired abstract paintings. Known for her photorealistic oil paintings of signs and architecture, Schechter recently began to explore nature as a subject.

2000

Jo M. Davis 00 IL

An exhibition of artworks by Jo M. Davis 00 IL, Pathways and Formations, was on view through March 30 at Curio Gallery and Art Supply in Lancaster, PA. Work from three series was on view —the Walls and Formation series featuring watercolors and mixed media on paper, the Neural Pathways series featuring mixed media on paper and Running Blind, an oil on panel painting.

2004

Samantha L. Bittman 04 TX

Various Small Fires, a gallery in Seoul, South Korea, presented On Pattern, the first solo exhibition for New York-based artist Samantha Bittman 04 TX from January 13, 2024–March 2, 2024. Over the last fifteen years, Bittman has developed an idiosyncratic weaving and painting practice inspired by the mathematical structures that undergird the natural, man-made, and digital worlds. Her hand-woven and painted textiles emerged from an early interest in representing the natural world and mathematical patterns, like Fibonacci spirals. Over time, Bittman’s work has evolved to emphasize this interest in pattern and simple mathematics, as required to structure weaving, as a subject in itself.

2006

Helen Lee MFA 06 GL

Helen Lee MFA 06 GL has been named a 2024 United States Artists Fellow. This year’s 50 awardees engage us in a collective responsibility to imagine and invest in our future. As an artist, designer and educator, Lee explores language and diasporic identity through glass. Her studio practice is informed by her trades as a glassblower and graphic designer.

Monica Ong 06 DM

Monica Ong 06 DM won a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship for her visual poetry. Ong is the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press). Her work has been published in Poetry, Scientific American, The Asian American Literary Review, and is forthcoming in the anthology The Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid Lit Collection (Fonograf Editions). Ong’s visual poetry innovates on text+image to surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. In 2021, Ong founded Proxima Vera, a micropress specializing in fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects, many of which have been acquired by institutional collections and museums worldwide.

2018

Simin Chu MDes 18

Simin Chu MDes 18, LEED AP BD+C was recently promoted to associate at Los Angeles firm CO Architects. Her work on higher education, healthcare, and K-12 projects includes a new medical school for Rutgers University that will be a hub for innovation.

2021

Shani Abass 21 GD “Chronic(ling) Pain” aka “sentoms,” an undergraduate thesis project by Shani Abass 21 GD, recently won two International Design Awards for Mobile/Web Application (Gold) and Interface Design (Bronze). The ongoing project is focused on the development of editable, multimedia icons that help individuals with unexplained chronic pain describe their symptoms more effectively, leading to more accurate diagnoses and effective treatment plans.

2023

Michael Farris BArch 23

Michael Farris recently organized and curated Newly Available, an exhibition in Tribeca that featured 20 emerging artists from RISD, Yale School of Art, and the Cooper Union—all of whom graduated in the last few years. These painters explore boundaryshattering mediums and techniques, experimenting with scope, scale, color and pattern and united by an unwavering dedication to their craft.

2024 Alumni Award Recipients

Emerging Leader Award

The Emerging Leader Award recognizes alumni of the past ten years who have made significant contributions to their profession and/or community and have helped to create new fields of study or contributed to fundamental change in their area of practice.

Hanson Cheng BArch 16 London, England

Co-Founder

The Tyre Collective

RISD Serves Award

The RISD Serves Award recognizes alumni who have achieved distinction through significant contributions and voluntary service, improving the lives of others over a sustained period of time.

Hanson Cheng is an entrepreneur and interdisciplinary designer whose innovative work promotes sustainability, health and well-being. His designs range from market-ready products like responsive garments that prevent injuries to speculative research and design on synthetic biological systems that can power the aircraft of the future. Through his clean-tech startup, The Tyre Collective, Cheng is working to address the secondlargest pollutant in our oceans after single-use plastic: microplastics from vehicle tires. The Tyre Collective has produced a device that captures plastic and rubber particles from tires at the source, preventing them from polluting the environment and allowing them to be processed into new products.

Art + Design Educator Award

The RISD Art + Design Educator Award recognizes alumni who demonstrate exceptional skills as an educator or a clear commitment to the field of art education, and are recognized by their peers and students as having shown those qualities that most encourage students to learn and thrive creatively.

