RISD XYZ Spring/Summer 2017 by Rhode Island School of Design

spring/summer 2017 rhode island school of design

// the play issue

inside FEATURES

// 22 Seeing Funny Longtime friends Ted Stearn 83 PT and David Mazzucchelli 82 PT have a lot to say to each other about their shared compulsion to create comics.

// 38 Wrangling Ideas Now that his commitment to Adventure Time is over, Andy Ristaino 97 FAV is looking forward to exploring new directions.

// 18 Nervy New Places

// 30

Once Shara Hughes 04 PT learned to let go and play more in the studio, her work really began to stand out.

Everyday Absurdities Insatiably curious, Allan Wexler BArch 72 loves probing and playing with the rituals of daily life.

DEPARTMENTS

// 05 // 03 comments online, incoming, ongoing

// 08 listen reflections, opinions, points of view

// 56 // 10 look

• toying with perception • playing outdoors • fun with food

// 44 reflect a message from the president

// 61

// 76 unravel our major abbreviations

// 85

// 46 two college street

// 60 impact

campus community newsbits

who’s giving to risd + why

// 56 six degrees connecting through the alumni association

// 62 moving forward class notes + profiles

// 96 sketchbook ideas in progress

// 96 facing page: Jim Drain 98 SC is showing

his six-foot-tall Eggs Over Ozzy in Utopia Muscle, his first NYC solo show in a decade and his most overtly political to date. The title references author Junot Diaz’s call for optimism through activism. The exhibition continues through June 11 at Nathalie Karg Gallery on the Lower East Side.

start here Ready to Play Though the outcome may not always show it, most creative people recognize that the urge to play is a huge driver of artistic exploration and making—that letting go, following your natural curiosity and experimenting with materials, approaches and ideas are essential to making satisfying work. As the first form of creative learning and expression all humans (and many animals) pursue, play is a way of engaging with the world that comes so naturally you’d think we wouldn’t allow ourselves to outgrow it as we age—and fortunately, many creative people don’t. In this issue you’ll find stories about RISD artists and designers who tap into their own sense of play in creating meaningful work— frequently with a level of seriousness that counters the idea of play as totally carefree or even frivolous. You’ll also see examples of alumni-designed or -made products and projects with a playful feel—from toys and games to comics and cartoons to whimsical gadgets and clever functional objects. Seen collectively, the work underscores the true meaning and value of play as an essential approach to lifelong learning. And as a counterpoint to the bleak political climate in the US this year, we hope that this issue reflects the prevailing optimism of the RISD community. — Liisa Silander

// thoughts from the editor

contributors E D ITOR / LEAD WR ITE R

Liisa Silander lsilande@risd.edu

THIS ISSUE

LEAD D E S I G N E R / PR OD U CTI ON COOR D I NATOR

Elizabeth Eddins 00 GD CONTR I B UTI N G WR ITE R S

Robert Albanese Simone Solondz PH OTOG RAPH E R

Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH campus/event photos unless otherwise credited CONTR I B UT I N G D E S I G N E R

Sarah Rainwater D I R E CTOR OF ALU M N I R E LATI ON S

Christina Hartley 74 IL PR I NTI N G

Lane Press Burlington, VT Paper: 70# Opus Satin (R) FSC text and 80# Sterling Dull (R) FSC cover F ONTS

Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk and text face, Quiosco, designed by Cyrus Highsmith 97 GD COVE R

Your Grass is Greener (2016, oil, acrylic and plaster on canvas, 68 x 60")

cover

Shara Hughes 04 PT

Even before being selected for inclusion in this year’s Whitney Biennial, Shara’s playful paintings had begun gaining traction. The critical success of her 2016 spring solo show at Marlborough Chelsea has led to six solo and eight group shows in just over a year since. While the Brooklyn-based artist is happy to be on a roll, her real joy comes from talking shop with her painter boyfriend and holing up in her tiny Greenpoint studio making new breakthroughs.

cover

listen // 08

Katie Salen Tekinbas MFA 92 GD With a lifelong belief in the transformational power of play, Katie is a game design professor at UC Irvine and a cofounder of the online learning platform Connected Camps. She is also the founding executive director of Institute of Play, a nonprofit educational organization focused on games and learning. Katie co-wrote Rules of Play and The Game Design Reader, among other books, and is also the mother of twins Baris and Sevda, born in October 2015.

listen

feature // 22

Ted Stearn 83 PT + David Mazzucchelli 82 PT Friends since they first met at RISD, Ted and David both make comic books but have followed different paths professionally. Based in Hollywood, Ted works as a storyboard artist for an ever-changing range of animated shows. David is best known for his comic book collaborations with Frank Miller on the Batman and Daredevil series and for his graphic novel Asterios Polyp. R I S D XYZ

Two College Street Providence, Rhode Island 02903-2784 USA risdxyz@risd.edu

risd.edu/xyz Published twice a year by RISD Media (in conjunction with Alumni Relations) AD D R E S S U P DATE S

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

sketchbook // 96

Haejin Park 15 IL

As both her sketchbook doodles and commissioned illustrations indicate, Haejin seems to have a preternatural predisposition to sunniness. Could it stem from her abiding love of eggs?

