RISD Alumni Magazine Winter 2024

Home Jane Kim paints murals outside Yosemite to honor the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation RISD Alumni Magazine Winter 2024

Contents

Miami Art Week, the Somerson Sustainability Innovation Fund supports new projects, RISD joins the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s Terra Carta Design Lab, Nancy Prophet at the museum, Paint Miami pink, RISD Taxidermy Club and UN phone booths

Hannah Carlson, senior lecturer, Apparel Design, talks pockets

AI fashion with Leanne Luce 13 AD

Visionaire magazine collection lands at the Fleet Library

One Beautiful Thing: Calico wallpaper

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson 08 FAV illustrates the new Barracoon: Adapted for Young Readers

On the Street: RISD Brand

Features

Of the Time

Get to know five recent RISD graduates whose careers are on the rise.

Deep Space

RISD industrial designers at NASA—and in the private sector— gear up for the new space race.

Home

Artist Jane Kim 03 PT paints murals outside Yosemite to honor the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation.

Wavespace

From a Google collaboration to a show in Saudi Arabia, Lachlan Turczan 15 FAV shapes light with water.

Living the Dream

The New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast 77 PT plumbs the absurdities of everyday life, sleeping and awake.

Jane Kim in front of the mural she recently painted in Mariposa, California

Photo by Helder Mira

Jane Kim and members of her team muraling

Photo by Helder Mira

RISD Alumni Magazine

Editor Edward Weinman

Associate Editor

Abby Bielagus

Senior Writer

Judy Hill

Manager, Institutional Advancement Operations

Rebecca Henríquez

Design

Once–Future Office

Contributing Writers

Kira Goldenberg

Tom Kertscher

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

Rey Londres 22 PH

Ryan Cunningham 02 FAV

Terry Beaty 84 GL

Tino Chow 09 ID

Todd Babick 92 ID

RISD Alumni Magazine Vol. 1 Issue 3, Winter 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). Printed by Lane Press in Burlington, Vermont.

President’s Letter

Taking the Lead: RISD at the Vanguard

From the 34 women who founded the institution before women had the right to vote to the students who are the first in their families to attend college, boldness, confidence and risk taking has always characterized RISD. In this issue, we feature news, stories, profiles and Q&As highlighting how our students, alums and faculty have used those traits to fuel their tremendous creativity in the classroom and beyond.

In their classrooms and studios, RISD students learn cutting edge techniques using state-of-the-art equipment and the latest technology, all of which informs their thinking and making. They also learn how to ask stronger, more incisive questions and to iterate, based on those questions, to identify better solutions. As graduates, our alums apply those skills confidently and across disciplines to create work that addresses the cultural touchpoints, social issues and societal challenges of our time.

Learn more about how AI is changing the fashion industry in a Q&A with writer and author Leanne Luce 13 AD. A feature about Roz Chast 77 PT, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, shares how she recently turned the hilarious whimsy of her internal dreamworld into a graphic novel titled I Must be Dreaming (Bloomsbury Publishing 2023). And Senior lecturer in Apparel Design Hannah Carlson discusses how the presence of pockets (or lack thereof) on women’s clothing is influenced by gender politics, power and privilege.

I am consistently struck by the determination and inventiveness of RISD alumni. Their unique perspectives ensure that they are constantly in motion and engaging the world in refreshing, even surprising ways. For example, RISD’s longtime connection to NASA has allowed students to explore the edges of form and fabrication in human-centered design. Through working with engineers and designers from Johnson Space Center students have developed innovative concepts for future spacecraft. Read more about how a group of alums is currently working with NASA to design habitats for living on the moon. We also share a story on how Lachlan Turczan 15 FAV creates immersive art experiences by exploring the qualities of water, light and sound, and profile five recent alums—Drew Dodge 22 PT, Sasha Gordon 20 PT, Qualeasha Wood 19 PR, Sahara Clemons 23 AP, Zoë Pulley MFA 23 GD—whose careers are on the rise. Our cover story follows Jane Kim 03 PT to Mariposa, California, where she painted two murals in collaboration with the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation to depict a new vision of the tribe, which has been fighting to gain federal recognition since 1982.

Whether collaborating with global corporations, grappling with the ethical use of emerging technologies, or working in their studios to push the boundaries of medium and genre, RISD graduates have an outsized impact in the world. Their original thinking and skillful making put them—and our institution—at the leading edge of art and design. I hope their stories inspire you to continue to explore and innovate in your endeavors

—Crystal Williams, RISD President

Destination Miami

RISD alums were showing their work all over town at Miami Art Week.

With more than 50 alums and current students exhibiting work during 2023 Miami Art Week—at Art Basel Miami Beach, Design Miami and host of concurrent shows around town—RISD artists and designers made quite a splash in Florida’s arts and culture hub this past December.

Among the RISD artists who made the trip to South Florida were graduate students and recent alums Samuel Aguirre MFA 24 FD, Jesse Groom MFA 23 FD, Yuxuan Huang MFA 23 FD, Felicia Neuhof MArch 24, and Lisa Sacco MFA 23 FD.

The five RISD designers were invited to exhibit pieces in Alcova Miami, a curated design exhibition that took over the iconic 1950s-era Selina Gold Dust Motel on Biscayne Boulevard for several days in early December.

This was the first edition of Alcova outside of Italy, where the influential design fair has previously taken place during Milan Design Week in historically significant urban settings, including a slaughterhouse and a factory used for baking panettone.

For Alcova Miami, the RISD designers fabricated an exhibition of nine objects titled Momentum, which

included fresh takes on familiar objects such as an aluminum welded lamp, a steel-and-glass sculpture, a biomaterial-based shelf, and two chairs, one entirely compostable.

RISD President Crystal Williams also traveled to Miami in December, with new RISD Museum Director Tsugumi Maki and other faculty and staff, to visit Art Week exhibits and to meet with alums.

While in the city, Williams moderated a Design Miami panel conversation that brought together women in design—educators, practitioners, gallerists, and more—who prioritize community building and collaboration. The discussion drew on the participants' experience of doing the work to shed light on the tools and models women have to support each other in the field.

Williams also led an Art Basel Miami Beach Conversation that brought together María Magdalena Campos-Pons—a multidisciplinary artist who is considered a key figure among Cuban artists who found their voice in post revolutionary Cuba—and Franklin Sirmans, director of Pérez Art Museum in downtown Miami.

Photo courtesy of the Selina Gold Dust Motel

Fresh Takes on Sustainability

A new RISD fund spurs imaginative solutions.

RISD’s new Somerson Sustainability Innovation Fund (SSIF) supported four research projects in the 2023–24 academic year that address issues of composting, land regeneration, climate data and sustainable communities.

Named after President Emerita Rosanne Somerson 76 ID and endowed by alum and former trustee Sarah Sharpe 94 GD, the fund provides substantial grants for transformative research initiatives that combine art and design thinking with a focus on sustainability. The fund is particularly interested in projects that involve collaborations with external community partners.

Among those selected this year, alums Maxwell Fertik 23 ID and Erika Kane 22 IS received grants for three design experiments that envision Japanese Knotweed as a central resource of the present and future. The researchers proposed putting the nonnative, invasive plant to use as bioremediation rafts, as a bioplywood and as a wine.

Terra Carta

Can design thinking help solve the climate crisis?

RISD has joined the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s Terra Carta Design Lab (TCDL) to find student- and recent alum-led, high-impact solutions to the dire challenges of the climate crisis.

This global competition unites the creativity of the design community and the power of private-sector supporters to bolster innovative, scalable solutions and highlight the urgent need to focus on collaboration between art, science, design and engineering.

The competition was launched in 2021 by His Majesty King Charles III, in his former role as the Prince of Wales, and British-American designer Sir Jony Ive HD 09, in partnership with London’s Royal College of Art.

This year, the competition includes four design schools from across the world. RISD joins as the first and only U.S. school to participate, along with the Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation (UAE), the National Institute of Design (India) and the Royal College of Art (UK).

Two projects from RISD will each be awarded £100,000 total in funding, as well as the opportunity to be mentored by Sir Jony Ive, who is best known

A project headed up by student Yizhou Tan BArch 24 bridges computer science, design and urban studies to develop a community-based interactive installation in Somerville, Massachusetts, that enables local tenants to visualize the corporate landlord network in the neighborhood.

Associate Professor of Graphic Design Anastasiia Raina garnered support for a project she has been working on with Soeun Bae 23 SC, Maggie Chang 23 SC and Gabriel Drozdov MFA 24 that creates a network of DIY satellite stations throughout the state of Rhode Island. Using affordable amateur radio technologies and open-source software, the network aims to promote access to climate change education, help build resilient infrastructure and foster community innovation.

Laura Briggs BArch 82 also received funding for a system of composting hubs for the city of Providence that include space for material experimentation and on-site testing of plastic alternatives.

for his work at Apple Inc. and currently serves as chancellor of the Royal College of Art, and the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s network to help scale their ideas and bring them to market.

“This global effort is an incredible opportunity for RISD students and alumni to apply the questionbased inquiry approach they learn at RISD,” said RISD President Crystal Williams. “This is also an important opportunity to help elevate and include voices and people who have been historically underrepresented in conversations about sustainability and the climate crisis.

“Including a range of perspectives and experiences—particularly from those most immediately affected by these challenges—catalyzes new insights, new discoveries and new solutions that benefit us all. I look forward to seeing the results from the RISD community and our global counterparts.”

RISD’s semifinalists, chosen by a panel of experts within RISD, were announced in early February.

A top-10 RISD shortlist will be submitted to the global judging panel, led by Sir Jony Ive, in June, with the winning designs to be announced this fall.

Into the Spotlight

The RISD Museum presents work by Nancy Prophet.

When Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch opened at RISD Museum in February, many visitors encountered the artist’s work for the first time. Despite being in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and having shown in numerous Paris salons in the 1920s, Prophet—likely the first woman of color to graduate from RISD, in 1918—remains largely unrecognized.

Dominic Molon, for one, thinks that’s a shame. “As a sculptor, she occupies this really interesting space between classicism and modernism,” says Molon, the interim chief curator and Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art, who put together the exhibit (and accompanying catalog) with Sarah Ganz Blythe, deputy director of exhibitions, education and programs, and Kajette Solomon, museum social equity and inclusion specialist.

“There’s something very timeless about her work, which is why it holds up and is so strangely contemporary from today’s perspective,” says Molon. Due to racial and gender bias, he says, Prophet always operated on the margins of art “and is richly deserving of reconsideration and her time in the limelight.”

The exhibit, on view through August 4, 2024, includes sculptures, documentary photographs, correspondence and diary entries. Four works are from RISD Museum’s own collection, while the rest are on loan from museums including the Whitney and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.

While Prophet, whose father was Narragansett and mother Black, never garnered national attention, she and her legacy have been wholeheartedly supported by constituents within the African American and Indigenous communities in Providence. Artist Simone Leigh has also embraced Prophet as a kindred spirit and inspiring mentor. Her 2020 film Conspiracy (with Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich) is part of the exhibit.

Molon is also excited to share some of Prophet’s carving tools. “RISD has such a rigorous approach to teaching artists how to make things, and craft is so baked into the DNA of the school,” he says, “having those implements will just tie everything together.”

exhibition was made possible with funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the RISD Museum Associates.

Photo courtesy of RISD Museum

Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Discontent, 1920s. Gift of Miss Eleanor Green

and Miss Ellen D. Sharpe

This

Miami Color Theory

Photos by Laura Paresky Gould

Words by Edward Weinman

In the early stages of the COVID 19 pandemic, some of us became bakers, runners, Netflix bingers. Laura Paresky Gould MAT 91 began looking at the colors of Miami, where the graphic designer, animator, photographer and fine artist currently lives, for inspiration.

Walking the streets with her iPhone, Gould documented the bright hues and shades that dominate the architecture and sky of this subtropical city. This photographic trip through the streets of Miami turned into a meditative pursuit.

“When something grabs my attention, I direct all my focus on that one object—whether it’s a shadow, a colorful wall, an interesting shape or line—I can get lost making a composition until it feels just right. When I am shooting, for me, photography can be meditation with my eyes open,” she says.