Moon Jung Jang MFA 08 GD Athens, GA

Associate Professor of Graphic Design

Lamar Dodd School of Art University of Georgia

Moon Jung Jang has developed a unique creative culture centered on graphic design. At the University of Georgia, she established core graphic design courses, including the firstyear seminar Color Design in Building Abstract Narratives, as well as an experimental design lab, C-U-B-E, that functions as a dedicated study and gallery space. From participating in the University Special Collections Libraries’ Faculty Teaching Fellows program, where she used archival materials to help students explore graphic design problems and the impact of visual communication design, to guiding undergraduates through events hosted by the Atlanta chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Jang has prioritized creative development opportunities for her students.

Gail Ahlers 85 JM Pawtucket, RI

Founder The Empowerment Factory

Gail Ahlers is a designer, artist and educator who maintains a fine arts practice and business while serving low-income youth through The Empowerment Factory. A sculptor with expertise in precious metals, Ahlers crafts custom works of art, commemorative gifts and merit awards through her company, Ahlers Designs. In 2014, she founded The Empowerment Factory, a nonprofit that offers classes and events for K-8 students— with a focus on underserved communities and students from Title 1 schools—in Providence, Pawtucket and Central Falls. Through afterschool and summer programs focusing on literacy, art and social-emotional learning, Ahlers’ organization helps students develop creativity, self-esteem and civic pride.

Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf Visionary Award

This award is the highest award by the RISD Alumni Association and honors Helen Metcalf, the founder of RISD, for her visionary spirit and civic generosity. The award recognizes alumni who have achieved outstanding distinction in their life’s work in a professional field, or in community, public or humanitarian service.

Elizabeth Whelan 91 TX Brooklin, ME

Founder And Principal Elizabeth Whelan Design

Elizabeth Whelan is an acclaimed designer and leader in the field of woven fabrics. Known for her emphasis on experimentation and her commitment to weighing performance, aesthetics and function equally, Whelan has partnered with clients across multiple industries and won numerous national and international awards for her innovative work. Her textiles are currently produced on four continents and sold globally, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Past and present clients and collaborators include the Advanced Future Fabrics of America (AFFOA), Nike, Knoll, Tumi and Spinneybeck. Whelan’s process, which begins with curiosity, exemplifies the RISD ethos and yields highly functional and aesthetically beautiful textiles.

In the Sandbox

RISD students enrich Founders Day 2024.

This year’s Founders Day celebrations included “Founders Sandbox,” a day-long event which took place on March 23 in Prov Wash, and engaged students with lively panel discussions, a student initiative showcase and a “makeathon” competition.

The day “originated 100 percent” from the students, says Mighty Wanitprapha 24 GD, co-president of E’Ship, a RISD-student-led creative entrepreneurship organization. “We wanted to make this a very large collaborative project centered on the theme of social innovation—how we can create socially just projects or startups or ventures that can impact the local and global community.” Wanitprapha planned Founders Sandbox with Manna Patiparnprechavut 25 GD, Sage Lou 24 ID and Nicole Lee 24 GD in collaboration with RISD’s Alumni + Family Relations Office.

Two student-moderated panel discussions kicked off the day, the first, moderated by Sage Lou, who is co-president of RISD IDSA, an official student chapter of the Industrial Design Society of America that focuses on connecting students to the professional world. Ashley Axios 08 GD, creative director for the Obama White House and co-owner of design studio Coforma, shared the stage with Max Frieder 12 PT, founder of Artolution, an organization that empowers local artists in conflict-affected areas. A second panel—featuring Ryan Cunningham 02 FAV and David Lee 00 GD—focused on how to engage creatively with community members.

Throughout the day attendees browsed a showcase of socially related student projects organized in collaboration with XR Hub, a student

organization interested in MR, VR and AR technology. Patiparnprechavut described one project as a “comprehensive but also emotional virtual journey through all the galleries of RISD Museum.”

The Prov Wash basement was a hub of activity, too, with students taking part in a “one for all” themed makeathon competition. The idea, says Nicole Lee 24 GD, who is co-president of RISD IDSA, was to provide “an opportunity for students to form groups, ideate and research, design and prototype solutions focusing on the idea of community engagement and addressing the unique challenges that diverse communities face.”

The student contestants were encouraged to pop in and out of the panel discussions happening upstairs, and mentors in turn would visit the basement to give feedback and support to the teams, which, says Lee, created “a really fun back and forth interaction.”