+ special contributions from: Andy Ristaino 97 FAV // 16 –17 + 38 Jonathan Kaplan 73 CR // 65 Laurie Rosenwald 77 PT // 67 Peter Barrett 90 PT // 72 Grace Rivera 15 PH // 86 Yong Joo Kim MFA 09 JM // 92 Annie Evelyn 99 FD/MFA 07 // back cover

feature sketchbook

comments

// online, incoming, ongoing

UP + DOWN I really enjoy reading the XYZ magazine to see all of the new work being done by alumni. I especially enjoy the consistent design and layout of the print edition. It always makes my day whenever it arrives in the mailbox. Michael Stoddard 10 IL Plainville, MA

I really enjoy what you do with RISD XYZ. It is a wonderful gift each time I receive it. The [Winter 2017] issue is amazing and so very relevant. Thank you! Mark Shunney MFA 97 SC Santa Cruz, CA

A voice message from an anonymous caller left on April 4, 2017 I just found that the RISD XYZ for winter was the most—ah—downing book I have ever seen you produce. It’s just such a downer. I went to look for some inspiration and everything in there was sad. I just couldn’t believe how upsetting it was to me. I just had to tell you. There was nothing beautiful or inspirational to lift my spirits. And I just have to tell you: Don’t publish anything as bad as that again! Everybody is nutty. Everybody is crazy. The crazier you can look the better, the sillier. I don’t get it. Is this all they learn? How to destroy themselves? God, no wonder we’re looking for another planet. This one’s gone nuts. Editor’s note: This is one of the most anguished responses ever to an entire issue of the magazine. While the Winter 2017 issue reflects the sober mood of the RISD community in the wake of the extraordinarily divisive 2016 US presidential campaign, I see it as full of hope and promise. The stories of RISD artists and designers eager to contribute to the world around them and ready to stand up for equity and justice are meant to be far more inspiring than “sad.”

Please let us know what you think — about this issue or anything else on your mind: email risdxyz@risd.edu.

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

tracts Travel Ban Responding to the federal travel ban issued in late January, Jennifer Hom 09 IL created I lift my lamp beside the golden door, a print portraying a diverse group of people standing next to the torch of the Statue of Liberty. “I am the daughter of an immigrant and granddaughter of a ‘paper son,’” says the San Francisco-based artist and Google Doodler, who has been donating all proceeds from the sale of the print to the ACLU. “My family gave our name to live in liberty.”

You can run your life like a craft project… Just start playing. Andrew Crawford 93 SC in an interview on Why Metalworking Will Make You More Badass in The Manual (2.13.17)

It is better to fail repeatedly and learn to carry your own weight than to become a background character in your own story. Kenyan filmmaker Ng’endo Mukii 06 FAV in a Vimeo spotlight interview (4.3.17)

For people to genuinely be dumbfounded or confused by something that’s going on at an art school is pretty cool. grad student Drew Litowitz MFA 17 GD speaking about Vernacular Spectacular, a winter show he co-curated at RISD’s Gelman Gallery

When I started at RISD I couldn’t wrap my head around [“concepts”]—a word for an idea of… something else that you make from an idea. But now I kinda get it. Elizabeth Hilfiger 16 AP in her first interview with W — about her new brand Foo and Foo (4.17.17)

A DIFFERENT KIND OF WALL During the 2016 presidential campaign Brick × Brick founder Sarah Sandman MFA 09 GD teamed up with RISD faculty member Nikki Juen 90 GD to design a public art performance that builds human “walls” against misogyny. Participants wear brick-patterned jumpsuits emblazoned with many of the choice words the new president has used to describe women. It’s “a symbol of our resistance and determination to maintain control over our bodies,” Brick x Brick states. “Linking hands to form community walls of individuals further blocks and subverts the harmful messages that subjugate women.” 04

// comments

Because it was not a character who would get a lot of scrutiny, there was real freedom to just go for it—to establish it as ours and try something light, fun. artist Erica Henderson 08 FAV on collaborating with writer Ryan North on Squirrel Girl in a Chicago Tribune story on women in comics (4.14.17)

I started making 3D objects when I was six years old. first-year student Nina Gregg 20 ID, who already runs a successful jewelry business called Never Grow Up

STILL PLAYING @90

STANDING UP FOR EQUALITY

In response to a torn-out ad for RISD| CE that reads: “Finding time to be creative is easier said than done,” this arrived penned by hand: Don’t tell me! I’m creative. One lost day and I’m very unhappy. I turned 90 years old on November 23, 2016 and I have had one hell of a great life and still do here in crazy Provincetown. I belong to the Provincetown Art Association and work at home, not only as a painter but also a writer—nine books and I’m on a huge one now, Nature. I have been associated with the New England Conservatory and have been in their concerts (piano)…. I paint, I write, I live alone, with my daughter just down the street. Love you all! Carmel Zonfrillo Cody 48 PT Provincetown, MA

Since the beginning of the year, RISD faculty member Gina Gregorio 92 TX (above) is among the many members of the RISD community who have been putting their talents to work to speak out about women’s rights and other core values increasingly under threat in the US. After initially setting out to design something for her

DESIGN YOUR SUMMER AT RISD

mother to wear to the Women’s March on Washington (January 21), Gregorio threw herself into full production mode as word quickly spread about her crowns. “The vision I had [is] of people wearing something that makes them feel proud, regal, uplifted and upstanding,” the NYC-based designer told a reporter for WWD.

HIGH SCHOOL

RISD PRE-COLLEGE precollege.risd.edu COLLEGE LEVEL AND BEYOND

SUMMER STUDIES ART + DESIGN COURSES TEXTILES SUMMER INSTITUTE SUMMER INSTITUTE FOR GRAPHIC DESIGN STUDIES summer.risd.edu CONTINUING EDUCATION

COURSES FOR ADULTS, TEENS AND CHILDREN ce.risd.edu

RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN Division of Continuing Education

Please let us know what’s on your mind by emailing risdxyz@risd.edu.

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

Foot Fetish Look down and the world brightens up. Here are just a few of the many happy feet seen at RISD in recent months.

BACKING FREEDOM In February people watching the 2017 Super Bowl may have seen that Airbnb—the global accommodations network founded by Brian Chesky 04 ID and Joe Gebbia 05 GD/ID (see also page 48)—went very public in its opposition to the presidential executive order closing US borders to refugees and citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries. Using the hashtag #we accept, Airbnb also reached out to its global community of hosts and travelers to ask for continued support as it works to provide short-term housing for 100,000 refugees, disaster survivors, relief workers and other displaced people over the next five years. In addition, Airbnb pledged to contribute $4 million over the coming four years to the International Rescue Committee to support the most critical needs of displaced people around the world.

Kindred Souls? For the Women’s March in January, RISD Professor of Graphic Design Bethany Johns MFA 83 GD created a suite of four posters riffing on the Trump-Putin and Trump-Pence connections and made them available for free download.

// comments

At the beginning of the year, textiles artist Karelle Levy (left) sponsored two workshops at KRELshop, her studio in south Florida, and joined the wave of women worldwide who busily knit and crocheted Pussy Hats for the January 21 Women’s March in DC and in her case, her local one in Miami.

WE THE PEOPLE A new series of We the People posters created by Shepard Fairey 92 IL and two other artists got a lot of traction after first hitting the streets at the Inauguration ceremony in Washington, DC. “It’s hard to encapsulate the complexity of what we’re facing going into this Trump presidency in three images,” Fairey says of the prints he made for the project. But as a counterpoint to the divisive rhetoric of the campaign, he focused on “groups that are vulnerable” and added simple messages of resistance and affirmation below each image.

top: Obey Giant / Amplifier Foundation, photo by Ridwan Adhami

READY TO RESIST Robert Geller 01 AP is among the leading apparel designers to literally show his dismay about the direction of the new administration at February’s menswear show in NYC.“I wanted to do as much as I could,” said Geller, who was born in Germany and grew up at a time when Berlin was still divided and ultra-conservatives were in power in both the US and the UK. “With clothes, it feels a little bit silly, but it’s my life. It’s what I do,” he said, wearing a t-shirt with “immigrant” emblazoned on it (far right). “Through this balance of soft and hard, protection and protest, Love and War [the title of his collection], Geller’s message really hit home,” Vogue summed up. “Resist.”

Drawn + Quartered These quarters were placed on each chair as a give-away at a small RISD gathering this spring. Feedback welcomed at risdxyz@risd.edu.

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

// reflections, opinions, points of view

CONFLICTED ABOUT SCREEN TIME? D I D YOU KNOW that kids who play a lot of video games often have better social skills than those who don’t? And that they are more confident in their intelligence and abilities, have more friends and are more willing to talk to others? Researchers analyzed the results of a wide range of studies on video game play and found consistent evidence of these positive outcomes. Given common beliefs that gaming is antisocial, these results may be surprising. I’m a gamer and a game designer and even I was a little surprised. I chalk this up to the fact that I’m a new mom and hence, a new worrier. (Already) I worry about how I will manage screen time or choose the “right” games for my twins to play. And I worry about them making friends and being kind and not having to sit by themselves in the lunchroom at school. Beyond a worry about their safety, I worry about them being social. The good news for a gamer mom like me is that the research shows pretty consistently that playing games has social benefits worth paying attention to. This

Read more of Katie’s columns at connectedcamps.com.

doesn’t mean that gaming is always beneficial. It does mean that the right kind of gaming helps kids become socially well rounded. For example, research on video games and violence has found that when children are exposed to games that encourage positive social behaviors, they are more likely to behave in kind and helpful ways in the future. Another study on the implications of teamwork in video games demonstrated that cooperative play has social benefits: it leads players to think helpful behaviors are valuable and commonplace. This research made me wonder: Could we raise a whole generation of kind and helpful children by worrying less about how much our kids are gaming and more about how and with whom? Both the mom and gamer in me think ‘yes,’ and here are some thoughts on how all of you who are parenting these days might go about that. Unleash your kid’s social superpowers. The work of being a child is intense. Kids have to learn new things constantly and they have to do it in front of a bunch of people who are happy to tease them if they don’t get

by Katie Salen Tekinbas MFA 92 GD

“The right kind of gaming helps kids become socially well rounded.” photos by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH

listen

it right on the first try (siblings, for example). Supporting and organizing ways for your kids to play games with friends can nurture some of the social skills they’ll need to make it through. Go for cooperative play. Playing games with friends—either in the game room or living room—gives kids a chance to be social in a group context. Team sports are great for kids for the same reason. When trying to reach a goal (whether it is building The Most Epic Castle Ever or crushing their in-game nemesis) kids quickly discover how useful it is to have a helpful partner. Playing on a team is awesome because it exposes kids to the idea that people with different skills can work together to solve a problem. “In online games, [players] don’t necessarily choose their teammates, so they have to negotiate whose strengths are used at what time,” says Kathy Sanford, a researcher who has studied the social benefits of gaming. “These are not one-off strategies. Some of the participants have talked about the usefulness of their leadership skills in running a guild in a game and then going into a high school classroom and navigating that structure.” Look for games that explicitly reward teamwork and collaboration. Sports games are an obvious choice but if your child likes puzzles or adventure-style games that only come in single-player mode, up the social ante by adding a friend or sibling to the mix. Kids can share a controller or keyboard or just keep each other company as they play. The more practice kids get at strategizing with each other, negotiating moves, sharing observations and celebrating great game play the better the chance they’ll be able to summon their social superpowers when needed. Join an online community. Kids make friends and learn how to get along by playing together. This is true for online games as well. Since not all online communities are created equal when it comes to supercharging social skills, the key lies in finding the right gaming community for each child. Look for gaming communities where kids have a chance to

“Playing games with friends—either in the game room or living room— gives kids a chance to be social in a group context.”

collaborate with and learn from more expert players, for example. Getting better at something provides the perfect context for social interaction: kids are not only motivated to learn but have a ton of cool experts to talk to. If you have younger kids or ones who are new to online play, look for communities that are parent-run or that label themselves as kid friendly. This can help to limit exposure to inappropriate content or language. It also gives kids a chance to test out their online social skills in a welcoming environment. Host a gaming playdate. If you’re feeling truly adventurous, why not host a gaming playdate for your child and their friends? It’s a great way to support the social benefits of gaming and provide an up-close look at them—kids sharing expertise, strengthening bonds between friends, building self-esteem and, well, being super social. One more fact. According to a large study on the social benefits of playing video games, children who engaged in social interactions while playing video games are more likely to take an interest in civic engagement once they become adults. At a moment in history when civic engagement seems more important than ever, I say let them play games with friends.

look

// toying with perception

BEYOND THE HOW Photographer Laura Skinner MFA 09 PH has been attracting attention for her series Experimental, which captures the marvels of scientific principles in photographs that are both poetic and surreal. “I have a profound interest in scientific properties as a means of understanding the world,” she told a reporter for Wired in late November. Though she doesn’t have a background in science, Skinner got hooked on playing around with physics and chemistry a few years ago when a friend showed her how to use dish soap, water and lighter fluid to set her hand on fire. Unafraid to fail, she exhibits a lot of patience as she experiments with — and attempts to photograph — basic physical phenomena in her basement and backyard in Louisville, KY. For instance, to get a shot of a matchstick rocket launching 10 feet into the air, Skinner performed the experiment more than 150 times. But results like Tornado (a vortex of dish soap and water) are intriguing. “As demonstrative as the images are, they remain mysterious…. both forthright and totally unreliable,” the artist points out. Given “photography’s tenuous relationship with ‘truth,’ they generate more questions than answers…. Ultimately, science can tell us the how of the universe but never the why.” lauraskinner.com