“The rest of the world, and any thoughts about the past or the future, is tuned out and my whole world is the light, colors, shapes and shadows in front of me. Plus, whatever I see is only there for one moment. If I come back the next day at the same time, the sky, the color and the light, are different. Photography

is both meditative and grounding. It celebrates one moment in time, capturing it forever.”

The “forever” images she took became a hit on Instagram, and followers began flooding Gould’s IG account to the point where @miamicolortheory was born, and was awarded “Best Instagram” in the Best of Miami 2022 issue of The Miami New Times Apple’s Instagram also featured a selection of Gould’s sophisticated images on multiple occasions.

Then came a book, Seeing Differently: Miami Color Theory (Tra Publishing), and a video series, and she began showing her vision of Miami in multiple art shows. During Art Basel in Miami last December, installations at the Royal Palm South Beach displayed the ideas behind Seeing Differently. Gould was part of the No Vacancy exhibition, which selected 12 artists and paired them with 12 area hotels to create custom installations for the public during Miami Art Week. She also showed a video display at Pérez Art Museum Miami along with her book signing.

“My book is based on a video series that I created for the Bass Museum of Art,” she says. “The series teaches minimal photography, seven elements of art

Laura Paresky Gould says photography is meditation with your eyes open.

and five composition techniques. There is also the meditative aspect, and it teaches about the practice of seeing, and visual awareness, calming the mind, focused attention, process over product and the concept of one moment in time.”

Gould was surprised by the reaction to Seeing Differently. For some, it’s about the design elements featured in the photography, others focused on the meditative quality of the images, the minimalist photographs leading to mindfulness. “And others like the book as a visual catalog of Miami. I wasn’t expecting that but it makes sense.”

Gould told Miami New Times that she shot “Miami like it was a flea market of color.”

A happy accident also helped spark Gould’s ode to Miami. In December of 2020, Adobe announced the removal of Flash from all browsers. “That meant my website, the online archive of all my favorite creative projects in animation, photography, and logo design, would no longer be accessible,” Gould says.

Before it was gone, she took screenshots of the pages of her website, and created an Instagram account of the Flash site (@vintageflashsite) and

realized that she was still connected with the style of photography she shot from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

“During that time, I was using Fuji Velvia ASA 50 35mm slide film. I decided I would start shooting minimal images again and I was driving in Wynwood (a neighborhood in Miami known for its many murals), and I didn’t have my camera with me, but I did have my iPhone. So I shot images of colorful buildings. I was blown away by the saturated and vibrant colors and how beautifully the iPhone captured them.”

She started posting one photo a day to Instagram and within about six weeks a magazine in Italy, FrizziFrizzi, contacted her and wrote an article about the series.

“Oftentimes, I would find something visually interesting to shoot, and then learn more about the architect or be introduced to a new mural artist’s work. Daily errands turned into an adventure. There is always something interesting to look at. And beauty is everywhere.”

Stuff It

The Taxidermy Club connects students to the natural world.

As a freshman, Wendy Tang 26 ID was bewildered to learn that the Nature Lab, acclaimed for housing over 100,000 specimens, including taxidermy and bones, didn’t offer classes on the art of preserving and stuffing animals. But the lab hasn’t been able to find a person who is both licensed and permitted to teach taxidermy. So Tang decided to take matters into his own hands.

Photo by Mekala Kumar 27 RISD Alumni Magazine RISD News

He started a club and papered the campus with flyers. It wasn’t long before two like-minded souls, Sebastian Bateman 25 PR and Flora Damon 24 FD, reached out. And now, one year later, the Taxidermy Club meets every Saturday for two hours in the BioDesign Makerspace and boasts around 30 to 40 members, including students from Brown University.

The three founders, at first glance, don’t appear to have much in common. Tang was born in China. He’s been to taxidermy school and feels like he was born to do it. “That might sound creepy to other people, but I love old things. Taxidermy brings me closer to history,” he says.

Bateman was born in the Bay Area of California, slightly north of Silicon Valley. Ironically, his interest

in taxidermy stems from his interest in digital culture. “Digital culture causes me to be disconnected from the physical, natural world. Whenever I encounter a taxidermy specimen it’s a powerful experience— it’s a confrontation with death,” he says.

Damon was born in Oahu, Hawaii. She grew up in a hunting culture, where holiday meals consisted of the meat her family caught. She was taught how to strip animals and preserve their pelts and skins. The first fish she ever caught was taxidermied because it was a protected species. “I learned to appreciate and value life. We used every part of the animal possible that we killed, and we didn’t take more than we needed,” she says. She now does a lot of traditional Hawaiian feather work, and skeletal articulation is a personal hobby.

Each member brings their particular expertise to the club. Bateman knows about wet preservation, and Tang is skilled at mounting, making the molds and stretching skin. Damon likes to teach people “the values of knowing the life of the animal,” she says. “I teach about going into nature, sketching, making dioramas and knowing about the animal’s behavior.”

The meetings, much like the art of taxidermy itself, range from genial to gory. Some Saturdays the founders give lectures and host speakers, such as when Brown philosophy graduate student Patrick McKee spoke and asked the club, “Can you harm a dead animal?”

Other days they host workshops, such as wilderness walks where the members sketch and build scenery sets where their taxidermied creature will live out forever. Or they collect insects for a hands-on, bug-pinning workshop led by Ben Gagliardi, Nature Lab biologist & collections manager. Some days they get out and have some fun, like when they took a field trip to see the Body Worlds exhibit in Boston and observed humans and animals displayed without skin in order to learn about the structure of the musculature and nervous system.

As one can imagine, some meetings are more well attended than others. “We have a couple of members who come consistently, but there are all different skill levels and stomach abilities. Not all of the activities are PG. You need a little bit more of a stomach for the really grody stuff, and some people don’t have the

right frame of mind for it,” says Damon. Although members can pick and choose what level of gore to embrace, there is one caveat—everyone must learn the entirety of the topic at hand and attend the lecture, training and workshop. No one is allowed to go from zero to skin stretching.

But the real R-rated stuff will come later, once the club has figured out the facilities for storage. And also once the members have been taught skeletal articulation and how to skin and pelt.

The emphasis on ethics is a cornerstone of the club. All three of the founders are committed to taxidermy as an art form and educational tool, and vehemently reject the idea of animals as trophies, a literal brag on a wall.

“We want to focus on the animal’s behaviors and why it’s important to taxidermy a particular species and preserve it,” explains Damon. “Most people only associate taxidermy with creepy animals staring at you in a museum. We want people to learn more about it and be able to look really closely at a species they’re unfamiliar with. It’s a wonderful craft when done ethically and correctly.”

Students working in the Nature Lab

Photo by Matthew Clowney

(Not) Phoning It In

RISD designs phone booths for the UN.

Words by Judy Hill

Platia

An idea for a class can come from anywhere. Inspiration hit for Tom Weis, RISD associate professor of Industrial Design, while he was working on a project for the United Nations with his company, Altimeter Design Group.

One of his UN clients told him about the vintage phone booths that used to populate the New York City headquarters. Almost all had been removed from the building over the years, but four remained, and Weis was asked to bring them back to life so that they could be incorporated into a newly renovated office space. Weis thought this sounded like a valuable learning experience for his graduate-level Industrial Design students.

“The academic calendar doesn’t always sync with the rest of the world,” though, says Weis, who discovered to his chagrin that merely penetrating the UN’s formidable layers of security to remove the phone booths from the building and U-Haul them back to RISD’s woodshop took half of the spring semester. The design brief was a little fuzzy too, so by the time the class ended in May, they were just getting into the meat of the work.

Loath to abandon the project, Weis enlisted the help of two graduate students who had taken the class, as well as two Industrial Design alums, to pitch in over the summer.

Weis’s UN client had proposed that the booths exemplify four stages of innovation: inspiration, experimentation, listening and collaboration. For the “inspiration” booth, the design team took their cue from RISD’s Nature Lab, creating a tactile mood board with swatches of stone, shell, fabric and wood, and wallpaper sun-printed with leaves and grasses. In the “experimentation” booth, wooden puzzle pieces on a magnetic wall invite the occupant to slot them together in different patterns.

For the “listening” theme, the student designers envisioned a meditative space sheathed in soft, upholstered fabric. The fourth booth explores the idea of “collaboration” with a light box featuring cutout notches into which visitors can insert acrylic building blocks to create an endless variety of three-dimensional shapes.

Before the team could bring their vision for the booths to life, the vintage structures had to be

Photo courtesy of Maria Alexia

gutted and cleaned. “They were really filthy,” says Chris Baker MID 25 ID, “with gum under all of the seats, dents and scratches, not super sound structurally and with the original wiring from the 1950s.”

Beyond the challenge of designing something within a 24-inch container, the group also had to contend with the realities of working on a clientbased project. “At RISD, obviously people are very creative and imaginative and a lot of ideas are very out of the box,” says Baker. “But when you have a client and strict parameters, you run into very real boundaries and obstacles.”

Color decisions were an ongoing part of the design debate, says Maria Alexia Platia 17 ID, now a graduate student at the Pratt Institute. “They were really trying to push for a palette that fit within the colors of the UN,” she says. “We knew the space they were going in was pretty chromatically dull, with dark-blue carpets. We wanted to bring in something fresh.”

Specifically, recalls Anna Glass MID 24 ID, they planned for one of the booths to lean heavily into green. “We’d send a color palette and they’d say, ‘We don’t like this green.’ Why not? ‘It’s too green.’”

That impasse stalled the designers for a while until, on Weis’s urging, they decided to just start building. “Tom was good at encouraging us to stick to our guns and advocate for our ideas,” says Glass. “So, we used green, but we adjusted it a bit, and they liked it.” It was a question, she says, of finding the balance between “how much feedback to take and how much to trust your gut.”

For Isaiah Aladejobi MID 23 ID, the project was especially meaningful since two of the booths—those with the puzzle pieces and the light box—were drawn from his thesis project, for which he had created a building language influenced by being both firstgeneration and Nigerian American.

Aladejobi hopes the booths, which the team installed on-site in September, will serve as a “tool to encourage more creativity” and also a “transformative space for individuals to escape to.”

Glass anticipates that as “the only pop of color” they will be a spectacle, but she also hopes that people will “touch things, maybe charge their phones, use them for FaceTime, or just check some emails and sit in a weird spot for a little bit.”

Deep Pockets

In her new book, Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close, RISD Apparel Design lecturer Hannah Carlson delves into the social and political history of pockets—a tale of gender, politics, sexuality, power, privacy and privilege.

Judy Hill: How did you go about your research?

Hannah Carlson: From dress history, we know some of the basics about pockets—evidence of their origins shows up in 15th-century tailor’s invoices—but nothing about what they might mean to people. So, I looked to literature. Pocket references are surprisingly evocative in Elizabethan drama: Shakespeare suggests Caesar’s outsize power by noting he “carries the moon in his pocket.” That’s when I knew I should cast a wider net. Royal edicts, dictionaries of criminal argot, etiquette guides followed. Once I started it was hard to find some sphere that did not mention pockets.

When did women start to get upset about not having pockets?

It became a point of dissension around 1800, when fashion got really narrow—think Jane Austen’s Empire dresses—and women’s pockets, which were previously tie-on pockets worn under the skirts, emerged and became the first fashion handbags. Some people love handbags, but it takes psychic energy to keep track of a handbag. There were women who just said, “I refuse to carry a handbag.”

Once women recognize that there’s a problem it becomes the focus of a simmering battle of the sexes. You start to see complaints in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and The New York Times. This lack of pockets even became a point of contention in the suffrage movement: the demand for the vote and demands for pockets were sometimes made together.

Is misogyny to blame?

It’s never stated out loud, but beauty and aesthetics are foregrounded and function is not. If you go to the children’s section of any major brand today and take a look at the girls’ shorts, the pockets are tiny. You go to the boys’ section and it’s like, “ That kid is ready to do anything.”

There are some amazing designers today who have made a commitment to including pockets, but it’s still buyer beware because they’re not standardized for women’s wear. The expectation is women have handbags and don’t need pockets. And so, we still don’t have pocket equity.

Why are we so interested in the contents of people’s pockets?

We’re curious because we think it’s going to give us some inside intel. We search the pockets of the dead, of our lovers, of our children to find out where they’ve been, to find out their secrets.

We also carry our hands in our pockets. What is significant about that?