First place went to a team that designed a food truck concept to bridge connections between the Brown and RISD communities, based on the idea that if a RISD student and a Brown student visited the food truck together, they would be given free food. Cash prizes were awarded for the top three projects through the EShip Opportunity Fund (a subset of the RISD Fund). “It really fits in with the entire theme of everyone coming together for this one RISD day to celebrate new and ongoing ideas from students and alumni,” says Wanitprapha. “I think it was a good mashup of every positive thing in the RISD community.”

Baruch David Kirshenbaum

Art Historian, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Art History at Rhode Island School of Design.

Baruch David Kirschenbaum died on January 30, 2024 at his home in Providence, Rhode Island. Born November 27, 1931 into inauspicious circumstances in New York City, he led a remarkable life. Growing up on New York City’s West Side during the depression and war years, his early life was formed by the determination to better his circumstances. In 1948 he met the brilliant Blossom Steinberg. They married in 1951 and together they pursued their academic lives. Barry, as he was known, was an admittedly indifferent student in grade and high school. He worked at a variety of jobs throughout his younger life: at a NYC newspaper stand, a drugstore soda fountain, pick-up jobs on the docks, a dairy farm in New England, in the shrimp industry in Florida, a muck farm in Wisconsin and driving cab. He was drafted into the Marine Corps during the Korean War. After discharge from the Marines at the rank of sergeant, with the aid of the GI Bill, he attended Hunter College in New York City, graduating Summa cum Laude with a degree in History and Art History in 1957. He was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Hunter College and awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He went on to attend graduate school at Harvard University, receiving an M.A. in Art History in 1959 and Ph.D. in Art History in 1966. With their three children born in Boston, and with Blossom’s support, in 1962 Barry began commuting to Rhode Island School of Design, where he ultimately taught for almost 40 years.

Over the course of these RISD years, in many settings, an extraordinary mix of artists and colleagues gathered often for parties and work collaborations. It was a powerful life-affirming scene. During his faculty tenure, he was twice the Director of RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome, Italy; he served terms as Dean of the Liberal Arts Division, as its Head of the Department of Art History and Chair of the RISD Faculty Meetings. He loved teaching at RISD and had the respect and affection of generations of art and design students. His engaging teaching style often included current music on a “boom box” along with masterful “slide shows”. His various courses and memorable large-scale lectures to each year of RISD freshman foundation students elicited thoughtprovoking notions about the impact of art in society. He published two books and many scholarly articles during his career. The Religious and Historical Paintings of Jan Steen was published in 1977. It remains a definitive study on the subject of Steen’s religious work. Slippage, a collection of poems composed during his retirement, was published in 2016.

He volunteered at Amos House shelter in Providence, at the Rhode Island Free Clinic and taught adult education classes in art history at various venues in the Providence area. His knack for connecting with others crossed cultures, class, gender and societal norms. He could communicate with everyone he encountered. Charming, eloquent, streetwise and curious, he was always interested in what others were engaged with.

Baruch and Elizabeth Greenwell Grossman were a couple for many cherished years. Elizabeth taught architectural history at RISD and survives him with a heart full of memories. They treasured their life together at homes in Providence and Westport, Massachusetts. Their beloved “Shack” on Cadman’s Neck was the perfect perch where he regularly marveled at the views over the Westport River. There, family and friends would gather for great feasts and quiet moments on the porch, fishing and boating on the river, and hard-fought games of croquet. His grandchildren Joshua and Julia remember especially that he taught them to drive a stick shift in the parking lot of Horseneck Beach. A loving and most reassuring father, his guidance remains lasting and embedded. He is survived by three children: Jennet Kirschenbaum of Providence, Rhode Island, Abram Kirschenbaum of Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, and Helena Kirschenbaum of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts and was adored by his grandchildren, Joshua and Julia Kirschenbaum.

Saturday, June 1 11am–5pm

Celebrate Commencement and Reunion Weekend with unique, handmade fine art and design works by nearly 120 RISD alumni artists.

Benefit Street (between Waterman & Hopkins Streets), Providence, RI

With 41 regional clubs from New York City to Hong Kong and 21 affinity groups, your RISD community is always there for you. Alumni clubs and groups host exhibitions and studio visits, social events, community service days and more.

Wherever

Volunteers make these groups possible. Join, lead or start something new by visiting alumni.risd.edu/connect or contacting alumni@risd.edu.

Rain or shine

Photo by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH

Dot Ford

Awarded President’s Medal of Honor.

On Friday, May 31 during the closing of the Black Biennial Show, at the Gelman Gallery, Dorothy “Dot” Ford will be honored with the President’s Medal of Honor for her work advocating for RISD students of color. The rarely granted award recognizes individuals who have distinguished themselves through civic engagement, advocacy, philanthropy, professional excellence and significant contributions to their fields of endeavor.