// look

transcendence

Behavior Modification In making objects to help negotiate social anxieties, Jessica Frelinghuysen 02 PR sees her Michigan-based

practice as something of a personal mission to help people connect and maybe think about themselves and others a bit differently. “The design of my work is intentionally awkward,” she says. Meant “to reveal behaviors that are… absurd,” the absurdity of the artwork in turn highlights these behaviors. Frelinghuysen recently earned a Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, which helps promising players like her “make their own artistic choices and forge a unique career path.” paperhelmets.com

Piece of Cake Born in Hong Kong, Ling Chun MFA 16 CR grew up playing with crayons and paints and wandering around her parents’ textiles factory. The swirl of colors, textures and cultures she absorbed during childhood informs her work today, as does her lifelong love of dyeing and playing with her hair. Halfway through a two-year residency at Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT, Chun says her work took a “360-degree turn” a couple of years ago when she moved on from the uninspired ceramic food objects she had been making. Now she’s totally into the “refreshing, wild, no-boundaries style” of work like Piece of Cake (ceramics, hair, clay), which will be on view in August in a First-Year Fellowship Artists Exhibition at Bray Warehouse Gallery in Helena. whoissherry.com

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

//////////////////////////////////////////////////// // playing outdoors

TURF FOR THE TUSH Furniture Design senior Sarah Crist 17 FD and Textiles junior Lauren Klein 18 TX were among the 16 undergraduate and graduate students who teamed up in a fall RISD research studio to rethink the use of soft materials in furniture design. Instead of using conventional approaches to upholstery, they researched diverse materials and were asked to both emphasize their inherent qualities and explore weaving, knitting and other alternative techniques for creating structure.

// look

Crist’s and Klein’s fanciful Lawn Chair (36 x 24 x 42") combines AstroTurf with handwoven mercerized cotton that snugly hugs a laminated bent ash frame. Its kitschy suburban indoor/ outdoor aesthetic made it a standout this spring at the RISD Patterns of Making exhibition on view in April at Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan and in May at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. risdxmilan.com // risdxnyc.com

Swing Time Keeping with the joyous absurdity of Fred & Friends’ signature products, this Swing Time ceramic bird feeder remains one of the company’s perennial bestsellers. Jason Amendolara 94 IL has helped shape the Fred ethos since signing on as design director in 1996 — just two years after graduation. Two years ago he became president of the Rhode Island-based bastion of comic relief — a company committed to delivering a daily dose of silly in everyday objects. fredandfriends.com

Natural Discoveries While she was at RISD, Christina Kazakia MID 11 realized that her best childhood memories center on outdoor play. Concerned that kids today don’t get a chance to play outside as much as in the past, she wrote her ID master’s thesis on Natural Imagination and designed a related product to help kids reconnect with nature.

Since then Stick-lets has gained growing interest via such international venues as the recent Spielwaremesse Toy Fair in Nurenberg and the Design for Kids exhibit in Milan. “We believe a good toy should last a lifetime,” Kazakia says, and that “play is for everyone, not just kids.” stick-lets.com // RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

//////////////////////////////////////////////////// // fun with food

DON BUGITO RULES In 2009 when Monica Martinez MFA 09 SC first cooked up the utopian idea of farming edible insects, not many Americans were ready for larvae-laden tacos, crunchy crickets and toffee mealworms atop their ice cream. While it’s still a real challenge to break through the “eeuw” factor eight years later, the San Francisco-based entrepreneur believes that history is on her side. In looking ahead to practical ways to address global food shortages, she’s also looking back to how her Mexican ancestors ate centuries ago. 14

// look

“I want to offer a more sustainable and ecological form of protein,” Martinez recently told Make magazine in speaking about her cleverly named company Don Bugito. “At the same time, I want to rescue ancient food practices from pre-Columbian times and bring them to the rest of the American continent.” Martinez initially started her “Prehispanic Snackeria” as a food cart that quickly caught on with Bay Area hipsters. But after she hooked up with the incubator La Cocina five years ago, she began to focus more on marketing pre-packaged snacks, including Chili-Lime Crickets, ChocolateCovered Bugitos, Spicy Bugitos and Dark Chocolate-Covered Crickets. “Despite the fact that edible insects are objectively delicious, for some it requires a bit of bravery to take the leap,” Martinez admits. But there’s no denying the logic: insects are 80% protein (twice that of the beef available for consumption), require minimal space for farming, need no water and produce almost no waste. “The more you know about the benefits associated with edible insects,” Martinez says, “the easier and more enjoyable the experience [of eating them] becomes.” don-bugito.myshopify.com

Sweet on Salad As a natural outgrowth of her Salad for President blog — launched in 2011— and related projects at the Getty Museum and MoMA, this spring Julia Sherman 06 PH released an enticing new cookbook focused on high-quality seasonal produce. Called Salad for President: A Cookbook Inspired by Artists (Abrams), it includes 75 of her own salad ideas along with inventive recipes and thoughts abouts creativity in the kitchen from a fascinating range of artists she interviewed. The NYC-based artist, cook, creative director and author also invited several RISD friends to contribute. Arley Marks 10 SC offers great cocktail recipes, Rachel Mosler 03 SC contributes calico wallpaper used as lovely visual breaks and Joana Avillez 08 PT provides playful illustrations. saladforpresident.com

Eat, Drink + Be Merry For decades Jim Dow 65 GD/MFA 68 PH has traveled the world with his 8 x 10 view camera close at hand, seeking out the charm — and food — at diners, taquerias and ice cream shops from Argentina to the UK. Here in the US, when it comes to barbecue “the more smoke and neon the better,” insists the Belmont, MA-based artist, who immortalized the beloved porcine mascot outside Kelly’s BBQ in Georgia in 1998. This spring Dow’s work was on view in Eat & Drink, a solo show at Janet Borden Inc. in Brooklyn that highlighted the “sense of place [and] excitement” he captures in his work. (Sadly, the Kelly’s BBQ pig disappeared a year after Dow photographed it and is still at large.) jimdowphotography.com

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

features

// ready to play

etches by An

sticky note sk

dy Ristaino

97 FAV

When a sense of play meets serious purpose in the studio, the process feels right and the results can be amazing. In the four stories that follow, alumni working in disparate media and at different stages of their careers show and talk about how play informs their work.

// feature title

Name Xxxxxxxxx XX XX

bottom, far right: photo by Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxxxxxxx

Once Shara Hughes learned to let go and play more in the studio, her work really began to stand out.

by Liisa Silander LAST YEAR WH E N Shara Hughes 04 PT made her solo debut at Marlborough Chelsea, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith likened the vibrant landscapes she showed to “puppies— noisy, incautious and frequently irresistible.” It’s a simile that makes the artist smile, especially coming from one of the most respected critics in the business (whom RISD recognized with an honorary degree in 2008). Leaving her intrinsic love of dogs aside, she finds Smith’s comparison to be “spot on.” For Hughes—whose work is also attracting attention in this spring’s Whitney Biennial, among several other shows—it’s especially gratifying when viewers connect with the playfulness and joy in her paintings. In fact, one of her favorite responses to her work is when it inspires emulation. “I really love it when people say that seeing my work makes

them want to paint,” Hughes says, speaking from her tiny studio in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. “That happens frequently. The paintings seem to spark some other thing inside of people that makes them want to experience the joy of painting, too.” Despite the almost childlike sense of wonder in her most recent work—an ongoing series of large (roughly 5 x 6-foot) canvases that artnet news calls “windows to a more tranquil world”—Hughes has been pushing for 20 years to get where she is as a painter. Growing up in Atlanta, she would escape the city with her family to spend time on their tree farm in southern Georgia, where she was encouraged to play using her own resources—to figure out “what you do when you have nothing” but time and curiosity. At home, with three older brothers

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

“ I’m very intuitive in the studio. I try to do something that’s surprising to me—something that maybe doesn’t work but then I try to make it work.”

who routinely shut her out of whatever they were into, she transformed her closet into an arts and crafts studio and “was always making up stories.” By her senior year in high school, this creative bent led Hughes to apply to several art schools. “I didn’t know how far I could take my art or what that even meant,” she says, “but when I got into RISD early, I thought that was some sort of a sign. My parents were, like, ‘Oh, no!’ But once I got there I felt like, ‘These are my people.’” Hughes loved the mix of freedom and rigor she found at RISD—so much so that the same combination still drives her practice today. “Just like when I was in school, I get to do whatever I want—but I have to do it all the time,” she laughs. FI N D I NG A R HYTH M

For Hughes working hard means making time to play. As she gets going in the studio, she doesn’t consciously set out to make playful work. But she has come to realize that she works best when she’s “a couple of different people: somebody who’s nonjudgmental and makes mistakes, and somebody who can step back and take control and be critical.” Tapping into that anything-goes feeling of freedom and exploration—what people do when they play—has made all the difference in her work. The very ritual of going to her studio—a 10-minute walk from the apartment Hughes shares with her painter boyfriend— is an enticing invitation to explore the unknown. “I make paintings because I can’t do anything else,” she says, “but not in a ‘poor me’ kind of a way. It’s just a constant urge—and a constant feeling of doing something to understand myself and the world. And I feel comfortable on all levels in the studio,” she adds, even when she’s returning to a challenging piece in progress and needs to “look at it carefully and try not to strangle it.” In terms of process, Hughes likes to putz around a bit cleaning up or doing “busy work” in the studio as a means slipping into an “unconscious place” where “the best things happen” once she picks up a paintbrush. “When I start a painting I just play around and see what happens and go from there.”

// nervy new places

Shara Hughes 04 PT

previous spread: High Waters (2016, oil on canvas, 68 x 60") clockwise from above: Throwing Shade (2016, oil on canvas, 68 x 60"), Song to the Moon (2016, oil, dye, Flashe on canvas, 48 x 40") and Twisted (2016, oil on canvas, 68 x 60")

Playing around often means starting with no clear intention. “Right now I’m looking at a painting I started the other day that’s on the floor. It’s just a bunch of messy abstract marks.” But together those marks create “an abstract place of no placeness”—a challenge or tease she finds irresistible every time. “Out of the invention of mark-making, I invent these places. I need to be out of control in a sort of subconscious place and then reign it in and control it.” For Hughes, the discovery of this yin-yang in her process has resulted in a big breakthrough in her work. For years she was based in Atlanta, where she “made a lot of sacrifices to keep painting”—working at a grocery store, for an arts publication, at a commercial gallery and landing residencies at places like Vermont Studio Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and Atlantic Center for the Arts. “I needed the time and space to figure things out,” she says, “and be away from the intensity of New York,” where she had lived for under a year in 2008.

LETTI NG GO After moving to Brooklyn in the summer of 2014, Hughes “started making these landscapes in response to the noise of the city,” she says. In doing so, she also allowed a sense of play and pure experimentation to infuse her process. “The thing that happened is I stopped controlling it,” she says. “I stopped having to prove myself to myself. I cleared out my head about having to control everything.” As a result, her brushwork has become more gestural, her palette unpredictable and the overall impact of her paintings more satisfying. “There’s something about the playfulness and confidence in the paintings that people are attracted to,” Hughes is happy to say. “And since they’re sort of about being somewhere and wanting to be somewhere else, they’re also very suited to the current political climate in the country.” By 2016 Hughes could barely keep up with the growing interest in her work, exhibiting paintings from this most recent series of ebullient landscapes in four solo and eight group shows. She welcomed Whitney Biennial curators Christopher Lew and Mia Locks to her studio a couple of times during the planning phase of the exhibition and also signed on with Rachel Uffner Gallery in NYC. This year she has exhibited in three more solo shows: Mind Bender at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Lamenting, Sighing, Weeping at the Metropolitan Opera House’s Gallery Met and Same Space Different Day, which continues through June 25 at Rachel Uffner in NYC. Despite her recent successes, Hughes admits that “it’s not like every day I come into the studio and feel like I’m crushing it. I put in a lot of time and a lot of effort—just showing up at the studio and at openings.” But that’s what keeps her moving forward as an artist, she says. “I really do love all the parts of painting,” Hughes says. “I’m very intuitive in the studio. I don’t premix. I try to do something that’s surprising to me—something that maybe doesn’t work but then I try to make it work.” It’s a process that feels like play at the best of times, but not always. “I have a lot more exploration to do,” she says. “Even with all this excitement with the biennial and the other shows, I’m more interested in getting back to the studio to see where the work will go.”

“ There’s something about the playfulness and confidence in the paintings that people are attracted to.”

racheluffnergallery.com

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

Two accomplished artists and longtime friends who met at RISD 35 years ago compare notes on their attraction to a goofy medium. Ted Stearn 83 PT, creator of the Fuzz & Pluck series, didn’t actually think of making comic books until David Mazzucchelli 82 PT—perhaps best known for his work on the Batman and Daredevil series—suggested it. A decade after graduation, Mazzucchelli was so intrigued by Stearn’s approach to making art that he invited his friend to create a comic for Rubber Blanket, a magazine he was publishing at the time. “Ted took the challenge so seriously that he’s still making comics today—damn good ones, too,” Mazzuchelli notes in introducing a recent interview with Stearn in The Comics Journal (1.18.17). In the following excerpts from that conversation, the two look back over three decades of creative output.