It’s considered rude to put your hands in your pockets because it gestures to the body. What is your hand doing there? And fashion picks it up, because fashion loves to mock the proprieties of the day.

It’s also about being easy and natural with your body. That’s where it moves from being louche to sexy and casual.

What do you want readers to take away from your book?

That this isn’t just a book about apparel. It’s equally about material culture. Pockets are a reflection, a microcosm, of ourselves.

AI Fashion

Since graduating from RISD, Leanne Luce 13 AD has run The Fashion Robot blog, which was recognized by Vogue and Glossy, started an accessories brand for cryptocurrency hardware, and written a book, Artificial Intelligence for Fashion: How AI is Revolutionizing the Fashion Industry.

Leanne Luce photo by Donna Pradas

Abby Bielagus: How has AI technology evolved in the fashion industry since you wrote your book?

Leanne Luce: Something cool that I was playing with last week is called role prompting. You can have a large language model take on a specific role and you’ll get responses more closely related to the domain of that role. So if you prompt it to be [editor in chief of American Vogue] Anna Wintour and ask for outfit ideas, it will give you a very different response than if you just ask for outfit ideas without any context or background.

I also think we’re going to see more emerge with image models, especially things like virtual try-on. In the past, you needed to scan a photo of your body and have 3D point clouds [sets of data points in a three-dimensional coordinate system], and then the 3D renderings of garments would go on your body. With the new generative AI models, there’s a scrappier way to transfer the image of a garment onto an image of a human and merge those images.

Is it scary that these generative AI models have gotten so sophisticated?

It happened so much faster than most people thought was possible. I don’t see it as scary, I see it as totally exciting, but it definitely comes with good things and bad things

What would you say are the bad things?

I don’t love to speculate about the bad things, but with any technology, we have to consider bad actors—malicious humans trying to use new tools to hurt other humans. While there are many protections discussed and in place, we also have to worry about the biases present in training data. When you think about the web data that models are trained on, contributions to the open web are not perfectly representative of the world.

One prediction you made in your book is the concept that AI could sync with our calendars and suggest an outfit for an upcoming holiday party or board meeting.

It’s funny to hear you say that because I wrote that book five years ago, and I still think about this. I think it would be really amazing if a product could use machine-learning to make outfit suggestions. I feel like every girl born in the late ’80s, early ’90s has this dream of having the closet from Clueless. But no one is going to photograph every garment in their closet to be able to make this possible.

It would be so fun if AI could go through a virtual closet and tell you what to get rid of and then automatically sync up with ThredUp or Poshmark to resell them.

Now you’re building products with me!

Have you seen any advancements with AI and trend forecasting?

Trend forecasting is interesting because if you over-index on historical data, the trend every year is going to be blue jeans and white Ts. Traditional AI has struggled with predicting trends like this. There was one funny example where people tried to train a machine-learning model to predict fashion buying. It was January and the AI kept saying to buy Christmas pajamas because they were trending the month prior.

The Visionaries

The entire collection of acclaimed Visionaire magazine lands at the Fleet Library.

Words by Abby Bielagus

Greg Foley 91 AP had no idea he was creating a cultural time capsule.

In the beginning, he was merely a recent RISD graduate making something cool with friends around a dining room table in New York City. But the difference between that art project and the many others born of burgeoning talent and youthful confidence is that the friends happened to be magazine maven Stephen Gan, model Cecilia Dean and makeup artist extraordinaire James Kaliardos.

And the product became Visionaire magazine, the barrier-breaking, trend-setting, publishing marvel that combined fine art, fashion, commerce and brand identity with its first issue in April 1991.

Early this year, Foley gifted all 69 issues of Visionaire to RISD’s Fleet Library.

“It is clear now, looking at the impossibly brilliant and creative pieces that redefined the meaning of the medium, that Foley played an integral part in a defining moment for magazines,” says Margot Nishimura, RISD’s dean of libraries.

“RISD’s Fleet Library now has every issue of Visionaire magazine.”

The first chapter of this story of luck, talent and fearlessness began in Austin, where Foley grew up. The summer before he was to set off for RISD he attended a friend’s party and saw issues of Details magazine scattered about. This was when Details was still an insider’s guide to the New York City art and fashion scene, when its tagline was still “We go out so you don’t have to.” Foley flipped through the pages detailing the city’s electrifying nightlife scene and thought “Wow, someday.”

As an avid follower of fashion and pop culture who read magazines like The Face, ID and Arena, Foley decided to major in fashion. He became great friends with fellow apparel design major, Karen Park 90 AP, who went on to marry the renowned artist and designer Jean-Paul Goude. She had interned at Details and suggested that Foley do the same.

“I went to work for editor Stephen Gan. I did all the clothing returns from shoots. I modeled in photo shoots. Gan and I created our own special effects for layouts before Photoshop existed. I hand-cut little silhouettes of Polaroid prints and Gan rephotographed them on pins above backgrounds,” he says.

The first twenty issues of Visionaire maagzine.

Photo by Nicholas Alan Cope

Photos by Greg Foley

Foley kept in touch with Gan and would stay with him and his then partner, Kaliardos, when he visited New York City. So when Details was bought by Condé Nast in 1990 and Gan got a severance, he started his own magazine and enlisted Foley to help while he was still a senior at RISD. “They made this thing on the fly. We started something that was really off kilter and free form. And then it snowballed,” Foley says.

The launch of Visionaire was announced in a brief item in The New York Times and $40 subscriptions were offered for the quarterly publication. It was also available at Rizzoli bookstores. It quickly sold out. The fashion sect knew Gan and he knew all the top players. He enlisted highly regarded photographers Bill Cunningham, Steven Meisel and Bruce Weber as initial contributors—as well as other photographers who weren’t yet the icons they are today, but were quickly climbing. “We were the first people in the States to publish Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot. Inez and Vinoodh and Mario Testino and Steven Klein worked with us. All of these photographers that are now the top photographers in the world were just getting established,” says Foley.

The team made another issue and another, each redefining what a magazine could be, including the seven-foot-tall “Larger Than Life” issue. Ideas were fueled by sophisticated concepts based on a production technique or a print technique and propelled by basic notions like color. Issue 7 was all black. Issue 11 was all white and inkless and embossed.

By about the tenth issue the Visionaire crew had found a place to house their offices, a little mews building—a former carriage house—that was behind their printer in the SoHo neighborhood. They started doing brand work, ad campaigns and logo design, and consulting on the side to help fund the operation. Visionaire also started to work with major brands who would help pay for the production of forthcoming issues.

“There was no advertising, but Gan was canny enough to take sponsorships that helped increase our budget, which he did very quietly at first. I think the eighth issue was sponsored by Esprit, although we didn’t call it out,” says Foley.

The budget kept increasing as more and more brands decided to join ranks with the magazine.

Issue

"Forever" transformed 2D photographs into indestructible

3D embossed metal plates.

Photo by Shu Akashi

Sponsorships became louder, like when Louis Vuitton designed a satchel for issue 18 and Levi’s wrapped issue 31 in a denim jacket.

Sometimes the brands came to Visionaire wanting their eyeballs and their audience, and other times the team went to brands to help them execute an inkling of an idea. “We had the dream of doing a scent issue and we were able to partner with International Flavors and Fragrances who could make the fragrances and we could bring the print to it. We knew that the best collaborations were the ones where we could use our strengths and rely on them for theirs,” says Foley. This particular issue, number 42, had 21 tiny vials of perfume included, and each scent was paired with images and a theme, such as “cold” and “success.”

The successful partnerships Gan and his team brokered ironically allowed for an independence rarely experienced in print publications. Visionaire was able to exist with total creative freedom and to offer that same luxury to all of its contributors. “We could tell people, ‘Whatever you want to give us, we can publish. This is noncommercial and nobody will tell you no,’” says Foley.

As the issues became more intricate and elaborate, the timeline became more fuzzy. No longer was Visionaire on any sort of dictated schedule. It had turned into limited edition publishing. In 1999, Gan started V magazine. If Visionaire was couture, this was the ready-to-wear collection.

In 2003, Gan launched VMan magazine. At this point, Foley had found his footing in a myriad of creative positions from album cover design to jewelry design to starting fashion collectives to fine art to branding work to children’s book author to teacher. He was made a partner at V magazine and VMan

“We were helping to establish a new form of media collaboration. When I look back, Visionaire bridged the gap between fine art and fashion. Gan always included a fantastical mix of high, low, drag, fashion and art, and we did it at the highest possible level,” says Foley.

Foley now lives back in Austin with his wife and three children. He and his wife founded the body care brand Esker and Foley’s latest graphic novel for children, Dex Dingo: World's Best Greatest Ever Inventor, is out this September.

Photo by Dan Forbes

One Beautiful Thing

Each issue we shine the light on one exquisite object selected from the vast collection of RISD alumni. This winter we bring you art disguised as wallpaper by Calico.

Photo courtesy of Calico

Inspired by marbleized Turkish papers discovered in a Lower East Side curiosity shop, husband and wife Nick and Rachel Cope 03 SC experimented with making their own wallpaper and Calico was born in 2013. Today, their hand-made art wallpaper adorns the walls of homes across the globe. They have a staff of twenty-plus, a showroom in Manhattan and are revered power players in the design industry. This print, Midnight from the Lunaris collection, based on photography of moonscapes and uninhabited space, was one of their first.

Of the Time

In just five short years, these alumni have long lists of accomplishments.

Words by Abby Bielagus

Qualeasha Wood 19 PR

Who gets the right to be audacious? Is it textile artist Qualeasha Wood, a Black daughter of military vets from the Jersey Shore? Is she audacious when she weaves self-portraiture, religious iconography and digital motifs onto large tapestries, a medium almost solely reserved to tell the tales of white men, or is she just being narcissistic? “I’m challenging who gets to control the narrative of audacity as something that is risk-taking and bold. A lot of my white peers get the grace; I was asked how dare I insert myself so directly into the canon,” says Wood.

She didn’t set out to disrupt the status quo. In fact, as an artistic kid who used to draw portraits on wood panels in ballpoint pen in a town she describes as “pinnacle gentrification,” she often felt like she existed in two worlds and just wanted to fit in somewhere. She couldn’t imagine a place in her parents’ military world, so she applied to art school. RISD, with a less than 10% Black student population, didn’t prove to be an ideal fit either, at first. “I felt isolated. I was trying to make the work and fix the environment so that I could get all the benefits that I was promised when attending a top art institution,” she says. It was in the fixing that she began to realize that perhaps it was better to stand out than to fit in. “I told myself that I was going to make it count. I couldn’t afford to be closed off, I couldn’t afford not to stand out. I taught myself over time to fight for what I deserved and to not allow myself to be made small,” she says.

Wood ditched illustration. “I realized I didn’t want to be a perfect draftsman. I wanted to do something that was fine art and loose,” she says. A phrase came into her head and took roots; “God is young, hot, Ebony, and she’s on the internet.” A phrase born from feeling othered that Wood felt needed to be heard. She silkscreened it, letterpressed it, etched it, printed it and tried to make it work as a photograph. It wasn’t until Wood saw a photo blanket at her grandmother’s house that she realized an image could be woven.

Working in Jacquard weaving was scary at first. “But that’s what made it feel worth doing,” she says. “I always felt like the work wouldn’t be taken seriously until it was woven. I don’t want it to be a fantasy, I want it to be real. Jacquard wovens make the work competitive,” she continues.

Wood was exhibiting her tapestries before she graduated from RISD and signed with her gallery, Kendra Jayne Patrick, soon after. Her work is in the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. She’s exhibited at Art Basel as well as multiple shows around the world and has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Essence magazine, Harper’s Bazaar and W magazine, just to name a few.

Top Error 404, 2022 Photo by the artist

Bottom Self-portrait photo by the artist

Drew Dodge 22 PT

Drew Dodge’s mischievous paintings depict figures that are part human, part beast and part cuddly cartoon, often set against a Southwestern backdrop. There is humor to them, as well as darkness. They are playful, sexual, fantastical and real. The inherent duality in them also resides within their creator. Dodge talks in a soft-spoken, slow cadence, but never for one second are you to believe he is bashful.