From 1973 until her retirement in 2000, Ford served as the coordinator of RISD’s Minority Affairs/Third World Office where she championed the principles of social equity long before language like diversity and inclusion were regularly spoken. Her work ultimately built the foundation for RISD’s current Social Equity and Inclusion plan, Project Thrive, and other initiatives that continue to support and amplify students of color on campus today. It is because of her tireless efforts that alums of color had the ability to persist and prosper to their full potential.

As President Williams said in her honor letter to Ford, “At root and most simply, your love for them changed lives.”

Membership

Is For Everyone

Are you a RISD grad within ten years of graduation, an artist living in Rhode Island or a newly naturalized U.S. citizen? Your RISD Museum membership is on us!

Are you an alum from 2014 or earlier or a RISD friend? Become a member to support community programs, receive invitations to special events and enjoy reciprocal membership at museums around the country.

Join today for unlimited admissions at risdmuseum.org/membership.

Photo by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH

RISD Fund

RISD students build on tradition to create something entirely new. They are in their studios and in their communities; they are today’s learners and tomorrow’s vanguard of art and design. They are curious, creative, experimental and bold.

The RISD Fund is with them at every step, from first-year studios to senior shows.

Make your gift today and help support students with scholarships and funds for materials, travel, internships and more.

give.risd.edu

give.risd.edu/magazine

Photo by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH

Photo by Gian Villarruel MArch 18

Skull and Bones

An illustrator finds inspiration in biodiversity.

When Nellie Geraghty-Scharf MFA 24 IL walks around RISD, sometimes she carries a skull. One day, it was the skull of a Sitka black-tailed deer that the former farm hand was planning to sketch.

As part of a Voices of the Wilderness artists residency she attended last summer in the Bernoff Wilderness in Alaska, Geraghty-Scharf assisted scientists with field work such as observing spawning salmon. Through the residency, she is illustrating a poster with intricate drawings of the skulls of various wildlife—sea otter, beaver, porcupine and the Sitka black-tailed deer, to name a few, all found in what

is the largest temperate rainforest in the world. When completed, she’ll donate the poster to the Sitka Conservation Society. Motivated by the intricacies of small-scale, biodiverse agriculture, she earned a NOAA fellowship where after leaving RISD she’ll be part of an interdisciplinary group addressing ecological issues, and will produce artistic work in response to a specific concern or challenge presented by NOAA. “I’m obsessed with the fact that in order for a new life to form everything has to die and decompose into the soil that is made up from dinosaur bones, cells, and blood.”

A simple plan can make a world of a difference

Paul Harvey 52 GD* attended RISD for just two years, but felt called to connect young people with opportunities. During his long career as a commercial artist, he decided to leave RISD in his will. While he was not wealthy, he managed to do something extraordinary—his scholarship fund is one of the top ten largest at RISD. Now, every year, a talented student is able to meet their creative potential at RISD via a Paul Harvey Scholarship.

Do you want to help sustain RISD’s future and inspire the next generation of creative leaders? No matter your circumstances, planned giving empowers you to make a significant and lasting impact on the college and/or museum.

The Jesse + Helen Rowe Metcalf Society, named in honor of two of RISD’s founders, is a community of donors who have demonstrated their generosity and commitment to RISD by incorporating the college and/or museum into their estate plans. Join us today!

From bequests to beneficiary designations to gifts that pay you income, RISD’s Planned Giving team will help you find the way of giving that is right for you. Reach out today— we are here to help!

Rebecca Dupras Senior Planned Giving Officer

401 427-3151

rdupras@risd.edu

Photos by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH

Amy Duffell Senior Planned Giving Officer

401 277-4698

aduffell@risd.edu

Rhode Island School of Design 20 Washington Place Providence, RI 02903

RISD’s Gelman Gallery housed Sonder: The Black Biennial, a multidisciplinary exhibition bringing together Black artists from RISD and the surrounding community. Amadi Williams 25 PT and Isaiah “Prophet” Raines 25 SC curated the exhibition, building on the themes of access and unity introduced in the first Black Biennial in 2022. The exhibition ran from April 18 to June 2 with a closing reception held over Commencement & Reunion Weekend. For more information, see page four and risd.edu/news/blackbiennial2024

A view inside the gallery with a large-scale painting by co-curator Amadi Williams.

Photo by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH