RISD XYZ Fall 2012 by Rhode Island School of Design

Rhode Island School of Design alumni magazine FALL / WINTER 2012 / 13

LIVING BEASTS 20 BEYOND SHELTER 32 AT HOME IN THE STUDIO 38

Rethinking Home

D E PA R T M E N T S

F E AT U R E S

Conversations online, incoming, ongoing

Six Degrees alumni network news

20 Living Beasts In helping to make the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, four alumni discovered a lot about themselves as they created the Bathtub, the compelling parallel universe that lead characters Hushpuppy and Wink call home.

08 Listen reflections, opinions, points of view

10 Look at better homes, inner beauty, home work + home improvements

› 57

Impact why people give to risd

62 Where We Were a blast from the past

64 Where We Are class notes and profiles

› 14

46 Two College Street campus community newsbits

› 70

96 › 51

Sketchbook sketches, doodles, ideas in progress

› 89

Beyond Shelter

At Home in the Studio

After years of thinking and dreaming, architect Peter Stamberg BArch 72 and his partner finally took the plunge and tackled the architect’s perennial dilemma: building a home of one’s own.

Step inside the very personal space where artist Anna Schuleit 98 PT spends her days and nights musing, listening to music and making art.

thoughts from the editor

Discovering Home T he wo rd “ ho m e” soun ds sort of soft, qui e t,

soothing. But the brevity and simplicity of the word belies its true impact. Home (sweet) home can be something we totally take for granted and, at other times, obsess about. Think about how the notion of home has permeated our collective psyche. We’ve built classic clichés—and tender truisms—around it, with sayings like “Home is where the heart is,” “A house is not a home” and “There’s no place like home.” After Oz, it has spawned such unforgettable cinematic utterances as “ET phone home” and sweet sounds like Homeward Bound. And on the commercial front we’ve got everything from Home Depot to Home Goods. We assess people positively as “coming from a good home” or worry about them and try to help if they don’t. Though we left “homemakers” behind in the 1950s, we still prefer our baked goods to be “homemade.” And we like being home for the holidays… or even if we don’t, adverters bank on the fact that most people are sentimental about the place they call home. But what exactly is that? At its most fundamental, home is something more than having a roof over your head. It’s a safe place to lie down and let go at night— but one that feels personal, like your own space. Having a home, whether you “own” it or not, is such a basic human need that even the idea of homelessness spooks us. And when the recent housing crisis forced millions of Americans to lose their homes to foreclosures, it only underscored our discomfort with the notion of having nowhere to live. Let us know what home means to you: risdxyz@risd.edu.

The basic human desire to have a home, or at least feel at home, has also driven the assisted living industry to shift its emphasis from offering old-style nursing “homes” that feel like overcrowded hospital wards to creating comfy environments for the elderly full of “homey” touches. For millennia, the basic human desire to have a home has been motivating young adults to leave home as soon as they’re old enough— ultimately in order to establish homes of their own, where they can choose to nurture or reject the values they’ve learned at home. And here’s where this issue of RISD XYZ picks up—with the notion of home as a creative center, a matter of values more than simply a house with a hefty mortgage or a place where you can live as you choose (though it’s certainly that, too). At the most literal level, this issue focuses on how alumni choose to live in their own homes and studios. And it looks at the types of residences and home-oriented art and products they create for others. But this issue also considers the intangible, more spiritual aspects of the word—namely, what it means to find a creative home and to connect and feel at home in the world. Over the years, a lot of RISD students (and their parents) have noted that coming to RISD feels like coming home. Not surprisingly, that’s got nothing to do with our better-than-average Residence Life facilities and everything to do with our creative community. Home, it seems, has a lot more to do with feeling, emotion, values and relationships—all the things that drive artists and designers to do what they do—than it does with housing or a sluggish real estate market.

editor’s message by

Liisa Silander

illustration hand-stitched by

Sarah Rainwater

PUBLISHING DIRECTOR

Becky Bermont

cover »

Painter Brian Martin 98 IL explores the idea of suburbia as an icon of the American dream, adding his own twists of memory to create images that feel both familiar and strange. As a founding member of the Broadstreet Studio (thebroadstreetstudio.com), he co-curated and participated in From What I Remember/From What I Forget, an exhibition of 35 artists held last January at Principle Gallery (which also represents him) in Alexandria, VA. A detail from his gesso on panel painting Witness is shown on the cover. The painting was included in the recent Safe at Home exhibition at Cube Contemporary Art Projects in Adelaide, South Australia. Brian and his wife Amy (Paulin) Martin 97 IL live in Providence, where they’re enjoying life with their young son Elliott.

EDITOR/WRITER

Liisa Silander lsilande@risd.edu 401 454 6349 P R O D U C T I O N C O O R D I N AT O R / DESIGNER

Elizabeth Eddins 00 GD DESIGNERS

Listen (8) »

A professional illustrator, fine artist and writer, Pamela Becker 86 IL (insightartssedona.com) is also creative director of Big Vision Graphics (bigvision graphics.com) in Sedona, AZ. Her work and life are inspired by her exploration of human consciousness and interest in potentialities beyond beliefs and expectations.

Kate Blackwell Sarah Rainwater CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Michelle Aldredge Kirsten Andersen Abigail Crocker Michael Fink Greg Kanaan 02 FAV Gillian Kiley Francie Latour Paula Martiesian 76 PT Meghan M. Reilly Michaud 01 GD D I R E C T O R O F A L U M N I R E L AT I O N S

Christina Hartley 74 IL PRINTING

Lane Press Burlington, VT printed on 70# Sterling Matte, a recycled stock FONTS

Quiosco + Antenna by Cyrus Highsmith 97 GD

spot illustration (53) » Now living in Hong Kong, Adam S. Doyle 98 IL says the simple “magic of creation” inspires him to make evocative paintings, illustrations and prints. “It’s important to me to find a balance between an elegance of form that holds both visible marks of paint and a representation of ‘energy within.’”

Sketchbook (96) » Industrial Design student Dillon Froehlich 14 ID grew up in Boca Raton, FL, where he and his brother first parlayed their gift for illustration into commercial work, mostly doing t-shirts and editorial illustration. Dillon has also exhibited his work in Florida, California, East Asia and Europe.

back cover » Recent graduate Laura Guerin 12 IL (cargocollective.com/ lauraguerin) is working to establish her freelance illustration career in Cleveland, OH. When Illustration faculty member Fred Lynch 86 IL asked students to illustrate 88 houses in a week, Laura says “it was a blast because I’m obsessed with drawing architecture—and it opened up new possibilities.”

FEATUR ED A LU MNI

RISD XYZ

Two College Street Providence, Rhode Island 02903-2784 USA risd.edu/xyz Published two times a year by RISD’s Media Group, in conjunction with Alumni Relations. I N I T I A L C R E AT I V E D I R E C T I O N

WellNow Design O N T H E C OV E R

Witness (2011, oil on panel, 15 x 9") by Brian Martin 98 IL

A D D R E S S U P DAT E S

Beasts (20) » Jonathan Mosca 07 PR, Sophie Kosofsky 06 FD, Eliza Zeitlin 07 SC and Annie Evelyn 99 FD/MFA 07 didn’t all know each other well at RISD. But by the end of their intense experience making Beasts of the Southern Wild (written and directed by Eliza’s brother), the cast and crew felt a lot like family.

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Beyond Shelter (32) »

Architect Peter Stamberg BArch 72 shares his life and Manhattan-based practice, Stamberg Aferiat Architecture (stambergaferiat. com), with Paul Aferiat. The moral of their professional story is “that for many seemingly impossible problems there are often simple solutions.”

At Home in the Studio (38) »

This year Anna Schuleit 98 PT (annaschuleit. com) was a visiting artist at the Eastman School of Music and created her second set design for dance at New York Live Arts. Collaborating with Columbia Medical School, she’s currently developing a new drawing technique based on eye-tracking technology, which she’ll test on an expedition to the North Pole next summer.

Postmaster: Send address changes to Office of Advancement Services RISD, Two College Street Providence, RI 02903 USA Or email gduarte@risd.edu

online, incoming, ongoing

When superstorm Sandy slammed the Northeast the week of Halloween, RISD closed for two days. Fortunately, the effects on campus were minor and Foundation Studies student Yidan Zeng 16 FS took the time to create this bit of beauty after the winds subsided.

Just to the south, a lot of New York alumni and faculty were harder hit. Photographer Michael Neff 04 PH (see also page 54) had to pump out his basement studio in Brooklyn (again) and was moved to share photos of the damage in Chelsea on his Facebook and Pinterest pages. Note the Andrea Rosen Gallery doorway, where a solo show of work by Andrea Zittel MFA 90 SC had closed just two days earlier.

Safe but Sandy-ied Sandy was quite dramatic from our [NYC] loft. With the winds whistling through and rattling our shaky old loft windows we saw the Con Ed explosion on 13th Street. Soon after, our lights flickered and went out. A short while later we heard a crash on the south side of the loft, and then a crash from the north windows. We looked to see, but couldn’t tell the problems. A little while later a friend who is stranded in NY and staying with us (a BBC correspondent who was supposed to be covering the election but was detoured by the storm) came in our door, quite shaken. He had seen something large come crashing to the sidewalk on the north side of the building. He was about 50 feet away, but it narrowly missed several other people.

In the light of day the next morning we saw that the loud noise to the north—and what Alex had seen—was the roof of the water tank from the top of our building, which had blown off and crashed to the street. We also found the source of the noise to the south: something had smashed in and broken part of our kitchen window. Like the rest of lower Manhattan, we are without power. Additionally, like many but not all, we are without water, heat and elevator. Hopefully things will be repaired soon. Peter Stamberg BArch 72 (see also pages 32 – 37) New York, NY

Find more RISD conversations at twitter.com/risd and facebook.com/risd1877.

fall/winter 2012/13

Happy Voice Mail I hope this message finds you well. My name is Joe Lempa and I wanted to offer a compliment. My wife attended your school— Mary [Flock] Lempa 86 IL. I have to say increasingly over the years I guess we’ve become more and more critical of the RISD magazine because, like so much of the art world, we found it becoming out of touch and in many ways elitist. But I have to say this most recent issue really caught my eye when I brought it in from the mail. I’m referring to more specific articles like Thirst to Help on page 15, Road Trip to Reality on page 32, Happiness Revisited on page 40 and Mourning America in Decline on page 74. While I’ll readily concede that a great motivation for creating art is to elevate us—to transport us somewhere else—I think it’s become imbalanced, and it’s become a form of escapism. You can’t solve issues unless you face them. Maybe I haven’t been looking closely enough at past issues, but this just seems to be an unusually real issue of the RISD magazine. I haven’t even put the keys down yet and have been reading since I walked in the door five minutes ago. Anyway, good job, and I wish you and your staff well.

Re: Road Trip to Reality Documenting impoverished communities by upper-class outsiders in the name of beauty is troublesome. I found the featured essay Road Trip to Reality disturbingly naïve, and I can only hope the anthropological photographic excursions heralded in this article are critically engaged as a teaching tool by the RISD Photography department. Katie Herzog 01 PT Los Angeles, CA

Editor’s note: I agree that it’s difficult and sometimes awkward for artists to step beyond their own sphere of knowledge or immediate socio-economic circles, but I believe that Justin Kimball 85 PH, John Willis MFA 86 PH and Tom Young MFA 77 PH take pictures of people, places and situations that move them, pure and simple. In so doing, they don’t appear to exploit their subject matter nor do they either glorify or condemn what they capture through the camera lens. Perhaps XYZ was “naïve” in how we presented their work, but I don’t see it that way.

Huge Impact I was saddened not only at reading about the passing of [Professor] Gerry Immonen in the Fall/Winter 11/12 issue, but at the brevity of what I read. So I was very glad to read Terry Sapp’s Remembering Teach [in the Spring/Summer issue] because I am one of the many who loved him. Gerry Immonen also lives on in me today. He had a huge influence on me freshman year. I have never forgotten his kindness or his encouragement. Thanks to him, I have never stopped drawing, and I have followed his example in my past 41 years of teaching—by seeing each of my students as an individual who matters. Joan Fox LaCasse 70 AE/MAE 75 Cumberland, RI

Joe Lempa La Grange, IL

Sorry about this: I don’t mind the little mistake of Marsha becoming mysteriously Martha (obviously a typo) [see page 68, Spring/Summer 12 issue], but the SCULPTURE magazine article about my work did not come out in the Spring 2012 issue. It will be coming out in 2012, but we don’t know exactly when. Marsha Pels 72 PT Brooklyn, NY

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I feel ridiculously lucky to have grown up in such a beautiful, vibrant place. Sarah Pease 13 FD speaking about her “beloved hometown” of Jamestown, RI (Design Milk, 11.2.12)

By day six, we had three people sleeping in our apartment. RISD trustee and Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia 05 GD/ID speaking at RISD (10.19.12)

You cannot find a book that makes you more ignorant. MacArthur and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot

Díaz speaking at RISD (11.5.12)

I’m really excited, and nervous. Kelsey Lim 14 GD, cofounder of RISD Votes,

Double Trouble

Find more RISD conversations at facebook.com.risd.alumni.association.

on Election Day (our.risd.edu, 11.6.12)

You are in a place where you can live out loud. Provost Rosanne Somerson 76 ID delivering her 2012 Convocation Address at RISD (9.10.12)

Painful Cover?

“I think that it was a very poor choice of cover and hope that it was not an intentional reminder of our country’s sordid past.” I could not help but notice the similarity between the latest XYZ cover photo and the photo taken at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, one of the most shameful and surely best known episodes of American torture. I think that it was a very poor choice of cover and hope that it was not an intentional reminder of our country’s sordid (and I hope) past. Otherwise, I think that you’ve done a great job with XYZ. Surely it’s a vital, lively and great improvement over risd views. Dan Nerney 62 GD Portsmouth, RI

Your recent issue of RISD XYZ has an important message and a compelling cover photo. There is no doubt that anyone staying the course on a fine art degree from RISD will always see his or her role in life as that of the artist. The Abu Ghraib-esque cover image relating construction work to torture might have been better balanced by including a little journalism that included at least one interview with someone who wears a hard hat to work every day. It may be time for RISD and similar institutions to grow up, and accept the fact that there are many work environments that do not consider a BFA as an accomplishment. In fact, rather than having to explain it away, a fine arts degree is sometimes better left unmentioned in “the real world.” It is nice to see the RISD publication make an attempt to explore the different pathways that grads need to take toward their individual success. We can all agree that everyone is just doing the best with what they’ve got. After all, “Hard Times” have been around for a very long time. Perhaps in the future RISD will give every grad more reasons to “talk RISD.” Maybe some interviews with the lawyers, politicians and homemakers that Roger Mandle wrote about in risd views some years ago would be inspiring. Possibly RISD’s entrepreneurial incubator could start looking past having “customers and cashflow” as the prerequisite for helping grads with good ideas. Not everyone will be the artistic flavor-of-themonth but we all work hard (wherever we are) toward making some kind of breakthrough, no matter what unglamorous job we may be presently engaged in. You have presented, as always, some fine people doing great work in your recent issue. It is a great pleasure to learn about their art, their struggle and their dedication to the business of art. With the aforementioned in mind, the RISD publication should also decide what it wants to be when it grows up: a vehicle for uniting and strengthening the community that we’ve all helped to build, or merely to remain a costly multi-page sales brochure. May I request that you take a paragraph or two in the next issue to help clarify the meaning of your last cover? We’re having some debate here, and we’re not sure how to critique it properly.

Editor’s note: Our choice of cover image for the Spring/Summer issue was in no way meant to reference Abu Ghraib, though regrettably it had that connotation for at least two of you. We actually chose to run the photograph of Julia Sherman 06 PH wearing a denim work habit because it both references her own research into the meaning of professional uniforms and speaks to the subject at hand—namely, the pursuit of meaningful work in a down economy. Since the image also directly references our lead feature, we thought it made for a reasonably playful and eye-catching way to address “hard times.” The assumption that former RISD President Roger Mandle was responsible for what we presented in the Fall 1999 issue of risd views is incorrect. However, I’m glad you remember it because we’ve often talked about doing a reprise. Finally, while XYZ certainly isn’t mature and all grown up yet, we do hope to make the magazine a vehicle worthy of your interest and attention.

Martin Brown 91 IL Amherst, NH

Tell us what you think: risdxyz@risd.edu.

fall/winter 2012/13

10 more

WOrds more or less

The home fascinates me because it is where we start.

Digital Bits of Home Assistant Professor John Caserta’s Digital Bits assignment got some play in the Twittersphere earlier this fall. The Graphic Design professor asked students to “collect objects that you find in and around your apartment, and draw them using HTML and CSS.” The idea is to use any one foreground and any one background color, “working only with form and counter-form.” Stylization and simplification are welcomed as long as “a faithful copy of the object” emerges. To see more, go to fc12.johncaserta.info/triennial.

Visions of Providence I was a fifth-year student at MIT in 1956 when architect Bill Warner [who just passed away this fall] was working for his master’s degree. But he set up his “workstation” in my studio, sporting (hiding behind?) a huge portrait of his first wife, Sunny Bertrand Warner 53 IL (who was my high school classmate!). Bill was a brilliant architect [credited with the massive river relocation project that transformed downtown Providence in the 1990s]. But it was my brother, RISD English Professor Mike Fink, who first discovered the Providence River [hidden under the asphalt], which extended from north of Steeple Street to the Crawford Street Bridge, and from the Providence Courthouse to the Hospital Trust Bank. Mike prepared a canoe ride with a RISD photography student, lifting manhole covers en route to determine location. And it was in the 1970s that the late RISD Professor Gerald Howes and his Architecture students published Interface: Providence, featuring text and their own illustrations of rivers, green space and trees. This is not to distract in any way from Bill Warner’s Providence—from historic Benefit Street to the uncovering of the rivers. It is merely to identify two other RISD people who made significant contributions to Bill Warner’s vision of the city. Charles B. Fink RISD Architecture Professor Emeritus

Newport, RI 06

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Real Zest for Zest Having recently moved from the chilly north country of Connecticut to the warmth of the sandy beaches of the Grand Strand in Myrtle Beach, SC, I missed getting the Fall/Winter 2011/12 issue of RISD XYZ when it was published. But I couldn’t believe all the comments [in the last issue] concerning the books SEX, QUEER and CRAP, etc. (These comments? From an educated alumni audience?) I have since received that issue— two copies, in fact, and for that I thank you immensely. The first position I took after leaving RISD in 1965 was to work for a large national textbook publisher in Boston, where I served as an art director while learning all the many typographic design details in creating effective high school and college textbooks (the only gap that I felt was missing in my years at RISD). About Zest Books [Fall/Winter 11/12 issue]! Wow! Like any good ad or sales promotion, the very first job of the designer is to get the attention of the audience. And Zest Books does just that. Well done!! Rik Gobeille 65 IL Myrtle Beach, SC

Find more about all things RISD at our.risd.edu.

Illustration Professor Jean Blackburn 79 PT explaining her series of paintings based on catalogues from Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Williams Sonoma, etc.

You can’t throw a stone without hitting someone who went to RISD. The Brothers Mueller (Kirk and Nate Mueller MFA 10 DM) in reference to walking around NYC (9.10.12)

Things you didn’t have growing up…define you. RISD President John Maeda tweeting from the GigaOM RoadMap 2012 conference (11.6.12)

I’m passionate about sculpting and grew up playing with PLAY-DOH. Ian Williams 13 SC, Hasbro’s Official PLAY-DOH Artist of the Year based on his busts of President Obama and Mitt Romney (our.risd.edu, 10.4.12)

A solid home base builds a sense of self. a Truism from Jenny

Holzer MFA 77 PT

six co we lle ek jun ge s e2 2â&#x20AC;&#x201C; / a of p au rt re gu RI sc pa st SD 3, ho ra 20 .ED 13 ol tio /p n U/ PR or for tfo EC lio OL LE /l GE ife

Think ahead.

You can leave a lasting legacy for much less than you imagine. Here are a few of the many options worth considering:

> Make a gift that literally costs you nothing now yet helps generations of art and design students in the future.

> Donate residential property, keep using it and get a tax break all at the same time.

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Contact Louise Olson at 401 454-6323 or email lolson@risd.edu for more options and information.

risd.edu/giftplanning

reflections, opinions, points of view

“I am always at home with the guidance, the memories and the process I absorbed from RISD. In a sense I never left.”

Home in the Unknown Once you experience the blue magic of creative

text + illustrations by

Pamela Becker 86 IL

rush, you want more. In the beginning, creativity is often rebellious and irresponsible and ready to go to great lengths to unravel tradition and the stability of home. It is self-referential, impatient, overconfident and—well, youthful. It takes the patina of experience, travel, hunger—life’s lows and faux triumphs—to tame the beast. I am not a quick learner. My stubborn do-it-myself technique does not always carry me gently, and I am often unsure of my decisions. But I do know this: I am an evolving artist on every level, and my home is not just geographical. It’s also my artistic educational foundation, with RISD as the ever-present touchstone. What I am not

Fresh out of RISD in the mid 1980s, I went to work at Hasbro (the RI toy company) and supplemented that entry-level position by being a restaurant grunt. I dyed my hair wild and wore pink high-tops, tried to fit in—but not—and soon got noticed as an artist who could create product-accurate line art and basic catalogue layouts. Form chasing function. When I left to become one of Hasbro’s freelance lone wolves, I gained more freedom and independence. But a doll illustrator I am not. 08

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Arizona Highways magazine (a childhood gift from my grandfather) introduced me to the mysterious landscape of cowboys and Indians, and while at RISD I grew fascinated by a classmate who was a bit older and from the southwest. She carried the essence of smoky native campfires, along with a wisdom and easy comfort with herself. In class, when we looked at Alfred Stieglitz’s photos of Georgia O’Keeffe, I was moved by the artist’s confidence and grace. To me she looked fearless, and I wanted to be her. With the freedom of a freelancer and a loadeddown Subaru to support my creative lifestyle, I hit the road for San Francisco. There I did the business skirt and jacket thing (it was the early ’90s), freelancing in graphic design, illustration and photographic art direction. I had an amazing client list, but it was easy, the economy was rocking and I took it for granted. I was in my mid-20s and I wanted more. Where was my inner Georgia O’Keeffe? As I stood facing the salty Pacific, wind in my face, suddenly aware of my freezing feet sinking into the wet sand, I heard a RISD professor’s voice urging me to change the vanishing point in my drawing. “Just because you have talent doesn’t mean you can’t learn more. Change seats, change perspective, try a different view.” This transmission from home stunned me into action.

I needed to move to a new color spectrum—to get away from the couture cult, the tawdry, apathetic dada life of the too hip with too much time and too little artistic substance. Under sfumato fog with no clearly defined stars, my imagination was going gray fast. Onward to Marin County, California, which opened the chapter of children’s book illustration, along with old issues with conceptual thinking. I found myself back inside a RISD studio with my least favorite teacher. I was frustrated because he didn’t care about my nice art school drawing technique; he wanted to see how I could communicate visually. My safety net had been embellishing well-drafted garden-variety illustrations, but here—at this late date—I found my mind revisiting his class as a prerequisite to taking my art to the next level. “Pay attention and learn from this,” said a small voice from Providence, calling me home again. A fellow student who I envied for her insight and talent whispered, “Sneak up on your brain to find the answer.” A decade later and just in time to land a large series of commissioned children’s posters, I finally understood what she was saying. It was uncomfortable to go inside and deconstruct my thoughts, to tease the concepts apart— and then draw, draw, draw as I had been taught, until the subject breathes an inspired message. But it worked, and it got easier. And I hear my teachers saying: “Keep going. Re-work, re-formulate, don’t embellish until you arrive.” Who I might be

Painting and illustrating rekindled an interest in history, culture and a desire to travel. I wanted to embody the art I was creating. At RISD I remember asking a friend, “Wouldn’t you like to live inside the warm hues of a Gauguin painting—feel the light on your skin?” Now, enamored with masks, mythology and dance, I emptied my bank account and headed to Bali. I was 30 years old and illustrating books was great, but being the illustrations seemed so much more exciting, dramatic, experiential— until it proved to be short-lived. Back in the States, Marin had gotten old, but the RISD mantra returned: “Listen to yourself and tune out the static.” So, overloaded with printing presses, paint and protesting pets, my Toyota pick-up hauled me up the California coast past Eureka. It seemed an obvious fit when the first gallery I went to offered me a solo show, including an interactive performance with the audience. Improvisation and dance without the mask became my main creative medium. I was terrified to be on stage, but as the obsession grew, I drove my almost 40-year-old self to become a notable dancer—until a dangerous fall from a height made me come to terms with reality. While I had been finding out who I was not, I had lost touch with my main client base and suddenly found myself in familiar territory: starving artist. With the wolf at the door, I was homesick for RISD, as always. I missed the challenge—and even the arguments. At RISD we were pushing each other to go alpha on our creativity. If artists aren’t going to step into the uncomfortable unknown, who is? As I found myself further and further from home geographically, each creative impasse was bringing a fragment of support and wisdom like a third-eye email from Rhode Island to startle me awake and send me out to try again. I remember once during an illustration class, we were sketching the exact moment of tension right before catastrophe hit. I was reminded that this close-range foreshadowing was a warning to me now. I knew the Southwest was my next and maybe final destination—but then, up pops a new-age adventure fantasy and I’m off to Brazil to play shaman. I was in the jungle with a lot of pseudo spiritual cats, howler monkeys swinging in the trees and the sentiment “Don’t waste your time” rises from memory in the voice of a successful working artist I had known at RISD. So I get For more on Becker, go to insightartsedona.com and bigvisiongraphics.com.

on the plane, destination Sedona, AZ. Goodbye mystic jungle revelation. Check that off the list. I’m going to the desert to finally channel Georgia O’Keeffe and regain some sense of balance with my true love: art. So there I am. Years go by, it’s beautiful, magical, gorgeous—but something is not right. And I get another long-distance transmission from home. I am on a small mesa with miles of polychrome sky, burnt orange rocks and tie-dyed seekers who think medium refers to someone who can tell your future. “Remember, Pamela, you can’t be anybody but you,” says this voice from an established RISD artist. “Stay true to your path and your day will come.” I knew I had to drop Georgia and get serious about being Pamela. So I turned the channel, declined the distractions and got busy planning the extensive ensemble of Pamela Becker’s debut, all the while thinking: here I am on the other side of 40, my life displayed in a coffee shop. Hard work, focus and a little synchronicity

I didn’t expect much to happen here, but over the next few weeks originals were actually selling off the walls. I was enjoying the startling flow of success so much that when a stranger walked in proclaiming, “I love your work! Do you do commissions?” I didn’t want to say yes. I wanted everything to stay homeostatic. Lucky for karma, I again remembered some practical words of advice from back home. A RISD classmate who was older than me (with two kids) didn’t have the luxury of turning down work. “When they ask me if I can do something, I say ‘yes’ even if I’ve never heard of it,” she told me. “And then I go back and figure it out fast.” (And this was before the internet!) Before the stranger notices my hesitation, the words flow gracefully from my mouth, “Yes, I do commissions.” That was several years ago, and the commissioned series has grown as it has been well received by the art-buying public. Today I sit in a remodeled old gallery/artist studio facing the giant sycamore trees that guard Sedona’s Oak Creek—an artist’s dream, my dream. Synchronicity has the last laugh because this ongoing series of commissioned pieces is called The Timeless Unknown. How do you make your home in the unknown? In my case, RISD was a constant touchstone and artistic GPS in finding the golden mean. Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again,” but that sentiment doesn’t concern me as an artist since I am always at home with the guidance, the memories and the process I absorbed from RISD. In a sense I never left. I have added portals and trellises, I’ve torn down the walls and resurfaced the floors. But a quarter century later, the reliable foundation remains. Home (sigh of relief) has brought me home. fall/winter 2012/13

better homes

Name Namexxxxxx MFA 09 XX

Name Namexxxx 11 GD

Breathless in the Rockies For more than 20 years, Scott Lindenau BArch 86 has been creating stunning homes that make optimal use of breathtaking sites in and around his home base in Aspen, CO. While his firm is known for its residential and civic work well beyond the Rockies, his fresh minimalism is so well suited to the region’s natural environment that Studio B Architects earned the AIA/Colorado’s Firm of the Year in 2009 and continues to rake in design awards for homes like this one, Linear House. Lindenau says that RISD gave him an ongoing thirst for an “intense cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines” and a taste for an intense “ephemeral, poetic and artistic milieu” that still informs his practice today. studiobarchitects.net

Scott Lindenau BArch 86

New New England Style As the duo behind Estes/Twombly Architects in Newport, RI, Jim Estes BArch 72 and Peter Twombly BArch 80 build and renovate homes that lengthen New England’s short summers and cozy up the winter, all by breaking down barriers between outside and in. Their homes are happy to be local: sticking with Yankee restraint, the work is modest in scale, while also hugely ambitious in design. The self-coined “quiet modernists” distill classic structures to their essence, creating coastal homes, farmhouses and more that hum with energy. estestwombly.com

James Estes BArch 72

Peter Twombly BArch 80

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Home Making Artists’ homes generally don’t fit the subdivision norm. No matter the size, shape, real estate value or style, they tend to be full of flavor and unusual finds. But when your home is an ongoing art project—that you’ve been working on for two decades—it can cross into the realm of 21st-century wunderkammer. Take Luna Parc, a personal project Ricky Boscarino 82 JM calls his very own “museum of oddities.” Covered in ceramic mosaics inside and out, the house in Montague, NJ is bursting with artwork and treasures collected from travels around the world. lunaparc.com

Ricky Boscarino 82 JM

David Coleman BArch 79

Well-Sited A rocky hilltop site in Washington’s Methow Valley didn’t make for easy construction, but David Coleman BArch 79 met terrain-based challenges by designing a house 20 feet wide and 115 feet long that hugs the ridgeline. His sustainable, minimalist home is built to last: with three glass walls and a fourth of corrugated steel, the structure is also bookended by gabion walls of stone from the site. The 1,100-sf home “reads and lives like a habitable landscape,” Coleman says. It also boasts just as much deck space, where the same plantationgrade mahogany boards used indoors frame a sunken fire pit and mountain views to die for. davidcoleman.com

Mila Zelkha BArch 01

Redesign Within Reach Just as the housing bubble burst, Mila Zelkha BArch 01 began building Mint Condition Homes from the ground up. Using green design and an eye for period detail, she takes on distressed properties in and around Oakland, CA and transforms them into appealing homes within reach of first-time home buyers. Zelkha improves on conventional renovations without sacrificing the bottom line, refashioning vintage houses to maximize natural light and open space. Her homes offer butcher block counters, original antique stoves and modern-leaning hardware, proving that a marriage of good intentions with high quality can live happily under the same roof. mintconditionhomes.net

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inner beauty

Lindsey Adelman 96 ID

Let There Be Light—and More Lindsey Adelman 96 ID has long led the pack in creating elegant, edgy lighting. Her Manhattan design studio includes a team that keeps it all in the RISD family: working with Ilya Brukhman 12 ID, Barrett Hanrahan 10 ID, Brendan Keim MFA 12 FD, Kevin Quale 10 ID, Brett Windham MFA 12 SC and Karl Zahn 03 ID, Adelman is best known for creating dramatic chandeliers and pendants made of brass and blown glass. Recently, she has expanded her extraordinary home goods to include vessels, tiles and wallpaper, along with Maine mussel shells plated in 18k gold, wall-hanging glass stalactites and turned walnut candlesticks—a curation of objects that is as impeccably crafted as it is desirable. lindseyadelman.com

Bill Hilgendorf 02 ID

Jason Horvath 02 ID

Megan Lawler Thörn 81 GD

Transforming Scrap Bill Hilgendorf 02 ID and Jason Horvath 02 ID, founders of the Brooklyn-based design studio Uhuru, make showstopping furniture for the home from stuff other people don’t want. Stockpiling sawmill scrap and discarded wood from sites like the Coney Island boardwalk and the deck of the USS North Carolina, they craft heirloom-quality seating, tables, lamps and more, with product names that read like poetry: Try to choose between a Love Someone table, a Street Wood bed and a Summer Snow bench, and you’ll quickly learn why Uhuru has been intoxicating buyers for years. uhurudesign.com

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Nina’s Nifty New Haus Now that she has opened a new shop in Los Angeles, interior designer Nina Freudenberger BArch 03 has discovered that West Coast shoppers are as crazy about her home accessories as New Yorkers who frequent the flagship Haus Interior in Nolita. It didn’t hurt business to be featured on HGTV’s new series The Real Designing Women, either, or to be named an IFDA Rising Star and one of Traditional Home’s top 20 New Traditionals. With all the attention, it might be tempting to toss price points to the wind, but Freudenberger is committed to offering quality design at affordable prices. hausinterior.com

Nina Freudenberger BArch 03

photo by Lauren Coleman

California Cool Combining calming colors and artisanal materials, Cathleen Gouveia MIA 98 creates interiors that are also comfortably green. She earned a 2011 ASID Design Excellence Award for Sustainable Residential Design and a “stylemaker” accolade from the San Francisco Chronicle. With an appealing aesthetic (featured in California Homes and Traditional Home Magazine), Gouveia layers old and new materials to harmonious effect, creating interiors that respond to Californians’ call for freshness, beauty and fuss-free functionality. gouveiadesign.com

Sweden Calling Megan Lawler Thörn 81 GD recently introduced Duro, the leading Swedish wallpaper brand, to the American market through her Vermont-based company Innobo Inc. For its Gammalsvenska [Traditional Swedish] Collection, Duro looked to classic wallpaper fragments found in historic manor houses throughout Sweden. In contrast, the company commissions contemporary designs from local artists for its Atmosfär III and Galleri collections. Made with water-based inks and solventfree coatings, the paper promises to add a refreshing touch of Scandinavian design to any home. innoboinc.com

Cathleen Prisco Gouveia MIA 98 fall/winter 2012/13

home work

Precipitous Living

Steven Kenny 84 IL

Passersby pray that the 35-ton house Do Ho Suh 94 PT has placed teetering off a seven-story building in southern California is more illusion than reality. But it’s actually a bit of both. Called Fallen Star, the permanent installation landed last summer in the renowned Stuart Collection at the University of California/San Diego. The full-scale, fully furnished bungalow reflects Suh’s ongoing explorations of the idea of home and how we both perceive and remember the spaces in which we live—all stemming from his own feelings of displacement when he arrived from Korea to study at RISD. Since Fallen Star is perched on a 5-degree angle, walking into the house feels disconcerting, despite its homeyness. “You physically experience this instability while you’re surrounded by elements you’re so comfortable with,” Suh says. stuartcollection.ucsd.edu

Back Door Inspiration Inspired by his move to St. Petersburg, FL, Steven Kenny 84 IL recently succumbed to the urge to “flex different artistic muscles.” Though his new alley series seems totally different from the surrealistic paintings he’s best known for, he says “the underlying symbolism” of both reveals the yin-yang of human and natural activity. “Alleys are utilitarian back entrances,” Kenny points out, unlike “a home’s manicured front entrance. Out back, trash bins, broken furniture and rubble mingle with blooming

Paul Kelly BArch 72

Architect /Artist Now that architect Paul Kelly BArch 72 is focusing more on his painting, his work is gaining attention, with his first solo show last summer at Alden Gallery in Provincetown,

bougainvillea, creeping grasses and small wild-

MA (where he lives). As co-principal of Manitou Architects,

flowers.” The alley paintings were shown earlier

a firm he runs with life partner Ed Dusek, Kelly has long

this fall at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art’s 2012

focused on historic preservation projects, affordable

Contemporary Realism Biennial.

housing and second-home design. But in recent years he

stevenkenny.com

has been translating his architect’s eye for structural detail into beautifully rendered drawings and paintings. “I look at my work and know that I am constantly evolving,” he says. “If you do it often enough, and keep at it, your instinct is to find your own way and see that simpler is better.” paulkellystudio.net manitouarch.com

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Do Ho Suh 94 PT

Rootless in Suburbia In her most recent work, Meg (Kelleher) Aubrey 85 IL questions the old “American Dream of owning a house with a picket fence and a perfectly green lawn on an idyllic tree-lined suburban street.” Instead, the soccer moms and other young women in her paintings suggest that subdivision life in the new South can feel as sterile and isolating as it looks. “The idealized notion of home shown in the work of Norman Rockwell is a mirage as people move from place to place far from family and without a sense of home,” she notes in the artist’s statement accompanying Domiciled, her early fall solo show at whitespace in Atlanta. megaubrey.com

The Fine Art of Buying Even though he’s not out looking, RISD Printmaking Professor Andrew Raftery has examined homes more

Meg (Kelleher) Aubrey 85 IL

than most. In his Open House series (on view through December 9 at Wesleyan University’s Davis Art Center), he focuses on the real estate ritual of home buyers carefully combing through homes for sale. Using the ancient art of burin plate engraving, the master printmaker surprises with contemporary touches like Saarinen tulip chairs and Graves teakettles, elevating everyday domestic decisions to moments worth preserving. wesleyan.edu/dac

Andrew Raftery 84 IL

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home improvements

Fund a Home in Rwanda Through the nonprofit GA Collaborative (GAC), a group of artist/ activists, Jungil Hong 99 CR and Yutaka Sho BLA 96 are working to use art to raise funds to build 50 new houses for Rwandan widows. Their Fund-a-House Project involves more than a dozen alumni who contributed African-inspired print designs that are produced first on paper and then on fabric. The prints are being sold through The Headlight Hotel Print Shop and Tiny Showcase gallery, with proceeds helping to fund prototype housing in the women’s rural village. In StitchWorks, the next phase of the project, the Rwandans will print the designs on fabric and make clothing and accessories to raise additional funds. gacollaborative.org theheadlight.com tinyshowcase.com Jungil Hong 99 CR

Yukata Sho BLA 96

Great Rugs, Good Work The eponymous rug company Inigo Elizalde 95 TX runs with help from Ilene Godofsky 09 TX is not just producing fabulous floor coverings for the home. It’s also doing great things through Goodweave, a nonprofit working to end child labor in the carpet industry. Beautifully crafted by skilled adult artisans, Inigo Elizalde Rugs are designed to “bring the outside world inside.” The native of Manila says his most recent collection focuses even more than ever on his love of nature, ethnic fabrics and all things Filipino. “I feel most alive when outside,” the NYC-based painter says. “I want to share that with people through the experience of my designs.” inigoelizalderugs.com

Seeing the Everyday Inigo Elizalde

Since publishing the premier issue of Seeing the Everyday in

95 TX

the spring of 2008, founder and editor Daryl Smith MFA 04 GD

Ilene Godofsky

to find greater meaning and purpose in the rituals of everyday

09 TX

has been reconnecting people with the prosaic, helping them life. The seed for the beautifully designed, ad-free quarterly grew out of Smith’s thesis work at RISD, “based on our most common, most influential relationships—those at home.” And people are buying the values-driven message. With subscribers from all 50 states and countries throughout the world, Seeing the Everyday is also seeing success, despite declines in the publishing industry overall. seeingtheeveryday.com

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Richard E. Polton BArch 75

Heartfelt History Even though he now lives in nearby Glen Ridge, Richard Polton BArch 75 considers Paterson, NJ home. He grew up in the old industrial city, as did his parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. Now a founding principal of Value Research Group, a consulting firm that specializes in affordable housing and urban development, Polton has long had a personal fascination with Paterson and its past. That led to a seven-year labor of love researching a new book on one of New Jersey’s most influential 20th-century architects. The Life & Times of Fred Wesley Wentworth (2012, Rutgers University Press) offers a fascinating look at a talented architect who shaped Paterson and its people. fredwesleywentworth.com

Geoffrey Bruce 61 ID

Shapely Shade Through his fabulous prefab and custom tensile sculptures, Geoffrey Bruce 61 ID allows homeowners to extend the usable limits of outdoor spaces in a beautiful, practical and environmentally friendly manner. His fabric architectural interventions— sold though his company Tensile Shade Products—go well beyond the standard sun-umbrella and awning concepts to reduce energy consump-

Daryl Smith MFA 04 GD

tion and related eco-(logical and nomic) impacts. Since the launch of his first mass-produced tensile sculpture in 2007, the Tucson-based entrepreneur has made his stunning custom solutions to desert living available to homeowners everywhere. tensileshadeproducts.com ghbruce.com juxtaform.com

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Living Beasts … 20 Beyond Shelter … 32 At Home in the Studio … 38

For most people, home is a concept thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s very close to the heart. The following stories look at various connotations of the word through the eyes of half a dozen alumniâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;from those who came to feel at home in the bayou while creating an imaginary home known as the Bathtub, to the architect who defines his professional self by designing his own home, to the artist who is most at home in her studio.

bottom, far right: photo by Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxxx

Making a home in the heart of this year’s most extraordinary film.

by Francie Latour O n a Sun day a f t er n o o n i n F eb rua ry 2 0 10,

Jonathan

bottom, far right: photo by Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxxx

Mosca 07 PR got a phone call from a friend in Boston with an

unusual request: track down the passport of someone he didn’t know, get on a plane and deliver it—before dawn—at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans. Mosca is a builder who specializes in millwork design. At the time, he was adrift, having followed a string of jobs from Massachusetts to Maine to North Carolina and then back to Rhode Island: carpenter, cabinet maker, sculpture technician, unemployed sculpture technician. In more ways than one, a free trip to Louisiana seemed like the best offer that had come along in a while. When he arrived, he looked up his friend Sophie Kosofsky 06 FD, who was on an expedition of her own. “I’d been to New Orleans before, and I wanted to just sort of see other parts of Louisiana,” Mosca recalls. “She said, ‘That’s perfect. I have to go to the bayou because I’m scoping out some locations for this movie I’m working on.’ To which I was like, ‘Great. Let’s go.’”

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“Even though Beasts is fantasy and we were not literally representing [the wonderful people we met], there were aesthetic choices I struggled with while making the movie— the extreme messiness of how they live.” Sophie Kosofsky 06 FD

The movie was called Beasts of the Southern Wild. And the place Kosofsky took Mosca that day was Isle de Jean Charles— a speck of land that measures about two miles long and a quarter-mile wide, and that is slowly vanishing into the bayou-laced waters of the Gulf coast. It’s a place whose residents have been sealed off and written off, left to improvise their own survival outside the rim of a massive, $887-million flood protection system. It’s a place some predict will be the first US community to disappear as a result of climate change. And it’s also a place residents insist they will never leave— because it’s their home. “It didn’t look like anything I had ever seen before,” Mosca says. “There’s the feeling of entering a kind of remote, separated community. If it was someplace in the Northeast it would almost seem like a destination for high-end beach homes. But it had such a desolate, dilapidated feeling. You drive along this long causeway that’s straight as an arrow, and it’s right at the level of the water—like pavement basically rising out of the bayou. And the whole landscape is perforated by pockets of water and inlets and channels, so everything about it seems fragile.” Riding in a borrowed black Mazda, Mosca and Kosofsky were in and out of Isle de Jean Charles in under an hour. “I thought: ‘Wow, this is a really weird place and I’m glad I came,’” he recalls. “Now back to my regular life.” But soon the waterways and marshlands of surrounding Terrebonne Parish would become Mosca’s regular life. For five months of chaotic, consuming, often desperately creative filmmaking, south-of-the-levee Louisiana became home for him, Kosofsky and fellow alums Annie Evelyn 99 FD/MFA 07 and Eliza Zeitlin 07 SC—all of them drawn by the parable of a bayou on the edge of apocalypse, and by the gravitational pull of Court 13, a New Orleans artists’ collective that somehow brought a spellbinding film to life from production headquarters set up in an abandoned gas station on Louisiana’s Highway 55. At Home in the Bayou

With virtually no money but an abundance of heart, the project seemed to pull an ever-widening circle of relatives, friends and improbable recruits into its orbit—like the Boston friend who called Mosca about the passport, and who also wound up in New Orleans, working as a handler for pot-bellied pigs trained from birth to perform as the movie’s mythological aurochs. In this movie-making brigade, RISD alums would come to play instrumental roles—Mosca as construction foreman, Kosofsky as construction coordinator, Evelyn as set decorator and Zeitlin as artistic advisor to her brother, Beasts director

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Sophie Kosofsky BFA 06

When the Beasts crew first got to Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, it looked like nothing they had ever seen before. But it proved to be the perfect inspiration for the Bathtub—the world they were about to create.

Benh Zeitlin. None of them had experience making a featurelength film. But together they helped conjure up the cinematic world of the Bathtub, the fantastical yet brutally real bayou village where a 6-year-old girl named Hushpuppy lives on the brink of becoming an orphan. With a band of fellow novices and a distinctly RISD sensibility, these four alumni designed and built some of the iconic exteriors and interiors that lend Beasts so much of its aesthetic power: the elevated trailer where Hushpuppy lives, cantilevered off of decaying oil drums; a schoolhouse boat clad in wooden spears—part raft, part apothecary and part battleship. As they turned to the surrounding environment for the structures and salvage that would become the physical world of the film, the makers of Beasts increasingly became part of that environment, in a way that is rare for any film shot on location. Day in and day out, they ate, drank and slept alongside Terrebonne Parish residents, living in barebones housing scattered along the bayous. With an ever-growing crew that included a number of local and untrained members, at times the lines of distinction between the filmmakers and the larger community became blurred. As strangers became neighbors, neighbors became collaborators and collaborators became friends, the sense of what home means in the Delta bayou deepened for the filmmakers, including Kosofsky. And with that understanding came a daunting sense of responsibility—that if the film did nothing else, it had to honor, and not exploit, the communities that had opened up their homes and welcomed them in. “We met so many really wonderful people,” Kosofsky says. “And I felt completely responsible for making sure that we were representing them in a way they would feel good about. Even though Beasts is fantasy and we were not literally representing them, there were aesthetic choices I struggled with while making the movie—the extreme sloppiness, the messiness of how they live.”

Sophie Kosofsy and others building the sets struggled with how best to translate the funkiness of what they saw all around them into the place Hushpuppy, the sixyear-old protagonist, calls home.

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In some ways, Kosofsky says, the film’s phenomenal success makes some of those questions feel even more weighty. “Before I moved to New Orleans, I’d never been anywhere that felt so much like I was home. I didn’t think it was even a possibility to feel that way about a place,” says Kosofsky, who recently returned to her native Boston after living in New Orleans on and off for five years. “There’s a sense of identity that people hold onto really tightly and because of that it really preserves this unbelievable sense of tradition and culture.” Creating the Bathtub

Beasts marks Benh Zeitlin’s first feature-length film; he also co-wrote the screen adaptation with playwright Lucy Alibar. From the time the film premiered at Sundance last January, winning the Grand Jury prize, Zeitlin has been riding a wave of success at premieres and festivals across the globe. In the span of a few months this fall, he traveled from Odessa to Sarajevo to Guanajuato to Berlin and then Deauville, France, where the film picked up yet another top honor. No matter what continent he finds himself on, Zeitlin inevitably gets asked a question that he says speaks volumes about the contribution of RISD alums to the movie. “I get asked all the time, ‘Where is this place? How do you drive there?’” Zeitlin says, referring to the film’s elaborate sets. “And I mean, what do you say? It’s a world that was completely created by artists. A lot of our people—especially the people who came from RISD—are all artists in their own right, and

each of them created their own art in making the film. The fact that people see it and think it’s a depiction of reality is a credit to just how good our art department was.” It’s true that Isle de Jean Charles inspired the world of Beasts. But Isle de Jean Charles is an actual place you can find on a map; the Bathtub is cinematic fiction. That meant that every square inch of every set had to be conceived from scratch and made to look like it had always been there, weathered by natural disaster and the passage of time. Much of that work fell to Annie Evelyn—a furniture designer whose job as set decorator ranged from rigging a child’s dresser with a sliding board to devising a pulley system for apothecary shelves to strategically cramming piles of clothes, dirt, debris and found objects onto empty sets until those sets evoked real rooms where real people live. “It was a massive undertaking,” Zeitlin says, “because you can see just how cluttered almost every space in the movie is. They looked like spaces that had been sitting there for 50 years— untouched. But in reality they all started out as blank canvasses.” In some ways, Evelyn arguably had one of the most delicate roles among the 80-person crew: creating interior sets that evoke the chaos, isolation and extreme hardship of the Bathtub without reinforcing stereotypes about race or class. As the film racks up awards—with seemingly unstoppable momentum heading into Oscar season—the portrayal of abject poverty in the bayou has been one of the most controversial and hotly debated aspects of the film.

Making Beasts had a profound effect on everyone involved. Director Benh Zeitlin had never made a feature-length film and six-year-old actress Quvenzhané Wallis had

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Annie Evelyn BFA 99/MFA 07

never acted in one (or in anything else, for that matter). But the months spent living in the watery bayou made the entire cast and crew feel at home in the region—and with each other.

“ It was really important to me to try to express who I thought these people were through their homes.” Annie Evelyn 99 FD/MFA 07

“It was really important to me to try to express who I thought these people were through their homes,” says Evelyn, who also helped scout locations and hold auditions for thousands of local residents. “You’ve got this certain aesthetic that’s built around people who are shut off from the world and who actually reject that world. It was important to create spaces that respect the characters and don’t . . . pigeonhole them as these wild, crazy people who live in piles of garbage. I definitely wrestled with that internally. ” Evelyn and the entire production crew also wrestled with the elements. Working on a shoestring budget, they had to find a way to create Beasts’ epic, alternate universe and then recreate that universe in a state of post-flood destruction. It was a backbreaking process of trial and error, in which she and others found themselves bending back individual tree branches and spraying them with dirt and water for scenes in the film’s second half, when a violent storm submerges the Bathtub in floodwaters. (Ultimately, the film had to be shot in two different locations to achieve a pre- and post-flood Bathtub that looked believable.) “One of the things that was hard to do was to try to make nature look alive in one shot and completely dead in another shot, when in reality nothing’s actually changed,” Evelyn says. “So we’re out there with a fire hose wetting these trees down and we’re like: ‘Is this even doing anything? What the hell are we doing?’”

As the seafood dinner scene shows, the interiors of all the sets for Beasts looked totally lived in and like they had always been there—even though everything started out as a blank canvas. That’s the beauty of having artists like those from RISD creating the sets, director Zeitlin says. Dwight Henry (to the right above) does a fabulous job playing Wink, Hushpuppy’s moderately messed-up father.

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With so many novice filmmakers assembling the sets that would become the Bathtub, it wasn’t always clear how the physical world of the film as a whole would hang together. Beyond director Zeitlin, the person most responsible for making sure that happened was his sister, Eliza—a RISD sculpture major whose real life actually mirrors the scavenging, heaped-on existence of the film’s characters. (In a 2002 story on teenagers and their messy rooms, the New York Times catalogued the teeming collections she had amassed in her bedroom in suburban New York: keys, hardware found on the side of the road, thousands upon thousands of tabs off the tops of soda cans.) Though Zeitlin was directly involved in building sets, her all-encompassing role in the film is best reflected in her unusual, stand-alone credit: “featuring the Art of Eliza Zeitlin.” Over the course of the shoot, she became a guiding force for the film’s sense of authenticity. “We got the prettiest place on earth,” Hushpuppy’s narrative voice-over says in one of the early scenes, and to the extent that the film convinces us of this, it is in part due to what Zeitlin brought to the film, grounding it in a vision of home that is both atmospheric and brutally stark. Asked to describe his sister’s work as an artist, Benh Zeitlin says, “She builds universes. And she’s got this incredibly immersion-intense approach to creating those distinct universes.” In any movie production, Zeitlin says, filmmakers turn to tricks of the trade to save money, effort and precious time— tricks like building up only that part of a structure the camera will see. “But Eliza would never allow me not to let her build the entire thing. Every single thing had to be real. If there was a drawer, there had to be something inside of it, even if the drawer was never going to be opened.” OUTRUNNING THE DEMO CREWS

It’s the makeshift, otherworldly beauty of the Bathtub that transports viewers into Beasts’ epic tale of man versus nature. Shaping that world required a months-long scavenging expedition in which Kosofsky, Mosca and a team of location scouts and crew members hunted and hauled massive amounts of materials salvaged from blighted properties across Terrebonne Parish—siding, flooring, windows, doors, trailers and trucks full of debris. And to do that, they had to stay a step ahead of another crew in town with far different goals: to demolish those properties per order of parish officials. “One of the first things I discovered was that the parish was funding this huge demolition effort, with these companies tearing down hundreds and hundreds of properties,” says Kosofsky, who knew her way around salvaged materials after building the boats featured in Zeitlin’s 2008 short film Glory At Sea. “So we’d go out and find something we really liked, and by the time we got permission to be there, that place would be gone.” Almost anywhere else, outrunning a fleet of demo crews would have been an impossible proposition. But as the filmmakers would learn time and again, the Louisiana Delta isn’t like anywhere else.

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Eliza Zeitlin BFA 07

“She builds universes. And she’s got this incredibly immersion-intense approach to creating those distinct universes.” director Behn Zeitlin speaking about his sister, Eliza Zeitlin 07 SC

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“You could actually stand back… and see that the trailer blurred that line—as something that was too far-fetched to exist and yet was right there in front of us.” Jonathan Mosca 07 PR

Once Zeitlin and the crew figured out that Hushpuppy should live in a trailer perched on a foundation of rusted out oil drums, Jonathan Mosca

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Jonathan Mosca BFA 07

jonathanmosca.com

found that making the ramshackle house structurally sound enough to ensure the safety of the cast and crew proved to be a nerve-wracking challenge.

Filming Beasts in the water-logged bayou posed all sorts of logistical challenges, including the need to create the illusion that the natural world had changed after being ravaged by a fictional storm.

“I don’t remember how this happened, but somebody got the list of properties in our parish that were slated for demolition,” Mosca explains. “So we would call the demolition company that had the contract and say ‘Hey, can you just not demolish this place for a couple of days so we can strip it of all the stuff we want?’ ” Mosca recalls. The response on the other end of the line was almost always the same: “Yeah, sure, why not?” As the crew accumulated a massive inventory, their salvaged finds began to breathe life into the script—and even alter it. That was the case with one of the principal sets, which appears in the very first frame and sets the tone for the movie: the trailer that Hushpuppy calls home. Even in a field teeming with debris and farm animals, it’s impossible to miss the eerie, symmetrical beauty of the trailer. And though the search for structures and materials sent the production team out scouring the region, it turned out that the makings of the trailer were sitting right in the filmmakers’ backyard. “I don’t know what Hushpuppy’s house was originally in the script, but at a certain point in the back of the gas station we found these huge oil drums,” says Mosca. “And so Benh

just wrote into the script that Hushpuppy lives on top of these oil drums.” When they finally found the perfect trailer to hoist on top of the drums, it turned out to be a storage trailer belonging to a neighbor. Eventually, the crew peeled off the aluminum siding and used it on the frame of a replica they built to the same dimensions. In engineering terms, the trailer was a complex feat that often teetered on the brink of collapse; at one point, Mosca recalls having to vouch for its structural integrity so that a 350-lb. pyrotechnics engineer with propane tanks could climb on top to set up an explosion—“which was just, you know, insane,” he says. But in cinematic terms, the structure perfectly captures Hushuppy’s essence and the broader vision for the film. “A lot of Benh’s aesthetic comes from this magical realism lens, where there’s this ambiguity in what’s real and what’s not,” Mosca explains. “When I finished that set, you could actually stand back and look at it and see that the trailer blurred that line—as something that was too far-fetched to exist and yet was right there in front of us.”

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“ There were so many times during the shoot when I felt, ‘I have absolutely no idea if this is going to work.’ But I felt confident in being able to figure out different processes and materials, which is the part that is totally fun and joyous.” Sophie Kosofsky 06 FD

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A CHALLENGE LIKE RISD

The same could be said for the schoolhouse-turned-postflood-battleship, which also plays a central role in Beasts. It’s the place where Hushpuppy and her friends get schooled on homemade cures, prehistoric creatures and the spirit of defiance that is necessary for their survival. Turning that structure into reality required all of Kosofsky’s ingenuity and creative wherewithal. The entire structure had to be built on water, and because it had to be filmed in motion, it had to be structurally sound. Driving pile after pile into the bayou waters to anchor what she was building, Kosofsky encountered the same obstacle that defines so much of life in southern Louisiana: everything sinks. “The reason I like working on movies is because it involves some really bizarre circumstances and constant creative problem-solving,” says Kosofsky. “That’s all you do all day, and that’s what I was doing at RISD all the time—having these crazy challenges thrown out there, working around the clock and figuring out how to attack them.

“There were so many times during the shoot when I felt, ‘I have absolutely no idea if this is going to work,’” she says. “But I felt confident in being able to figure out different processes and materials, which is the part that is totally fun and joyous.” COMING HOME

To the characters who live in the Bathtub, the world inside the levees isn’t just ugly. It’s antiseptic, joyless and cut off from the rhythms of nature. “The Bathtub’s got more holidays than the rest of the world,” Hushpuppy narrates as a fireworks celebration erupts early in the film. “Up in the dry world, they don’t got nothin’. They got fishes wrapped in plastic wrappers. They got their babies stuck in carriages.” For the filmmakers, making Terrebonne Parish home was a surreal, at times intoxicating experience that opened them to a new sense of belonging. To this day, Kosofsky says the only time she feels she’s back home is when she touches down at the airport in New Orleans. “I miss it so hard,” she says. “It was heartbreaking to leave it.” Evelyn can still remember being stuck in Point-aux-Chenes, LA, with no ride, after going door-to-door searching for local non-actors. She wound up staying with a couple she had never met before who are now lifelong friends. Mosca had similar experiences: He could feel the wide-open embrace of parish life, though it was tinged with a heightened awareness of himself as an outsider.

Sophie Kosofsy used all of her creative wits to figure out how to construct the prickly floating community house meant to survive the flood.

“You could run into a complete stranger and start up a conversation with them for no particular reason,” Mosca says, “and within 30 seconds they’d have you over for dinner. You’d walk into this incredible feast and their entire family would be there. So that was definitely part of it. At the same time, it was hard not to feel like we were bringing an uninvited force on this place that has been at the brunt of a lot of uninvited forces, be it environmental or manmade.” These days Mosca is working on a film in New York’s Hudson Valley. On Beasts, he lived in a trailer overlooking a sewage pond, bunking with multiple crew members (not to mention frogs, snakes and mice). On his new film, he has his own hotel room—and a lot more responsibility, working with vendors, ordering materials and hiring a crew. In some ways, there will be no duplicating the intensity and delirium of shooting Beasts, Mosca says. He never mistook the parish for home, but it reminded him of how much home is a feeling. “When we finally left, I drove back to Rhode Island with Sophie and [two other crew members], and we went to Charlestown Beach,” Mosca says. “It was right after we crossed the border. I just remember seeing the Atlantic Ocean for the first time after being in the Gulf for so long, and just feeling so good. We went swimming, and the water was so cold and clear. It was a glorious feeling.”

And she learned to deal with the reality that when you’re trying to build in the bayou, everything sinks—so you have to compensate.

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by Liisa Silander

With their playfully conceived Maison Plastique, two architects realize the home of their dreams.

C r i t i cs h av e call ed i t “ s educti v e .” “St r ik in g.”

“A quasi-Cubist crayon box.” And a “chaotic jumble of planes.” Certain neighbors whisper about the “garish eyesore” that took years to build. But Peter Stamberg BArch 72 and Paul Aferiat, his partner in life and in practice, call their colorful new addition to the Shelter Island landscape home—at least on weekends or whenever they’re not renting it out to pay the bills. “We knew going into this that if everyone likes our house, we will have failed,” Stamberg says, underscoring just how much that wasn’t the point. “This was an intellectual exploration— and a lifelong dream. We didn’t build it because we wanted a house; we wanted to find out who we are as architects. It’s just something we had to do.” The arresting 1,100-sf home—which they’ve dubbed Maison Plastique in a tongue-in-cheek nod to their disparate materials and influences, along with Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre—is the most recent residential project completed by Stamberg Aferiat, a New York-based studio with a broad portfolio. Since its inception in 1989, the firm has produced

a series of beautiful and effective designs for hotels, museums, galleries, showrooms, schools and private homes—including the Manhattan apartment designed for apparel designers Tom and Linda Platt in almost every shade of green. Stamberg and Aferiat first “fell in love” with Shelter Island—the exclusive vacation spot ‘sheltered’ by the two forks of land at the eastern tip of Long Island—in the late ’90s, after working on a residential project there. Just prior to the turn of the millennium, they seized the opportunity to buy a tiny piece of land there, at a time when Stamberg says it was still “off everyone’s radar screen.” Both he and his partner had grown up on Long Island— just a few miles from each other, though they didn’t meet until they had each graduated from architecture school. “There was this house by Marcel Breuer right in between where we lived and it’s actually what inspired us both to become architects,”

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Peter Stamberg BArch 72

he explains. And from the beginning they also shared the dream of so many young architects: “to have our own office and design our own house.” For Stamberg and Aferiat, it actually took years of building a practice and designing residential properties for others before they were able to follow through with a home of their own. In the 1990s “we couldn’t afford to walk away from jobs,” Stamberg notes. “Paul and I realized that the only way we would ever get to build anything would be to fulfill our clients’ functional needs so dazzlingly well that they could see no other option.” By the time they became their own clients in 2007, neither dazzle nor function were the primary motivators. Instead, they were intent on packing everything they knew and loved about architecture into a relatively tiny footprint on a third of an acre off the coast of the island where they grew up.

stambergaferiat.com

photos by Paul Warchol Photography

“ We knew going into this that if everyone likes our house, we will have failed.”

The interior of Maison Plastique is as brilliant as the exterior. But color is something of a liability when dealing with clients, Stamberg says, since almost everyone gets squeamish about infusing it into their homes.

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Just after they first closed on the land in December 1999, Stamberg and Aferiat traveled to Spain to celebrate the new millennium. En route to Rhonda, they revisited Mies van der Rohe’s iconic 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, which immediately got them thinking about their own home-to-be. “We wanted to take Modernism from the teens and ’20s and reanalyze it in terms of where we are now,” Aferiat says. “The glass box had been done, and we wanted something more plastic, more fluid—but just as ordered, not deconstructed.” When they finally took the leap and started building eight years later, they freely embraced good friend David Hockney’s observation that great artists can best be judged by “how great the artists are he copies.” In their case, that meant embracing influences from almost every architect and project they admire—from Le Corbusier’s sweeping roof at Ronchamp to the scale of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and the opaque street elevation of Richard Meier’s Hoffman House. And then there’s the influence of Matisse, as summed up in “the c-word,” as Stamberg calls it. Even though over half the work his practice has produced is predominantly white or based on jewel tones, color simply couldn’t be contained when it came to creating their own home. On Hockney’s advice, almost a decade ago the partners started looking closely at Matisse’s paintings in order to better understand color. “We both have an affinity for color,” says Stamberg, who has been known to wear mismatched shoes in bright hues. “And we adore spectral colors. But with the

The all aluminum house proved to be so beautiful in its pristine state that the architects considered leaving it unpainted. But in the end they gave in to their own strong affinity for color—as shown in their lower Manhattan loft on the facing page.

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Shelter Island house, we seriously debated about whether or not to paint it at all—because we loved when it was just all aluminum, too.” Still, as with their Manhattan loft—which, since they moved in in the late ’70s, has gone from bare drywall to all white to soft tones to saturated colors—they ultimately let out all the stops with color, something they can readily do when they’re their own client but that’s much more of a challenge in the competitive marketplace. “No one in the world does what we do with color,” Stamberg says, “but in general people are very color-phobic. And with our clients, when they get involved in the design process, they get a whole different mindset. They get very fearful”—a lot like their Shelter Island neighbors, who watched with trepidation as Maison Plastique took shape. But once they step inside, skeptics are won over, Stamberg says. “Everyone who has been inside adores it”—even the grand dame of island realtors, who is not a fan of modern architecture. But once inside she never wanted to leave, Stamberg says, adding that her ultimate assessment was: “This is what a house on Shelter Island should be. Relaxed, simple, comfortable, a joy to be in.” As for the partners who spent a decade making the place, they’re pleased. “Philip Johnson cautioned young architects against trying to put everything they know into that first building for themselves,” Stamberg says. “But we’re not in our 20s, and we’ve made a lot of architecture. Everything of us is in this house.”

“ No one in the world does what we do with color.”

interview & photography by Michelle Aldredge captions by Anna Schuleit 98 PT

Like most artists, Anna Schuleit sees her studio as a creative sanctuary—the place she needs to be to think and work.

The paint chips in the glass jar (facing page) are samples I collected years ago for my senior thesis at RISD. I found them inside Grafton State Hospital, a psychiatric hospital that I documented in depth. Collecting the paint chips,

rather than painting the building from the outside, was my transition from small-scale work to site-specific projects. I still have many of these jars, all lead-based and eerily vibrant—reminders of my sources.

An n a Sc h ul ei t 9 8 PT, a painter and multimedia artist

known for her large-scale installations, is curious, playful, open-minded and intelligent. But forget the stereotypes of flighty creative geniuses (a word that makes her and most other MacArthur fellows squirm); she is as deep and introspective as she is energetic and outgoing. Born in Mainz, Germany and raised in a family of artists, Schuleit was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2006 and just completed the five-year grant period last year. In the past decade, she has been a visiting artist and lecturer at MIT, Brown, Smith, RISD, Bowdoin, UMass Amherst and elsewhere. Residencies have been important to her artistic development, with stints at The Blue Mountain Center, The MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco, Yaddo and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard, among others. The following Q&A took place in the small, rural town of Harrisville, NH, where Anna owns a studio she uses in the summer, when she wants to escape from her main home base in DUMBO. On the morning I arrived at the studio, her dog Finnegan was relaxing on the couch and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians was playing on the stereo. When I commented on this musical choice, Anna explained that she begins every work day in the studio by listening to both that piece and Drumming, also by Reich.

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What is your typical routine? Do you have any daily rituals that help your creative work?

When I wake up in the morning I first go outside with my dog to check on the weather and the overall feel of the day. That’s the very first thing—going outside—then a walk or run in the woods, breakfast and off to the studio for the rest of the day. Once there I usually continue working on what I was doing the night before— a series of works, never just a single piece. If I stay long enough in the studio—just stay with the work even if it doesn’t feel great or seem satisfying, if I just stay to tend and garden, then my mind gradually yields control to the more automatic labor of painting, and with that comes a sweet spot in the process further down, a worn groove, a sense of ease. That’s a bit elusive and hard to describe, and it doesn’t really depend on any rituals other than, well—presence.

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Anna Schuleit BFA 98

annaschuleit.com

Just staying with it allows it to open up. The same is true for any creative task, no? I listen to music while I work, usually abstract things. But I also enjoy the quiet—sounds from elsewhere— birds. I eat simple meals, more lunch than dinner, and I read the news when I can, or make phone calls, or run quick errands, but usually I’m in the studio for long stretches of sameness: mixing paint, looking at paintings, drawing, looking more, painting, mixing more paint, drinking some tea, looking more. I enjoy this more than I can adequately express. By the time I leave the studio at night I often feel deeply connected to my work and I have to tear myself away like a kid from a playground. The process feeds itself, somehow, and I get to be a part of it, which is the best and simplest and most tumbling and humbling feeling I know.

I have multiple stations in my studio that prevent me from getting stuck in any one. I just keep moving on to another work close by. And I love these antique casters and pulleys from Europe.

I love the combination of intense creative energy and controlled order in your studio. Can you explain how it’s organized?

“All rather quotidian objects, but for me they’re a stirring mix of ordinary things.”

My studio is one large space subdivided into several parts—paintings on the walls, drawings and prints on tables in the middle, paints and inks and dry media and other tools in between, and books and papers on the fringes. The different parts of the studio help me to keep moving, like stations along a road. Things are in flux though. It’s definitely not overly neat, but it’s not chaos either. It’s a good, medium kind of state with room for dried paint and dust and empty bottles and clothes. And there are large, handsome industrial windows overlooking a row of trees. Oh, and lots of lamps and spotlights, since I work at night, too. Working at night makes all the other things that aren’t part of the paintings fall away, adding contrast and saturation and a kind of temporary authority in the composition that the next day supersedes again. Are there any objects in your studio that have special meaning to you?

Objects are interesting to me if they have the potential of ending up in my work in one way or another. For a while I was accumulating dozens of sketches of feet and legs—for use in my paintings. So while I wasn’t able to collect actual legs and feet, I made them into objects via my drawings. Now I’m switching over to found shoes and old wheels and pulleys—just ordinary things that are lovely and precious in small, unexpected ways when held and handled. Chairs have also been in my work for years and I have a few here that I vowed to care for forever—a fuzzy orange upholstered one I found on a rainy roadside, two handsome 1930s swivel chairs with wheels and a narrow wooden folding chair that is as light as a bird. Some of my tools also have special meaning to me: brushes that have been with me since RISD and trusty rusty palette knives; my sketchbooks—and books in general; and my mechanical Corona typewriter that I bought at auction for $3, which is less than the impossible-to-find ribbons it requires to run properly in the 21st century. All rather quotidian objects, but for me they’re a stirring mix of ordinary things.

In the back there, with the computers, is the reading corner, filled with books and

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documents. My dog Finnegan is there with me most of the time, snoozing on the couch.

“ By the time I leave the studio at night I often feel deeply connected to my work and I have to tear myself away like a kid in a playground.”

You have had many studio spaces besides in this renovated mill building in New Hampshire. What are the advantages of creating art in a quiet, rural community versus in New York?

When I work in my DUMBO studio, it means continually keeping the city at bay. Urban seductions sneak into one’s days at all hours and are as unstoppable as water. It’s a useful exercise for artists to learn to build dams against distractions so that the work gets to be the most important force and can speak loud and clear. Time slips away at such a rapid pace if there are even just two extraneous things scheduled in a day other than one’s studio work. And time is still the key ingredient to growing something. When I’m working four safe hours away from New York, it means I’m here most days—automatically—just by being too far from the city to be spontaneously whisked away from something I’m doing. And this small town holds me gently—and simply—with its tiny post office and general store and a lake to swim in when it’s warm. On the spectrum of distractions, Harrisville offers the bare minimum, up only a notch from a deserted island, which I’ve once had a chance to try and love before moving on.

I know now that I need a sprinkling of human contact in an otherwise quiet and free-running day of painting. But when I miss the whirling city, I admit to courting it in my mind. It’s a continuous mix of wishing and longing. Speaking of keeping distractions at bay, how do you keep technology from invading your creative space— both your mental and physical space?

That’s probably the Gordian knot of our times, no? How much “tool” do we require to enable expression? How easy it is to sink oneself into the relationship with a piece of technology rather than into the relationship with the thing that the technology was acquired to facilitate, the thing itself, the treasure. What is the treasure of our creative life? Is it a single late painting coming out of hundreds before? Or is it a lone novel? I do think now—and this has probably changed over the years since art school—that the treasure is one’s whole sweep of trying, not letting go of a direction once under way. And if that’s so, then technology to me as a painter—computers especially—are easily exposed as another complex form of distraction. Why? Because they carry the good with the bad in one potent mix: access to information alongside rivers of crap.

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I try to have as little of it as possible. I don’t watch TV, although I do love movies. I use email, but I rely on a temperamental public wireless network here in town. I drive a car, but I don’t use an electric can opener. So, on the spectrum of technology consumption, I might be found somewhere in the hazy middle—not addicted but dependent. And wishing for less, by which I mean more direct interactions, experiences, touch. More actual risk. The question is how much mediated experience (such as GPS) versus how much raw experience each one of us prefers and needs. I prefer the raw, I think, even if it comes with erroneous roads, detours and delays.

So many artists struggle to maintain a balance between their creative work, family and social life. As someone who grew up in a family of artists, how has this informed your own views?

Growing up among artists meant that the life of an artist was considered normal by everyone closest to me—not special, not glamorous, not precarious or worrisome, just normal. And that meant that the demands of making a living as an artist while keeping the work alive and in the forefront, weren’t so scary to me. Family and art were the same thing to me, and still are. As a teenager I was assisting my mom with her art, which was intense for me. But it also brought us close. She’s one of my most honest critics, colleagues, friends. I owe so much to her, especially the no-nonsense attitude to making your art, the sense of normalcy and daily continuum.

“ I prefer the raw [over the mediated] experience, even if it comes with erroneous roads, detours and debris.”

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The large buckets of acrylic paint (above) are leftovers from Just a Rumor, my painting project at UMass Amherst (2010 – 11), for which I was allowed to special-order any amount of paint, in any shade. My library of drawings of bodyparts—especially legs and feet and shoes—are often the beginnings of my paintings.

Can you talk about some of your early struggles with creating art and making a living? What kind of impact did winning a MacArthur have on your creative life?

My family always encouraged us kids to work, so I found my first job at 12, working for a grocer on Saturdays. I also delivered newspapers and worked as an usher at a classical music festival. Later I was a resident assistant in the RISD dorms and when I graduated I worked for a horse trainer. Then I moved to NYC where I did web design and tried to sell handmade sketchbooks on the streets, which didn’t work out. In grad school I worked in catering, in the libraries and in a juice bar, and I lived in the attic of a nursing home staffing the night shift. When I moved back to NYC I found my two favorite jobs: at the MTA’s Arts for Transit (art in the subways) and at Nightingale Bamford School, teaching art. None of those jobs were discouraging— just challenging in that they took over most hours in the day and left little time for work in the studio. And now I’ve been in my studio full-time since 2007, which was made possible through the enormous, humbling gift of the MacArthur Fellowship, allowing me to stay and stay and stay with the paintings as I had always wanted, seeing them through to a point when they’re ready to go out into the world. This then is my first unhurried body of work I have ever produced. I put all my time into it, with only a few interruptions. And yet it feels like it’s all only just beginning, too.

“ Ultimately, this is what I repeat most often to myself: avoid tip-toeing around, Anna. Stay. Go deeper. Don’t leave.”

Do you have advice to share with struggling artists?

One of the early, fundamental bits of advice I got came from David Frazer 70 PT, my painting professor at RISD, who said, “You can’t think your way to a good painting—you have to paint your way there.” And Max Beckman said something to the effect that when you get there, don’t back out; too many times you don’t exhaust the material. Stay. Go deeper. And then there’s Chogyam Trungpa, who speaks about the artist’s life: “You have to start by paying attention to reality. You need to learn to eat properly, to cook properly, to clean your house and to work with your clothes. You need to work with your basic reality. Then you go beyond that, and you begin to have something much more substantial.” Sounds obvious, no? But it’s so frequently neglected. You know, good advice is really anything that keeps you afloat via a sense of shared struggle. Good advice is the kind that tugs at your heart a little, since it addresses something you know you need help with, be it focus, authenticity, endurance, fearlessness, etc. Ultimately, this is what I repeat most often to myself: avoid tip-toeing around, Anna. Stay. Go deeper. Don’t leave. What’s been fuzzy then gradually falls into place around me, into a more solid, observable, bearable state. For Michelle’s full interview with Anna, go to: gwarlingo.com and search by her name.

campus community newsbits

A Question of Values by

John Maeda RISD’s President

O ne t h i ng that shines

through in the work produced at RISD is that its integrity comes from a place of materiality and criticality. In our digital age, we’re seeing renewed curiosity about materials and all things physical, simply because much of the world has lost sight of them. You see little bits of this in the obsession with placing faux woodgrain veneers on software apps, for example. What people want now goes beyond sleekly designed objects and experiences. We’re all hungry for authenticity—in the form of the human hand, mind and heart—and we’re looking for ways to reconnect with our values—to ground how we choose to live in the world. This is why the questions RISD students and faculty ask in their work are so important. Every stone, spec of dirt and atom of oxygen are virtually turned over and examined in the creative process. This deep probing of purpose and meaning sometimes takes us backward and sideways to reveal which way “forward” actually is. The questions artists ask are often enigmatic. They may answer a why with another why, which makes understanding art difficult at times. But it’s this intensity that makes RISD’s unique brand of “critical making” so relevant. 46

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“We’re looking for ways to reconnect with our values— to ground how we choose to live in the world.”

The critical thinking and making that go on every day in RISD studios leads to the kind of innovation most needed today. It also spawns projects like Assistant Professor Cas Holman’s High Line Children’s Workyard Kit—a perfect blend of art, design, engineering and play.

Jobs’ world

In the business world, Steve Jobs was the iconic CEO-as-artist. One conclusion to draw from his example—as revealed by Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography—is that to be an artist is to be a mercurial asshole in bloodthirsty pursuit of an ideal others can’t yet envision. But an alternative is to see an artist as someone driven to explore and express ideas, and with such ferocity that he or she is willing to sacrifice everything for a vision or cause that may have no immediate or readily apparent meaning to anyone else.

Follow President Maeda at twitter.com/johnmaeda + our.risd.edu.

In other words, artists are driven. And they’re not as interested in fitting in or feeling comfortable as in getting to the truth at the core of an enigma. In Jobs’ case, he painstakingly pursued the question of what a digital ecosystem that transcends mere relevance and basic needs could mean for contemporary culture. We buy Apple products not just because they function, not just because they’re well designed, but out of respect for the integrity of his vision and what it brought us. We buy into the vision of the world he was

Ghibli Love

trying to create and the values they represent. And for this, we are happy to pay a little extra. In a world in which new breaches of integrity are revealed every day, it’s important to us to hold on to clear values. We want the products we buy to be made responsibly, presented honestly and come from the mind of a human being, not an algorithm. Art drives innovation

Art speaks to us as humans, not as “human capital.” It shows us that human beings still matter in a world where money speaks loudest, machines make our meals and computers know everything about us. Artists ask questions that others are either afraid to ask or unable to conceive and that reach beyond the value of money. Occasionally, as in Apple’s case, or Pixar’s, or Harley Davidson’s, we witness an artist asking questions that have a profound effect on the marketplace—on the way we live and play and drive. So how do we have more of these successes? I’m not talking about commercializing or debasing art. I’m talking about reminding people that innovation and cultural advancement stem from an artistic sensibility. In the US we focus on technical skills as the drivers of innovation. Silicon Valley now has talent agencies to manage hotshot programmers (yes). And around the world, even small countries such as Estonia are focusing on teaching coding. When politicians and policy makers talk about improving education in America, they focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subjects. It’s so mainstream now that even will.i.am is talking STEM. If we want to make the next generation of “artrepreneurs,” we need to add A for Art to transform STEM into STEAM (see also pages 56–57). Faculty like Assistant Professor of Industrial Design Cas Holman are building STEAM in action here at RISD. Her new Children’s Workyard Kit, designed as a custom play feature for New York City’s High Line, allows kids to assemble their own large-scale play objects out of wooden planks, wheels, pulleys and ropes. It’s a perfect example of what can happen when we blend art, design, engineering and play. I’m happy that this movement is gathering steam (pun intended) across government and research. But what really tickled me this fall was to learn that the 43rd season of Sesame Street is being brought to viewers by the letters S–T–E–A–M. Only a year ago, Elmo was interviewed on CNN about the importance of S–T–E–M. Now that Elmo gets it, surely everyone else will catch on. This article has been adapted from a lengthier WIRED piece. See risd.cc/Z9NKMY.

Thanks to coordinated efforts by two alumni—Associate Professor Nicholas Jainschigg 83 IL and Tokyo-based apparel designer Tae Ashida 87 AP—one of the three principals of the renowned Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli came to RISD last spring to accept an honorary degree at the 2012 Commencement ceremony. Getting Ghibli’s participation was especially exciting since the studio regularly declines requests from groups all over the world and is very careful about the distribution of its films. But director and animator Hayao Miyazaki, his colleague and mentor Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki agreed to accept the honor, with Suzuki coming to Providence to collect the honorary degree on behalf of the studio. As part of his visit, the celebrated Studio Ghibli films Spirited Away (directed by Miyazaki) and Only Yesterday (directed by Takahata) were screened in their original Japanese (with subtitles), accompanied by a public discussion with the producer. And this fall, RISD’s new friends in Japan sent a show-stopping thank you gift: every DVD they’ve ever made, given to the Fleet Library at RISD in the name of the Illustration department.

Stills from Studio Ghibli’s animated classics Spirited Away and Only Yesterday.

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America in View Photography alumni Justin Kimball 85 PH, Laura McPhee MFA 86 PH and David T. Hanson MFA 83 PH are among the artists with breathtaking work in America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now, this fall’s lead exhibition at the RISD Museum. The show of approximately 150 photographs includes work by a dozen or more alumni and faculty and presents a broad panorama of imagery ranging from 19th-century albumen prints to contemporary digital images. America in View features major gifts from the late RISD provost and professor

Funding for Critical Making In September RISD was awarded two grants—totaling almost $250,000—to fund leading-edge projects spelled out in the new strategic plan, known as Critical Making/ Making Critical. The George L. Alden Trust awarded $80,000 to launch a pilot “Fab Lab” (fabrication lab) in downtown Providence. Modeled after MIT’s experimental space by the same name, the Fab Lab will provide students access to CNC machinery such as laser cutters, 3D scanners and rapid prototype printers— giving them experience with high-end tools and a possible leg up in the competitive job market. RISD also received $160,331 from the Davis Educational Foundation to support interdisciplinary partnerships in the form of experimental studios. Both grants support the strategic plan’s call for the advancement of interdisciplinary study and cross-collaborations between departments. “We don’t want ideas to be locked in silos,” notes RISD Writing Center Director Jennifer Liese, who helped secure grant funding. Both grants will support the type of integrated teaching and learning that ultimately “inspire, support and highlight” the best student work. 48

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Joe Deal (a landscape photographer himself) and his widow Betsy Ruppa, as well as gifts friends and colleagues gave in Deal’s honor. A fabulous series of supporting lectures—including one by Sally Mann—has added meaning and depth to the show, which continues through January 13.

Reading Wao In early November Junot Díaz, the author and recipient of a 2012 MacArthur grant, visited RISD for a reading and book signing as part of this year’s Common Reading Program. Over the summer, all incoming students were asked to read his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which the New York Times called “so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets Star Trek meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West.” Now in its second year, RISD’s Common Reading Program introduces freshmen and transfer students to the sorts of questions and discussions that shape the liberal arts undergraduate experience at RISD. Last

For more on these and other stories, go to risd.edu/news.

year’s book, the 1927 pulp-fiction novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward written by Providence native and “weird fiction” pioneer H. P. Lovecraft , proved to be universally popular among RISD readers, which essentially upped the ante on this year’s selection. “We wanted another book that is readable and engaging, but that introduces students to the kind of close critical reading required of them in RISD’s liberal arts courses,” notes Dean of Liberal Arts Barbara Von Eckardt. “Oscar Wao is a wonderful choice because of its strong global emphasis.” Students seem to agree. Free tickets to Díaz’s presentation were snapped up the very same day they were first offered.

Two student ventures, Second Life and RISD Exposé, now share great space in downtown Providence.

Work, Money, Love RISD students clearly understand how to coax their craft, but Jennifer Liese, director of the RISD Writing Center, and Liz Collins 91 TX/MFA 99 TX, associate professor of Textiles, have developed Work, Money, Love: Practices of Art and Design to give them the tools necessary to sustain their practices in the professional world. Offered for the first time last spring, the new interdisciplinary graduate course was made possible by a two-year grant from the Marketplace Empowerment for Artists program sponsored by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. The goal is to help students understand “creative practice as part of everyday life, with its complex and nourishing contingencies: economics, politics, community, family and friendship,” notes Dean of Graduate Studies Brian Goldberg MArch 00. Work, Money, Love took students off campus to learn directly from practicing artists and designers. In March they visited the Armory Show in Manhattan and met with an art advisor, a curator, a critic and an arts lawyer to get an “insider’s view into the art world,” says Liese. Students also learned practical lessons about fiscal responsibility—one of the keys to sustaining creative practices—from people like A.L. Steiner, cofounder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (WAGE) and drafted a group manifesto to outline their values and ambitions. The experimental course will be offered again in the spring of 2013, with a new mix of faculty and guest lecturers. “What I find compelling about Work, Money, Love is how it locates professional practice within broader historical and theoretical considerations,” Goldberg says. “It supports students with practical skills and insights, but also provides a broad context in which they can imagine—and invent—a life in art and design.” Students in Work, Money, Love visited Mildred’s Lane, an artists’ collaborative in rural Pennsylvania, as part of their exploration of sustainable practices in art and design.

Another Life for Exposé This fall Second Life, the nonprofit, student-run upcycling center, moved downtown—to 204 Westminster Street, where it shares great grungy space with RISD Exposé, the pop-up gallery/shop selling student work. The building is also home to The Design Office, a shared space directed by Assistant Professor John Caserta and full of lots of RISD alumni. Since Alex Williams 06 FD (now a partner in Rich Brilliant Willing) and Kate Abarbanel 06 FD founded it in 2004, Second Life has sold materials and supplies hunted and gathered through donations and discrete dumpster diving. Staff members in RISD Facilities are always on the lookout for good finds to share with students, who are also notorious for leaving behind goldmines of canvas, drawing pads, paint brushes and more at the end of each academic year. Last spring “we went around to the Hill Houses and the freshman Quad, and because people were leaving art supplies by the trash, we would take them,” notes Second Life co-director Hilary Wang 14 GL. The team also designates collection points around campus so that students can donate art supplies and other items when they move out. That, along with hours spent scavenging and coordinating with potential donors, enables the Second Life team to collect, store and ensure the reuse of materials that would otherwise end up in landfills. The space on Westminster Street also serves as a new home for RISD Exposé, which showcases and sells student works, with its biggest effort at this time of year: in fact, its holiday White Tie Show opens on November 29. Currently headed by Sarah Lammer 13 PR and Emily Jenne 13 PR, RISD Exposé has merged well with Second Life, using old doors as tabletops to display works for sale and a row of theater seats donated by the FAV department as a comfy place to relax in the center of the store. And that makes for a promising experiment, especially given that store manager James Harrison 11 PR is known for “creating a relaxed but efficient atmosphere that encourages customers to check out” the items available via both Second Life and RISD Exposé, according to All-Nighter reporter Jacqueline Jing Lin 15 FAV.

For more on each of these student organizations, go to risdsecondlife.com and risdexpose.com.

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Stunning New Steinways At the start of a new fall studio, Associate Professor Lothar Windels BID 96 and his students visited the Steinway factory in Long Island City, NY to see just how pianos are made. The visit set the stage for a Furniture Design studio in which they’re creating new custom concepts for the world’s leading maker of pianos. Steinway is challenging students “to modify specific parts of the piano in order to make a strong statement” while respecting the company’s brand, according to Steinway & Sons President Ron Losby. During a subsequent visit, students showed scale models of their initial piano designs.

More Mindshare Inspiration RISD’s Career Center hosted another full-day Mindshare event (mindshare.risd.edu) on October 27, bringing leading entrepreneurs to campus to speak to students about how to start their own ventures. Speakers included Evan Polivy 10 FAV (above) of Polivision Productions, Danny Kim 09 ID of Lit Motors and Derek Cascio, founder of the Design Museum Boston, among others. New RISD trustee Joe Gebbia 05 GD/ID, cofounder of Airbnb, gave a preview Mindshare talk the week before.

Upstart Starts Up RISD is one of several colleges collaborating with Upstart, a new startup dedicated to crowdfunding an individual graduate with a good entrepreneurial idea in return for a percentage of the person’s income over a period of 10 years. CEO Dave Girouard, former president of Google’s enterprise business, started the venture as a way to help new grads pursue their startup dreams even if needing to repay student loans. RISD continues to support “artrepreneurship” through the Career Center’s early adoption of supportive online platforms such as Behance, Etsy, Kickstarter and Square. 50

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Cellist Yo-Yo Ma sent a happy-gram to Willa Anderson 15 PR and Andrew Yon BArch 16 after listening to one of their Foundation Studies Spatial Dynamics projects. In response to an assignment from Professor Gareth Jones that asked students to imagine time outside the visual realm, Anderson and Yon rearranged Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 into an invented scale based on the sequence of mathematical integers known as the Fibonacci series. Jones loved the recording so much that he sent it to the famous cellist, who sent his “congratulations on taking a fascinating idea and turning it into an eerie recreation of [the suite].” He added, “I have always been fascinated with Bach’s inclusion of the Fibonacci series in the structure of his compositions, but this is the first time I have heard it at the scalar level. Both of you obviously possess unfettered imaginations, a quality that I so admire in RISD students.” Needless to say, the now-sophomores were thrilled. “I’m just so happy, not only to have my professor think that my work is worthy of sending to someone like Yo-Yo Ma, but to then be recognized by him,” Anderson wrote on his blog. “Just, wow.”

far left: photos by Gregory Geiger

Scaling Sonic Terrain

photos by Courtney Lam 13 TX + Allison Morgan 15 AP

Students Still Know How to Ham it Up Playful students emerged from their studios on November 2 for the ever-popular Artists’ Ball—held this year at the City Center ice-skating rink in downtown Providence. The get-ups were so good that we’re wondering where they possibly find time for such extracurricular creativity.

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Donna Bruton, 1954 – 2012

Newsbits Associate Professor of Architecture Hansy Better Barraza edited Where are the Utopian Visionaries? Architecture of Social Exchange (Periscope Publishing), a newly released collection of essays. In early November the Architecture department hosted a related exhibition and panel discussion in conjunction with the release. Kinefaktura, a film by History of Visual Art + Culture faculty member Marcin Gizycki, is being screened at upcoming international film festivals in Slovenia and Malaysia. Sieves, a new audio-visual series by Assistant Professor of Foundation Studies Shawn Greenlee 96 PR, is on view through December 21 at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook [NY] University. Following the Leak, an exhibition by Senior Painting Critic Jerry Mischak 73 PT, continues through December 1 at Cornell University’s Milstein Gallery in Ithaca, NY. Agnieszka Taborska, a senior lecturer in the History of Art + Visual Culture, was one of seven international writers invited to participate in the annual New Literature from Europe festival, held in NYC in mid-November. She did a reading from The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks, her latest book, at the New York Public Library. A fictional tale inspired by the life histories of 19th-century spiritual mediums, it’s a humorous and poetic tribute to a select group of Victorian women. New York-based artist Selena Kimball 97 SC created a compelling series of collages to illustrate the book.

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Focus on Research A growing emphasis on research is a key component of Critical Making/Making Critical, the five-year strategic plan endorsed by RISD’s Board of Trustees earlier this year. With that in mind, in early November the faculty Research Initiatives Committee hosted the first RISD Research Colloquium. The biennial event offered an open forum for faculty presentations, respondents, panel discussions and breakout groups focused on considering the conditions, characteristics, opportunities and challenges of research at RISD. Participants began to map RISD’s distinctive research culture, proposed ways to support research in its many forms and identified potential initiatives, projects and internal and external partners.

For more on RISD faculty, go to risd.edu/academics/faculty.

Professor of Painting Donna Maria Bruton passed away on September 9, 2012, after a two-year battle against cancer. Born and raised in Milwaukee and Detroit, she earned a BFA from Michigan State and an MFA from Yale. She taught at RISD from 1992 until this year and served as Painting department head from 2001 – 03 and as interim dean of Graduate Studies from 2003 – 05. Donna’s beautifully textured and evocative paintings offer insight into a remarkable artist and individual. “When I’m open and receptive it flows easily,” she said of her process. “When I think too much, the work shuts down. It’s like there’s a higher intelligence that you tap into.” In October the campus community held a memorial celebration, preceded by a participatory program called The Book of Donna: A Workshop of Collage and Contemplation.

Cecilia (Guiu) Searle, 1946 – 2012 Cecilia Searle BLA 71, better known

as Lalla, passed away at her home in Providence on June 23, 2012. She ran Searle and Searle, Landscape Architects and Planners with her husband, RISD Professor Colgate Searle, Jr. BLA 71, and taught Plant Materials and Design at RISD for 13 years. During her 40-year career, Lalla focused on a broad range of regional landscape projects, including an Open Space Plan for Block Island, the Blackstone River Heritage Park and Bikepath, North Kingstown’s Ryan Park, Roger Williams Park Botanical Gardens, Swan Point Cemetery, the Wheeler School and numerous private residences. Throughout her career she also worked to preserve historical landscapes. Lalla’s work was recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the RI State Council on the Arts and the RI Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

top left: collection of the Albright-Knox Gallery | produced with the support of the Public Art Fund, NY | image courtesy of Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and Eleven Rivington, NY | photograph by James Ewing for Public Art Fund

No Hotel: Kevin Zucker, an exhibition showcasing a new body of work by Assistant Professor of Painting Kevin Zucker 00 PT, is on view through December 22 at Eleven Rivington— at both the 11 Rivington Street and 195 Chrystie Street locations. Modern Painters cited it as one of the 100 best upcoming shows this fall. In addition, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY recently acquired his Amalgamated Sculpture (2010, steel, polyurethane, foam, resin and paint, 108 x 60 x 48") for its permanent collection.

Flying Home For me, being at RISD is being at home. The display of miniature furniture in Pendleton House, the Museum’s mummies, the Buddha. Miss McCusker, our ancient history teacher in junior high, brought us to see and wonder, and early on these objects imprinted themselves upon my soul. The stuffed (and living) birds in Miss Edna Lawrence’s Nature Lab, the potter’s wheel and kiln in the ceramics studio. My brother and I spent our Saturday mornings in RISD’s studios. My uncle, the late Herbert L. Fink 48 PT, taught some of these Saturday school classes. So did Wilfred Duphiney, who, incredibly, saved my charcoal sketch of the pose of a ballerina, a very big triumph and thrill for me. I had at long last learned to “put weight on the figure.” He never returned my page but saved it for his portfolio. Imagine that! And then, I flew forth from this miraculous, marvelous, mystical realm at the four corners of Benefit Street to wing my way to New York and Paris, to Boston, Montreal and on to London, like a lost dove—in quest of beauty and glamour. I migrated and then—like one of Noah’s biblical creatures, his folkloric feathered friends, from black raven to the white peace symbol—after our local and historical hurricane floods of 1938 and 1953, I rediscovered the drowning world, my childhood and youth, among the allees of sycamore trees and the tides of our rivers and bays.

I came to RISD as an instructor in 1957 and it strikes me now as a sort of “Chassidic” destiny. Everything and everyone seemed sacred. My colleagues were angels. My students were magical messengers. Like a movie—in Technicolor—there was a brilliance that has never left my memories. They may be myopically blurred by the passage of time, but they are ever renewed and repeated like the Eternal Return. Presently and currently, I serve as faculty advisor to students who run the brand new Pigeon Club. Across from the parking lot above the University Club, with its adjacent Frazier Fountain—the Orpheus sculpture by Gil Franklin 41 SC—you approach the aviary via a thin strip of meadow grasses. And there—voila!— is the coop, the dovecote. The pleasant pigeons coo peacefully as I greet them each dawn and again every weekday dusk. Their home overlooks the Carr House tower, the State Capital and the steeple of the First Baptist Church. They, too, are imbued instinctively with this lovely RISD realm, which is their home forever. I am delighted to be associated with the students and alums involved in the project, like Mackenzie Younger 12 PT, who started the campaign to create this dignified—even divine—domain, and undergrads like Mateo Ward 13 ID, who oversees the club. I identify with this flock, fellow travelers who belong to this benign Olympus.

Michael Fink professor of English

paintings by

Adam S. Doyle 98 IL

above: Adam Doyle’s new oil paintings Brink of Discovery (24 x 18"), Binary Ode (24 x 18") and Direct Assent (18 x 24").

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connecting through the Alumni Association

Creative Energy Fuels RISD/NY by Paula Martiesian 76 PT

O n a f r i gid winter night,

Michael Neff 04 PH is precariously

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Michael Neff 04 PH just prior to his wedding this fall. His evanescent Bridge Project is characteristic of his desire to he share his personal point of view with others.

Neff took a circuitous route to RISD, starting first at the University of Washington and moving on to the Cornish College of the Arts, with a detour to Utah—to follow his heart and a ballerina. He ended up (sans ballerina) at a dot-com company in California, but like so many others at the time, the company quickly disintegrated, leaving him to try his luck on a different

“It makes me happy when people reconnect.” coast—at RISD. With an energetic, positive personality, he got involved in student government and as a natural leader, was elected president of the student body his senior year. Once he moved to New York after graduation, Neff wanted to continue his involvement with RISD. So he initially attended a few alumni club events, then joined

For more on Neff’s work, go to michaelneff.com. Find more on RISD/NY at risdny.org.

the group and helped Carpenter strengthen the board and develop a website. “New York is a very overwhelming place to move,” Neff says. “And I did everything I could to adjust to the city.” Now, he wants to help other RISD alums who are relocating to NYC. “It makes me happy when people reconnect,” he says. Neff and Carpenter have worked to create a strong infrastructure so that the club will thrive regardless of who’s leading it. They’ve expanded the board to include more individuals who can take an idea and make it happen. And they’ve developed a successful site that, in addition to highlighting events, offers job listings and opportunities for networking and professional development. Neff is clearly drawn to bridges—both concrete and abstract—and is committed to building one in New York for RISD alums.

bridge photos by Michael Neff 04 PH

perched on the Pearl Street Bridge in Johnson, VT carefully painting letters with a foam brush and a coffee can full of water. The water freezes on contact and the freshly brushed concrete sparkles under the bridge lights. Though he lives in New York, Neff was at the Vermont Studio Center for a two-week artist residency and the ideas were flowing. “I love noticing things— and sharing them with other people,” he says. Newly built, the bridge was gorgeous and the words he painted on it—supplied by a fellow resident artist—were evocative and positioned so others could read them from the Studio Center cafeteria. Unfortunately, it rained a few hours later and the thoughts were washed away—but not before the photographer who painted them had capably documented the bridge project to share with others. Today Neff runs a one-stop creative shop in Brooklyn geared toward small businesses. “I’m a creative Swiss army knife,” he explains—a photographer, designer, printmaker and co-publisher of a quarterly magazine. He’s also a principal force behind the success of the RISD/NY alumni club, a group he leads with Polly Carpenter 77 PT.

Clubbing it Around the Globe RMCC at Tillinghast Members of the RISD Multi-Cultural Community (RMCC) gathered at Tillinghast Farm in September for a full-day block party. The group is committed to supporting the success of artists and designers from African, Hispanic, Native American and multiracial backgrounds both during and after their studies at RISD. Through activities and advocacy, they intend to “demonstrate by example the inherent strength that diversity brings to creative endeavors.”

The Brothers Mueller The one-of-a-kind twins Kirk and Nate Mueller MFA 10 DM (shown here with Director of Alumni Relations Christina Hartley 74 IL and Admissions officer/Head of RISD/RI alumni club Becky Fong 05 GD) returned home to RISD in September to speak to incoming students as part of Orientation 2012. They talked about their work at the NY-based RISD design collaborative Studio Mercury, where they’re out to offer a more interesting alternative to the “cold, raw, masculine aesthetic of digital art.”

Together in Oregon

Happy (Work) Hour in Hong Kong Wanting to gather to make work together instead of clink glasses at another

Alums in Portland, OR got together in August at the

Happy Hour, RISD/Hong Kong club member Maggie Ma BArch 04 “found this

stunning home of Martha and Anthony Belluschi

precious Wai Chi Print Shop tucked away in an alley” and invited fellow alumni

BArch 66. Their iconic Willamette Heights house was

to a “wordjamming” session. “We’re also learning more about the city, its history

designed in 1948 by Tony’s father Pietro, one of the

and the evolution of printing,” she says, adding that “RISD/HK will continue to

pioneering architects of 20th-century modernism,

seek out these hidden treasures in our city and sponsor events like this for our

and recently renovated by Tony.

alumni to continue making and creating works just like during our time at RISD!”

For information on alumni club contacts around the world, go to alumni.risd.edu.

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When well-known author/illustrator David Macaulay BArch 69 co-taught a course on Communicating Medical Risk last spring, RISD and Brown students explored many possibilities for using visual aids in clinical settings.

STEM + Art = STEAM by

Meghan M. Reilly Michaud 01 GD RISD Alumni Association President

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As an educator, I am well aware of the national agenda to promote more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education and research in America. As a designer, I am also aware that the critical thinking skills we share as artists and designers are essential to true innovation and creative problem solving. RISD recently renewed efforts to get the message out that we need to add the notion of Art (and everything it represents) to the equation if an emphasis on STEM is to yield real innovation. President John Maeda is actively speaking about this on the national stage and publishing articles in places like WIRED, SmartPlanet and The Huffington Post, working to remind policy makers and governmental leaders that we need to add the type of process and creativity alumni acquired at RISD to our broader educational goals. Recently, I joined President Maedaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s efforts to bring

For ongoing news about this initiative at RISD, bookmark stemtosteam.org.

the need for more creativity to the forefront by starting a petition in support of House Resolution 319, a STEAM statement introduced by Rhode Island Representative Jim Langevin. At RISD by Design weekend in early October, the president hosted a fascinating panel discussion about the many ways RISD students and faculty are already cross-pollinating the fields of art, design, science and technology. The presentations were amazing and made it clear just why this is such a promising trendâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and one that deserves more attention. Visit stemtosteam.org to learn more, read case studies and find a link to the petition in support of this timely House resolution. I can think of no more passionate advocates for the broad impact of art and design than our alumni community. Thank you in advance for your interest and support.

Let’s Put the Art Back in Smart by Greg Kanaan 02 FAV

When I attended the Alumni Council meeting in October, the major topic we discussed was STEM to STEAM, which is currently a big deal at RISD. At the meeting, students gave presentations discussing their studies at the intersection of science and art, and I was absolutely blown away by what they’re doing. They demonstrated real-world examples of how the process-oriented technique used by artists can be combined with the goal-oriented technique employed by scientists and engineers. And that combination of art and science isn’t solely an academic pursuit either. Wu-Tang’s GZA is apparently so inspired by the rings of Saturn that he is teaming up with astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson to make a space-themed rap album. Pardon my lawyer-speak, but holy f**kin’ A! That’s awesome! Anyway, here’s why I support STEAM: Art has always been a huge part of my life. In school art class was a place where an average student like me could shine. I couldn’t split atoms, do fractions or catch a football, but drawing and painting—I was good at that. And I worked hard at it. Eventually, I got good enough that a teacher suggested I consider going to art school. RISD led to television and television led to law school and law school led me to where I am now— teaching filmmakers and artists about how to protect their work and rights. Beyond just giving me something to do, my art background has given me the ability to look at problems with a unique perspective and solve them using creative processes. And this, by the way, comes in extremely handy in a legal setting. I would not be the man I am today if I hadn’t studied art—and I like the man I am today. Every artist has a story like this, and even the non-artists I know have fond memories of art classes. Those classes were free of judgment and allowed you to let your mind wander, ponder and create. Art class is a place where imagination and inspiration are encouraged, which are not only good for the soul, but also stimulate innovation. That’s why I support STEAM. I lived STEAM and so did most of you. All of us know from experience (even those of us without an artistic bone in our body) that art is a fundamental underpinning of our culture. We use it, rely on it, communicate through it. It entertains and educates us. If students don’t have a space to let their creative juices flow, they become tamped down, uninspired, drones—and that’s not America. House Resolution 319 could lead to a bill that will put federal funding behind just this type of initiative. I highly suggest you sign the petition supporting it— and tell your friends about it, too. To sign, go to stemtosteam.org.

24 / 7 Partnership Tom Hazzard 92 ID + Tracy (Davio) Hazzard 92 TX For Tom and Tracy Hazzard, home has been something of a moving target—a place they’ve created together wherever they’ve happened to alight. And in the two decades since graduation, the Hazzards have moved a lot—from Rhode Island to South Carolina to Michigan, back to Rhode Island, then to upstate New York, northern California and now southern California. For Tracy Leigh Davio 92 TX, moving around is how she grew up—living in Connecticut, Arizona, South Africa and California before heading to RISD in 1988. When she met native New Englander Tom Hazzard 92 ID the very first day of Orientation, he called her a “Valley Girl” before realizing she might be offended by the stereotype. But “over the course of freshman year we became best friends, even as we were each dating other people,” he says. “In reality the other people probably never had a chance,” he adds. By spring he had “fallen head over heels for her” and during their senior year they got married. After RISD the Hazzards found that their chosen fields of Textiles and Industrial Design were as complementary in the workplace as the two of them have always

Tom and Tracy during their sophomore year—in fall 1989.

been at home. They now hold more than two dozen patents and run Hazz Design Consulting in Irvine, CA, where they design chairs, textiles, case goods, products like mobile office desks (for cars) and furniture collections for giants such as Officemax, Staples and Walmart. The Hazzards recently got a fair amount of press focused on their GenderBlending philosophy of furniture design, which was picked up in Furniture Today, HomeWorldBusiness magazine and Furniture World. The idea is to push for adding a female point of view in a predominantly male-dominated product development industry, the Hazzards explain. “We spend five to six weeks in Asia every year, and it’s rare to see women in product development or engineering,” Tom says. Though they travel a lot, Tom and Tracy have slowed down on the moves. They’re raising kids of their own (a teenager and a toddler) and after a 20-year partnership, still embrace the opportunity they seized at RISD— to both work and play together.

For more on the Hazzards’ company, go to hazzdesign.com.

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RISD by Design 2012 Another memorable alumni, reunion and parents’ weekend has come and gone, with hundreds of alumni returning to RISD in early October. Between receptions, demos, dinners, exhibitions and open studios, the weekend offered a great way to soak up the positive energy and easy camaraderie at the heart of the RISD community. If you missed this year’s event or can’t wait to come back, save the date for RISD by Design 2013: October 11–13.

Honoring Dick Jones, an Exceptional Mad Man

4 David O’Connor

In 2008, when Chris Jones 52 IA first contacted RISD to see if the school had any interest in the working archive of her late husband Richard W. (Dick) Jones 51 AD, Director of Library Services Carol Terry saw an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. “I visited their home in Pennsylvania and was immediately impressed with what I saw,” she says. “Not only does the collection of materials sum up the life’s work of a very talented alumnus, it captures a seminal period in American advertising—a time now popularized on the television series Mad Men.” Terry knew that Jones was far from the only RISD graduate who found success in the world of advertising, but was struck with how “remarkably well-represented, well-preserved and well-organized” the materials were. “Dick’s numerous awards from the field showed that his work was also very well regarded,” Terry adds, making it an ideal acquisition for the RISD library’s new Archive of Graphic Design and Illustration. 58

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Dick Jones: One of RISD’s Mad Men, an exhibition on view at the library during RISD by Design weekend and continuing through December 15, features graphic design and advertising highlights spanning his 55-year career. Having spent most of his career as a Madison  Avenue art director, Jones worked in pharmaceutical advertising  during the golden years (1955–75) and also did design work for  CBS Radio and Xerox, among countless other firms and nonprofits. Douglass Scott, a long-time faculty member in Graphic Design, curated and installed the show, with help from graduate student Brian James MFA 13 GD. “Doug’s organization of the story complemented the remarkable work that Chris had already begun to preserve and organize the material before its transfer to us late last year,” Terry says. “Overall, the show offers a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a successful advertising  art director during an exciting and groundbreaking time in American commerce.”

For library hours and more, go to library.risd.edu.

Ricky Boscarino 82 JM (see also page 11)

and Vivien Jones 82 JM catch up.

Demos always attract plenty of interest.

Lynne McCormack 87 FAV attended as

both an alum and a current RISD parent.

Timothy Quinn BLA 62 (left) and Dana

Newbrook BArch 63 (right) catch up at the

50th reunion luncheon.

An NYC-lover having fun in the Nature Lab.

Sally (Cummings) Struever 02 GD

and friends.

Mystery twins bare their gap-toothed smiles.

Open studios allow for informal interaction.

A trio of alums looking happy to reunite.

For information on RISD by Design weekend, go to rbd.risd.edu.

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why people give to risd

Pevaroff’s 5x3-foot oil on canvas painting Main Beach is on permanent display at the US Embassy in Montenegro as part of the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. She frequently shows, sells and auctions off her paintings for charity. The Dunes (oil on canvas, 4 x 3') and Ocean Road (encaustic, 18 x 18") are the other paintings shown to the right.

In Support of Creative Thinking by Paula Martiesian 76 PT

mental” that it changed her view of the world. “It was so much more important than anything else I could do that when I got into the studio, I just wanted to focus on the act of making—and to make whatever I wanted to make,” Pevaroff says. As a result, she has put together a large body of work in many different media. Her studio—two blocks from her Manhattan home—is set up with different stations, one for painting, one for encaustic, one for jewelry. She’s constantly moving from one station to another, working on her jewelry as a layer of encaustic dries. Recently, she began to experiment with mosaic and enjoys the labor-intensive process.

Lisa Pevaroff 83 TX is self-assured and well-spoken, as at home in her studio as she is hosting events. Her jewelry, encaustic works, oil paintings and photographs reflect a positive attitude towards life. Bright, lush colors and forms from nature are the foundation for her optimistic messages, often delivered with a dusting of glitter. “I’m very comfortable with the work I make,” Pevaroff says. “Having my daughters helped me with that.” Her children are now 16, 18 and 21, but when they were younger she found taking care of another person to be “so monu60

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soon married a person she had grown up with in Ohio. She and Gary Cohn—now president and COO of Goldman Sachs—have been together every since. “I have always loved making things,” Pevaroff says, noting that her RISD education gave her the confidence and tools to be creative with anything she set out to do. “There’s no reason not to go the distance with what you want to do.” Now that she has become involved at RISD as a trustee, Pevaroff really values the time she devotes as Board vice chair. “RISD meant a lot to me,” she says. “I learned how to think, not just how to make things. And now, it’s exciting to see what the kids are doing.

“RISD meant a lot to me. I learned how to think, not just how to make things. And now, it’s exciting to see what the kids are doing.” While at RISD, Pevaroff majored in Textiles with an eye to a career in the textiles industry. But her year in Rome as a European Honors Program student convinced her that she’s really a painter at heart, and after working in textiles for a few years, she ultimately decided it wasn’t for her. A week after graduating from RISD, she “remet” and

For more on Lisa’s work, go to lisapevaroff.com.

Sold under the name Lapev, Pevaroff’s jewelry line includes charm, macramé and beaded bracelets.

Raising Promise Annabeth Faucher 14 FAV is among the students who are calling alumni and parents this year Annabeth Faucher 14 FAV

She made it!

to help the RISD Annual Fund reach its goal of raising $1.3 million before June 30, 2013. As a financial aid recipient (and daughter of alums Wayne Faucher 83 GD and Tammy Rodgers 83 PH), she depends on scholarships, along with two work study jobs, to make it possible for her to attend RISD. Annabeth is also collaborating with RISD’s Media Group in producing a series of direct mail pieces to remind alumni and parents to give— hence the silly charcoal dousing to allude to the crazy exhilaration of her Foundation Studies experience. “I love my work study jobs,” says the film major, who also serves as an Admissions tour guide. “They connect me even more to the amazing community at RISD.”

A Living Legend I find it very inspiring—and it reminds me to take risks.” Pevaroff also wants to contribute some of the creative thinking she derives from RISD back to the community. To that end, she helped facilitate a partnership between RISD, the US State Department’s Arts in Embassies program, sculptor Jim Drain 98 SC and a new embassy being built in Rabat, Morocco (see page 56, XYZ, Spring/ Summer 2012). This year she’s also helping to conceive and fund a new lecture series called Beyond RISD, which brings successful alumni back to campus to share their experiences as artists and designers. “How do you become a person in the world once you graduate from art school?” Pevaroff asks. “How do you earn a living? What does it mean to run a business? File taxes? Pay for your supplies?” Working with RISD’s Career Center, she has helped shape a series that will address these and other very real considerations facing students about to transition from school to becoming practicing professionals. On January 29 Dana Schneider 82 SC will visit campus to speak about how she has ended up creating iconic jewelry and accessories for major films (The Hunger Games, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), TV shows and celebrities. On March 5 David Stark 91 PT will share his own story about shifting from studio painter to producer of wildly inspired events and fundraisers. And on April 9 Neil Kraft 78 FAV, owner of KraftWorks in Manhattan, will talk about his trajectory from majoring in film at RISD to running a hugely successful New York ad agency. “There are a million ways to live your life,” Pevaroff concludes. “Life’s not going to necessarily turn out the way you expect it to. You have to be open. An art school education can help you think openly and expansively.”

Friends, colleagues and former students are working to raise funds for an endowed scholarship in honor of Professor Emeritus Malcolm Grear, an internationally reknowned designer who has been integrally connected to RISD for more than half a century. After arriving at the school to teach in 1960, the Kentucky native not only helped build the Graphic Design department into one of RISD’s most dynamic and popular majors, he developed an increasingly strong reputation as an international force in design education. In the process, he mentored thousands of Graphic Design alumni and built a world-class design firm in Providence. In recognition of his extraordinary impact, RISD is establishing the Malcolm Grear Endowed Scholarship Fund to provide financial assistance to a deserving junior or senior majoring in Graphic Design. Thanks to the generosity of initial donors, well over half of the $100,000 goal set for December 31, 2012 has been raised. To contribute, go to risd.edu/give and indicate the name of the scholarship fund on the form.

fall/winter 2012/13

a blast from the past

“I love this house. It’s a testament to wonderful design. And it’s a beautiful refuge—like a spaceship tucked up in the woods.”

facing page/top: The ILZRO house was way ahead of its time in terms of accessibility. Sinks and kitchen work surfaces are at a height accessible to people in wheelchairs, but equally comfortable to other users. The research that went into creating this kitchen fed to a subsequent five-year project Harrison led two decades later—to design a Universal Kitchen as accessible to users with disabilities as to the able-bodied.

— longtime owner and Professor Emerita Lorraine Howes

In the early 1970s, Industrial Design students and faculty designed and built an amazing experimental house in the woods of Foster, RI. Under the leadership of Professor Marc Harrison, a pioneer in the field of universal design who has since passed away, the department landed funding for a five-year research and development project sponsored by the International Lead Zinc Research Organization (ILZRO), a trade association for mining companies.

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Made of galvanized steel, lead and zinc, the resulting house—an 1,100-sf single-level structure—was something of an early precursor to the shipping container homes and offices being constructed today. But ultimately, the ILZRO house became much more than a futuristic experiment in universal design: It became the dream home of Professor Emerita Lorraine Howes, the longtime head of Apparel Design, who has lived there since 1979.

images courtesy of RISD Archives

Metal Home Ahead of its Time

“I feel like I’m the curator of this house, preserving and caring for its special qualities and ever thankful for Marc’s vision for the space.” — Professor Emerita Lorraine Howes

above: Building the full-scale prototype gave scores of students the opportunity to explore new materials, energy conservation, construction challenges and issues of accessibility.

below: The late Professor Marc Harrison in the open living area with his wife, Diana (Rantoul) Harrison 64 SC/MAE 66. All the furniture is also custom-designed for the home.

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

undergraduate class notes

77.2%

1990s

percentage of alumni who graduated since 1980

Illustration

decade with the largest number of alumni

major with the most alumni

Lee Lee Leonard 96 PT (Taos, NM)

Cynthia Lahti 85 IL (Berlin, Germany)

Noah Shopsowitz BArch 79 (Toronto, Canada)

Natalie DiCostanzo 63 CR (Eureka, CA)

Manasi Kirloskar 12 PT (Bangalore, India)

Gudjon Bjarnason 84 BArch (Reykjavik, Iceland)

Jeffrey Isaac 77 PT (Castel Ritaldi, Italy)

Iliahi Anthony 12 MFA FD (Hilo, HI)

Wilson M. Ben 76 PH

Alison Lee Schroeder 02 PT

(Philippines)

Salma Raza 97 PT (London, England)

(Cuernavaca, Mexico)

Andrés MonzónAguirre 09 PT (Medellin, Colombia)

Brooklyn, NY

1,251

Northwest

73.7% live abroad?

by far the single most popular place that alumni call home

percentage of alumni living in the Northeast

Providence 397 22 64

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home of RISD’s newest alumni group

How many alumni

region in the US that’s home to fewest alumni

per capita claims AE the most APartists Arch CR (of any city in New England)

India

# of alumni on record as living in Brooklyn

FAV

# GL of alumni living IA in San IDFrancisco IL

JM 9

1,620 or 7.3% of all graduates on record

Hong Kong most home alumni LA remote PH for PT activities PR

1953 Sunny (Bertrand) Warner IL*

(Tuscon, AZ) has republished her first picture book, Tobias and His Big Red Satchel (Alfred Knopf, 1961). New editions are now available at Amazon. Soon to follow are three more of her

children’s books: The Magic Sewing Machine, Madison Finds a Line and The Moon Quilt, all originally published by Walter Lorraine Books, a special imprint at Houghton Mifflin run by the now-retired children’s book editor Walter Lorraine 52 AD.

Peter Hesse 48 IL George Lyman 52 ID

Doris Allen Farrar 43 GD Doris celebrated her 90th birthday by visiting Barbara Hill Sharp 43 GD and Helen (Ellis) Doerr 43 GD in California. In 2011 she and her daughter Gail Armstrong MAE 80 had a minireunion with Henri Budlong 43 GD and Dick Parker 47 GD. Doris lives in Warwick, RI and would love to hear about (and from) other alumni from her class.

1948 A Salute to the Art of George Hanover, a retrospective of artwork by George Hanover GD (Ocala, FL), including 20

paintings and sculptures, was on display at the Appleton Museum of Art at the College of Central Florida last July and August.

1950 An annual scholarship has been established in honor of Ruth R. Clark IA (Jamestown, NC) to mark her retirement from The Lane Company, where she served as vice president for design at Pearson. Two of the scholarship recipients have been RISD students, including last year’s winner, Andrew Prioli 13 FD.

This cartoon by Peter appeared in the May 2012 issue of Playboy magazine. The cartoonist lives in Denver.

After reluctantly retiring after a 60-year career, George has begun designing and building furniture. “Thanks to my excellent RISD education I have never been without a good job as a product designer,” he notes. George lives in Cape Porpoise, ME and is seeking a manufacturer for pieces like his Lap Top Desk in black walnut and red oak.

1952 Last summer David Seccombe PT showed photographs

from his On the Road series at the Westbeth Gallery run by Westbeth Artists Housing in NYC, where he lives. Ranging from a giant salt pile in Chicago to a dumpster full of propane tanks in Tucson, the images were taken as he was driving across the US.

Perfectly at Home on the Cape Last spring Lina (Fleischer) Berry 39 TX* showed a series of eight oil paintings in a solo show at Seaman’s Bank in Provincetown, MA, where she lives. A related article in The Provincetown Banner notes that her “street scenes, seascapes and landscapes [are] characterized by a lively sense of color, careful composition and a clear understanding and love of her subject matter.” Though the artistry shines through in her paintings, the 95-year-old Berry says she considers herself to be more of a designer. “Organizing my ideas has always come naturally to me and I enjoy doing it,” she notes. “That is what a designer does—organizes ideas.” Berry has summered in the town at the very tip of Cape Cod since 1942, when she and her husband bought a 1908 Sears Catalogue Kit Cottage on Commercial Street. For the next 55 years, she taught art at the junior high school in Keene, NH, while enjoying the family’s summer cottage on the Cape. Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

Lina (Fleischer) Berry 39 TX*

Since retiring to Provincetown yearround in 1979, Berry has become something of a local legend. She lives alone, and despite her arthritis, still paints and works on beautifully designed hooked rugs. As part of the recent show, her daughter Debbie McKown noted that in the mid-20th century her mother “became friends with many of the well-known artists who came to Provincetown to work.” She also took a lot of art classes, including ones given by Wallace Bassford and Henry Hensche. Both mother and daughter recall the closeness of their Commercial Street neighborhood and the memory of “32 children in our block moving freely, like a flock of birds, in and out of each other’s cottages. We both remember the feeling that the neighborhood interacted as would one big family.” fall/winter 2012/13

Elaine (Mendolia) Longtemps 63 GD

Mary (Melikian) Haynes 55 PT Earlier this year Mary earned a gold medal for her pastel Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego at the 113th annual members’ exhibition at The National Arts Club.

1954 James E. “Jim” Owens IL*

(Eastham, MA) tells XYZ that he “is alive and well, doing watercolors (and sometimes selling one).” In addition to selling coloring books on Amazon and doing calligraphy, he keeps in touch with Jack Coughlin 54 IL, Joan (Hopkins) Coughlin 58 IL/MA 62 , Steve Cook 54 IL , Robert Hammerquist 54 GD and John Adams 54 ID. Strangers often approach him, he says—at places like the Met in Manhattan, or abroad in Italy and Ireland—whenever he wears his blazer with the RISD seal on it.

1958 Janice (Kennedy) Doctor GD

(South Portland, ME) recently wrote and illustrated Gibble Gobble, a small book for children that she dedicated to her grandson Alex.

If you saw the publicity for the exhibition Crossing Lines: The Many Faces of Fiber, held at the Courtyard Gallery at the World Financial Center from December 2011 to April 2012, you probably saw images of this piece, Extension and Velocity (104 x 72 x 3"). Based in Brooklyn, Elaine hand-painted hundreds of ropes for the work, which, along with the other pieces in the show, helped celebrate the 35th anniversary of The Textile Study Group of New York.

Three smoke-fired vessels made by Jackie (Bean) Melissas PT (Evanston, IL) were selected by a jury for inclusion in the Evanston Art Center’s 21st Evanston and Vicinity Biennial, which ran from August into September. In addition to teaching ceramics part time, Jackie was one of the judges for the Lakeshore Arts Festival, held in Evanston last August. Teddi (Carbo) Shattuck AP

(Burbank, CA) wrote in to let us know that one her paintings is featured on the cover of Second Journeys, an online and printed magazine about the “second half of life.” Recently she was also asked to contribute an article to the magazine Illusions in which she mentions her RISD affiliation. A painting by Karol (Bowker) Wyckoff IL (South Yarmouth, MA) was included in 200 Years of Cape Cod Art, a summer exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art. Her painting was also shown during the exhibition Cape Art Blooms,

opened in late August and ends in early November. in which floral designers from regional garden clubs interpret artwork included in the summer’s premier exhibitions.

1959 Recent paintings by Robert Cronin PT (robertcroninart. com) were on view last summer in The Last Figure Picture Show at The Hotchkiss Library of Sharon in Sharon, CT.

1961 Work by Suzanne Packer McGarr GD* (suzannempacker. com), who lives in South Yarmouth, MA, is included in the group show 21 in Truro: Expanding the Image at The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, MA. The show, featuring women who come together for an annual week-long retreat in Truro (on the outer Cape),

Stan Mack 58 IL Stan (stanmack.com) released two graphic books last summer. Fight for Freedom, written with his wife Susan Champlin, is the second in the Cartoon Chronicles of America series for young people. In a starred review, Library Journal called his second book, the nonfiction Taxes, the Tea Party, and Those Revolting Rebels, “endearingly irreverent and well-researched.” In addition, he has published a new eBook for young children called 10 Bears in my Bed. Stan is well known for his pioneering comic strip Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies, which ran for years in The Village Voice.

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Geoffrey Bruce ID (see page 17) Linda DeHart AP (Cambridge, MA; dehartart.com) will show new works in the show Innovations in Watercolor at LaCapelli Salon and Gallery in Cambridge, MA from November through early January. In 2010 she founded Colors in Motion, a company that allows her to combine her paintings with art forms including dance, poetry, music, soundscapes and photography to create large-scale digital architectural works.

Earlier this fall Irene C. Glaser AP* (Potomac, MD) showed

work in Differing Perspectives, an exhibition at Cleveland [OH] Botanical Garden’s Guren Art Gallery.

Elizabeth Ginsberg 64 TX Veneto 37 Main (digital print, hand-coloring, 11 x 15") is among the works by Elizabeth (elizabethginsberg.com) included in PAPYRI: Guestbooks, Notebooks, Bookobjects and Similar Departures, which runs through late November at Archivio Emily Harvey in Venice, Italy. The artist is based in NYC.

Nancy (Hollingsworth) Taplin 64 PT* Nancy H. Taplin: New Work, a spring solo show at BigTown Gallery in Rochester, VT, featured paintings and collages such as this one Little Greens (oil on linen, 41 x 51"). Nancy’s work was described as a “fully fledged realization of her move away from the representational reference” and “a celebration of more than 40 years at the easel.” She works out of her studio in Warren, VT.

Paintings by Gretchen (Dow) Simpson PT* (Providence, RI)

were featured in Time Lines: Visual Chronologies from Nancy Gaucher-Thomas, Mimo Gordon Riley and Gretchen Dow Simpson, a show that ran in September and October at the Attleboro [MA] Arts Museum.

1962 Kathy Kelm IL is still enjoying

her work as executive director of the Nantucket Island School of Design and the Arts (nisda. org), which offers interdisciplinary learning programs for children, youth, and adults as well as college credit courses, artist residencies and ElderHostel courses. NISDA is affiliated with RISD and MassArt.

1963 50th Reunion October 11 – 13, 2013

(Eureka, CA) was one of three artists featured last June at Arcata Artisans Cooperative in Arcata, CA.

need for alumni to contribute what they can to support future RISD students. We shall continue to do so annually as we always have done.”

1964

1966

Bonnie Tarses AE* (Missoula,

Last summer the Oregon Historical Society presented The Architecture and Legacy of Pietro Belluschi, an exhibition curated by his son, Portland-based architect Anthony Belluschi BArch, and his wife Martha. The show covered the three major phases of Belluschi’s influential career as well as his journey from his native Italy to Portland, where he settled and contributed to a 20th-century style known as Pacific Northwest Regionalism. Tony also recently completed the renovation of his father’s 1948 classic home in Portland’s Willamette Heights, where he and his wife hosted a RISD reception in August (see page 55).

Natalie DiCostanzo CR

MT) headlined the show Talking Threads and Woven Words at the Hangin Art Gallery and Coffee House in Arlee, Montana last summer, which featured the works of over two dozen established and emerging artists who are members of the Killdeer Artisans Guild.

1965 In August Bill Smith PT (Katama, WA) showed a series of his digital landscape photographs at the Broadway Gallery in Longview, WA. George M. Woolsey PT

(Homewood, IL), a staff member at the A.C. Buehler Library at Elmhurst [IL] College, wrote to say that he is happily married, with two sons who graduated with honors from the University of Michigan/Ann Arbor. He added, “though I haven’t made practical use of my BFA, I consider the discipline I learned at RISD essential to my self-discovery from an intellectual standpoint. I am very grateful for this, and my wife and I are also aware of the

Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

Splendid Traditions, a group exhibition at the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum in Warner, NH last spring and summer.

Living, as well as local and regional newspapers. She’s based in Brattleboro, VT.

1968 45th Reunion October 11 – 13, 2013 Arlene (Friedman) Distler PT

(arlenedistler.com) works as a freelance arts writer for such publications as Art New England, Vermont Magazine and Southern Vermont Arts &

Pat White 64 IL Pat’s monoprint Upheaval #4 won an award in the juried 32nd Annual National Print Exhibition, held last spring at Artlink Contemporary Art Gallery in Fort Wayne, IN. Pat is based in Cambridge, MA.

1967 John Silverio BArch, owner

of Silverio Architecture and Design (silverarchitecture anddesign.com) in Lincolnville, ME, had a late summer solo show of recent paintings at Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, ME. Work by Pamela (Resch) Tarbell AE (Concord, NH) was

included in Splendid Clothes, FALL/WINTER 2012/13

Karen Rand Anderson

77 CR Karen’s painting Tentative Embrace was recently displayed in a window at the Rhode Island Housing Authority in Providence, thanks to a grant from Providence Art Windows. Last summer Karen Rand Anderson: BRANCHWORKS was on view at the Candita Clayton Studio at Hope Artiste Village in Pawtucket, RI and she participated in the Statewide: RISD Alumni Show at the Jamestown Art Center. Karen (karenrand anderson.com) is based in Providence.

Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA.

1972 Jim Estes BArch (see page 10) William Dunning SC and Patricia Daunis-Dunning 72

Kenn Speiser 68 SC Kenn (Providence, RI) is one of 16 artists invited to design and build a sculptural installation for the recent Garden Gates Exhibition at the Heritage Museums and Gardens in Sandwich, MA, a 100plus-acre botanical garden. His whimsical Bubble was installed in the rhododendron forest through the end of October, when all the pieces were auctioned off to benefit the botanical garden.

1969 The June 2012 issue of LYNX: A Journal for Linking Poets (Lynx XXVII: 2) published an extensive interview with Ed Baranosky PT (Toronto, Canada) discussing his painting and poetry. In May he gave a reading at the Art Bar in Toronto and earlier this fall had work in a two-person exhibition of paintings at Artscape Wychwood Barns Community Gallery in Toronto. In September Ed’s paintings were also on view in the faculty show at LucSculpture School & Studios in Toronto, where he teaches. After creating a series of small acrylic vistas of Ocean Drive in Newport, RI that were carried by Sheldon Fine Art, George Delany GD (Rehoboth, MA; aaaforay.com) recently switched gears and made a series titled Fox News Chicks Take First Beach. He teaches 68

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at the New England Institute of Technology and freelances as a graphic designer. In June and July John Dilg PT (Iowa City, IA) participated in a group show called The Big Picture at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Gallery in New York City.

SC run Daunis Fine Jewelry (daunis.com), a jewelry studio and showroom in Portland, ME. The couple takes on special commissions, including such projects as an 18-karat gold egg filled with sterling sculptures representing landmarks in the life of a client entering retirement. Patricia has taught throughout her career, and she and William have won numerous awards, including from DeBeer’s, Jewelers of America and the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, among others. They sell their jewelry at jewelers and galleries throughout the USA.

Last spring Reed Estabrook PH (ReedEstabrook.net) was named the 2012 Honored Educator at San Jose [CA]

State University. Reed began developing the university’s photography program in 1984, and has served as its coordinator for many of the intervening years, developing a dual track curriculum and recently leading the transition to a digitally-based curriculum.

1970 A solo show of new paintings by Andrew Stevovich PT (andrewstevovich.com) was featured in October at Adelson Galleries in Boston. Andrew is based in Northborough, MA and has been represented by Adelson for many years.

1971 Gregory Paul Breault PH

(Washington, CT) recently earned his Master of Divinity Degree from the

Paul Kelly BArch (see page 14)

We stand corrected: Karen Wilkin’s article on Marsha Pels PT (Brooklyn, NY) in Sculpture magazine is forthcoming, and was not published last spring, as noted in the last issue of RISD XYZ. Wendy Prellwitz IA/BArch 76

(prellwitzchilinski.com), a principal at Prellwitz Chilinski Associates in Cambridge, MA

Joseph Traugott 72 ID* As a curator of 20th-century art at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, Joseph wrote New Mexico Through Time: Prehistory to the Present (July 2012), a fascinating, 244-page survey of the state’s art history that covers 14,000 years, from pre-European Native American pottery to 20th-century artists.

Kennebunkport; Warm Springs Gallery in Charlottesville and Warm Springs, VA; and The Art Store in Charleston, WV. Carol (Goldenberg) Rosen IL

(Newton, MA) curated Picture This! the Danforth Museum of Art’s second annual juried exhibition showcasing new and original artwork created by picture book illustrators. The show, which ran through November 4, includes work by

Peter Hanks 74 IL

Jennifer (Indreland) French

Two of Peter’s paintings—Bugs and Bob Applaud the Many Benefits of Spontaneous Recreation and Summer Snack—are among the banners to be sold at auction on December 8, 2012 to benefit the Avalon Foundation in Easton, MD, where he lives. The Foundation’s mission is to provide diverse arts and educational programs to improve the quality of life on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

and a teacher at the Agassiz Baldwin Community’s Maud Morgan Arts (MMA) center, led a group of middle school students in designing a play structure during their February vacation week and then building it during April vacation. Wendy taught the kids how to build sketch models, use an architect’s scale with a T-square and triangle, make measured drawings and build a final model. Following on that success, she’s teaching an eight-week

Beginning Architecture class at MMA this fall.

1973 40th Reunion October 11 – 13, 2013

In the past year Henry Isaacs PT (henryisaacs.com) of Islesford, ME has exhibited his lovely (largely landscape) paintings at The Islesford [ME] Dock Gallery; Gleason Fine Art in Boothbay Harbor, ME; The Maine Art Gallery in

Jean (Carlson) Masseau 75 IL Jean won first place for her photograph Jazz Notes in the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum’s juried photography exhibit Lake Champlain Through the Lens. She also recently taught a graduatelevel nature drawing class at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, ME. The students, mostly science teachers, sought ways to utilize the artist’s tools and observation skills in the science classroom and in the field. Jean is based in Hinesburg, VT.

93 PT (Providence), Jen Hill 97 IL (Brooklyn), Salley Mavor 78 IL (Falmouth, MA), Joe McKendry 94 IL (Chestnut Hill, MA), Jenny Rappaport 12 IL (NYC) and Phoebe Stone 81 FS* (Middlebury, VT).

1975 A photograph by Charles Corda BArch (photos.crcorda. com) of Coconut Grove, FL was selected for inclusion in the 18th Annual Texas National 2012 Competition and Exhibition held in Nacogdoches, TX last spring. Charles also exhibited work in the San Francisco International Photography Exhibition 2012 and the Family Dynamics juried exhibition at The Kiernan Gallery in Lexington, VA last February as well as in last summer’s Arles Photography Open Salon in Arles, France. His work also traveled to juried exhibitions in Kuala Lumpur, Los Angeles and Boca Raton, FL.

1976 Retired Lieutenant Colonel

Cynthia Scott 75 SC Cynthia recently completed a site-specific installation at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans (where she lives) in conjunction with Sculptures I Wish I Had Made, a solo show at Staple Goods gallery. She also participated in the Southern Open at Acadiana Center for the Arts in Lafayette and was named a “Favorite” in the April 2012 issue of the online magazine inadenola.com.

Wilson M. Ben PH spent 27 years in the US Air Force, serving over 11 years overseas in the United Kingdom, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Iraq and other locations. After retiring in 2007, he has remained active and last March went on a church mission to the Philippines to help build a seawall and a lodge for pastors. Shelley Lake IL (shelleylake.

com) won the Best in Category award for her photo Abandon at the May 2012 Orlando [FL] Camera Club show and had work included in Urban Wild, Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

SNAP!, a group show at the Orlando Museum of Art that same month. Her work was also included in last spring’s group show Back to the Future at the Texas A&M Art Gallery. Shelley lives in Longwood, FL.

1977 Jeffrey Isaac PT (jeffrey

isaac.com), who lives and works in Castel Ritaldi, Italy, participated in the +50 exhibition at the Collicola Visual Arts Building at the Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto, Italy, which ran through October. FALL/WINTER 2012/13

1977 continued The July 2012 issue of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors features a story on the making of Owl Stools, one of the signature pieces of fine furniture created by Geoffrey Warner PH* (geoffreywarner studio.com) and his students in his studio in Stonington, ME. A piece on Geoff’s new Rolling Owl Stools can be found in the June 2012 issue of Design New England. James Maguire BArch (Denton,

TX) began his new duties as vice chancellor for Administrative Services and chief architect for the University of North Texas system at the end of July. James formerly served as associate vice president for Campus Planning and Facilities at Boise [ID] State University, where he was instrumental in

the planning, design and completion of nearly 20 new facilities and major renovations totaling more than $275 million.

1978 35th Reunion

T Barny 80 SC Based in Healdsburg, CA, T (tbarny.com) has had a 30-year fascination with carving the mobius figure out of stone. He showed Circo in a September exhibition at Hunter Kirkland Contemporary in Santa Fe.

October 11 – 13, 2013 Valerie Hird PT (Burlington, VT) participated in a fourperson show at the FurchgottSourdiffe Gallery in Shelburne, VT in July. She showed the second installment of her Creation Mythologies series of illuminated scrolls with a piece called the Origin of Birds, inspired by the medieval Persian poem Concourse of the Birds by Farid Attar. Stuart Karten ID (Marina

Del Ray, CA) and his company Karten Design recently partnered with the Da Vinci

Design School, a designfocused charter school in Los Angeles, on an eight-week course on product innovation, with the goal of preparing students for 21st-century careers in creative industries. Karten’s researchers and designers worked with 9th graders—in the context of their physics and humanities classes— on a range of projects that were exhibited in May at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles. LA-based artist Katherine Kean FAV (katherinekean.com)

Berke Recognized for Commitment + Vision This fall the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED) named architect Deborah Berke BARCH 77 the firstever recipient of the BerkeleyRupp Architecture Professorship and Prize. The $100,000 award comes with a semester-long teaching appointment, culminating in a public lecture and exhibition in January. In recognizing Berke’s commitment to community and sustainability along with her artful economy of form and function, the nominating committee noted that her work is “restrained, thoughtful and beautiful.” Whether designing homes, hotels, art centers or other diverse projects, she reflects a deep commitment to specificity of time and place. In fact, Berke says that walking through her own neighborhood in Queens, NY and imagining the interior layouts of its freestanding homes led to what she’s doing today. “The form and the function—and the life and the people—that made these buildings made me want to be an architect,” she says. Since founding Deborah Berke & Partners Architects in 1982, Berke believes that her professional success has been fueled by a combination of practice, teaching and public service. She devotes significant time to her students at Yale University, where she has taught for 70

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more than 25 years. They “keep me smart and alive,” she says. “They’re full of good ideas and they challenge my presumptions, and all of that is really valuable.” During her semester at CED, Berke will examine the concept of “buildings for work”—architecture that supports the creative undertakings of others. Recognizing that women and minorities are underrepresented in the field, she will also study how the workplace can empower people equally. “For me being an architect means creating things of lasting meaning,” Berke says. “It means being part of a broader discourse about the greater good, because buildings don’t exist in a vacuum. It means participating in all the other parts of life... because embracing life makes you a better architect.”

For more, go to dberke.com and rupp.ced.berkeley.edu.

Berke’s renderings for two active institutional projects: the Rockefeller Art Center at SUNY/ Fredonia and Bard College’s Conservatory of Music in Annandaleon-Hudson, NY. The 5,400-sf Tulip Avenue House in Llewellyn Park, NJ was completed in 2009.

Deborah Berke BArch 77

showed a new body of work called Murmuration at the TAG Gallery in Santa Monica, CA last April and May. The series of paintings explores the kinetic character and organization of flocks of birds in nature.

1979 David Coleman BArch

Robert de Michiell 80 IL Last March Robert married Jeffrey Michael Wilson, a Broadway general manager and founding partner in 101 Productions, in the lobby of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in NYC. Shown here around Robert are (l–r): Bonny Katzman 80 GD, Chris Enander 80 GD, Susan Gilzow 80 GD, James Finkle 80 GD and his maid of honor Helen Litt 80 AP. A wide-ranging profile about Robert ran on Advocate.com in June and his pop cultural illustrations (illoz.com) appear regularly in Entertainment Weekly and The New Yorker as well as The Wall Street Journal, Reader’s Digest and Time. Robert has also produced many Broadway posters and fundraising art for Broadway Cares/ Equity Fights AIDS shows.

(see page 11) Eco-focused artist Ana Flores PT (earthinform.com) creates “poetry boxes” for her public art project Poetry in the Wild (POW) in New London, CT. “The boxes are made and decorated by different community members: artists, poets, citizens, students and me, then installed throughout the city,” she explains. While earlier POW projects have been focused on getting poetry out into outdoor public spaces, the New London

Stacy Jannis Tamerlani 80 FAV Stacy recently created a series of videos for the interactive exhibit Life Lab at the Marian Koshland Science Museum in Washington, DC. The show, which opened in March and will remain open for several years, encourages visitors to explore the science of growing up—by looking at how the brain develops over time. Stacy’s Aging Wall allows visitors to interactively explore details of human development at different stages of life. She’s based in Silver Spring, MD.

project includes indoor installations. In June Ana took the POW concept to the conference The Home and the World, sponsored by Aune Head Arts in Devon, England. She lives and works out of her studio in Wood River Junction, RI.

Woodman exhibition on view last spring at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC. Sloan is also featured in Scott Willis’ film The Woodmans, which won an award at the Tribeca Film Festival and is now available on Netflix.

Debra (Fleisher) Livingston

This year Noah Shopsowitz BArch of Toronto, Canada released God Code Peace, his first “non-fiction pop-culture biography.” The book—about John Lennon—was written under the pen name Pepper Chomsky (pepperchomsky. blogspot.com).

PR (Scotch Plains, NJ) had work

in the Book Arts Roundtable show held in March at the Pierro Gallery in South Orange, NJ. One of her books, Remarkable People I Met in Sierra Leone, won a purchase award given by the Newark, NJ Public Library. Debra plans to donate the prize money to ishiglobal. org (see RISD XYZ, Spring 2010), a nonprofit that provides free surgical care to underserved communities worldwide. In March Sloan Rankin IL (Noank, CT) spoke about her friend and collaborator, the late Francesca Woodman PH, at Hunter College in NYC. Many of their collaborative photographs were shown in the

Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

In July Susan Weinreich SC* (Mount Kisco, NY) showed works on paper in Naked Self at H-Art Gallery in Peekskill, NY.

1980 Jamie Hogan IL of Peaks

Island, ME recently illustrated A Warmer World, a nonfiction book by Caroline Arnold. Peter Twombly BArch

(see page 10)

The 22, an online magazine based in Brooklyn, featured a selection of paintings by Scott Waterman PT (Los Angeles) in its August 2012 edition. Each issue features the work of 22 artists or writers.

1981 Denver-based artist Trine Bumiller PT was profiled in the March/April 2012 issue of art ltd. David Hodge ID (davidandhijin. com) and his wife Hi-Jin Kang Hodge followed up the exhibit of their video installation

Spinning at Fotografiska in Stockholm last May and June with showings of Who’s Counting and Temporal State of Being this fall at the Loyola Museum of Art in Chicago. An online exhibit, Closer by the Minute, is on view through January 2013 at luc.edu/closer bytheminute. The Hodges live in Half Moon Bay, CA. Megan Lawler Thörn GD

(see page 13)

1982 Ricky Boscarino JM

(see page 11)

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

residential garden design firm in 1992. She has done gardening everywhere from Newton, MA to New York City, and in 2009 also co-founded a second business with her 12-year-old daughter, Louisa. Called Love At First Night, the company makes and sells beautiful flannel covers for European hot water bottles. Big Nazo Lab founder and puppeteer Erminio Pinque IL (Providence, RI) and his team of artists recently created special suits to help train staff at Providence’s Women & Infants hospital to work with obese patients. Worn by volunteers and staff members, the suits sensitize nurses and others to the challenges involved in treating, moving and/or functioning like a patient who weighs 400 pounds or more. Annette Rusin BArch and her

Daniel Clayman 86 GL The Muskegon Museum of Art in Muskegon, MI has acquired a sculpture by (East Providence, RI; danielclayman.com). The piece, Clear Volume, is part of the museum’s Centennial Collection, which celebrates the organization’s 100th anniversary.

1982 continued Five paintings by Madeleine (Pydych) Hopkins IL

(MPHopkinsStudio.com) were included in the Splendid Splashes Juried Exhibit at River Tree Arts in Kennebunk, ME last spring. Over the summer, she showed paintings at the Shore Road Gallery in Ogunquit, ME and the Islesford Dock Gallery on Little Cranberry Island off of Bar Harbor. Madeleine lives in Moody, ME. savannahnow.com, a publication of the Savannah Morning News, recently covered Joan (Turpin) Kornblatt AP and her work with Meals on Wheels in Savannah, GA. In addition to her 12 years of volunteering with the food program, Joan makes regular mission trips 72

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to Haiti with the organization Hope for La Gonave, which works with children in remote schools. She also bakes birthday cakes for residents at SAFE Shelter, which provides services to victims of domestic violence. Sculptural assemblages by Abby Rieser TX were included in the The Chelsea International Fine Art Competition Exhibition at the Agora Gallery in New York City in August

and September. Abby, who works in a studio made of recycled building materials, uses the industrial detritus she scavenges at a landfill to make her pieces. Jane Talcott TX (janejohn

studio.com) exhibited her oil paintings of Brooklyn neighborhoods in March and April at the Steeplechase Coffee Shop in Brooklyn, where she lives.

1983 30th Reunion October 11 – 13, 2013 Eugenie J. Najjar PH

(loveatfirstnightdesigns.com) started Ground Flora, Inc., a small Providence-based

David Goldin 85 IL In Meet Me at the Art Museum (Abrams, November 2012), David combines actual artwork by famous artists (like Nicole Eisenman 87 PT, whose painting is the one in the middle), found pieces and digital art to tell an entertaining and educational story through the “eyes” of a museum ticket stub and a name tag. is an artist, author, and self-proclaimed junk collector. He is well-known for his work with the New Yorker, MTV, Nickelodeon, Disney, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times.

husband Mark Bischel opened their studio and showed their first collaborative project as newlyweds during September’s GO Brooklyn Open Studio Weekend. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, the event invites artists from throughout the burrough to open their studio doors so that the public can decide which ones will be featured in an exhibition at the museum.

1984 A late summer article in The Hindu, a newspaper in Bangalore, India, focused on Gudjon Bjarnason BArch

(Reykjavik, Iceland and NYC) and his redesign of the Holii store at Bangalore’s 1MG Road Mall. In the piece, Gudjon discussed ways the city’s development might be approached differently to discourage social segregation and encourage more welcoming, democratic design. This winter Tom Faulkner FS (Fallston, MD; tomfaulkner photos.tumblr.com) will publish two series of his images, The Shoreline and Lake View, in book form. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently posted several images from The Shoreline online and Tom invites visitors to both his Tumblr and Facebook pages to see more of his work. Steven Kenny IL (see page 14)

Gone to Feed the Roses, a series of drawings by Colleen Kiely PT (Roslindale, MA), was featured in Art New England’s online Portfolio. She wrote in to say, “I’m happy to have my work showcased here, as this is only the second edition of this brand new Art New England feature.” An independent filmmaker and animator, Judith Kriger FAV (Los Angeles) has been a professional CG artist for two decades. Her credits include: Cats & Dogs, Antz, South Park and Ren and Stimpy and she is pleased to announce the publication of her first book: Animated Realism: A Behindthe-Scenes Look at the Animated Documentary Genre. Judith

served as the college’s Ceramics studio technician for many years and has taught part-time in both the Ceramics department and the School of Continuing Education. Last summer Farsad Labbauf ID (Jersey City, NJ) had a solo show of paintings and drawings called Beyond the Veil at BLANK SPACE in New York City.

Leila (Marantz) Hammer 86 TX

Brooklyn-based artist

Leila recently diverted her energies from textiles to photography and drawing, and after securing a new studio in Frenchtown, NJ, has decided to pursue her original dream of painting. Pigeons Black (pastels, oil, chalk, watercolor) is shown here.

(FotiniVurgaropulou.com) is exhibiting more than a dozen glass and mixed media wall pieces in Cast & Reel, a fall solo show at Repeat Performance Gallery Space in Greenwood Lake, NY.

is also an assistant professor in the Digital Arts Program at the Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University and is currently working on an animated iPad app for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Neil Martin BArch (Hingham, MA), a design principal with the Slam Collaborative, has three major design projects under construction: his award-winning Ruane Center for Humanities at Providence College; a new patient tower at the Danbury [CT] Hospital and the Duke University School of Medicine Learning Center. He’s also currently designing the renovations for two buildings at MIT. Lisa (Buck) Vann GD (Potomac,

MD), a senior designer at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, won an award in the Washington Book Publishers design competition for the cover of the exhibition catalogue Artists in Dialogue 2: Sandile Zulu & Henrique Oliveira. She also designed the exhibition, which was on view in 2011 at the museum, and recently designed Lalla Essaydi: Revisions, which runs through February 24, 2013. Lisa has worked at the National Museum of African Art since 1998.

Fotini Vurgaropulou SC

In Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay (2012, Duke University Press), Michele White PT examines the sociological implications of new media by looking at how sites like eBay reinforce cultural assumptions about gender, race and sexuality. Michele is an associate professor of communication at Tulane University and the author of The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship. James Phillips Williams GD

and his wife Allison (Muench) Williams 83 GD are the

principals of design studio MW (designmw.com) in NYC. James, a former art director at Bergdorf Goodman, is also an inveterate collector with a blog called Amass (amassblog.com). On August 22 The New York Times Magazine mentioned Amass in its column The 6th Floor. Sophie Mascatello’s article A Manic Collection of Orderly Designs discusses the James’ preoccupation with design and typographical ephemera.

1985

sculptures based on her study of the art and culture of Berlin. The resulting work was shown in an exhibition at the Ceramics-Berlin Gallery from November 1–15. Poulin + Morris (poulinmorris. com), the NY firm co-owned by Douglas Morris GD, has developed a comprehensive environmental graphics and wayfinding signage program for the Conrad New York hotel’s new 16-story landmark location in Lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City.

entitled Out of Place at Lake Anne Plaza in Reston, VA. The project was inspired by the history of the planned community of New Town of Reston and the sculpture and architecture of Lake Anne Plaza. This fall John Fazzino CR (Providence, RI) began a position as a full-time faculty member in Ceramics at Providence College. John has

Straw Garden, an installation by Stacy Levy GD (Stacylevy. com) made of erosion-control wattles in the shape of a baroque garden, is on view under the Space Needle at the Seattle [WA] Center. The piece is part of The Next Fifty show celebrating the anniversary of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. At the end of the show and the growing season, the garden will be divided and sent to other landscapes in need of restoration and erosion control. Scott Lindenau BArch

(see page 10)

Lisa Nilsson IL (North Adams, MA) delivered a TED talk about her artwork at the 2012 TEDMED conference in Washington, DC. Using the medieval paper art of quilling, Lisa renders the human body in beautifully detailed cross-sections. A video of her talk can be viewed at tedmed. com/videos. Didi Suydam JM (Jamestown, RI) showed work in the exhibition Presence at the Newport [RI] Art Museum, which ran through early November.

1986 Pamela Becker IL (see page 8)

Last spring Ronit Eisenbach BArch (Takoma Park, MD) and dance artist Sharon Mansur created a well-received performance piece and installation

Meg (Kelleher) Aubrey IL

(see page 15) Normally based in Portland, OR, Cynthia Lahti IL is participating in a residency at Ceramics-Berlin this fall, where she has been busy in the studio creating ceramic

Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

Ben Anderson 84 SC Walking Softly, a solo show of Ben’s work, was on view in September and October at Providence College’s Reilly Gallery. Ben is based in Barrington, RI.

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

1986 continued T.L. Messegee PH (Fairfax

Station, VA) relates what it was like trying to make a living as a writer in Hollywood in his new book Hollywood Eats Children! (available on amazon. com). T.L. writes that he is a published playwright and a produced screenwriter, but still does professional photo gigs from time to time in addition to teaching fine art at Northern Virginia Community College. The Julie Nester Gallery in Park City, UT featured a solo show of work by Carol O’Malia IL (omalia.com) in August. Carol O’Malia: Nomads and Warriors presented a series of figurative paintings of young men at work and at play. Carol is based in Westwood, MA. Confessions of a night guard, an article by Geoff Rockwell PT (Brooklyn, NY), ran in The Boston Globe last January. Geoff worked at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston for a couple of years after graduating from RISD and the piece describes his experiences roaming the galleries in the dark with nothing but a flashlight, just a few years before the infamous 1990 robbery at the museum. After writing and illustrating a series of children’s books, Nan (Parson) Rossiter IL

George Almasi 88 IL Blades of Winter, George’s first novel, was published by Del Rey, an imprint of Ballantine Books, in late August. The book is a cyber-spy story set in a fictional world where the Germans win World War II.

James Harvey 87 PT James (jamesharveyartist.com) and his partner, Frank Rogers, moved from Laredo, TX to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and have started designing and producing hand-forged iron furniture like the table above—to replicate natural growing vines.

Christine (Hoffman) Casarsa 89 PT (New Milford, CT) turned to adult fiction last year, publishing The Gin and Chowder Club, followed by a second book, Words Get in the Way. The most recent is about a preschooler’s diagnosis of autism, set in a time when the condition was poorly understood.

1987 In July Edward Aldrich IL demonstrated painting techniques at the Phippen Museum in Prescott, AZ. A wildlife painter based in Golden, CO, he is a member of the Society of Animal Artists and exhibits his work nationally. LA-based artist Alison Berger GL* (alisonbergerglassworks. com) recently showed a series of glass tables in Tables of the Trade by Alison Berger at the Holly Hunt New York Showroom in New York City. In August Anna Biggs PR (annabiggsdesigns.com) exhibited her new jewelry at the Rehoboth Art League’s 39th Annual Fine Art and Fine Craft Show in Rehoboth, DE. Anna is based in Wilmington, DE. Scott Briggs BArch, a senior associate of Museum Services at Lee H. Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership (LHSA+DP), was the project manager and lead designer for the recently completed Children’s Library

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Discovery Center (CLDC) at the Queens Library in Jamaica, NY. He worked with LHSA+DP Principal and Director of Museum Services Jo Ann Secor Skolnick 73 AE and Steve Brosnahan BArch 71, whose firm RBH Multimedia, Inc. created audio-visual elements for the CLDC. The project won a prestigious 2012 MASterworks Award for “Best Neighborhood Catalyst” from the Municipal Art Society of New York and was selected by the American Libraries Association as part of its 2012 Design Showcase of notable American libraries. It was also deemed one of the 10 best children’s libraries in New York City by Time Out New York Kids. In August and early September Signs of Life, a solo show of paintings by Amy Goodwin ID

Kristina Swarner 89 IL Kristina’s illustration Flying Horse (kristinaswarner.com) was featured in 3x3, the 2012 illustration directory published by The Magazine of Contemporary Illustration. Her pop-up version of The Nutcracker is being released this fall by Chronicle Books, and at a recent ceremony in Montreal, the Chicago-based illustrator joined author Howard Schwartz in accepting the 2011 Sydney Taylor Book Award for their collaborative effort on Gathering Sparks.

Last spring Christine showed Nude (2011) and other paintings in the juried 2012 Great Barrington Rudolf Steiner School Art Show at The Good Purpose Gallery in Lee, MA. Proceeds from all sales benefitted the Steiner School and its Student Educational Development Fund (SEDF). Over the summer she also showed new work in group shows at the Knox Gallery in Monterey, MA and the Stonover Farm Barn Gallery in Lenox, MA. Christine lives in the Berkshires—in Great Barrington.

(Lincoln, MA), was on view at the Charlestown [RI] Gallery.

at Edward Cella Art + Architecture in Los Angeles in November and December.

Adam Silverman BArch

created site-specific vessels to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, TX. His goal in placing the vessels on the travertine plinths in the museum’s interior courtyard was to “memorialize the moment in time when Louis Kahn and Renzo Piano come face to face in dialogue.” Adam will have a solo show

Elaine Simons JM (Redmond, WA), executive director and cofounder of Peace for the Streets by Kids from the Streets (PSKS) in Seattle, worked with young artists in the recent community the show I AM HERE, which presented portraits of the homeless folks who go to the PSKS drop-in center. J.P. Terry IL (Westfield, NJ),

the CEO of SmartDoc Tech-

Jill Greenberg 89 PH Casey #4–50 (2011–12, archival pigment print, 50.7 x 41") is among the new photographs in Jill Greenberg: Horse, a solo show on view through December 21 at Clampart in NYC. The exhibition coincides with the release of Jill’s 224-page hardcover monograph Horses (Rizzoli), which includes an essay she wrote about her latest series.

Sabrina Fadial TX (Lake

Elmore, VT) is the assistant director of the visual art program at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, VT, a position she’s held since 2010. Last spring So Yoon Lym PT (soyoonlym.com) showed work at the Hall of Fame Art Gallery at Bronx [NY] Community College and contributed work for the Djibouti exhibition sponsored by the US State Department’s Art in the Embassies Program, which marks its 50th anniversary this year. So Yoon is based in North Haledon, NJ.

1990

nologies (smartdoctech.com), wrote in to announce that Apple released Antietam 150, an iPhone and iPad app his company created, in early May. The app enables users to tour the Antietam Civil War battlefield with intelligent GPS technology and was nominated for a 2012 Apple Design Award.

1988 25th Reunion October 11 – 13, 2013

1989 SoHyun Bae PT (sohyunbae.

com) participated in the group Summer Show 2012 at Skoto Gallery in New York City, where she lives.

Last summer Providence Business News ran an article on The Curatorium and its owner/ founder Matt Bird ID, who previously managed risd|works and helped establish its reputation in Providence. He describes his own shop as “part design store, part Natural History Museum, part smalltown gift shop.”

David Opie 90 IL Dave (spacemandave.com) illustrated the educational reading books Tiger and the Boy and Harold Bumpkin’s Big Surprise and writes that he had a great time attending the ICON7 conference in Providence (see entry for the Buzellis on page 78). He’s teaching full-time in the illustration department at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, where he lives with his wife Miller Matthews Opie JM, whom he met at a RISD freshman ice cream social.

Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

In the past year Franklin Einspruch IL (Roslindale, MA) reviewed exhibitions of work by Anya Janssen; Dreams of Nature: Symbolism from Van Gogh to Kandinsky, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; and Odd Nerdrum’s show at the Forum Gallery in NYC for Art in America, The New Criterion and the New York Sun, respectively. In August he had a solo exhibition at Common Sense in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and in September he curated Ying Li: No Middle Way at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College. Last spring Robert Feinstein BArch (Asbury Park, NJ) launched a new furniture company called SOAPBOX (soapboxhome.com).

RISD alumni, commented on the politics of reproduction, addressing the issues of “authenticity” and “aura.”

1991 Rebecca Chamberlain AP

(Brooklyn) participated in Size Matters, a summer group show at Dodge Gallery in NYC. Artists included in the show create work that habitually oscillates between varying scales, so they were asked to contribute one large and one small piece relative to the parameters of their practice. Rebecca has also earned a New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Award for 2012. Katherine Daniels PT (NYC)

has been awarded the 2012 Clare Weiss Emerging Artist Award, given by the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation’s Art in the Parks program. Her work Ornamental Paths, a site-specific installation of 12 weavings inspired by the Art Deco residential buildings that line the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, will border the central and northern pathways in nearby Kilmer Park through June 2013. After spending part of the summer at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts in upstate New York, San Francisco-based artist Mel Prest PT had work in a group show at IS-projects in Leiden, the Netherlands, as well as the October exhibition Art on Paper at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC.

Andy Sklar 89 IL Last summer Andy (andysklar. com) showed works such as Costume diCarnevale (watercolor, 24 x 18") in the Small Works Group Show at Barnsdall Art Park in Los Angeles, where he lives.

Jordan Isip IL (Brooklyn) and

Edward del Rosario co-curated Permanent Collection, a recent group show at Nancy Margolis Gallery in NYC. They asked 130 artists to select any single piece from the 15,000+ works in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection and create their own version, with restricted dimensions. The show, which featured many FALL/WINTER 2012/13

Adam Gould 91 IL owns the

tattoo shop, and like Jason and Richard, is a member of Urban Folk Art, a gallery collective and studio. Monique Rolle-Johnson PT

Leah Oates 91 IL Earlier this fall Leah (leahoates.com) showed work such as Transitory Space, Newfoundland, Canada, Rene Mill 14 (2009 – 09, traditional color photograph) in the three-person show Earth, Sea and In Between at the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, NY. Leah lives in Marblehead, MA.

1991 continued Last spring TINYcrush Society, a company owned by Dre (Hynes) Rawlings GL (Ashfield, MA), produced Glitter Sinner, a fashion and art spectacle in an indoor horse riding ring at a private girl’s school in Greenfield, MA. The event included a runway performance, a TINYcrush Society Pop-Up store, a full set of electro-pop and a food truck serving tacos and refrescas. Brooklyn-based artist Yuh Okano TX (textilesyuh.com) participated in the recent survey exhibition Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers x1 at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art (MOCFA) in San Francisco. The two-part show divided the artists’ works into those who work intensively with color— like Yuh—and those who create more monochromatic pieces. Michael Riley GD (Los Angeles) and his company Shine designed, animated and edited the 90-second title sequence for Aaron Sorkin’s popular HBO series The Network, which premiered last summer. The work can be viewed at shinestudio.com/ featured/.

1992 Last summer Gallery Tornby in Tversted, Denmark began representing the paintings of Arnor Bieltvedt PT (artistarnor.com). Arnor, who is represented by Anne Loucks 76

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Gallery in Glencoe, IL, participated in two group shows over the summer: Life: Real and Imagined at Linus Galleries in Pasadena, CA (where he lives) and Beeldkracht Zomer Salon at Gallery Beeldkracht in Scheemda, the Netherlands. Union Territory, a solo show of photographic work by Rob Carter IL (Austin, TX), was on view earlier this fall at Station Independent Projects gallery in NYC. The works featured in the show fuse the illusion of

architectural miniatures with the detailed reality of plant life. Shepard Fairey IL (Los

Angeles) designed the stage and graphics for Russell Brand’s new show Brand X on FX, with animation provided by Pete Conlon 95 FAV* (wutitis.com) and his studio WUT IT IS. The show premiered in June. Tom Hazzard ID and Tracy (Davio) Hazzard TX

(see page 57) In June Laura Owens PT (Los Angeles) presented Untitled, 2007—2012 in Art Unlimited at Art Basel 2012. The installation included 92 paintings and handmade books laid out on a long wooden trestle table designed by the artist.

MISCEGENATOR, a band that includes Brooklyn-based artists Jason Mitchell PT (midasimages.net) and Richard Moody 91 PH, played at Brooklyn Tattoo’s 10th anniversary last spring. Max

(Cranston, RI) exhibited in Lyrical Warriors: On Their Own Terms, a recent two-person show at Tsetse Gallery RI in Providence. The artists visually interpreted the orations of six female activists/musical artists: Tracey Chapman, Abby Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, Odetta, Nina Simone and Sweet Honey in the Rock. Denyse Schmidt GD (dsquilts. com) participated in Quilters Take Manhattan, a September fundraiser benefiting the Alliance for American Quilts,

Michael Townsend 93 PR For nearly 25 years, Michael has been developing Tape Art (tapeart. com), the company and drawing medium he uses as “as a tool for empowering others to find a voice through acts of collaborative image making.” In the last year, Tape Art has installed a mural covering the entire Bank of America skating rink at Providence’s Kennedy Plaza; traveled to Greece to work with students, local artists and administrators from Deree College and Pierce University on a mural exploring how the country can rebuild itself in the face of the economic meltdown; and covered the Renaissance Hotel in Providence with a giant snake (below) after being asked to capture the spirit of the graffiti that adorned the building back when it was a Masonic temple. Michael also went to Leipzig, Germany recently to make a mural for the exhibit Mit Krimineller Energie. He and his Tape Artists work weekly with patients at Bradley Children’s Hospital in Providence and regularly help with leadership training at GE.

Journal’s review of the show. Last fall she was a resident artist at Bamboo Curtain Studio in Taipei and earned a Studio Immersion Project (SIP) fellowship through the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Program in NYC.

Jennifer Uhrhane 94 PH Cathedral Ruins #1, Antigua, Guatemala 2010/2012 (analog c-print from color negative) is among the photographs Jennifer (detailphoto.com) exhibited last summer in two juried exhibitions at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, MA: Off the Wall and Community of Artists. Jennifer lives in Jamaica Plain, MA.

which aims to document, preserve and share the American quilt heritage. Denyse is based in Bridgeport, CT. Stephen Shaskan IL (stephen

shaskan.com) is working on his second picture book, The Three Triceratops Tuff, which will be published by Beach Lane Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. His first picture book, A Dog is a Dog, was released last fall and was one of the New York Public Library’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing: Children’s Books 2011 and also made the library’s list of Top 10 Picture Book Read-Alouds of 2011. Stephen is based in Minneapolis, MN. The San Francisco gallery Marx & Zavattero presented a solo exhibition of paintings by William Swanson PT (Emeryville, CA) at the VOLTA New York Art Fair last March.

1993 20th Reunion October 11 – 13, 2013

Last summer Nicole Cherubini CR (nicolecherubini. com) showed a new series of sculpture in a solo show at Tracy Williams in midtown Manhattan. In addition to her large standing pieces incorporating terracotta, earthenware, paint, glaze and wood, she showed new wall-based work

combining highly textured clay and colorfully painted wood. Derek Friesenborg IL

(Santa Monica, CA) has begun animation production on the film Two-Headed Cop (two headedcop.com), a project he conceived of and has been developing on his own while working at Disney, Nickelodeon and Sony ImageWorks. An animated take on film noir, Two-Headed Cop was exhibited at San Diego Comic-Con and described as an “idea I wish I’d thought of” by Glen Mazzara, executive producer and showrunner for AMC’s The Walking Dead.

Her work was also included in the large group show Permanent Collection at Nancy Margolis Gallery in New York, co-curated by Jordan Isip 90 IL (see page 75).

1994 Brooklyn-based photographer Joseph De Leo PT (jdeleo

photo.com) was nominated for a James Beard Award for Photography for his work on the cookbook The Cheesemonger’s Kitchen by Chester Hastings. Brooklyn-based artist Veronica Frenning CR

participated in Bronx Calling: The First AIM Biennial at the Bronx Museum and Wave Hill, a public garden and cultural center in NYC. Her work was mentioned in the Wall Street

Last spring the Beeville [TX] Art Museum presented a 10-year survey exhibition of the digital collages of Sarah Greene Reed PH (sarah greenereed.com). Her collages have been used in set designs for the TV show Damages and the movie The Smurfs. Sarah collaborated on two children’s projects last year, the book Ben and Boo: Two Dogs on Mars with Banana Pies and an online set of stories, illustrations, activities and coloring pages called The Creepy Valley. Based in Austin, TX, she also designs exhibition catalogues, does branding work, is involved in residential art styling and started a vintage housewares business. In July Alyce Santoro CEC (alycesantoro.com) participated in Slow Numbers, a group show at Show Room in NYC. In September she created a multi-part installation entitled The Universal Raisin Cake Theory for the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Albuquerque, published two pieces on climate change on truth-out.org and was invited by 350.org and The Blue

Mountain Center in upstate New York to attend a focused, month-ling residency for artists working to communicate about our planet’s delicate ecology. Alyce lives in Alpine, TX. Do Ho Suh PT (see page 14)

1995 Laura Cary GD (Portland, OR) collaborated with a pair of journalists and travel writers on a pocket-sized guidebook for bikers and craft beer-lovers called Hop in the Saddle: A Guide to Portland’s Craft Beer Scene, by Bike (hopinthesaddle. com/blog). The book includes maps and itineraries for cyclists of all levels and with varying degrees of thirst. Marie Lorenz PR (Brooklyn, NY) participated in In Our Wake, a summer group show curated by The Movement Party in collaboration with Susie Nielsen MFA 05 GD at farm Project Space + Gallery in Wellfleet, MA. Works in the show captured human movement through drawing, photography and collage, and the exhibition was part of the Fleet Moves Dance Festival on Cape Cod.

Marivi Gonzalez 94 GD Panama: Interior Landscapes, a solo show of Marivi’s photography (marivigonzalezphoto graphy.com), was featured last spring at Allegro Art Gallery in Panama, where she lives.

Annick Houle BArch has been

living in Australia (in South Melbourne, Victoria) for the past 17 years and with her husband, Stephen O’Connor, runs the successful business O’Connor and Houle Architecture. Annick and Stephen both have master’s degrees in architecture from Harvard and are the proud parents of 8-yearold twins—a girl and a boy. Elissa Levy GL participated

in the summer group show Cut Up, in which artists showcased “attacks” on art objects—including chopping, cutting and reconfiguring them—at StorefrontBushwick in Brooklyn (where she lives).

Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

1995 continued Sarah Luhtala BArch is one

KEY CURRENT MAJORS AP

Apparel Design

Arch Architecture CR Ceramics DM

Digital + Media

FAV Film/Animation/ Video FD

Furniture Design

Graphic Design

GL Glass IA

Interior Architecture

Industrial Design

IL Illustration JM Jewelry + Metalsmithing PH Photography PT Painting PR Printmaking SC Sculpture TX Textiles FORMER MAJORS AD

Advertising Design

AE Art + Design Education LA Landscape Architecture MD

Machine Design

Textile Chemistry

Textile Engineering

5TH-YEAR DEGREE BArch Architecture FORMER 5TH-YEAR DEGREES BGD

Graphic Design

BID

Industrial Design

BIA Interior Architecture BLA Landscape Architecture MASTER’S DEGREES MA

Art Education (formerly MAE)

MArch Architecture MAT Teaching MFA

Fine Arts

MID

Industrial Design

MIA

Interior Architecture

MLA Landscape Architecture OTHER CEC Continuing Education Certificate FS enrolled for Foundation Studies only * attended RISD, but no degree awarded

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of the owners of Warren Red (warrenred.com), an architecture, interior design and branding firm that has contributed to a number of projects, including the True Religion company showroom in NYC and the Manhattan Cocktail Classic festival. Sarah’s company recently completed a project providing both the architecture and branding for a bar/club called Demi Monde (demimondeny. com) in NYC (where she lives). Between the release of Ted in July and the media frenzy leading up to it, the upcoming revival of Cosmos and anchoring this season’s premier of Saturday Night Live, the multitalented Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane FAV seems essentially unstoppable. Next up for the master voice actor, singer and comedian: hosting the Oscars on February 24.

1996 Lauren Crahan BArch and John Hartmann of the Brooklynbased studio Freecell created Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good as the US pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their kinetic system of color-coded banners, pulleys and weights showcase 124 urban interventions for the public good. The project earned a Special Mention for innovative design from the biennale jury. Freecell, which also includes Jacqueline Lavin BArch 11 and Warren Aftahi MArch 12, also recently installed Point to Line, a permanent public art piece commissioned by the Ohio Arts Council, at the University of Akron’s Guzzeta Hall. Both Lauren and John teach in RISD’s Architecture department. Christy (McCaffrey) McIrwin IL married Oliver McIrwin in Palm Springs in October 2011. Christy is a set decorator and lives with her new husband in Los Angeles.

Photographer and outreach coordinator Ami Lawson IL (Hollywood, FL) runs the nonprofit organization Earth Angel Outreach (earthangel outreach.org), which uses art

mentorship, advocacy and education to assist homeless and at-risk youth in South Florida. Having trained with the US Justice Department and worked on task forces and with anti-human trafficking coalitions, Ami created the Revolving Door Project, in which doors salvaged from a high-rise in Miami were transformed into works of art that draw attention to issues such as domestic abuse and sex trafficking of minors. Diana Harrison 64 SC has supported Ami’s organization since its founding in 2006. After winning a Richard Cabe Terraphilia Residency at the Colorado Art Ranch in June,

Lee Lee Leonard PT (Lee-Lee. com) had work in the show Natural/Constructed Spaces II at The Painting Center in New York. She also participated in A Trans-Atlantic Evening, a fundraising dinner that supported a cross-cultural collaboration between Denver

and Ireland as a precursor to the August exhibition Hybrid at RedLine in Denver. For the show, 14 artists examined the experience of crossing the Atlantic in the current political climate while also acknowledging historic influences. Lee Lee is based Taos, NM.

Soojin Buzelli 96 IL + Chris Buzelli 95 IL As secretary of ICON, the national professional organization behind the hugely successful ICON-7 international illustration conference held in Providence last June, Soojin spent the last two years helping to plan the conference—while continuing with her responsibilities as SVP/creative director at Asset International. RISD’s Illustration department sponsored the four-day event, hosted workshops and mounted RISD ICONS, a well-received exhibition featuring the work of more than 60 accomplished alumni. Chris created the eyecatching Providence-inspired artwork to promote the conference.

Last March Brooklyn-based aritst Ken Millington IL participated in Slow Release, a group show at the Bryan Miller Gallery in Houston. The four artists in the exhibition explored the overlap between the natural and constructed landscape in their works. Yutaka Sho BLA (see page 16)

1997 The newspaper Austinist described Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale PT* and Brian Gibson 98 IL (both of Providence) as makers of “transcendental noise” in advance of their late August show at Emo’s East in Austin, TX. Accomplished typeface designer Cyrus Highsmith GD, who teaches in RISD’s Graphic Design department, has published a book entitled Inside Paragraphs: typographic fundamentals, which grew out of lectures prepared for his beginning-level typography students. Last winter Karelle Levy TX relocated her KRELwear Knits company (krelwear.com) to an atelier in Manhattan after having been based in Miami for years. She has also been

Pearl Ng 98 ID In 2007 Pearl founded Pearly Collection (pearlycollection. com), a line of silver and semi-precious jewelry along with bespoke fine jewelry, in Hong Kong, where she lives. To express her love for her alma mater, she designed this RISD Rocks ring (925 sterling silver with rhodium plating), which is available on her site and at the risd:store.

staging Quickie Couture events in which she makes custom fashion for clients in under an hour, doing one in Casco Viejo, Panama in March and another at Blackall Studios in London in July. Karelle has also participated in recent performances, fashion shows and trade shows, including the COAST Show New York. Last winter Salma Raza PT (London, England) had a solo show called Black & White— featuring a 19-piece series

of pen-and-ink drawings— at the Faraar Gallery at T2F in Karachi, Pakistan. The reviewer for The Express Tribune called her drawings “the fullest empty figures you have ever seen.” Salma produced the work during a sabbatical from teaching art in London. Thick as A Brick, a solo show of new paintings, sculpture and photographs by Brooklynbased artist Gibb Slife PR, was on view earlier this fall at Fitzroy Gallery in NYC.

1998 15th Reunion October 11 – 13, 2013

In the web series Written by a Kid, animation artists Roque Ballesteros FAV, Daniel Strange FAV and Evan Larson 99 IL are helping to bring kids’ fantasies to life with silly, lighthearted abandon. Each story is narrated by the kid who came up with it, adding to the overall cute-factor of each episode. Wired magazine’s GeekDad blog recently called Episode 6 (Robots Attack) “pure, unadulterated awesome.” Drain Expressions, a solo show of work by Jim Drain SC, in on view at Prism Gallery in West Hollywood, CA from November 10 through January 5. On November 15 he’s delivering a lecture at UCLA’s Hammer Museum. Jim has also had recent solo exhibitions at the University of Florida, Locust Projects in Miami (where he lives) and the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas/

Austin. On November 30 a maquette of the site-specific installation he’s creating with RISD students for a new US embassy building in Rabat, Morocco is being unveiled at the 50th anniversary celebration of the US State Department’s Art in Embassies program.

Center, MA) is part owner and the creative director of Revival Brewery (revivalbrewing.com), a brewery based in Providence that was voted Best of 2012 by the Providence Phoenix within six months of opening. Jeff also recently created an interactive 3D projection mapping sculpture for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The sculpture reacts in real time to a sound composition and controls 126 layers of individually projectionmapped video content. Brian Martin IL (see cover

In June Glen launched Sunset, a new public commission at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn as part of BAMart: Public. The layer of perforated vinyl depicting a sunset on the windows and façade of the theater will be up through May 2013. Earlier this fall Glen had a show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in NYC and the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired two editions issued by Forth Estate, his print publishing company. He is also happy to announce that in May he married Providence native Louise Houghton Sheldon in Exeter, RI and he and his wife now live in Brooklyn.

Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

In September Lisa Kudrow wore this Layered Multi Necklace from Maggie’s Echo Collection (maggiebokor.com) when she appeared on the talk show Chelsea Lately. Maggie is based in South Portland, ME.

Jeff Grantz ID (Dorchester

and page 2 )

Glen Baldridge 99 PT

Maggie (Hickman) Bokor 95 CR

Mike Ryan CEC is one of the

producers of a collaborative film project called Rock and Reel (rockandreel.com), which pairs independent filmmakers with local Providence bands and challenges them to make a narrative music video in just nine days. All completed work is shown at a big-screen local theater, where audience members and a panel of judges vote on their favorites. Yun-Fei Tou PH (Keelung,

Taiwan) has taken hundreds of photos of dogs in the minutes and hours before they were to be euthanized (picture

line.com/blog/memento-moriyun-fei-tous-portraits-ofdogs/). One of these portraits, which he took in order to “arouse the viewers to contemplate and feel for these unfortunate lives,” was featured in an article on ohmidog.com last summer and both the Washington Post and the Associated Press have covered his project.

1999 The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council have awarded Karen Azarnia IL (karenazarnia.com) a CAAP grant to fund materials for a new group of paintings. Last summer she also curated two exhibitions at the Riverside [IL] Arts Center, one of which was a Critics’ Pick in TimeOut Chicago magazine. Rachel Doriss TX has been

promoted to design director at POLLACK, the innovative textiles studio in NYC founded by Mark Pollack 76 TX, now that he has retired after 36 years. In July Patrick Hamilton 86 GD wrote an Apartment Therapy piece on the compact Bed Stuy home Rachel shares with her husband and young daughter Coco. FALL/WINTER 2012/13

Tzu-Ju Chen 00 JM A ring by Tzu-Ju (tzujuchen. com) is featured in the new book Showcase 500 Rings: New Directions in Art Jewelry (500 Series) published by Lark Crafts, an imprint of Sterling Publishing. The artist is based in Providence.

1999 continued Brooklyn-based artist Fiona Gardner PT (fionagardner.com) has garnered press attention for her Meet Miss Subways project, a book and recent show at the New York Transit Museum focused on an advertising campaign launched between 1941 and 1976 by the subway system. She also contributed an essay on RISD Foundation Studies Professor Ken Horii’s cardboard chair assignment to the book Draw it with Your Eyes Closed: the Art of the Art Assignment (February 2012). The book is the second in a series issued by Paper Monument: A Journal of Contemporary Art. Earlier this fall Nurture, a solo show of work by Anna Kristina Goransson FD

(Arlington, MA), was on view at the Dedee Shattuck Gallery in Westport, MA. Anna uses felt to create objects inspired by nature, including abstracted fungi, flora, chrysalides and nest forms. Jungil Hong CR (jungilhong.

com/see page 16) Work by Brooklyn-based photographer Yamini Nayar PH (yamininayar.com) is included in the publication UNFIXED: Photography and Postcolonial Perspectives in Contemporary Art. Earlier this fall her work was on view in Sculpture Is Everything at the Queensland Art Gallery in Australia and in the Shanghai SH Contemporary show at the Asia Pacific Contemporary Art Fair in Shanghai, China. The Asian Art Newspaper also ran an extensive interview with her.

2000 Twelve years after Dan Abdo FAV wooed Lindsay Foehrenbach SC across the FAV equipment checkout counter during their senior year at RISD, they got married on August 4 of this year in Groton, VT.

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Lindsay currently works as a preparator at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC and is working towards her master’s degree in landscape architecture at City College. Dan is an animation director at Hornet Inc. In October Megan Biddle GL (Philadelphia, PA) showed glass in The Other New York: 2012, a multi-venue biennial exhibition among 12 art organizations in Syracuse. She’s also exhibiting in the Pilchuck Glass School’s 2011 Emerging Artists in Residency show, which continues through November 8. Zachary Horn FAV (White

Plains, NY) won a 2011 Emmy Award for Best Overall Graphic Design Package for his broadcast design for horse racing’s Triple Crown. He also designed the NBC logo for the Olympics. The Raleigh, NC newspaper The Independent Weekly honored Sarah Powers CR with a 2012 Indies Arts Award for demonstrating a “longterm commitment to the region” and “spreading [its] cultural wealth as widely as possible.” Sarah is the executive director of the Visual Art Exchange (visualartexchange. org), one of Raleigh’s oldest

Tom Grady 00 IL 101 Portraits Card (2011–12, oil on canvas, 18 x 18") is among the work Tom (tomgradystudio. com) exhibited earlier this fall in 101 Portraits: A Lifetime at a Glance at The Sprinkler Factory Gallery in Worcester, MA (where he lives). Each portrait in the solo show represents a subject at a different age, from birth to 100 years old.

arts groups, and is widely lauded for expanding the nonprofit’s programming and impact over the last six years. She and Jack Hagel also had a son, Max Nicholson Hagel, in December 2011.

2001 Last spring Palma BlankRosenblum PT (palmabr.com) exhibited in her first solo show, Fully Charged, at the Horton Gallery in NYC. She’s based in South Norwalk, CT. In July the culinary blog Bay Area Bites profiled and interviewed Emmanuel Eng GL*, executive chef of Maverick Restaurant in San Francisco. Eng, who began his career by working for free in order to learn to cook, cites his design-based love of working with his hands as his entrée into cooking. Last March Emma Copley PT worked with her sister-in-law, sculptor Claire Sherwood, on Icing, a site-specific instal-

Victoria Jamieson 00 IL Victoria (victoriajamieson-illustration.blogspot.com) got some great attention for her children’s book OLYMPIG! during the summer Olympic games in London. The New York Times Book Review and USA Today each mentioned it in their round-ups of Olympian children’s books and the author/illustrator also appeared on the local ABC station’s morning talk show, AM Northwest, in her home city of Portland, OR.

lation for The Arts Center for the Capitol Region in Troy, NY (where she lives). They created pieces responding to the installation’s title in an empty storefront space and encouraged visitors to observe and discuss what they saw. Emma also recently created a sketchbook of mini paintings for The Sketchbook Project Limited, with the Art House Co-op in Brooklyn.

After several years at home with her family, Kate DeCarvalho GD recently returned to the design world with the launch of DeCarvalho Design (decarvalhodesign.com) a graphic design and illustration business specializing in identity, print and packaging. Kate lives in Barrington, RI with her husband Kas and two children, Nico (8) and Nadia (5).

Alex Dodge 01 PT Everything Appears as it is, Infinite (2011, six-color UV screenprint with braille texture on 2-ply museum board, 20 x 32") was recently published by Forth Estate (see page 79, Glen Baldridge 99 PT) and acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alex (alexdodge. com) is based in Brooklyn.

every day after meditating; 55 of these paintings were on display earlier this fall at Emiliano’s Cultural Space in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where she lives.

In late summer Susie Ghahremani IL (boygirlparty. com) had her first solo show in the Portland, OR area—at Land. The San Diego-based artist exhibited paintings ranging from the joyful animal imagery most often found in her work, to darker subject matter such as vignettes of extinct species and loved ones lost at sea, offering a bittersweet side rarely seen by the public. Katie Herzog PT (katieherzog.

net) participated in Print Imprint, a Pacific Standard Time show held in March at Cirrus Gallery and Actual Size Los Angeles, where she lives. She also showed the Feng Shuied Panopticon architectural model she made at a PROGRAM initiative for art + architecture residency in Berlin (with Bryan Boyer). Katie also published Feng Shuing the Panopticon, a book that debuted as Volume One, Issue One of the Molesworth Institute Journal of Rejected Research— an experimental publication that compiles manuscripts that have been rejected at some point in time. Last spring Laura Mylott Manning SC (NYC) performed 700 Spools of Thread (Keep it Together), supported in part by the NEA, at chasama’s gallery space in NYC. The work

was a continual performance, centering on a woman entwined in hundreds of spools of thread. Providence-based artist Daniel O’Neill PT (danoneill art.com) was one of four artists who exhibited work in one a one-night show in the courtyard of the RISD European Honors Program’s Palazzo Cenci in Rome. Dan described his June installation, Abaco, as his biggest and most ambitious to date. Cindy Schwarz PT, assistant conservator of paintings at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT, is conserving a large painting by Edwin Austin Abbey and researching biochemical techniques for identifying artist materials. Last year she presented the paper

A Chastened Splendor: The Study and Treatment of Works by H. Siddons Mowbray at the American Institute for Conservation’s annual meeting in Albuquerque, NM and at the International Institute for Conservation’s congress in Vienna, Austria.

(runningman.com). The two have worked on documentaries for HBO as well as host of commercial spots, corporate work and music videos. They live in Brooklyn and welcomed a baby girl, Hadley Siena Thompson, to the family in October 2011.

Mila Zelkha BArch (see page 11)

Bill Hilgendorf ID and Jason

2002 As producer of The Electric Company for PBS, Ryan Cunningham FAV won a 2012 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Children’s Series. In addition to her production and post-production work on Louie, Adult Swim and pilots for Comedy Central, Ryan and her husband run a boutique post-production house in Manhattan called Running Man

Jorvath ID (see page 12)

In late July Sonia Romero PR (Altadena, CA) celebrated the release of a new series of prints called Revolving Landscape with a launch party at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park, CA. Alison Lee Schroeder PT

(alisonlee.yolasite.com) began a one-year painting experiment on her 32nd birthday (in July 2012) called A Way to Measure Time. She makes one painting

Last spring Olivia Valentine PH earned her MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied in the department of Fiber and Material Studies. She is currently using a Fulbright Fellowship award to research the intersections between Anatolian textiles and architecture in Turkey, a project that will culminate in a series of installations in the landscape of Cappadocia next spring.

2003 10th Reunion October 11 – 13, 2013

San Diegans Nora (Farrell) Alexander ID and Maie Liis (Vaga) Webb 04 GD have

chosen Providence as the third retail location for Noon Designs (noondesign shop.com), which they founded in 2009. Nora is the jewelry designer and Maie is the graphic designer for the company, which employs a team of eight to run the shops and help them manufacture their handmade jewelry, letterpress stationery, tabletop goods, aromatics and body products.

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To submit information via post, write to: RISD XYZ, Two College Street, Providence, RI 02903 For address updates/mailing issues: gduarte@risd.edu

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

Chandler O’Leary 03 IL Chandler (anagram-press.com) is a contributing illustrator and overall project designer for the Tacoma Playing Cards project, producing a poker tournament-quality card deck that showcases the history and iconic architecture of Tacoma, WA, where she lives. Among the 14 Tacoma artists contributing to the project are Brian Hutcheson MAT 08 and veteran NW rock poster designer Art Chantry. The cards were released in early November.

Last spring John C. Gonzalez IL (johncgonzalez.com) participated in an exhibition of work by alumni of Skowhegan’s residency program at the 92YTribeca in NYC. Based in Boston, he and his partner Johanna are excited to announce the birth of their first baby, Orion, who was born in August.

Evan Olin 05 IL

2003 continued As a contributing editor to PRINT Magazine, Christopher Butler FAV (Carrboro, NC) writes the Interaction column. His first book, The Strategic Web Designer, became available from HOW Books and Amazon in September. He is on the Advisory Board for the HOW Interactive Design Conference and was a scheduled speaker for this fall’s Washington and San Francisco meetings.

In September Jessica Hess IL (jessicahess.com) had a solo exhibition of Bay Area urban landscapes in gouache on paper entitled Fade and Finish at Spoke Art Gallery in San Francisco, where she lives. Work by Alex Lukas IL (Philadelphia, PA) is included in Beyond the Parking Lot, a group show that continues through early November at Artisphere in Arlington, VA.

Rebeca Raney 03 PT Rebeca collaborated with the clothing company Madewell on Rebeca Raney X Madewell, a collection that includes a cashmere sweater, pendant necklace, silk scarf and silk blouse. With her sister Raquel, she cofounded RANEYTOWN, a NYC-based design studio that specializes in branding and custom letterpress. In December she’s having a solo show called RANEYTOWN at Primary Projects as part of Art Basel Miami (in Florida).

Inspired by the Joni Mitchell song Big Yellow Taxi, the show asks whether we are responsible for restoring disused paved-over landscapes to their original condition. The Sister, the latest album by Marissa Nadler IL/MAT 04 (marissanadler.com), was applauded in The New Yorker as “austere and enchanting.” It’s available on CD and vinyl. Jessica Wimbley PT was one

of 35 arts professionals from around the world to attend the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries Leadership Seminar at Northwestern University. A museum coordinator at Pomona College Museum of Art, Jessica also started a program called Art After Hours that was highlighted in the publication Inside Higher Ed. She is finishing up a graduate program in arts management at Claremont [CA] University and is represented by the Los Angeles gallery Western Project, where she had her first solo show, I am Katrina, in July.

2004 For a full week next June Jef Bratspis ID (Burlington, VT will ride the 545 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles on his bike for AIDS/LifeCycle to raise money and awareness in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Jef hopes to raise $5,000 through his web page: tofight hiv.org/goto/Bratspis. 82

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Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

Vamp is among the tattoos that have earned Evan more than 50 awards to date. After becoming fascinated with the art form while still at RISD, he and his wife Kara opened PowerLine Tattoo (powerlinetattoo.com) in Cranston, RI, in 2011 and now employ four other artists, including Jessica Brennan 05 IL.

Earlier this fall, Brooklyn indie band Yeasayer, fronted by Chris Keating FAV, began a transcontinental trek to promote their third album Fragrant World. Never ones to settle for the familiar, each album has redefined their sound, this time with a more minimalist bent. For Yeasayer’s last tour, Benjamin Phelan 05 ID worked on a sculptural light device for the stage. This round they partnered with digital artist Casey Raes (a former student of President Maeda’s at MIT and the inventor of Processing, now used in RISD Foundation Studies studios) to create a set using mirrors, projections and fractured light to complement the music.

Artists in Hawaii, an article about eight notable island artists (she lives in Kailua, HI). Last spring her work was featured in Breathe, a solo show at the Honolulu Museum of Art’s Spalding House café.

Sean Thomas 04 IL Hello Kitty (siblings 3) (2011, oil on panel, 13 x 20") is among the paintings Sean showed last summer in a solo show at the Rice Polak Gallery in Provincetown, MA. He’s based in Providence.

The world premiere of Things We Don’t Talk About: Woman’s Stories from the Red Tent (redtentmovie.com), a documentary film by Isadora Leidenfrost SC (Madison, WI), took place at the First Churches of Northampton in Northampton, MA on September 15.

Stephanie (Welch) Silverman FD earned Delaware’s 2013 Secondary Art Educator of the Year award, sponsored by the Delaware Art Education Association. Last March Stephanie was also a featured presenter at the National Art Education Conference in NYC. She chairs the fine art program at the Tatnall School in Wilmington, DE, where she lives with her husband Alexander and twoyear-old daughter Sophia.

2005 The May 2012 issue of Honolulu Magazine featured Jamie Allen IL (jamierallen.com) in Rising

As Long As You Get to Be Somebody’s Slave Too, a wellreceived solo show of work by Brooklyn-based artist Whitney Claflin PT, was on view from May through July at Thomas Erben Gallery in NYC. The exhibition was reviewed in Interview magazine, The Brooklyn Rail and The New York Times, among other places. Cesare De Credico PT

Al Decredico 66 PT, and

another with a piece by glass artist Toots Zynsky 73 GL. Polina Khentov GD and Jonathan Babcock Stein were married last August in Hyannis Port, MA. Polina works as a graphic designer for Club Monaco and Jonathan is the chief executive of Betterment. com. They live in NYC.

freshfix NYC, an iPhone application Annie Lee GD (annieleedesign.com) and Dong-Ik Shin ID (dongikshin. com) designed to help give fellow New Yorkers easier access to farmers’ markets, won Best App for Parks and Public Spaces in New York City’s first Reinvent Green Hackathon last June. It also won the popular choice app.

Molly Wheelock BArch 05 In June Molly completed a music pavilion she designed for her hometown of Idaho Springs, CO. Used for a range of events throughout the year, the pavilion was built by her father using materials like locally harvested beetle kill pine. Molly founded her firm Studio MW in 2010 after working for Peter Stempel BArch 93 in Virgin, UT for several years.

(Providence) is represented by the gallery Freight + Volume in NYC, where he will have a solo show later this year. Last March he participated in a group show at the Peveto Art Gallery in Houston and in the ReCollections/ReConnection exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Newport [RI] Art Museum. In that show, one of his works was paired with a piece by his father, the late RISD Professor

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Natalie Stopka 07 IL Natalie will display her work as a bookbinder in a three-person show by the 2012 Scholars for Advanced Study in Book Arts at the Center for Book Arts in New York City through December 15.

2005 continued Last summer work by Virginia Inés Vergara IL was included in Model Theories, a group show at fordPROJECT (ford project.com/artists/virginiaines-vergara) in NYC, where she lives. The exhibition catalogue, released this fall, includes some of her recent photographs from her Glassscapes series, as well as an interview conducted by Mara Hoberman. In August POSI+TIVE Magazine ran an interview with Virginia, along with a number of images of her recent work. New York-based artist Rebecca Volinsky PT

(rebeccavolinsky.com) recently published Walk With Me, a book based on text written for her MFA thesis in Fine Arts, which she earned at Parsons. Katherine Wong BArch (Hong Kong), who has worked in architecture and interior design in New York City and Hong Kong, recently partnered with yoga instructor and product designer Victoria Fong to start Omberry (omberry.com), a yoga wear line. The two are childhood friends and yoga enthusiasts who are passionate about design. They have also structured Omberry so it gives back to the community through charitable organizations.

After earning a 2012 Free Culture Award from AS220, Joan Wyand CR created 84

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Sean Dunstan-Halliday

06 PT Sean’s watercolor entitled 6 and a mixed media piece entitled Andrew by Amanda E. Gross MAT 10 (San Francisco, CA) were featured at the Arsenal Center for the Arts’ group show 30 Under 30 in Watertown, MA. The show ran through November 10.

a mural called Hurray for Fee-Thousand Twelve, which is on display in the second-floor windows of the downtown Providence arts organization.

2006 Maddy (Susser) Hague GD

and Devon Hague GD (Saint Paul, MN) welcomed a daughter, Aurora Grace Hague, to their family on March 10, 2012. Work by Kim Harty GL (kimharty.com) was included in Studio Glass at 50: Tradition in Flux, a recent group show at Illinois State University. She also showed the installation Toledo Workshop Revisited (2012), which uses video projection and glass detritus to create an ephemeral light installation commemorating the spirit of the original studio glass workshop in Toledo. In addition, the Chicago-based glass artist created two pieces during multi-day demo/ performances at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA.

Kelly Berg 08 IL Xylotopia (2012, acrylic and ink on canvas, 48 x 60") is among the work Kelly (kellyberg.net) will show in Amazonia, a solo show slated for next April and May at Frank Pictures Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. Kelly is based in Venice, CA.

Teek Eaton-Koch

09 IL/MAT 10 Teek’s watercolor October Morning earned an Award of Excellence from the American Society of Architectural Illustrators and is included in the society’s 27th Architecture In Perspective traveling exhibition. He lives in Riverside, CT.

his travels and his stomping grounds (the Upper East Side of Manhattan).

Providence-based artist Richard Pellegrino IL (rich pellegrino.com) had a solo show at Translations Art Gallery in Canton, OH in June and completed portraits of Star Wars characters for Acme Archives Direct, which sells original production art. Singer-songwriter Amanda Penecale IL (Richlandtown, PA) released her first full-length album, Time and Tide, in July. The music was recorded in rural Maine and follows two EPs released over the past few years. Earlier this fall Thomas Terceira CEC (Cranston, RI)

Last spring Sam Carr-Prindle PT and Lisa Rock PT showed paintings Splitting Image, a show curated by Chris Ashley at Some Walls in Oakland, CA, where they both live.

Marin Brennan IL (San Francisco) illustrated Otto’s Missing Tooth, which was just published for the iPad and can be found at farfaria.com.

2008

Jennifer Judkins PH (NYC)

Last summer Kyle Marshall BArch (Bayville, NY) and Christopher Hyland launched HYLAND Magazine, an iPad-only lifestlye/interiors/ architecture/travel magazine. The monthly magazine includes extensive coverage of an eclectic assortment of designers, individuals and locations, and can be found on itunes.apple.com/us/app/ hyland-magazine.

had her first gallery show in Chelsea last summer—a group exhibition entitled Portrait Stories at Porter Contemporary Gallery. Compressing Culture, a solo show of work by Harrison Love IL (harrisonlove.com), was on view at the Greenpoint Gallery in NYC in April. An article in New York Press discussed his book project, Pahasqa Ñan (The Hidden Way),

The Characternity and Other Funny Pictures, an installation by Ray Sumser FAV (Santa Cruz, CA), ran for a month last summer at Treehouse Gallery in San Francisco. The installation included a 9-foot-wide oil painting of 1,500 recognizable characters from pop culture, along with a 12-foot-wide piece called Nude Starbucks Interior Vista.

2009 Claire Bushey AP (vonjai.com)

has moved back to Providence to work with StyleWeek Northeast and to start a children’s clothing line called Vonjai with

local designer Ting Barnard. Vonjai launched its winter 2012 collection in late September. Jonathan Chapline PT* (Waco,

TX) and Lorraine Nam 10 IL (Brooklyn) created the website ffffffwalls.com, which features an inside look at artists’ studios and their artistic practices. The name comes from hex code for white (#ffffff), and the site includes interviews and photographs that reveal how artists— including RISD grads like Alex Markwith 11 PT and Sterling Wells 07 PT—navigate their careers post-graduation. Sarah Engelke BIA is the

in-house interior architect for a design/build team of three called Little Red House, which has done work for high-end condos and the Manhattan restaurant The Brewster. The condos and restaurant are housed in a building dating from 1856 that required extensive preservation as well as careful renovation of original features. In addition to blogging about interior architecture (20someodd.blogspot.com), Sarah has a fledgling interior design consultancy in NYC.

Hannah Kirshner 06 PT With help from Mira Evnine BArch 06 in the role of publisher and Isaac Gertman MFA 07 GD offering creative direction, Hannah launched Sweets & Bitters Quarterly (sweetsandbitters.com) with the Summer 2012 issue. The enticing little morsel offers “a beautiful and practical vision of the good life, printed as a seasonal mini-cookbook,” with plenty of fun imagery and recipes for pastries, cocktails and everyday foods. Printing was funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign and the journal got a boost from a Food52 write-up as well as tweets from Sam Sifton of The New York Times.

showed digital collages and decoupage on glass at Po Gallery in Providence, RI.

2007 In August James Minola ID and Chelsea Green MID (Bainbridge Island, WA) exhibited products from their design firm Grain (graindesign. com), along with 10 emerging West Coast designers who are part of the Seattle design collective JOIN, at the New York International Gift Fair. Grain was written up in Pacific Standard, Annabelle and Nylon in 2012, and began selling its new Bound Mirror at Design Within Reach. Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

Brian Renke 09 ID

Parul Singh and RISD student

As lead designer at Soldier Design in Cambridge, MA, Brian worked with the snowboarding brand Forum Snowboards to create seven new buzzed-about boot styles for the 2013 line.

Amara Abdal Figueroa BArch 13

2009 continued Katie Gallagher AP (katie gallagher.com) launched her new Spring/Summer 2013 Everything Forever collection at New York’s Fashion Week in September. Sponsored by Moroccan Oil, The Standard, MAC and MilkMade, the new collection is inspired by the concept of rebirth and purity, drawing from the perceptions of childhood. After the launch, Katie joined fellow RISD alumni in judging an on-site sketch contest at UO’s Night Out—a collaboration between Urban Outfitters, RISD’s Apparel Design Department and Philadelphia University. She’s also launching an e-store this fall at Katie by Katie Gallagher. Andrés Monzón-Aguirre PT

(Medellin, Colombia) writes that the Campos de Gutierrez Artist Residency Program (camposgutierrez.org) he founded in Medellin, Colombia has hosted 14 international participants in the year since it opened. With help from a Kickstarter campaign, he’s now working with ceramicist 86

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to construct a ceramics studio that they plan to call MAATI, which means clay in Sanskrit. Last spring Brooklyn-based artist Gabriela Salazar PT (gabrielasalazar.com) worked with Lucas Blalock to curate OPTOTYPE at the 92YTribeca in NYC as part of an exhibition of work by alumni of Skowhegan’s residency program.

2011 Work by Lila Ash PT (lilaash. tumblr.com) was included in Rebel, a group show sponsored by MOCA and conceived by James Franco MFA 12 DM. She notes that she was the youngest artist and only female in the show, which featured works by Franco, Ed Ruscha, Harmony Korine, Paul McCarthy and others. Lila works as a display artist for Urban Outfitters’ Hollywood location. Zach Brown IL (Mars, PA), who

is an MFA candidate at New York Academy of Art, won Best in Show and Best Painting at the 67th Annual Buck Hill Falls

Alexandra Allen-Cannon 11 IL In September Alexandra showed works of oil on panel in Domestication, a solo show at Blue Gallery in Kansas City, MO. She lives in Leawood, KS.

[PA] Fine Arts and Crafts Festival. His painting Lazarus was also a featured work at the summer Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh.

her channel, PerpetualMotion, were featured in a Colorado Daily article about Vidcon, the YouTube convention in Anaheim, CA.

The video blogs Karen Kavett GD (Farmingdale, NJ) posted while studying at RISD— including design tutorials ranging from home decorating to color theory, to why you should never ever use the font Comic Sans—landed her a job at YouTube. In July Karen and

Sabrina Kuchta IL (Northbor-

ough, MA) illustrated Where Horses Fly, a children’s book by Jacqui Palladini Boulter inspired by the Flying Horses Carousel in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, MA. This is the first book project for both author and illustrator.

In August Miguel LlorenteGonzalez FAV (Barcelona, Spain) began a year-long, 20,000-mile expedition that will take him from Philadelphia to the Southernmost tip of Argentina—in the 1980s Mercedes turbodiesel station wagon he grew up with and used at RISD. Miguel plans to produce art along the way and to share it on his blog (thiseuropeanlife.com) and through indiegogo, a funding platform similar to Kickstarter.

Amanda Goss 12 AP, Emily Shaw 12 AP + Helen (Hao) Wu 12 AP These three Apparel Design graduates recently teamed up with Urban Outfitters to design “capsule collections,” working directly with UO’s Director of Concept and Trend Marissa Maximo 95 PT. This fall the outcomes of that collaboration are available on the UO site and at selected UO stores across the country. The experience was clearly great for the new alums—down to the festive launch event during New York’s Fashion Week in early September. Katie Gallagher 09 AP (see page 86) judged an on-site sketch design competition at the launch event.

Part of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts’ New Visions/New Curators series, the show ran in July and August and included traditional and contemporary reflections on joomchi—ancient Korean papermaking techniques. In September Manasi Kirloskar PT (Bangalore, India) began an internship at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She’s working with one of the 14 artists who teach students at public schools.

Kyle Norris IL (Essex, VT)

participated in the Breaking Bad Art Project, an August exhibition at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles. The gallery, which specializes in art referencing pop culture, welcomed the stars of the AMC television show to the exhibition, which is also connected to a viral promotional campaign called Breaking Gifs, featuring artist-made prints relevant to the show. In addition to writing for the blog Art Fag City, Whitney Kimball PT (Boston, MA) co-wrote a petition asking Sotheby’s auction house to give its union art handlers a fair contract. Whitney writes that Shepherd Fairey 92 IL,

Marilyn Minter, Deborah Kass and Haim Steinbach are among the supporters of the petition. Matthew Leifheit PH (matt

hewleifheit.com) launched the publication MATTE Magazine (mattemagazine.net), which features one artist per issue, at Printed Matter in New York last March. He’s based in Marshfield, WI.

2012 Jiyoung Chung PT (Providence,

RI) curated International Joomchi and Beyond at the Atrium Gallery in Providence.

In late August Hope MacDonald AP (Providence, RI) closed out StyleWeek Northeast with a show at the Providence Biltmore. Her 2012/13 collection was inspired by the prints and bold colors featured in her mix-andmatch line. Zev Schwartz AP (Cambridge, MA) showed his first apparel collection there, too, with pieces inspired by

Armando Veve 11 IL + Sean Gerstley 11 CR These ceramic ostrich eggs are a popular seller at Veve & Gerstley (veveandgerstley.etsy. shop), the shop for functional and nonfunctional decorated ceramic objects Armando and Sean run through Etsy. They made Arts Business Institute’s list of Best Holiday Gifts of 2011.

totem poles and other Northwest American art. The Golden Book Gown designed by Ryan Novelline IL (Lexington, MA) will be included in the French book Avant-Garde Fashion, due to be released by Olo Editions in 2013. It features “the 100 most breathtaking fashion designers from around the world.”

2013 Eliza Squibb TX won the 2012 Nancy and Harry Koenigsberg Student Award from the Textile Study Group of New York.

2015 In July Natalie Kassirer IL played the part of Helena in The Impromptu Shakespeare Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was staged in Beverly, MA. She also designed the poster for the show.

In September Andy Romer PH had a solo show of more than 50 photographs at the Wilton [CT] Library. Based in NYC,

As an intern this fall with CollegeFashionista.com, Noah Berch AP is scouring RISD’s campus for good finds for the site, which highlights what college kids are wearing these days.

Deaths

Polly Norton Fink 65 PT of

Roland E. Butler 34 of

East Longmeadow, MA on December 22, 2011. Nancy (Noble) Robertson

Rockport, ME on April 29, 2012. Jon J. Moscartolo MAT 67 of

Branford, CT on November 22, 2011.

Coykendall 41 PT of

Kathryn Stackpole Cleaves

South Dartmouth, MA on July 24, 2012.

Burke 68 GD of Washington, DC

Ruth Bragdon Donovan

Roy “Bob” Zimmerman MFA

42 GD* of Pottstown, PA on

70 PH of Foster, RI on August 12,

June 3, 2012.

2012.

David H. Atwater, Jr. 43 MD*

Cecilia “Lalla” (Guiu) Searle

of Englewood, FL on June 1, 2012.

71 LA of Providence, RI on

Jane Gilbert Jeffers Hayden

Robert Ireton Tharp 81 MAE of

44 PT of Annapolis, MD on

Lexington, VA on April 13, 2012.

May 20, 2012. Janet (Field) Harter 48 GD

of Kennebunk, ME on August 5, 2012.

on July 25, 2012.

June 23, 2012.

Lorenzo J.I. Lucas 84 BArch of

Barrington, RI on June 19, 2012. Nancy Lee (Skahill) Gray 85 MAE of East Greenwich, RI

Louise B. Cahill 50 GD*

on August 17, 2012.

of Rockland, MA on October 2, 2011.

Samara (Hagopian) Katz

Carleton H. Rounds 55 AR*

April 21, 2012.

of Oswego, NY on June 4, 2012.

90 ID of Los Angeles, CA on

Livingston Rivers Webb

Pauline O’Donnell 56 IL of

91 PT* of West Hollywood, CA

Attleboro, MA on May 7, 2012.

on October 25, 2011.

Stormy Anne Sandquist

Karina Elizabeth Saari 97 PT

62 CR of Santa Fe, NM on

of Riverside, CT on July 24, 2012.

April 10, 2011. Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

he specializes in reproduction photography for all kinds of artists, galleries and museums, and also creates detailed panoramic virtual tours.

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

graduate class notes

1963

1971

In September painter Martha

This fall Muriel (Breen)

Armstrong MA (Philadelphia,

Angelil MA (Amesbury, MA)

PA) had a solo show at the Bowery Gallery in NYC. It featured landscapes painted in Vermont over the past year and was described as “a dialogue with painting as much as with place over the seasons.”

presented Back to the Past, A Daughter of the Nile, a solo exhibition of abstract and semiabstract paintings recalling her experience growing up in Alexandria, Egypt. Muriel is a professor at Newbury College in Brookline, MA, where the show was featured at the campus art gallery.

Perci Chester MAT 68/

MFA 69 PT From 2012–13 Perci’s sculpture Gyr Family Cycle (2005–09, stainless steel) is installed in Chicago’s Lincoln Park as part of the Chicago Sculpture International Outdoor Exhibition. In December and January Perci (percichester.com) is exhibiting at the University of Minnesota’s Katherine E. Nash Gallery. She’s based in Minneapolis.

1972 Bruce Helander 69 IL/MFA 72 PT

(West Palm Beach, FL) has had a busy year exhibiting works at the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, the Palm Beach Cultural Council’s new museum, DTR Modern in Manhattan and the Peter Marcelle Gallery in

Bridgehampton, NY. He also won an Artist Fund Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, was named to the Palm Beach 20 legends list by Palm Beach Illustrated magazine and lectured at the Art Naples and Art Sarasota art fairs. In addition, Bruce continues to write for The Huffington Post, Forbes Life and The Art Economist.

1973 Avraham Grant MID retired

this year after 32 years teaching design at Holon Institute of Technology in Israel, where he was the dean of faculty in the design department. He continues to live in Israel—in Hofit—and travels to the US annually to visit his daughter and grandchildren.

In January Sue Jensen MFA FAV (Salt Lake City, UT) will show her film February Light, which documents a family of Danish immigrants from 1870 to the present, at the 2013 Palm Springs [CA] International Film Festival. The film about a family’s efforts to preserve their farm over five generations was a finalist in the American Documentary Film Fund competition, which invites independent American filmmakers to vie for project financing. Alan Metnick MFA PH

(Providence, RI) and Salvatore Mancini have co-edited a book of photographs entitled Quaking Aspen: A Lyric Complaint, which includes more than 80 images chosen from hundreds found in the darkroom of the late RISD Photography professor Gary

Bunny Harvey

67 PT/MFA 72 PT Notes and Scales (oil on canvas, 66 x 66") is among the paintings on view in Bunny Harvey: From the Ground Up, which continues through December 30 at the Newport [RI] Art Museum.

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Metz. A faculty member for 23 years, Gary was head of the Photography department for much of that time and was an influential educator whose impact was felt at a number of institutions. The book can be purchased through blurb.com.

1974 Providence-based artists Kathie Florsheim MFA PH

(kathieflorsheimphotography. com) and Olivia McCullough MAE were among the five artists selected for an exhibition of past URI Sea Grant Recipients entitled Seeing the Sea, curated by Ana Flores 79 PT and shown last summer at the Hale House Gallery in Matunuck, RI.

1975 Ten years ago when Alma Davenport 71 PH/MFA 75

(Jamestown, RI) found that “the digital revolution became digital revulsion,” she taught herself how to paint and switched disciplines, moving from the design department to the fine arts department at the University of Massachusetts/ Dartmouth. Now a painter, she recently received a Fulbright Research Scholar Grant to paint

she also teaches figure drawing and watercolor classes. Since retiring as a high school art teacher, she has been painting and exhibiting as a signature member of the Rhode Island Watercolor Society and as an artist member of Spring Bull Gallery in Newport, RI. Linda King Ferguson MAE

(lindakingferguson.com) just earned her MFA in Painting from Vermont College of Fine Arts this year. She lives in Au Train, MI. Tom Lamb MFA PH (Laguna

Beach, CA) photographs California’s agricultural land, abandoned industrial spaces and former military sites—all from above, flying in helicopters. His exhibition Marks on the Land: The View From Here, Aerial Photography by Tom Lamb was shown at the Orange County, CA Great Park Gallery at the Palm Court Arts Complex last spring.

Geoffrey Pagen MFA 75 CR Geoffrey (geoffreypagen.com), who heads the ceramics program at Reed College in Portland, OR, has worked with the US State Department’s Art in Embassies program for the past decade. This had led to exhibitions in embassies in Nouakchott, Mauritania and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He’s now installing a large wall piece in the new US Embassy in Bujumbura, Burundi. Over the past year, Geoffrey has had solo shows at the Laura Russo Gallery in Portland and the Jeffrey Moose Gallery in Seattle. Another solo show is planned for the Reynolds Fine Art Gallery in New Haven, CT in 2013.

the landscapes of the Gaspe Peninsula in Canada. Her daughter Eva is 20, and Alma just celebrated her 25th wedding anniversary with her husband Bruce Sinclair de la Ronde. From May through August Christine Vaillancourt MAE

(christinevaillancourt.com) displayed her paintings at 25 Channel Center in Boston as part of the Fort Point Arts Community’s art lending program. Christine lives in Newton, MA. An exhibition of tree figures by Joseph Wheelwright MFA SC

(joewheelwright.com) at the Katonah [NY] Museum of Art has been extended through next spring. Joe’s love of the large scale is evident in his sculpture Loving Stones, which utilizes two five-ton rocks and took two years to make. He creates his marvelous work from his home base in Dorchester, MA.

This fall the exhibition space in Green Spring Gardens, a 28-acre public park in Alexandria, VA, hosted an extensive exhibition of silk shawls, watercolors, pastels and colored pencil drawings by Sharon L.

1987 Janice (Smart) Causey 68 IL/MA 87 (Narragansett, RI) exhibited work in the Virtue Art Show in the Park, held at Wilcox Park in Westerly, RI over Memorial Day weekend.

1988 Providence-based critic, curator and designer Martina Windels MFA JM is the host of a television show called Art Rhode Island, which aired on Rhode Island PBS this fall. On the show, she discusses subjects such as art education and art as an economic engine with guests ranging from RISD Professor Paul Sproll and Brown Professor Richard Fishman 63 SC to alumni Brian Chippendale 97 PR*, Aidan Petrie MID 85 and Barbara Wong MA 95.

1990 The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO has named Barbara O’Brien MFA PH as its new director. After serving as assistant professor of art at Simmons College in Boston, Barbara joined the Kemper in 2009 and

was most recently the museum’s chief curator and director of exhibitions and collections. In 2006 she won a RISD Alumni Association Award for Professional Achievement. Fluid Panel State, a solo show of new work by Andrea Zittel MFA SC (Joshua Tree, CA), was on view earlier this fall at Andrea Rosen Gallery in NYC. On November 15 she accepted the prestigious 2012 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts at an awards ceremony at the New Museum in NYC.

1992 Concetta Mattioni MAT

has earned recognition as the Pennsylvania Art Education Association’s (PAEA) 2012 Outstanding Secondary Art Educator of the Year. She lives in Conshohocken, PA and was presented with the award at the PAEA Annual Conference in October. Remnants, a solo show of sculpture by Frank Poor MFA SC (frankpoor.com), is on view through November 10 at Artspace in Raleigh, NC. Frank lives in Cranston, RI.

Safran 56 PT*/MA 80

(Annandale, VA).

1984 1977 Tom Young MFA PH (tomyoung

photo.com) has published Timeline: Learning to See with My Eyes Closed, a new book described as representative of a new genre: visual fiction (see also Winter/Spring 2012 XYZ, pages 34–35). The personal album-like volume has 60 four-color photographs and is available through George F. Thompson Publishing. Tom is based in Charlemont, MA.

1979 Last summer Laurence Young MA 78/MFA 79 PR showed his paintings in Mixing It Up, a three-person exhibition at Alden Gallery in Provincetown, MA, where he lives.

1980 In June Gail Armstrong MA (Warwick, RI) exhibited work in a three-person show at the Providence Art Club, where

Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

Last summer Susan Margolis 76 SC/MID 84 participated in

The Cutting Edge II: Gem and Jewelry Invitational at the Headley-Whitney Museum in Lexington, KY. The show included the work of more than 20 contemporary jewelers and gem carvers. Susan lives in Ridgefield, CT.

David Hasslinger

MFA 84 GL After 23 years working to “conceptualize, conceive, create, care for and nurture” the living works of art known as his three children, David recently reopened dh studios (davidhasslinger.com) in Pawtucket, RI, where he makes custom tables and site-specific architectural elements. He works with fused cast glass and steel, and has made several tables based on the theme of clouds and their shadows.

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

of abstract and denotative constructs in work that involves graphing, optical illusion and pictorial imagery.” Susan is loving living in Rome this fall, serving as chief critic for RISD’s European Honors Program. Cathleen Prisco Gouveia MIA

(see page 13)

1999 Liz Collins 91 TX/MFA 99

Douglas Jones

MFA 92 FD Kim Kulow-Jones

MFA 92 FD Random Orbit Studio (randomorbitstudio.com), Doug’s and Kim’s business in Los Lunas, NM, showed work earlier this fall in the Design Lab juried exhibition at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art in Santa Fe.

1992 continued In early summer Anne Pundyk MFA PT (NYC) exhibited Parallax Painting, a site-specific installation, in the MATERIAL TAK exhibition at Panepinto Galleries in Jersey City, NJ.

Gayle Mandle MFA PT/PR

1994 In June and July Susan Brearey MFA PT/PR (Putney, VT) saw many RISD alumni at her exhibition Reflective Nature at the Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. In addition, she “had the great pleasure of hanging out with Conrad Armstrong 02 PT” in Prague last February.

1995 Shahzia Sikander MFA PT/PR

(NYC) recently curated New Prints 2012/Summer for the International Print Center New York. Shahzia considered more than 2,500 images or the 42nd presentation of the New Prints program, which ran from May through July.

1997 Last summer Nermin Kura MFA CR (Providence, RI) exhibited work in Configura90

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tions, a three-person show at the Todd James Gallery in Provincetown, MA, and also had a solo show called Eggtopia— featuring her delicate porcelain vessels—at the same gallery. In addition to her ceramics work, Nermin is a photographer whose images were featured this year in the Canadian publication Semi Permanent Death (along with the work of 28 poets); in Off The Coast, an American poetry publication; and in the exhibition Random Acts Of Time held at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in California.

(gaylewellsmandle.com) had a solo show entitled Hypermarket at the Providence Art Club’s Dodge Gallery in September. Featuring paintings made while she has been living as an expatriate in Qatar— with her husband Roger, RISD’s president from 1993–2008— the artwork shown takes on many issues confronting the developing nation, from obsessive building to polygamy and male dominance. Gayle’s home base is in South Dartmouth, MA.

1998 Susan Doyle 81 IL/MFA 98 PT/ PR (Barrington, RI) showed her paintings and lithographs in the show Susan Doyle: Hermeneutics at PrintHouston last July. Interested in the tension between conception and perception, she writes that she’s working on a series “exploring the confluence

(lizcollins.com), an assistant professor of Textiles at RISD, performed a KNITTING NATION installation at Skidmore College’s Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY as part of the traveling Dance/Draw show curated by ICA Boston’s Helen Molesworth. She has also staged several knitting interventions recently—events where you can get your clothes knit-hacked, embellished and/or repaired—in New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. In addition, she collaborated with Nayland Blake on an editorial shoot for issue four of Headmaster Magazine. John Nordyke MFA GD has

been promoted to full professor at the University of Hartford’s Art School—in the heart of Connecticut.

2000 Don Dalton MLA (dondalton arts.com) has been awarded “Copley Artist” status from the Copley Society in Boston. This membership level is attained once an artist has been accepted into five juried shows. Don also had a watercolor selected for inclusion in the 2012 National Watercolor Society All Member Exhibition, held last spring in San Pedro, CA. The artist is based in North Springfield, VT.

Books and Buildings, a solo show of work by Jeffrey Sarmiento MFA GL (jeffrey sarmiento.co.uk), was featured recently at SODA Istanbul. A reader in Glass at the University of Sunderland in England, Jeffrey writes that his work is inspired by ethnography and the attempt to understand his place in the world. He also recently collaborated with Erin Dickson on a piece called Emotional Leak for Britain’s National Glass Centre.

Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

2001 Kristi Gelnett MArch has

been promoted to an associate at Durkee, Brown, Viveiros & Werenfels (DBVW) Architects in Providence. In her 11 years at DBVW, she has worked on some of the firm’s most challenging projects. She is on the Downtown Design Review Committee and the Board of Directors for AIA/RI and mentors local high school students interested in careers in architecture, construction and engineering. Tamar Kern MFA JM keeps her

studio in her Newport, RI gallery called alloy (alloygallery. com), which features the work of RISD alumni and professors. Yankee Magazine called it one of the state’s finest galleries. Amy (Britt) Powers MAT

teaches painting and elementary art at Alfred-Almond Central School in NY state. Her husband is a glassblowing professor and head of the glass program at Alfred University. They have a cheerful threeyear-old daughter and live in a beautiful orange house on five acres, complete with apple trees and a brand new studio with a view. She still sports a RISD sticker on her car and writes that she “loved every bit of [her] RISD experience.”

Robin M. Tagliaferri 86 IL/ MA 01 (Cranston, RI), executive director of the Forbes House Museum in Milton, MA, writes that along with hard work, she has found these things to be most important: “to have conceptual skills; to study and analyze things—to have ‘vision’ in a way that only RISD people have; to take risks; and push the corners of the envelope till the form is almost unrecognizable.” The museum was featured in the March 18, 2012 travel section of the Boston Globe.

2002 Late last spring Jon Laustsen MFA SC (jonlaustsen.wordpress. com) showed sculptures of miniature construction sites in a five-person exhibition at the AS220 Pop-Up Gallery in Providence, RI. A review of the show described his pieces as “nervous, beautiful” dreams of construction and demolition. Jon lives in Pawtucket, RI.

Amelia Henderson

MFA 95 TX Mile Marker #2 (mixed-media collage on paper, 18 x 24") was one of two of Amelia’s pieces included in a spring group exhibition of local artists sponsored by the Arts Council of New Orleans, where she lives.

Pure Genius

Natalia Almada MFA 01 PH Almada’s work engages a range of charged subjects: the complexities of illegal border crossing and drug trafficking; the fragmented forms of her own family’s personal grief; the public and the private life of her great grandfather Plutarco Elías Calles, who was president of Mexico from 1924–28. Each of her films is marked by a quiet, muscular empathy trained on Mexico, her birthplace and current home, where she tends to work alone, believing that making affecting films is “mostly a question of being patient, of paying attention, and being aware and awake.” Almada’s previous documentaries include El General (2009), Al Otro Lado (2005) and her RISD thesis project, All Water Has a Perfect Memory (2001), which also won Best Short Documentary at the 2002 Tribeca Film Festival. In a 2011 Ted Talk in which she alternated between English and Spanish,

FOR 2012 MACARTHUR FELLOW

Natalia Almada MFA 01 PH, winning a so-called “genuis grant” means one thing: freedom. The five-year, $500,000 “no-strings-attached” award from the MacArthur Foundation will allow the documentary filmmaker to bring future projects to life without the timeconsuming demands of fundraising. “This was super surprising,” Almada noted on the phone from her home in Mexico City. “You have no idea it’s coming, and then after it does, a huge weight lifts, because you’re suddenly free of the everyday worry of how you’re going to continue to make work.” Since graduating from RISD a decade ago, Almada has made four films. Her most recent, El Velador (2011), offers an evocative study of a night watchman who tends to the mausoleums of some of Mexico’s most powerful drug lords. Though she didn’t major in filmmaking at RISD (which is only available at the undergraduate level), she found the graduate program in Photography to be “very conceptually rigorous, very experimental.” And that open-ended approach was a good fit—in part because it ultimately led her to film. “It wasn’t a big deal to be exploring photography in other ways,” Almada says. Instead, the big deal may be the artist herself. At 37 she’s the first Latina filmmaker to earn a MacArthur since its founding in 1981, and her films have appeared at such venues as the Sundance Film Festival and the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.

Almada observed that language is nearly always an inaccurate method of communication. Instead, she turns to the camera “to try to order the world in a more reliable way.” Almada is not interested in simple truth, however. Instead, she’s set on accountability—bearing artful witness both in Mexico and throughout the world. Filming Al Otro Lado, she encountered a pauper’s cemetery just north of the Mexican border, graves she describes as “little bricks of anonymity and disempowerment... left outside the gates of heaven and completely forgotten about.” As a MacArthur fellow, Almada will be able to continue the work of naming and empowering, though she resists the term “genius” that the popular press has associated with her award. “I think it’s funny,” she says. “If anything, I prefer to think of [creative inspiration] as something that visits you, versus something you own.” No matter what you call it, Almada’s vision is secure, and her plan is simple: keep working. “It’s a marathon,” she says. “That’s something I learned at RISD—to work one project at a time.” —Kirsten Andersen

Stills from Almada’s most recent documentary, El Velador (The Night Watchman), which focuses on the senseless violence of Mexico’s drug wars. Time Out calls it “mesmerizing,” while critic Roger Ebert says: “The Mexican drug cartels have inspired countless films, but never one as final as [this one]. After this experience, everything else seems trivial.”

For more on Natalia’s work, go to altamurafilms.com.

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

2003 In early summer Common Ground—Uncommon Visions, a solo show of work by Veronica Juyoun Byun MFA CR (Hoboken, NJ), was presented by hpgrp Gallery New York in collaboration with Loveed Fine Arts. Joshua Enck MFA FD, who

teaches in RISD’s Foundation Studies program, teamed up with photographer Reenie Barrow for Contour: Reflections on Form, a late summer show at Dedee Shattuck Gallery in Westport, MA. The exhibition highlighted his investigation of geometrically informed contours in contrast to her organically curving forms.

2004 Double Acting Hinge, the first solo exhibition at New York’s Fitzroy Gallery by Colby Bird MFA PH (Austin, TX), ran from March to May. The title is the name of hardware often referred to as a “saloon hinge,” that which a door to be opened in both directions. Colby presented 14 photographic works.

Breanne Trammell MFA 08 PR The aptly named (and now fully funded) Nails in the Key of Life both beautifies your digits and welcomes you to the wonderful world of experiential art. Using a canned ham trailer as a mobile nail salon, Trammell (shown to the right with a recent client) is helping to “create an intimate platform to exchange ideas and conversation.” As a licensed nail technician, she also offers a letter-pressed certificate of authenticity to commemorate the experience. In addition, Lauren recently made silkscreen posters for the Wassaic [NY] Project’s efforts to support the volunteer fire department in town. She lives in Brooklyn.

Victor De La Rosa MFA TX

Michele (Glick) Erez 03 PT/

participated in a summer group show entitled Even The Smallest Change Can Be Profound at MACLA—Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americano in San Jose, CA.

MAT 04 lives in Tel Aviv, Israel

Daniel Michalik MFA 04 FD Daniel’s cork furniture is included in 40 Under 40: Craft Futures, an exhibition on view through February 3 at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. As part of that, he’s also among the 40 artists and designers featured in the October/November issue of American Craft Magazine.

with her husband Eyal and 2year-old son Liam David Erez. For FLOW.12 Laura Kaufman MFA SC (laurakaufmanstudio. com) installed Meters to the Center, a site-specific sculpture that reflects on the monumental dimensions of our solar system by relating them to the scale of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge at Randall’s Island Park in NYC. FLOW.12 was

the second installment in a two-part environmental art exhibition on view along the park’s shoreline during the summers of 2011 and 2012. In September Louise Kohrman MFA PR (louisekohrman.com) showed works on paper in Mapping Pattern, a two-person show at A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery in Northampton, MA. She presented prints and drawings that explore themes of patterned repetition and

multiplicity. Louise is based in Northampton, MA. In addition to curating a busy exhibition season at farm project Space + Gallery, Susie Nielsen MFA GD (farmproject space.com) rode in the Pan Mass Challenge, an annual bike-a-thon to raise money for cancer research and treatment. She biked from Sturbridge to Provincetown, MA, in memory of her mentor and close friend, Dr. Martin Gardy. She lives in Wellfleet, MA. In May Alissia MelkaTeichroew MID (Brooklyn)

presented her Ballpoint Pen Wallpaper series at the ICFF in NYC and created a Love It or Leave It tote for a show of the same name at Gallery R’Pure in NYC. A new collection of jewelry, sold under her company byAMT (byAMT. com), was shown at the New York International Gift Fair in August, and byAMT products are now carried at an expanded number of stores nationally and internationally.

2005 In August the Re Institute in Millerton, NY presented Another Side, a group exhibition that included work by Adam Eckstrom MFA PT and Lauren Was MFA 04 SC. 92

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Jenn Cash MFA 06 GD This year Jenn’s NYC-based studio Language Dept. (languagedept.com) designed the 4th edition of The Tobacco Atlas for the American Cancer Society and the World Lung Foundation. “In the age of infographics, we’re particularly excited and proud about this piece,” she says, “but more so for its potential to impact tobacco policy and the billion lives at stake this century.”

Unleashed Studio (unleashed studio.com) in Honolulu, HI, while Eli is based in NYC.

2007

Adam and Lauren also showed a drawing, three recent collages and their Dream Ride 5,6,7 at Wassaic [NY] Project’s Summer Festival. Melissa (Moir) RiveraTorres 01 ID/MAT 05 and Eli Levenstein MFA 09 FD

participated in a new series on

HGTV called The White Room Challenge hosted by David Bromstad. The show, which premiered in late April, challenges artists and designers to design 10x10’ white rooms using outrageous elements, like thousands of flowers, candy treats or treasures from dumpster diving. Melissa runs

Michael Radyk MFA 08 TX Swan Point 2, a piece from a series of large-scale jacquard woven, cut, flocked and manipulated textiles, was included in Outside/Inside the Box, an early fall exhibition at the Crane Arts Building’s Ice Box Project Space. The show was part of the international biennial FIBER/PHILADELPHIA, a festival for innovative fiber/textile art. This fall his work was also included in the Ivyside juried exhibition at the Misciagna Family Center for Performing Arts’ McLanahan Gallery in Altoona, PA. Michael (michaelradyk.com) lives in Klutztown, PA.

Since 2006 Christopher Robbins MFA DM (Bedford, NY), John Ewing MFA DM (Roxbury, MA) and Matey Odonkor MFA DM (Brighton, MA) have been running Ghana Think Tank (GhanaThinkTank.org), a worldwide network for creating strategies to resolve local problems in the “developed” world. Whether impractical or brilliant, proposed solutions are put into practice, sometimes producing positive results, at others, intensely awkward situations as different cultures’ assumptions about each other are played out. The Ghana Think Tank is included in the current Venice Bienniale Architettura 2012, which runs through November 25. The US State Department also selected the project for a person-toperson diplomacy initiative in Lebanon called smART Power.

show at DeVos Art Museum at Northern Michigan University in Marquette and in group shows at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis and the Lexington Art League in Kentucky. The Pacifist Library (pacifist library.org), a mobile structure Nathaniel Katz MFA DM

(Jupiter, FL) and collaborator Valentina Curandi constructed from discarded and recycled materials, offers a lounge for reading, meeting and exchanging ideas. After inaugurating the September exhibition Public Trust at Flux Factory in Long Island City, NY, the mobile unit traveled to libraries in Queens, NY, was on site at the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 and was included in the exhibition Perepepé at Pescheria Center for Visual Arts in Pesaro, Italy. Nathaniel and Valentina also exhibited and performed in Padua, Brescia, Biella and Turin, Italy over the course of the spring and summer. Last March and April recent work by Moon Jung Jang MFA

GD was featured in a solo show at Ciné in Athens, GA, where she lives. The books and posters on view “involve  the relationship between space and configuration… and design rhetoric in  visual communication.” Yuka Otani MFA GL (yuka

otani.com) created a series of site-specific works entitled Watarase Museum of Water based on her research on the water of the Watarase River in Japan. The piece was included in the experimental contemporary art festival WATARASE Art Project 2012. Yuka lives in Brooklyn. The Glass Tube project by Bohyun Yoon MFA GL is included in 40 Under 40: Craft Futures, an exhibition on view through February 3 at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. As part of that, he’s also among the 40 artists and designers featured in the October/November issue of American Craft Magazine. The piece makes ephemeral music via tubes that each emit a different sound.

Work by Matthew Szösz BID 97/MFA GL is included in 40 Under 40: Craft Futures, an exhibition on view through February 3 at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. As part of that, he’s also among the 40 artists and designers featured in the October/November issue of American Craft Magazine.

2008 Jonas Criscoe MFA PT has

been awarded a 2012–13 Jerome Emerging Printmakers’ Residency at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis, MN, where he lives. In the last half year, he has exhibited works in a two-person show at Rosalux Gallery in Minneapolis, a group Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

Yong Joo Kim MFA 09 JM This fall Yong Joo exceeded her $10K Kickstarter goal to pursue a “sublime experiment”—continuing to make really interesting jewelry using Velcro. The company recently created a short first-person video in which the Providence-based artist explains why she loves transforming such a utilitarian material into objects of adornment. Yong Joo’s neckpiece Reconfiguring the Ordinary: Twist Looped and Linked won a 2012 Niche Award from Niche magazine in the Sculpture to Wear category.

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

2009

Rial MFA DM (Providence, RI)

Last winter gallery sUgAr in Bentonville, AR displayed photo prints, drawings and video by Maralie Armstrong-

in the solo show A Seer’s Spectacle. Maralie performed the work Humanbeast with her husband Eli V. Manuscript at the opening reception.

Last summer Phillip Mann MFA FD (phillipmannstudios. com) joined writer Susan Tweit and paleobotanist Ian Miller in leading Floatposium, a fourday float trip through Lodore Canyon on Colorado’s Green River. Offered through the Colorado Art Ranch, the soldout trip allowed participants to write and build temporary works of art while learning about the natural world along the river. Phillip also creates custom furniture and sculpture and teaches at Metropolitan State College and the University of Colorado, Denver.

Bundith Phunsombatlert MFA 10 DM Wayfinding: 100 NYC Public Sculptures (wayfindingNYC. com) uses small drawings, directional signs and maps to help visitors to New York City find public sculptures. Bundith recently received a 2012 Emerging Artist Fellowship (EAF) from Socrates Sculpture Park in NYC and is participating in the EAF 12 exhibition, which continues at the park through March 2013.

Debra Folz MFA 10 FD Nominated by the MFA, Boston as one of five women artists to watch in Massachusetts, Debra (debrafolz.com) is representing the state in the national biennial Women to Watch exhibition. The show runs from November 2 through January 6 at The National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. Her XStich Stool is shown here.

Home Life

Louisa Marie Summer MFA 10 PH

Louisa Marie Summer MFA 10 PH stumbled upon an extraordinary opportunity when she met a second-generation Puerto Rican mother who was willing to open her home and her life to the photography student. The 26-year-old woman, named Jennifer, lives with her Native American partner and their four children in a run-down apartment at or near the poverty line in South Providence, an urban neighborhood with a large AfricanAmerican and Hispanic population. A FEW YEARS AGO,

Over the course of a year, Summer focused on photographing the family for her RISD thesis project, developing a close relationship based on mutual understanding, respect and trust. However, she knew that if she wanted to share her intimate view into the daily life of Jennifer’s family more broadly, she would need to add written context. So she invited one of her teachers, Professor of Litereary Arts + Studies Mairéad Byrne, to participate in the project. After talking at length with Jennifer and her family, Byrne provided powerful, 94

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For more on Louisa’s work, go to louisasummer.com.

first-person narratives culled from these conversations and video recordings. Jennifer’s Family, the newly released book that evolved from Summer’s thesis project, illustrates how a struggling young mother manages to remain optimistic and care for her children despite grueling living conditions. “Louisa’s photographs show a quality of great empathy,” notes Schilt Publshing in promoting the book. Rather than exposing “weakness or defect,” she allows “each of her subjects [to show] dignity and personal impact.”

Dan says comment on the lack of human support and social connections, were recently on view in the installations Last Moment Hospital at RISD and the Brown University Science Center.

Charlotte Potter MFA 10 GL Charlotte created Charlotte’s Web (2010–12, hand-engraved glass, Facebook images, metal, wax, 12' x 24' x 3") for FUSION [A New Century of Glass], a summer exhibition at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. She used the historical understanding of a profile—an engraved cameo silhouette—and applied it to the current Facebook conception of profile, creating a web of handmade glass cameos mimicking the worldwide web of connection. Charlotte is the glass studio manager at the Chrysler Museum of Art and is based in Stanwood, WA.

Justin Phillipson MFA DM

Last spring New Yorker Gabriela Salazar MFA PT

(gabrielasalazar.com) installed her public sculpture For Closure (Outdoors, The Bronx) at West Farms Square Plaza in Bronx, NY, where it remained on view through mid October. She also created Site Set, a site-specific game and installation on view earlier this fall at the Luchsinger Gallery at Greenwich [CT] Academy and had work in the group shows Exhibit A at Calico in Brooklyn and Building Material at the Control Room in Los Angeles.

showed a new video work in People Who Work Here, a summer group show at David Zwirner in NYC, where he lives. Featuring artists employed by the gallery, the exhibition explored notions of art and work, and established versus emerging artists.

2010 Kevin Arnold MFA PT* (Rudy,

AR) teaches in the art department at the University of Arkansas/Fayetteville and has been actively exhibiting for the past decade. His art column runs twice monthly in The City Wire, which covers local business, political and arts and entertainment news.

2011 In early November Brooklynbased artist Jason Huff MFA DM and Mimi Cabell MFA PH will moderate a panel entitled Invisible Participation at the 2012 Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and

Francisco Moreno MFA 12 PT Las Noticias, a summer solo show and mixed-media installation at 361 Union Avenue in Westbury, NY, was hosted by Curbs & Stoops, a contemporary art think tank, and Rhythmology, a network of social Latin dance parties and classes in New York. In his paintings, murals and installations, Francisco (franciscomoreno.net) explores notions of American identity and iconography. He’s based in Arlington, TX.

Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Also participating is Clement Valla MFA 09 DM. American Psycho, a collaboration between Jason and Mimi, is being published this fall by TRAUMAWIEN, a small publisher in Vienna, Austria.

Last winter work by Brendan Keim MFA FD (brendankeim. com) was included in the American Design Club (AmDC) show THREAT: Objects For Defense And Protection at the Museum of Arts & Design in NYC. Artists created their versions of contemporary arms and armor in the presence of museum visitors in the sixth-floor studios; Brendan made Lightsticks—candleholders for “defense against the dark (side).”

2012 In August work by Iliahi Anthony MFA FD (Hilo, HI)

was included in State of the Art 2012—Annual MFA Exhibition at the Chase Young Gallery in Boston, MA. He showed his sculpture Hilo Trestles 1, 2, 3. Dan Chen MFA DM (North Haven, CT) built a series of functional robots capable of reenacting human social behaviors, including Last Moment Robot, which consists of a padded caressing arm and a mechanical recorded voice designed to guide and comfort dying patients with a scripted message. The robots, which

Austin Ballard MFA 12 SC Blackberry Jam on Camo (20 x 22 x 66") is among the work Austin (austinballard.com) is showing in American Craft Today, a national juried exhibition that continues through December 29 at the Bascom Center for the Visual Arts in Highlands, NC. His work is also on view through December 14 in Phase of the Devout at Ithaca College’s Handwerker Gallery. Austin also earned a 2012 Dave Bown Project Grant and one of four residencies at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop’s new Bill Scott Sculpture Centre. He’s based in Charlotte, NC.

Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

sketches, doodles, ideas in progress

Dillon Froehlich 14 ID

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Last summer I did this series for Dude, Monsters!, a group exhibition out in LA at the Think Tank Gallery. The images are all 6 x 9" and done in pen, ink, watercolor, graphite and collage.

Rather than approach the theme of the show in a literal way, I decided to offer a satirical interpretation of the reckless lives and monstrous behavior my generation is sharing through Facebook and other social networking sites. I’ve now compiled this body of work into Now Available on VHS, my most recent zine.

In general, my artwork draws on influences from vintage culture and aesthetics. Whether focused on fictional or real events, I tend to emphasize the dinginess in humanity through illustrations, narratives and murals that satirize social customs, historical pretenses, surreal occupations and personal nostalgia.

For more on Dillonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, go to froelichbrothers.com.

Please submit some pages from your own sketchbook (showing anything thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on your mind). Our favorites will appear in the next issue. Questions? Email risdxyz@risd.edu.

FALL/WINTER 2012/13

Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage

Rhode Island School of Design Two College Street Providence, RI 02903 USA

Illustrations from the series House by Laura Guerin 12 IL

PAID Burlington, VT 05401 Permit No. 19