Dodge came to RISD via Arizona. A creative soul, he had illustrated, sculpted and done video work but had never painted before art school. “I was drawn to the Painting department because it was really open. Painting didn’t have to be defined as oil on canvas, and at the time I wanted to do textiles, sculpture, drawing, video art,” he says. He took full advantage of the tolerance and experimented.

It wasn’t until his junior year that he decided to focus. “The summer before my junior year, I started to think about what I wanted to do once I got back to school. I wanted to take all of my ideas and keep them in a flat rectangle. I wanted to represent my ideas uniformly and cohesively,” says Dodge. It was in the narrowing that he found his colossal voice, spoken through the unique figure that routinely appears in his work. This creature had never before been imagined by Dodge. “Before I started painting, my work was more critical. I was interested in the American landscape, consumerism, production, structures and rules, and how sexuality fits into all that.

Once I turned to painting, I became more sensitive and the work became more personal. I started telling my narrative through the figure,”he says.

As he showed his story through a fantastical creature on canvas in large, dense oil paintings, he took to Instagram to represent himself. Jonathan Hoyt, the partner and director of the Steve Turner gallery saw Dodge’s work and reached out. After a phone call, the gallery was ready to sign. “They could sense that I was serious and ready to work on a solo show,” says Dodge. A similar situation happened with the 1969 Gallery, which signed Dodge after one meeting.

Since graduation, he spent a little over a year in a residency with the Silver Arts Project and he now has a piece in the collection at Miami’s Institute of Contemporary Art. He has many more shows planned including one with the Semiose gallery in Paris, and another at the Untitled Art Fair, in Miami.

Top Victory, 2023. Photo by Max Yawney

Bottom Photo of the artist by Daniel Rampulla

Sasha Gordon 20 PT

When Sasha Gordon talks about her paintings, they seem to be made not of oil and canvas but of memories, sweat, tears and laughter. “All of the paintings I make take the life out of me. I’m very immersed in them,” she says. And to her they aren’t just materials waiting to be manipulated; they’re an outlet for her to examine past trauma, a mirror to hold up to herself and the world, a teacher that hones her craft, and a studio partner. “Painting is an isolating practice,” says Gordon: alone time with just her canvases, to which, once complete, she says a sad farewell. “It’s like I’m giving away my babies or my limbs," she says.

As her career has progressed, the goodbye has gotten easier. Gordon feels fortunate that some of her pieces are now in museums (Hammer Museum, Miami Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Houston Museum of Fine Arts) that she can visit. And her practice has evolved into one that is a bit freer, a bit looser, so she doesn’t hold on so tightly.

When she first arrived at RISD she was “reflecting a lot about my past experiences. I was learning about myself and feeling more whole as a person. I started painting a lot about identity and how I fit in certain spaces. Sometimes I would spend an entire semester on one or two paintings because I was so obsessive with detail and making things realistic. My professors were always pushing me to be looser,” Gordon says. It wasn’t until she went to Rome with the European Honors Program her junior year that she was able to pick up her head and look around. “I was with only twenty other students and I was able to not worry so much about how my art was perceived. I let go. I let parts of the painting breathe,” she says.

She returned to RISD and began to collage together this new style with her old one. “I was attentive to detail but in a different way. There was more variation. I paid more attention to textures and gestures,” she says. She also began to realize that a hyper-realistic painting is “really fast to read because everything is right in front of you. It can be interesting but not interactive. I want my paintings to read slowly, and in order to do that, things have to be told in a different way,” she says.

Gordon’s unique style caught the attention of art collector Jonathan Travis, who connected her to Matthew Brown, her current gallery. She started showing in her senior year and hasn’t stopped since. She’s also been featured in numerous publications, including Vogue, and attended the Met Gala and this past December, her solo show Surrogate Self opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami. There was a line down the block to get inside.

Top The Knight, 2023. Photo by Zachary Balber

Middle Sore Loser, 2021. Photo by Ed Mumford

Bottom Photo of the artist by William Jess Laird

Sahara Clemons 23 AP

Sahara Clemons has been sewing since she was seven. She “appreciates both the technical and the conceptual aspects” of apparel design. “How do you reach your audience, how do you fit a garment, how do you create a concept that feels relatable but also marketable?” she asks. These challenges within the medium spark her creativity. “There’s always a necessary challenge with your craft that makes you keep pursuing it,” says Clemons.

If challenges keep her creating, then it was no surprise that Clemons was chosen as the one senior to represent RISD in the Supima Design Competition last year. Launched in 2008, the competition introduces the next generation of designers to the fashion industry with a New York Fashion Week runway show judged by a prestigious panel from fashion and media. The winner not only gets bragging rights and invaluable exposure, but a $10,000 cash prize.

Clemons was tasked with creating a five-look evening wear collection in three months using five different Supima fabrics (denim, velvet, cotton, twill jersey and shirting), one fabric per look. The limits emboldened her to rise. “The restraints allowed me to get more creative with the textures and ultimately how the designs came to be,” she says.

Her collection, called Skin Deep, was inspired by her battle with eczema. “I had a really hard time growing into adulthood, my feminization and sensuality as a woman, especially when it came to building relationships and developing a sense of intimacy. The collection speaks to that desire for connection and the fear to do so because of your relationship with your body. Each of the looks represents a metamorphosis, a healing journey. The first is covered up and conservative, while the last look mimics cysts and bumps, and the beauty in that,” she says.

Although she didn’t win, Clemons certainly didn’t lose. After the competition, one of her looks was showcased during Paris Fashion Week for the Supima Design Lab, which features both emerging and established designers from around the world. Clemons wore an outfit she designed, thereby actually presenting two looks to the esteemed guests. These opportunities she does not take lightly. “It’s so difficult in this industry to get the opportunity to create your own body of work. I’m proud of what I made. And I’m feeling optimistic about how all of this will be a stepping stone for future endeavors,” she says.

Her next step is a move to Los Angeles, and then eventually she hopes to land in New York City. “I want to start my own ready-to-wear brand. But right now I’m taking the steps to build those resources in order to do that,” says Clemons. Rest assured, any hurdles she faces will only make her jump that much higher.

Top A look from Skin Deep. Courtesy of Supima

Bottom Photo of the artist, courtesy of Supima

Of the Time

Zoë Pulley MFA 23 GD

In many ways Zoë Pulley’s journey started at the end. She held a BFA in fashion design from Virginia Commonwealth University and was working in activewear in New York City. “But everything I was doing outside of work aligned with what is now my practice. I had a jewelry line called Grand Sands, named after my grandma, and I was bookmaking to tell stories through various materials, mostly textiles. I hit a point where my day job wasn’t serving me and I wondered what was next,” she says.

She turned to her father for advice. “He always steers the ship,” she says. But unlike many parents, he wasn’t steering toward a stable job. A writer and journalist, he didn’t push Pulley to security but toward her heart. “I’ve been very fortunate, especially as a Black maker, to have parents who have been so supportive and pushed me to really hone the skills I naturally have,” she says. Her father encouraged Pulley to go back to school for her MFA. She applied and was accepted to multiple programs but RISD offered her the Society of Presidential Fellowship.

Once she was a student again, she decided to major in graphic design, again with encouragement from her father. “A lot of the visual narratives I created incorporated typography. My father saw graphic design for me as a conceptual means to an art practice,” she says. Luckily, it was also a major that easily translates into a job: she was hired as a designer at Wolff Olins right out of school after winning the Graduate Graphic Designer to Watch award from GDUSA. But after working full-time for only a couple of months, Pulley learned she had been accepted as an artist in residence for one year at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She didn’t need her father’s advice this time. She left the stable job in favor of art.

The Studio Museum residency culminates in a show that will be hosted at MoMA PS1 as the Studio Museum undergoes renovations. Although Pulley hesitates to get specific about what she’s working on, she says that her interest in textiles and telling stories persists. “I always find myself going back to fabric. A lot of women in my family have sewn, and I have a natural inclination toward it,” she says. Her grandmother often comes up in her work. “Me and her have a lot of parallels. She studied fashion design and is very much a maker’s maker. We work in a similar way and I’ve always been able to talk to her; she just gets it. Plus, she’s lived an incredible life and I’ve learned so much from her. I need to honor this person and give them their flowers while they’re still here,” she says.

Top A Quilt For – , 2021. Photo by Dougal Hencken

Middle moving on up (?), 2022. Photo by Dougal Hencken

Bottom Photo of the artist by Nik Muka

Deep Space

RISD industrial designers at NASA—and in the private sector—gear up for the new space race.

Words by Judy Hill

LIFE IN SPACE IS HARD. There’s the moon dust, jagged as glass and capable of tearing fabric to shreds. Then there are the routine 500-degree temperature swings and the solar flares that can send deadly waves of radiation straight through the sturdiest space module. The challenges of negotiating microgravity aren’t exactly a walk in the park either. This much we know from Apollo 13

More surprising to Molly Harwood 16 ID, when she was working as deputy manager of NASA’s Soft Goods Lab, were stories astronauts told her about other cosmic hardships.

“One astronaut said that when he returned to Earth it felt like a huge visual relief to just look at the carpet in his house,” she says, “because it was a plain, solid color compared to the walls of the International Space Station that are covered in stuff, with wires floating everywhere.” In fact, she says, astronauts on the ISS are constantly losing things— shoes, laptops, tools—because of the sheer “visual noise” of the environment.

Minimizing optical clutter is the kind of design challenge Harwood and other RISD alums working in space-related design love to grapple with. They feel well equipped to do so thanks in part to a robust series of programs and collaborations with NASA that RISD has developed over the past three decades.

With plans afoot to send astronauts back to the lunar surface—through NASA’s Artemis mission —and a longer-term vision to establish a sustained human presence on the moon as a training ground for exploration of Mars, interest in the space program is high, with speculation abounding around the likely time frame for when—not if—the first subdivision on the moon will be built.

One of the biggest challenges of designing for space, says Harwood, is that you are “designing everything for this person in an environment that you’ve never experienced and probably will never experience, and so it’s very hard to empathize with them fully.” Listening to astronauts talk about living in space helps, as do tests in similar environments (Hawaii, Iceland, New Mexico), but nothing can compare to the actual experience.

Deep space has captured our imaginations of late with rovers crawling across Mars and the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, but down in lower

orbit there has been a continual human presence on the International Space Station for the last two decades. In other words, plenty of work out there for industrial designers.

Two NASA labs in particular—the Center for Design & Space Architecture and the Soft Goods Lab—both located at the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, have hired RISD alumni as industrial designers. RISD grads have also forged careers at private space agencies such as SpaceX, Axiom Space and Blue Origin.

Skye Ray 16 ID, design lead at NASA’s Soft Goods Lab, has worked on a slew of items for the interior of the Orion capsule, the spacecraft that is scheduled to carry four crew members, including the first Black astronaut and the first woman, into deep space in 2026 (last year, Orion completed an unmanned flight around the moon). Ray and his team have designed everything from acoustic covers to absorb the constant sound of machinery—living in space is extremely loud—to the seat cushions the astronauts will sit on during launch to the kits and bags they will use during their time in the module. He also works on spacesuits and thermal blankets and recently designed a cover for a new type of camera astronauts will use during their explorations on the moon.

“You have to really think about how every single thing gets used,” Ray says, “not only because it’ll float away but also because your user is probably using their other hand to hold on to something or use a tool. They’re not there to interface with your beautifully designed object. They don’t really care about your object. They have a job to do. It’s our job to make their interaction with our objects as simple as possible.”

Lily Douglas 20 ID, an industrial designer in NASA’s Center for Design & Space Architecture, works on the layout of future habitats and rovers, many on decades-long timescales.

Typically, a project will start with a set of requirements—how many people need to fit in the module, how long they will be living in it, what kind of research they will be doing, what equipment they will need. Douglas and her colleagues generate a design and a more granular list of requirements and mock up prototypes, at which point the project gets contracted to a vendor such as Northrop Grumman

“They have a job to do. It's our job to make their interaction with our objects as simple as possible.”

Skye Ray

or SpaceX. After that, Douglas may help to flesh out the design further, as she is currently doing with HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost), a module where astronauts will live and do research while visiting Gateway, the space station that will orbit the moon as part of the Artemis mission.

A self-confessed space nerd from an early age, Douglas first dipped her toe into aerospace design in a Design for Extreme Environments studio course at RISD taught by Industrial Design professor and NASA coordinator Michael Lye, who also helps place students in NASA summer internships and advises the RISD Rover Team that competes in the annual NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge, in Huntsville, Alabama.

Designers face a long list of constraints that demand creative solutions when designing for space. Gravity, or the lack of it, is the most obvious. “When we’re designing habitats for the lunar surface,” Douglas says, “we need to take into account that people are going to be moving very differently. You have to worry about whether they are going to bash their heads in a tight environment.” Handles sticking out into aisles are a potential hazard, because even though a person on Earth may be able to just walk from one place to another, a person on the moon, she says, might need to bounce, bunny hop or jump from one side to the other.

“We thought a lot about disabled populations in Michael’s Design for Extreme Environments studio,” says Douglas. “The philosophy being that if you consciously design for the least-abled people, you make a better design for everybody.” And in a way, she says, astronauts are similar to persons with disabilities in that they have specific challenges in the ways they navigate space. “They don’t have gravity to anchor them to a specific workstation,” she says, “so they need the ability to hook their feet around something, and our job is to make that foot hook as comfortable and as secure for them as possible.” Astronauts on the ISS frequently develop rough calluses on the tops of their feet from hooking them underneath the handrails.

The really big deal for life on the moon that everyone is trying to figure out how to cope with is regolith, otherwise known as moon dust. Unlike Earth dust, which gets eroded by wind and water and has smooth

edges, regolith has nothing to wear it down and is spiky and sharp. When it gets inside fabric (on a spacesuit for example, as happened during Apollo’s moon-landing missions) it rubs against itself and can tear the material to pieces. If it finds its way into mechanical systems, they will seize and bind. It clings to every surface.

Custom fabrics that can resist being ripped up by regolith will be needed for future NASA missions where astronauts will spend sustained periods on the moon looking for water. Extremely thick and hard to puncture, the fabric presents its own set of challenges when it comes to sewing, says Ray in the Soft Goods Lab. “It’s a learning curve.”

ENGINEERS HAVE BEEN DESIGNING components for space travel for decades, so what do industrial designers, and RISD-trained industrial designers in particular, add to the field?

“Engineering teams tend to be very deterministic,” says Robert Howard, co-lead of NASA’s Center for Design and Space Architecture, who has overseen many RISD interns in his lab, a fair number of whom have been hired to work fulltime. “Engineering’s bias is toward addressing and overcoming the forces of nature, so they’re going to want to look at pressures, gravities, temperatures—they’ll think from that vantage point. Whereas the industrial designers are coming from more of an experiential perspective.”

Ultimately, what industrial designers bring to human spaceflight, says Howard, is humanity. “That’s the value of their contribution. They remind us that it’s not just about balancing equations, it’s about bringing humanity.”

While engineers can sometimes lose track of the fact that they’re designing for “human beings who are going to be inside this tin can,” says Michael Lye, RISD students “are much more focused on trying to design an experience and a life for the people inside of the spacecraft or habitat.”

Knowing how to build things makes them better designers for space, too, says Howard, because “if you’ve built things, you understand how the physical hardware actually works.” A medical workstation mock-up built for Howard by Carl Conlee 05 ID and Evan Twyford 05 ID almost two decades ago is still in use today as part of HERA (Human Exploration

Research Analog), a three-story space-simulation habitat at the Johnson Space Center, where astronauts live and work in isolation for 45 days to study confinement and remote conditions.

Figuring out a way to make life in space feel “more comfortable, more habitable, more aesthetically pleasing, more psychologically pleasing” is inspiring to RISD alumni like Ray.

“If you look inside a lot of the habitats that are currently in use, like the ISS, they’re pretty stark,” he says. “As we start to look at habitats where people would be spending a lot more time, a Mars habitat for example, we have to think about how we could change the design of objects not only to be lighter in weight but also to feel more personal and pleasing to an individual.”

Tweaks could include padding the walls to deaden the sound of all the machinery and ventilation, angling walls to reduce echoes, or designing fabric sling seats in recreation areas, like hammocks that “hug” the body and help people feel more relaxed.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make a difference, says Bryan Cloyd, who was an industrial designer in NASA’s Habitability Design Center and now develops products at Apple. He helped the team working on a new toilet design for the International Space Station.

“If you’ve ever seen a photo of the old ISS toilet, it’s archaic to say the least,” he says. “You have all these little tiny buttons that do different things and are labeled really small. I worked with them to make that a lot more user-friendly and approachable.”

From her experience working at NASA on both habitats and soft goods, Harwood (who now works as an industrial designer at Google) says she did come across engineers who paid attention to the nuances of human experience, but she also encountered “plenty who were like, ‘Here’s a box. I’ve made the box. It meets the requirements. I did the thing. We’re done.’”

As well as having an ingrained sensitivity to the human and holistic experience of everyday objects, Harwood says, industrial designers also believe in the value of sketching and making as ways to think through a problem. “A lot of times engineers go straight to, ‘Here’s my final CAD,’ and I’m like, ‘No, no, we can sketch a little first.’”

Ray says that prototyping can help designers and engineers who have modeled an entire project in CAD. “We’ll make a real-world version and they’ll say, ‘Whoa, I didn’t really understand the scale at all,’ because they had no point of reference in CAD.” By prototyping early on, he says, you can find out what’s wrong with your assumptions and figure out “the hidden gremlins, the unknown unknowns that can turn into huge problems over time.”

IN SUCH A STEM-FOCUSED WORLD

, respect for the role of human-centered design has taken a while to gain traction. When Conlee was hired to join the Habitability Design Center, in 2006, it was “sort of a fledgling group that was being kicked off to really focus on design” in what had been perceived as an engineering development process.

HATCH TO EVA

“It was neat to be a part of something that seemed really big,” says Conlee, “but it could also be frustrating because design wasn’t a high priority for most of the community there.” Conlee thinks there has been an evolving understanding of well-being within NASA. “Back in the ’60s and ’70s, they were recruiting these hard-core military guys to perform missions, and so there was a very binary approach to problem-solving: Does it work or does it not? If the human gets the work done, if the human comes back alive, it works.”

In time, Conlee says, various discomforts bubbled up. “I think the reason anybody cared initially is because people’s performance was measurably worse, and since it was such an investment to get people up there, they figured it’s probably worth being thoughtful about how they experience their environment. When people would come back after doing Hubble telescope or satellite repairs, and their fingers would be raw, with skin coming off, that was pretty clear evidence that some improvements needed to be made to spacesuits, for example.”

Harwood remembers being the first industrial designer hired in the NASA Soft Goods Lab, in 2018.

“Because of the combination of design and the human focus of the objects, it was clear this should be a very industrial-design-friendly space, but we had to work hard to validate our role,” she says. “I lost count of how many times I was called a seamstress or referred to as the ‘64-Crayola-box-set girl,’ who could be relied on to make pretty renderings. I think people’s minds were changed when we produced valuable work and designed solutions for them.”

As the broader commercial sector of human spaceflight gathers momentum, NASA’s Howard sees ever more opportunities for industrial designers to play a key role. “We’re leaving the era where human spaceflight was something that only the government could do. In the future, who knows who’ll be going to space and for what reason? If you have a flight full of billionaires who want to go up to space to play, all of a sudden, things that don’t really matter on a science mission are going to become paramount.”

There are no rooms dedicated to gameplay on the ISS, but a space tourism hotel would likely have just such a facility, muses Howard. Personal grooming might be a priority, too, with workstations devoted to hairstyling and beauty treatments. “When science is the mission, comfort is addressed in the context of enabling the science,” he says, “but for space tourism, customer experience is the mission and part of that experience is comfort and aesthetics.”

And once a sustained presence on the moon is established, wouldn’t it be handy to have someone on-site to make and fix things? That job sounds appealing to Ray. “Obviously, there’s going to be a pilot, people with medical backgrounds, scientists, and that’s all superessential,” he says, “but if designers could design and make solutions in situ, that would be a huge asset for an isolated outpost on another planet.”

Deep Space

Home

Words by Tom Kertscher

Artist Jane Kim paints murals outside Yosemite to honor the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation.

Last autumn, Jane Kim 03 PR painted a mural six blocks away from a house in Mariposa, California, where a sign was affixed to the home that read: “Trump won. I know it. You know it.”

It’s fair to call this Gold Rush town and Yosemite Valley gateway conservative. Mariposa County chose Donald Trump over Joe Biden by 58 percent to 40 percent in the 2020 presidential election, and Trump over Hillary Clinton by 58 percent to 35 percent four years earlier.

Yet certain Mariposa town leaders turned to Kim, a nature-focused San Francisco Bay Area artist, after they won a $951,600 grant from California’s cleanup and beautification program. A collaboration was then formed with Kim, the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation community, the Mariposa County Arts Council and Mariposa County.

What emerged were two Kim-painted murals in downtown Mariposa: one that features the Miwuk word Uuchum, which means “home,” and a smaller mural, Ahumiti, the Miwuk word for “bear.” Both paintings depict a new vision of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation.

The Mariposa-based Native American community, which has been trying since 1982 to gain federal recognition as a Native American tribe, is endemic to Mariposa and Yosemite.

The effort wasn’t without controversy. Some residents wanted the new murals to depict ranching or mining; some argued successfully to keep a downtown mural of a barefoot and bare-chested Native American in front of a tepee.

“You can see the dark and the light side of what public art can be.”

Jane Kim

Sandra Chapman, who serves as chairperson of the Miwuk Nation, laments that the mural stereotypes Native Americans.

“It makes me feel sad that our people have to drive by there and see that ghost of a Native person standing there,” says Chapman, who is 76.

“It’s like, that’s the way they’ve seen us. We were here, but they never saw us. We’ve always been here; we’ll always be here. But when you see something like that—and it doesn’t have any artistry to it, it doesn’t depict our native culture. It doesn’t have any feeling for the Native American people here.”

The mural also reminds her of oppression during her childhood. Chapman recalls that during games of red rover, kids would say, “‘Red rover, red rover, if you’re white come on over.’ I didn’t want to be Indian,” Chapman says.

With Kim’s murals, though, there is now a stark contrast.

“You can see the dark and the light side of what public art can be,” Kim says.

INK DWELL

Kim is the founder of Ink Dwell, a Half Moon Bay studio in California specializing in public installations and environmental campaigns. “We do museumquality work that’s in the public square,” says Thayer Walker, the studio’s cofounder.

Kim’s public arts projects include the Wall of Birds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University, in New York state—a 2,800-square-foot painted mural that depicts the 375 million-year migration

Pages 34–35

Photo by Helder Mira

“ I think what always inevitably comes back to me is just that feeling of, wow, I'm living my best child-little-girl self.”

Jane Kim

of 270 species of birds—and The Migrating Mural, which highlights animals along migration corridors, including the monarch butterfly across North America and bighorn sheep in California.

Art captured Kim’s imagination early during childhood, a fact she reflected on while taking a break from her work in Mariposa in late October. “I think what always inevitably comes back to me is just that feeling of, wow, I’m living my best child-littlegirl self,” she says.

Kim developed a sense of mission for her work while at RISD, which she credits for helping her develop her critical thinking, and later while earning a master’s certificate in science illustration from California State University, Monterey Bay. She says she remained devoted early in her career, even when she struggled and was encouraged to try another path.

“Anytime I was feeling strapped for money starting off, everybody would be like, just get a job,” she recalls. “I’m like, no I can’t just get a job; are you crazy? That would be basically like, I might as well just jump off the bridge if you’re telling me to do that. I think there was always an obvious, almost life-ordeath, ‘I’m doing this.’”

THE CALL FROM MARIPOSA

Mariposa County, which counts some 630 Native Americans among its 17,000 residents, celebrates its gold-mining heritage. The California State Mining and Mineral Museum is on Highway 49. The Mariposa County Visitor Center offers a Gold Mine Escape

Room attraction (visitors solve puzzles before the mine explodes). Just off Highway 140, the Mariposa Museum & History Center celebrates the Gold Rush, though it has a Miwuk wing as well.

A man panning for gold is featured on a mural on the side of the Pizza Factory restaurant downtown, the one some residents fought to preserve. Also shown on the Pizza Factory mural are a California grizzly, an American flag—and, in sepia, the aforementioned barefoot and bare-chested Native American in front of a tepee.

The search for gold during the California Gold Rush of 1849 led to thousands of Miwuk being killed or dying of starvation.

When Mariposa County won the California Department of Transportation grant for its project to upgrade the town’s northern and southern gateways on Highway 120, the areas that became Kim’s two murals were central features.

“I just see public art as foundationally human,” says Ben Goger, a development specialist with Mariposa County who has lived in the county for 40 years. “Just as people have a need for food and people have a need for shelter and people have a need for clean water, people have a need for expression, and it’s often left out of civic planning.”

Goger’s sister, Cara Goger, executive director of the Mariposa Arts Council, was instrumental in choosing Kim to do the murals, largely because of Ink Dwell’s emphasis on nature. They agreed, after stakeholder sessions were held in the community, that the focus would be nature and the Miwuk.

“It made this narrative that surrounds the Miwuk not just historical,” Cara Goger says. “When we think about indigenous cultures, there’s often a lot of erasure that we kind of attach to indigenous communities. But the reality is, indigenous communities are very much woven into contemporary communities today,” Goger says, noting the work the Miwuk is currently engaged in to help mitigate wildfires and restore landscapes.

“The hope is that this artwork celebrates and explores Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation indigenous lifeways, not just in a historical lens, but through a contemporary and even future-facing lens.”

The main mural, about 100 feet long and 20 feet wide, next to the Grizzly Gas station, as mentioned, features the Miwuk word Uuchum (home) and things revered by the Miwuk, including the fanned tail of the Northern flicker, a bird whose features are important in ceremonial regalia; the white mariposa lily; bright-

green bunchgrass; and three coyotes. (Miwuk elders say that in the beginning the Earth was inhabited only by animals and that the coyote created the Miwuk.)

In the background is a map of Mariposa. Kim and a crew of five spent most of October painting it.

The smaller mural, Ahumiti (bear), honors the Miwuk’s reverence for the bear and includes the lily and other flowers in braided grass that “is symbolic of human presence,” Kim says. “We are not separate from nature.” That mural was finished in November; in total, painting the two murals took a little more than six weeks.

“There’s a huge emphasis on the fact that [the Miwuk people] are here; they are present; they are not relics—they are living,” Kim says. The murals are an “amazing opportunity, where I’ve been able to marry cultural and humanitarian subject matter with the natural world in a way that I’ve never had an opportunity to address before.”

Above Sandra Chapman, chairperson of the Miwuk Nation, with Aanthony Lerma, stewardship coordinator.

Photo by Helder Mira

Right

Photo by Helder Mira

IMPORTANCE TO THE MIWUK

The Miwuk Nation is continuing its quest for recognition from the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. A final decision is awaited on the agency’s proposed finding, issued in 2018, to deny the application. The agency says the nation did not meet a requirement that the “predominant portion of the petitioning group comprises a distinct community and has existed as a community from historical times until the present.”

The nation argues that its ancestors signed treaties with the federal government during the Gold Rush, but the treaties “were hidden away and left unratified,” leaving the nation without land. The nation says that being federally recognized as a tribe would give it sovereignty rights and access to health benefits, scholarships and other funding.

Chapman isn’t “hopeful” about the federal government recognizing the Miwuk Nation.

But Kim’s murals bring hope.

“I hope that (non-Miwuk) people see the pride that we have for ourselves,” Chapman says of the murals. “It’s a healing for our people. It’s going to make our people proud.”

Aanthony Lerma, 26, the Miwuk’s stewardship coordinator, says the murals “represent resilience, fortitude and community. The murals show what can happen to a community when we decide to come together to heal traumas from the past.

“The murals helped create a change we’ve been wanting to see in Mariposa for a long time—the change toward being one community.”

Says Kim: “This is home to many people now, and part of it is reminding people that this has always been home to a nation of people that have been pushed out. So, it’s kind of this beautiful full-circle story.”

Members of Kim’s mural crew: Chelsea Roberts, Jolene Russell, Sami Chang, Ellie Gainey and Clay River.

Wavespace

From a Google collaboration to a show in Saudi Arabia, Lachlan Turczan shapes light with water.

Words by Kira Goldenberg

Lachlan Turczan 15 FAV can’t recall how many objects he’s lit on fire.

“I think I was known as the guy who would break shit at school,” says Turczan, who in his art practice explores the optical and sonic properties of water.

An early obsession with manipulating water with sound and light led Turczan to light a subwoofer on fire while at RISD in order to experiment with circuit-bending. This led to a senior thesis project that used unburned subwoofers to vibrate waterfilled vessels, where he projected light reflected off the water onto screens.

“His use of sound waves to generate visual forms in the medium of water created a simultaneous sense of wonder and simplicity,” former RISD professor Daniel Peltz, who was Turczan’s thesis adviser, wrote in an email from a research residency in Benin, West Africa.

“Lachlan was both serious and playful in his approach. He was self-motivated and clearly invested in experimentation,” Peltz remembered.

This experimentation has led Turczan to show his work, in collaboration with Google, at Milan Design Week in 2023, as well as in an exhibition at Saudi Arabia’s light art festival Noor Riyadh.

Turczan entered RISD convinced he was going to be a painter. He’d spent his Southern California childhood doodling and then, with parental encouragement, had focused on art more intently in a specialized high school. When he arrived at RISD in 2011, he navigated the novel New England chill while starting requirements for the school’s painting concentration.

“I was taking painting classes and making a lot of landscape paintings. The paintings were becoming more and more abstract,” he says. “I was really interested in light and color, and atmospheric phenomena and optics.”

Then Turczan’s second-year painting instructor, Patricia Trieb, insightfully introduced him to the Light and Space movement. Developed in the 1960s, movement adherents used light, space and other nontraditional materials to create immersive and innovative sensory experiences. Turczan began to explore works by Light and Space artists like James Turrell, Helen Pashgian and Robert Irwin, whose works all reflected the open-skied sensibilities of

the western United States—specifically, Southern California. Turczan had traveled across the country only to find himself home again, at least conceptually.

“To be clued in to this work felt like a real homecoming to me,” he says. “It was kind of ‘game over’ from there.” He pivoted from his painting practice, which was by then using color to create representations of light, to working with the medium directly: Turczan spent the rest of his time in college experimenting with how to bend—then sculpt, shape and even hear—light.

“I never have the lightning bolt idea. It’s always thinking through my hands,” Turczan says of his approach. “You put in the hours and, out of the chaos, you find something salient.”

His discovery process ultimately included rabbithole excursions into cymatics, which is the study of vibration through liquid, as well as optics, acoustics and hydrodynamics. He did all this under the FAV major, the closest fit available to the direction his art was flowing.

“I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to use water to shape light,” he explains. “Then the question becomes, How do you shape water? I was in these classes where I’d bring the whole class into the closet. I’d have a spotlight shining on a plate of water.”

Ricardo Nagaoka 15 PH watched Turczan’s artistic journey unfold. Turczan’s best friend since their first year, Nagaoka was there when Turczan first started experimenting with light and water (and setting subwoofers ablaze), and he stuck around as the inquiries grew increasingly elaborate.

“He’s a very obsessive person in the most wonderful way,” says Nagaoka, a photographer. “We were just joking about how he has been obsessed with this one phenomenon for the better part of a decade. That’s what it requires to dig deep and find something interesting and new.”

That subwoofer capstone project was the start of a vision of work that has ultimately led Turczan to a degree of artistic success rarely achieved by young artists.

After graduation, Turczan continued to experiment and refine this vision on nights and weekends while supporting himself as a water choreographer at WET Design in Burbank, California, which creates large-scale fountain installations.

“You get in resonance because we are water.”

Ivy Ross

Previous Oceanic Series

Right Wavespace

Then, one fortuitous day, Ivy Ross called. Ross, the vice president of design for hardware products at Google, was looking for an artist to collaborate with for an exhibition at Milan Design Week, the annual design fair attended by over 350,000 people from around the globe. In April 2023, the company was showcasing the design of its latest watch there and, for the third year running, it sought to accompany its own displays with a related art installation. That year’s theme happened to be “shaped by water.”

“We recently launched a watch inspired by water,” Ross says. “By dropping water on a steel plate, it forms this beautiful radius—this bubble or shape— before it breaks, and we used that radius to inform the design of the watch.” Ross wanted to feature an art installation that used cymatics. She initially sought out scientists working in the niche field, only to find that their work lacked aestheticism.

“Then someone on the team sent me a picture of a bowl that Lachlan had made,” Ross says. “I said, ‘Oh my god, that’s beautiful.’ It was pristine and minimal. So I reached out to him entirely blind.”

Turczan, who was in Dubai working on fountain choreography at the time, remembers being stunned by the cold call.

“She was like, ‘I really love your work. Would you like to put this on the world stage?’ I was like, ‘What’s the catch?’ She was like, ‘Well, we’ll fund the work you always wanted to make.’” True to her word, Google set Turczan up with a temporary studio space where he spent over a year, during an Omicronrelated delay, working on Wavespace and Sympathetic Resonance, two installations based on the conceptual vision he first debuted in his senior project.

“We were just blown away at how meticulous he was,” Ross says. “He’s so like-minded to me and my design team in terms of how thoughtful he was with every detail.”

The ultimate installation took up two rooms at Garage 21 in Milan. Viewers lingered among the Sympathetic Resonance exhibit to wait for a turn experiencing Wavespace. The first room featured 11 mirrored bowls of different sizes filled with water that hummed with various vibrational frequencies, creating cymatic patterns on the water’s surface.

“We were afraid people would be bored waiting for ten minutes amongst the bowls, but we couldn’t

pry people away,” Ross says. “You get in resonance because we are water. Your body starts to almost tune to the same frequency as the patterns you’re witnessing.”

Wavespace featured a bowl surrounded by a circle of custom seating, where viewers watched a tenminute performance of water reflections moving to music by Maurice Ravel and Nils Frahm reflected onto the ceiling. Viewers couldn’t get enough of the experience; it was voted one of the top three exhibitions at Milan Design Week.

“We had lines out the door that were about an hour long. Some people came back twice,” Ross says. The consensus was that the exhibits put visitors in such an amazing state of mind that they wanted to experience it again. The exposure Turczan gained from his Google collaboration opened numerous doors to his art. He is working on installing permanent versions of Wavespace at two North American locations, and it was featured in Saudi Arabia’s light art festival Noor Riyadh.

Google “provided me with the jump start I have needed to instigate my artistic career,” he says.

For Turczan, who is now deep into experimenting with columns of laser light after a decade focused on LEDs, the desired impact of his work remains unchanged even as his explorations morph: he aims to recreate a wordless, collective experience, akin to a gathering around a campfire, where light is experienced communally and without the uniform mediation of that most ubiquitous of light sources—screens.

“You’re never going to know which way the flame will flicker,” he says. “You place the logs, you hope the fire doesn’t jump out of there too much. But it’s a chaotic phenomenon that is unpredictable, that provides this opportunity for us as humans to be co-collaborators in that experience.”

All photos courtesy of Studio Lachlan Turczan

Turczan thanks his collaborative partner, Kevin Izard, whom he met at WET, where Izard was lead engineer. This year, the two formed a studio together.

Living the Dream

The New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast plumbs the absurdities of everyday life, sleeping and awake.

Words by Judy Hill

Roz Chast 77 PT hates to be bored. The renowned cartoonist keeps ennui at bay by always having a slew of projects on the go in her Connecticut studio—from egg painting to rug hooking to ukulele playing—not to mention the weekly batch of sketches she submits to The New Yorker magazine, which, since 1978, has published more than 1,000 of her off-kilter musings on everyday life.

Chast also hates to bore her loyal fan base, which is why, in her latest graphic book, I Must Be Dreaming, she offers readers what she calls “dream filets” that hone in on moments of peak dream hilarity.

A sampling of said filets drawn in Chast’s singular style are: a woman licking whipped cream off a bald man’s head; Chast telling writer Fran Lebowitz to

“give a hoot and a holler” if she’s ever in her neighborhood; two rotting plums devouring each other and bursting into flames; actress Glenn Close covered in thousands of baby spiders; Chast keeping people alive during a water shortage by drooling into their mouths, with a caption that reads, “Everyone was grossed out but it was either take my drool or die.”

Chast has been interested in the landscape of dreams since she was a child growing up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. “It just seemed like such a strange and inexplicable sort of experience that you’d go to sleep and you could fly,” she says. Her new book includes a smattering of dream theory—Freud, Jung, the Kabbalah, et al.—but

Right Photo by Bill Hayes

at its heart is an exploration of Chast’s sleeping mind, with dreams as idiosyncratic (by turns fantastical, profound and pedestrian) as ours, but somehow a whole lot funnier.

“I think the first one I [drew] was about my mother meeting this guy who, for some reason, was named Bissell,” says Chast. “That could be because there was a drugstore in our town named Bissell. In my dream he had somehow gotten ahold of O.J. Simpson’s glove and he was showing it to my mother and telling her that he had this business idea where he could rent out the glove for parties. I drew it up and put it into four cartoon panels and it was very fun to do.”

While she was working on the book, Chast wrote down her dreams every morning as soon as she woke up. You have to, she says, or they will disappear. Even so, some are elusive and come back only as fragments during the day. Chast calls these “dream hangovers,” and the book includes a few of the “ones that got away”—a cult of corpulent men in France who dress like Liberace but sound like Johnny Cash (singing “Prison de Folsom”), a can of food called Bungalow Breakfast, a leprechaun with a unibrow.

Jotting ideas down in a notebook is second nature to Chast. “Things will just sometimes seem funny,” she says, and provide inspiration for a cartoon. Riding on a train a while ago, “not even thinking of cartoons,” Chast caught sight of a poster. “It was for Carvel and there was a little girl wearing glasses with a party hat on, surrounded by family and friends and grandparents.

On the cake was written, ‘Congratulations on your new glasses,’ and I thought, ‘Well, we really have set the bar pretty low.’ And that became a cartoon— Gifts from the House of Low Goals.”

Chast’s take on the world around her, which pokes fun at our insecurities and foibles while eliciting a heaping dose of compassion for those same frailties, emerged out of a childhood during which she often felt like an outsider. As chronicled in Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Chast’s 2014 graphic memoir about taking care of her ailing parents, her childhood—with a domineering mother and an intensely anxious father—was less than happy.

“I did well in school because my parents were teachers and I sort of didn’t have a choice,” she recalls. “But I hated it. I was not good at sports. I was not social. I didn’t like other people, and you know, they didn’t particularly like me. I wasn’t pretty. I didn’t know how to flirt.”

One thing the young Chast did have going for her was a love of drawing and the positive attention that garnered. “Since nursery school I remember being praised for art that I did,” she says.

When it was time to think about college, Chast chose to attend a liberal arts school (Kirkland College, in upstate New York, which closed in 1978) where she could take “all art classes” but still get a BA. “My parents did not want me to get a BFA,” she says. “To say I wanted to be an artist or a cartoonist, that would’ve been like saying I wanted to be a tightrope walker or juggle for a living. It just seemed like an insane thing.”

After two years, with the encouragement of a printmaking teacher at Kirkland who recognized her talent, she transferred to RISD. And that, says Chast, was when she began to doubt her artistic ability for the first time.

“At RISD, suddenly I was surrounded by people who were all very dedicated to being artists,” she says. “They weren’t dilettantes, they were serious artists, and it was very daunting.” Because there was no cartooning department, she started out as a graphic design major but was “terrible at it, just terrible, way too messy.” Next, she tried illustration, because it was closer to cartooning, but again “it was not cartooning.” Finally, she hit on painting because she lived with painters and “wanted to love painting more than I did.”

Ultimately, though, she says, “I came into RISD as a cartoonist and I left as a cartoonist.”

And that was no small feat considering the setbacks she experienced. On learning there was a group of male students who had started a cartoon publication called Fred, Chast eagerly submitted sketches but was rejected. That remains a terrible memory. “It was shocking. It was painful. I cried. The whole nine yards of tragedy.”

As Chast tells it, she floundered for her first couple of years at RISD. “I lost complete faith in what I was doing,” she says, though in retrospect she sees that ordeal as a “really good thing” because of how it equipped her for postcollege life.

Chast knew how different her work was from the prevailing cartoon aesthetic, which favored a

meticulous illustration style and witty one-liners. Chast’s work, by contrast, featured amorphous “blobby” characters populating busy scenes that thrummed with anxiety and spewed a cacophony of speech bubbles, captions and insets scrawled in an unsteady hand and liberally peppered with underscores, exclamation points and asterisks.

As Chast began taking her cartoons around to publications, she thought she stood a chance with The Village Voice because they published Jules Feiffer, Mark Alan Stamaty, Stan Mack and other cartoonists whose work had a more narrative bent, and she did indeed sell some cartoons there.

The New Yorker felt like such a long shot as to be almost absurd. But with a devil-may-care insouciance that might surprise Chast fans, she presented her work to then-comics editor Lee Lorenz, who decided to take a chance on her. Less than a year after graduating from RISD she had her first cartoon purchased and soon after she was put on contract with the magazine.

“It still seems unbelievable to me, and I’m still incredibly grateful,” says Chast, noting nonetheless that some of the “old guys” at the magazine really hated her work. Lorenz told her later that one of them asked him if he owed Chast’s family money.

For Chast, 45 years later, the enduring appeal of cartoons has a lot to do with the way text and illustration are intertwined—each vital to its impact— and how the medium lends itself to making fun of American culture. Some of the earliest cartoons she

remembers gravitating toward as a child were in the pages of MAD magazine.

Even if she couldn’t have explained exactly why, at the age of 11 many of the commercials, sitcoms and variety shows she saw on TV struck her as “inane or just plain weird.” And then, she says, to see them lampooned in MAD magazine, “was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s other people who see it too.’” She remembers a parody of Chase & Sanborn Coffee she came across in the magazine. “But instead of Chase & Sanborn, it was Cheese & Sandbag. I don’t know why, but that cracked me up. I would be in school and start thinking about it and I’d just start to giggle to myself.”

Other early influences included Charles Addams, who she describes as “jolly but transgressive,” as well as George Booth, Ed Koren, Helen Hokinson and Mary Petty, all of whom, she says, drew from a very particular, personal point of view and created “whole worlds,” not just talking heads and funny lines.

Chast herself may be the queen of creating whole worlds, and she especially loves drawing interiors replete with detail, so the coffee table is never just a coffee table but a repository for a bowl of coffee candies, a halffinished cup of tea, a slightly sad vase of flowers, and three or four remotes, each one a little different from the other.

She is more interested in drawing people, invariably of the schlubby variety, than trees, and despite having lived in Ridgefield, Conn., for more than

30 years, professes a lingering unease with suburban life and its rituals, such as driving cars and spending time in nature.

After the runaway success of Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, which spent 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won a National Book Critics Circle Award, Chast treated herself to a studio apartment rental on the Upper West Side, close to where she had lived with her husband, humor writer Bill Franzen, before their growing family prompted the move to the suburbs. She visits every week or so.

In the city, she says, she feels comfortable and grown up and not in the wrong outfit. “It’s still the only place I’ve been where I feel, in some strange way, that I fit in. Or maybe, that it’s the place where I least feel that I don’t fit in,” she explained in Going into Town:

A Love Letter to New York

Not much else has changed in Chast’s life, though, since becoming a bestselling author. And she’s fine with that.

“It’s always nice to do a project that people respond to in a not-throwingtomatoes way,” she says, “but I’m still submitting cartoons every week to The New Yorker and I haven’t bought a private jet. I would have to park it in our backyard, I guess, which probably wouldn’t go over well with the neighbors. Plus, there’s a slope in our yard, and, I don’t know, it’s complicated. It just wouldn’t work out too well.”

R ISD Cla ss Notes

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

Molly K. Dickinson 89 IL

Noah Breuer 04 PR

Beth A. Zaiken 08

Class Notes

1964

Elizabeth Ginsberg 64 TX

Work by Elizabeth Ginsberg

64 TX was included in two shows at a83 Grand Gallery in Soho, New York City, most recently PART lll: Happenings, Competitions, Courses, Parties, which ran from 11 November to 17 December, 2023.

1967

Mary Curtis Ratcliff 67 AE

Works by Mary Curtis Ratcliff 67 AE were featured at the University Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Hong Kong from October 27, 2023 to February 18, 2024 in the exhibit Couplet Pair Rebus: The Principle of Cause and Effect The exhibit explored the interplay of causality in art in multiple ways.

1973

Jacqueline Ott MFA 73 SC

Work by Jacqueline Ott MFA 73 SC was featured in the show Over Head And Ears at Chazan Gallery at Wheeler in Providence, along with work by Tayo Heuser 76 PT, from November 16–December 9 2023.

1977

John P. Cobb 77 PT

John Cobb 77 PT presented a comprehensive show of work at the Fine Arts Gallery at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas from October 12–November 2, 2023. Works included 27 egg tempera and gold leaf panels comprising a chapel interior.

Deborah Garber 77 PR

Parallaria, an oil painting by Deborah Garber 77 PR was selected for inclusion in San Francisco’s De Young Museum of Art’s juried triennial exhibition, the De Young Open 2023, which ran from September 30, 2023 through January 7, 2024. The painting is one in a series featuring semisymmetrical arrangements of flora and fauna.

Babette L. Strousse BID 77

In July of 2023, Babette L. Strousse BID 77 was appointed Dean of Industrial Design for the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California. The Industrial Design division is inclusive of graduate and undergraduate programs in Industrial/ Product Design, Transportation Design and Spatial Experience/ Environmental Design.

1983

Chris N. Bardt BArch 83

On October 25, 2023, Chris N. Bardt BArch 83 presented an author talk on his recent book Material and Mind at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in New York City. Bardt’s research interests are focused on materials and the role they play in our self-definition. For the past two decades he has developed pedagogy based on material engagement and resistance. His new book was inspired in part by the mysterious connection between creativity and material engagement in the studio.

1987

Trine Giaever 87 IL

The Way I See It, an exhibition of paintings and prints of local landscapes and New York City, as well as still lives, by Trine Giaever 87 IL was on view at the Dennis P. McHugh Piermont Public Library in Piermont, New York, in November 2023. Glaever’s work was also shown last fall (October 12–December 15), along with photographs by David Greene, in the gallery space of Hotel Nyack, in Nyack, New York. Giaever was also granted membership into the National Association of Women Artists, with her work included in the association’s new member exhibition at the Salmagundi Club on Fifth Avenue from November 6–December 8, 2023.

1989

Molly K. Dickinson 89 IL

Work by Molly K. Dickinson 89 IL was featured in Living on the Edge, an exhibition of plein-air sketching in oil, gouache and pen and ink, shown in November and December 2023 alongside work created by artists represented by Out of the Box Studio and Gallery (Jamestown, Rhode Island) during a 2023 workshop at the Gilbert Stuart Museum in North Kingstown, Rhode Island.

Andy L. Sklar 89 IL

On Saturday, October 14, Andy L. Sklar 89 IL, along with five other artists designers and associates, participated in the new art collective gallery Pop-Up Hexahedron Black Gallery in Pasadena, California. Curated by fellow artist and designer Kevin Cardani, the show was titled Season 3 to salute the autumn season. Sklar shared that it was a great honor to share some new watercolors and acrylics on canvas in the company of such wonderful, talented friends.

1990

Matthew Garrison 90 SC

Matthew Garrison 90 SC curated Parallels and Rupture, an exhibit on view at Albright College’s Freedman Gallery in Reading, Pennsylvania from August 29 to December 8, 2023. Garrison wrote of the exhibit: “Art has always been a continuum of parallels and rupture as artists embrace developments in the technologies, methodologies, attitudes, and concepts unique to the historic moment in which they reside. In the process, perspectives and values are chronicled as artists investigate and question the prevailing aesthetics and tenets of their time.

Parallels and Rupture builds upon these ideas by looking at abrupt and concurrent change in the work of individual artists, as well as our current reevaluation of art and history through a multicultural lens.”

1991

Daphne Minkoff MFA 91 PT

Work by Daphne Minkoff MFA 91 PT was included in As I Saw It, a group show at AMcE Creative Arts Gallery in Seattle from November 11, 2023–January 14, 2024. The works in the exhibit recreated memories both borrowed and personal. Minkoff exhibited works from her Facades series featuring derelict homes in Seattle reconstructed with paint and collage.

Michael Riley 91 GD

Michael Riley 91 GD / Shine designed and produced the “Monarch Legacy of Monsters” main title sequence for AppleTV+ and Legendary.

1995

Chris Condon 95 SC

Atlanta Artist Chris Condon 95 SC completed and installed a public commission for the parklet at Greenwood Ave and the Beltline in the Virginia Highland neighborhood, entitled Canis Rufus.

The piece is a trio of red wolves making their way across an abandoned section of elevated railroad track, cautiously watching pedestrians on the Beltline. The red wolf is a native species that once roamed Georgia as well as other states in the Southeast, and is now highly endangered.

2001

Katie Herzog 01 PT

A solo exhibition, Katie Herzog: Lekoudesch, is on display at Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, California, through March 17. This body of work began when Herzog moved to a rural ranch in Southern Monterey County, and learned that her ancestors spoke Lekoudesch, also known as Jewish Cattle Traders Jargon. Herzog’s Jewish cattle trader kin immigrated from Germany in the late 1800s, sold beef in San Francisco, and bought a ranch in the Salinas Valley which her family have been farming and ranching consecutively for over 150 years.

2004

Noah Breuer 04 PR

Noah Breuer: Reclamation, an exhibition at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was on view from October 28, 2023–February 25, 2024.

The exhibit investigated early 20th-century domestic textile design in Europe and the Jewish-owned textile printing companies in Czech Bohemia and Moravia. The textiles displayed in the exhibit were from Carl Breuer and Sons (CB&S), the artist’s family’s former textile printing business, founded in 1897 in Bohemia. In 1939 the company was seized and sold to Nazi-approved owners along with all other Jewish-owned property in German-occupied areas.

2008

Beth A. Zaiken 08 IL

A design by Beth Zaiken 08 IL has won the international Coin of the Year award. The U.S. Mint’s Artistic Infusion Program, which Zaiken has been part of since 2019, is a group of U.S. artists and designers contracted by the mint to help produce designs for coins and medals. Since joining the mint, Zaiken has had five selected pieces minted, and next year another five will be released, including the Harriet Tubman silver dollar. This year her very first coin design was selected and minted as a $100 high relief gold coin and also won an international Coin of the Year award for best gold coin.

2012

Ted J. DiLucia 12 FAV

Ted DiLucia 12 FAV recently published a new book he illustrated based on bestselling author Joe R. Lansdale classic shortstory Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. The book is available from Crystal Lake Entertainment, Amazon and Barnes&Noble.com.

2013

Sui Park MDes 13

Sapar Contemporary Gallery in New York presented a solo exhibition of work by Sui Park MDes 13 that closed in November 2023. Sapar Contemporary presented this solo exhibition of Korean American artist Sui Park curated by Barbara Stehle, Ph.D. Weaving Colors Into Cosmos coincided with an outdoor installation at Bella Abzug Park. Trained both as an architect and in the ancient art of Korean basketry, Park is a crafter of shapes and a creator of space. With simple means and an original technique, she creates colorful soft sculptures.

2015

Whitney A. Oldenburg MFA 15 PT

Chart Gallery in New York City presented Ticket to Paradise, a solo exhibition by Whitney Oldenburg MFA 15 PT from November 3, 2023 to January 6, 2024. Featuring new sculptural works and drawings, this is Oldenburg’s first solo show in New York.

2016

Kento Saisho 16 FD Reisig and Taylor Contemporary Gallery in Los Angeles, California, presented Skins, Holes, and Hovels, a group exhibition (October 14–November 11, 2023) of figural and abstract works by three Los Angeles-based artists: Ari Salka, Erica Everage, and Kento Saisho 16 FD. Drifting between bright and dark, waking and dreaming, the exhibition included expressively diaristic mixed-media drawings/paintings by Salka, sculpturally and materially driven mixed-technique works by Everage, and multi-dimensional fabricated and forged steel sculptures by Saisho.

2018

Chantal Feitosa-Desouza 18 FAV

Work by Chantal FeitosaDesouza 18 FAV was included in Plastic on the Sofa: The Interior Lives of Black Folx, an exhibit at Hausen gallery in Brooklyn, New York, from October 5 to November 30, 2023.

“Black interior life—the physical and the metaphysical – has been the source code for creative output for generations of artists across disciplines,” wrote Alyssa Alexander, who curated the exhibit.

2020

Ariana A. Embiricos 20 JM

Ariana Embiricos 20 JM was recently awarded the NYC-based Emerging Entrepreneur award at New York City Jewelry week. In conjunction with the award, she also launched a new collection in Williamsburg, New York.

2023

Maris Van Vlack 23 TX

Maris Van Vlack’s first solo exhibition, Fiberscapes, at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, (November 9–December 9, 2023) featured a collection of her woven works and paintings relating to topography as a way to investigate the constantly changing geological landscape of New England. These works draw inspiration from textures and patterns found in architecture, geology, and wildlife to explore the layering of memory and time held within a constantly changing space.

Class Notes

Drawing on History

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson illustrates a new adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo."

There are times when it can feel like the universe has written the screenplay and we are all merely actors. When artist Jazzmen Lee-Johnson 08 FAV was asked to illustrate the newly released Barracoon: Adapted for Young Readers, it felt like one of those times. She hadn’t even pitched the publishers, but her drawings powerfully illustrate the bestselling, true-life account of freed slave Cudjo Lewis, quite by accident.

Lee-Johnson’s linocut print, Flee Plantation, based on John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes, hangs in a friend’s home. That friend has a brother, David Dewitt, who happens to be a senior designer at Harper Colllins. DeWitt saw the print and thought the wood block aesthetic would be perfect for a book he was working on, a version of Barracoon for middleschool aged readers originally written by Zora Neale Hurston and adapted by historian Ibram X. Kendi.

This is the exciting climax the universe had planned for Lee-Johnson, a woman who has built a career telling other people’s stories, much like Hurston, one of her idols and fellow ethnographers. After graduating from RISD, Lee-Johnson worked in film and animation, contributing to documentaries as well as dramas. She’s always had an interest in making sense of the past and connecting it to the present’s ideas, theories and struggles. She earned her master’s in public humanities at Brown where she was a Public History of Slavery Fellow. But it’s the years leading up to that fateful meeting with DeWitt that are integral to this fated tale.

While Lee-Johnson was a student at RISD she was a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, which allowed her to travel the world and visit Benin, Mali, South Africa, India and Brazil. “When I was in Benin, I was like 21, and I took photos at the Gate of No Return on the

coast where smaller boats took captives out to the ocean where the slave ship was waiting. I went back to those photos for the Barracoon project. What that experience was for me at 21 and now to have this story, it just gives a whole other context and understanding. It’s heavy,” she says.

A Handwoven Life

More than five decades after opening a handweaving studio in New Hampshire, Roberta Ayotte 58 TX is still practicing her craft, albeit several thousand miles away in Sun City, Arizona.

Ayotte moved to the Southwest in 1995 with her husband, Robert Ayotte 58 ID, who passed away in 2015. The Ayottes met at RISD and in 1967 opened Ayotte’s Designery, a handweaving studio and showroom, which they operated for 30 years in a former schoolhouse in the village of Center Sandwich, N.H.

Roberta Ayotte continues to weave in her home studio. She also paints in watercolor and oil and teaches handweaving at Sun City’s two local handweaving clubs.

RISD Alumni Magazine

Reunion

Register now and view the complete schedule of events, including class-specific gatherings, RISD Craft, family-friendly activities, open houses and campus tours, the Lantern Lighting and Artists Party with the Class of 2024 and more.

Celebrate, reminisce and reconnect!

Reunion Weekend 2024 May 30–June 2

RISD Made

Discover and be discovered at RISDmade

A home for goods created by alumni makers and designers from all over the world, RISDmade is an online store and showcase for the RISD community’s signature inventive brilliance. From fine art and furniture to textiles, games and more, RISDmade can help you find your audience or your next favorite work of art.

Members of the classes of 1949, 1954, 1959, 1964, 1969, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019 and 2022 are invited to Reunion Weekend 2024.

Risdmade.com

Top to bottom:

Akeem Glaze 12 ID, Stephanie Delvecchio 12 ID

Timothy Ohliger 06 IL

Nicole Mann 03 TX

How did Once–Future Office begin life?

Our founding principles Dungjai Pungauthaikan MFA 07 GD and Nikki Chung MFA 08 GD met in architecture school at University of California, Berkeley and then again as graduate students at Rhode Island School of Design. What started out as small collaborations around kitchen tables and in coffee shops eventually became more official.

What is your design philosophy?

We try not to approach our projects with preconceived ideas. Our process of listening, research and stakeholder engagement is what really drives our design. There’s also a certain amount of going with our gut feeling and aligning with our values.

What are some current projects that make you proud?

There’s a lot these days. First, this RISD Alumni Magazine! Also, a new website for the Princeton University School of Architecture and a new identity system and signage and wayfinding for the David Rubenstein Treehouse conference center at Harvard University. We’re also designing environmental graphics, signage and wayfinding for the Vancouver Art Gallery’s new home by Herzog & de Meuron—our first international project—and we launched a new brand and website for ALA Studio, previously Alda Ly Architecture. Finally, placemaking, signage and wayfinding for the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

How important is the RISD connection to you?

Most of us are transplants to NYC, including designer Joseph Wulf 22 GD/ID, so staying connected and building community is really important to us. The work we’ve done on RISD Alumni Magazine has allowed us to stay plugged into the amazing things the RISD community is up to. We’re excited to be a part of bringing this magazine back to life.

How does the future look for Once–Future?

We just celebrated the Lunar New Year with a team dinner at MáLà Project in Brooklyn. The Year of the Dragon promises to be an adventurous one. We look forward to it!

on the current issue RISD Alumni Magazine Meet the Designers

RISD Alumni Magazine is designed by the Brooklyn-based design firm Once–Future Office, which was established in 2012 by two RISD alums.

Meet the Designers

RISD Fund

Fuel the Spark

RISD students carry a spark of creativity that burns brighter each time they enter the studio. From Foundation Year to senior shows, the RISD Fund fuels experimentation and discovery.

Make your gift today! give.risd.edu

“In my first year, I want to find my voice and better understand my own art. Why is most of my art about my family? Why did I choose this material? RISD is helping me think about the answers to these questions.”

-Julio Solano 27

On Brand

RISD settles into its new visual identity.

RISD’s new brand identity, with its distinctive broken font and signature “RISD Blue,” has been part of the college’s visual vocabulary for more than a year now, gracing banners and flags, social media posts and pamphlets, T-shirts and buttons.

Rolled out in the fall of 2022, the fresh visual framework was created by Brooklyn design studio Gretel, along with ON ROAD, a London-based research agency, and includes a family of typefaces custom-designed by Ryan Bugden 14 GD and a redrawing of the college’s seventy-year-old seal.

The process of developing a new visual and verbal language involved hundreds of community members through multiple open forums and a microsite where they were invited to track and participate in the process from start to finish.

The resulting identity centers on a guiding idea: “question to create, create to question,” which reflects both the RISD community’s shared mindset and the college’s approach to pedagogy.

At the heart of the design system is a family of custom typefaces designed for RISD by Bugden in close partnership with Gretel. RISD Serif is a set of three display faces that evolve from complete to incomplete, telling the story of designers, artists and scholars who make the invisible visible through their work of questioning and creating. RISD Sans is a complementary neutral workhorse for everyday use.

The cornerstone of the visual identity and the institution’s official logo is the RISD seal, which was

designed in 1951 by sculptor, stone carver, calligrapher and late RISD faculty member John Howard Benson. In consultation with the Benson family, Bugden redrew RISD’s long-serving mark to lessen its density at small sizes, improve the clarity of letterforms and bring back some of the calligraphic character that had been lost over the decades.

“It was an honor to contribute letterforms to the place I first learned to love them,” says Bugden.

Photo by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08

PH

Photo by Bruce Damonte

Rhode Island

School

of

Design

20 Washington Place Providence, RI 02903

The new cutting-edge Itema Jacquard loom was installed in the Metcalf Building this past fall. The advanced machine can weave large, complex textiles and is exceptionally fast, making even the most innovative concepts into tangible fabric.

Photo by Christian Scully / Designing Imaging Studios