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

“I remember something you said in the studio back then: ‘You know, it’s like the Talking Heads. Stop making sense!’” Ted Stearn 83 PT

// seeing funny

Ted Stearn 83 PT

DAVI D You and I had similar trajectories at RISD. We both started off majoring in Illustration and then switched to Painting, but I’m curious about why you chose Illustration in the first place. TE D I was paranoid about work and how I was going to get it, and I thought that fine art was too—fluffy. But three months after being in Illustration I called my parents and said, “I don’t know what to do”—I was, like, crying—“I don’t know what to do, I—I can’t do this, I don’t like it, I hate the teachers, and stuff’s stupid….” And I actually said, “I wanna go into Painting, but I don’t know,” you know, it’s just too—you just don’t do that, it’s too—impractical. They were so sweet, they said, “Do what makes you happy. Just go ahead and do it.” And I remember my first tour of the Painting department I just felt like, “Oh, I belong here. This is great.” Everyone was just really into it and I liked the smell, and the freedom…

Mazzucchelli saw in Stearn’s drawings an animated quality that suggested a natural affinity for making comics, so he urged him to give it a try.

I think I didn’t know what illustration was, and I was trying to make what I thought art was, even though in the back of my mind I think I always knew I wanted to make comics. I feel like something can be compartmentalized as illustration and not art when the subject is more important than the actual work. You know what I mean? That’s its job. If it goes beyond that and it becomes a world within itself, and it becomes this really interesting, complex, other thing, then you can call it “art,” I guess. With a capital A. What occurred to me was that I embraced ambiguity. In art ambiguity is a good thing; in illustration it’s not necessarily a good thing. I remember something you said in the studio back then: “You know, it’s like the Talking Heads. Stop making sense!” You remember saying that? I do. Well, it stuck with me. I was like, “Yeah, sure, definitely.” I mean one of my favorite things about art-making is you have to break rules. I never liked sense too much. ••••• I’m sitting here going through, like, 30 years of your stuff and it’s really interesting to see the connections between drawings and paintings you were doing back then— Thirty years! That’s crazy. Well, that’s the late ’80s, right? It’s interesting, because I remember a lot of those paintings very distinctly. Some of the imagery in the paintings you were doing back then found its way into the first comics you were making. The Beach Boy comic, for example [published in Rubber Blanket No. 1]. There was a lot of Coney Island imagery in your paintings before that. Right. Well, that was the first comic I did for you, and that was definitely pulling from my obsession with the Jersey shore— before it was a TV show! And where did that come from—that obsession? Um, I don’t know. I think I saw a lot of aesthetic stuff that I was really excited about, and so I wanted to reinterpret it as, not a cacophony, but a whole orchestration of shapes and colors and busy-ness and—

tedstearn.com

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

You mean the combination of signs and different typography and different-shaped buildings and things all crammed together—that kind of accumulation? Yeah, I was very intrigued by that, and I was also intrigued because it’s right next to nature—beach, ocean, complete nature—and then you’ve got this, you know, orgy of the follies of civilization or something. Also, I grew up in that kind of environment—we would always go to the beach in the summer and as a kid I loved the boardwalk, the ocean, the whole scene. So it had a lot of personal resonance with me, and the whole craziness of the boardwalk made me think about that contrast. In the drawings that came a little bit later—the ones you call “automatic drawings”—there’s also an animated quality to shapes, so that seemingly random or casual marks get turned into living creatures by the addition of arms or legs or something like that. Yeah, all those images that I was creating were kind of like building an imagination archive that I could pull from. ••••• You know, Jonathan Borofsky was a big influence on me. I remember seeing his work in 1982. We did a field trip to New York from RISD, and he just blew me away. I was like, “This is just play, this is just so much fun.”

“ All of those images that I was creating were kind of like building an imagination archive that I could pull from.” Ted Stearn

// seeing funny

Ted Stearn 83 PT

83 PT

opposite: Once he started making comics, Stearn drew from some of his earlier imagery — like this surrealistic painting of an orange walking on the boardwalk — to create characters like Sourpuss.

It was just like this huge sculpture here, this painting of a dream leaning against the wall over here—I loved that freedom, the turning yourself inside out. I loved just being able to, uh, not be disciplined about what you’re going to make and just sit down and start making something and see what you come up with. So this was a frontier for me—to build things and construct things, as opposed to sitting and drawing on paper. It was a very different experience. Long before you were making comics you were thinking about characters and settings and worlds and creating these environments and I think it really shows right from the first comics you made that there was this sense of world-building, or atmosphere— I hadn’t really thought about that a lot, but I think that’s true. And I think the artists and the authors who I admire the most are able to do that. They reflect on the real world, but they created their own—like, Basquiat did that, and, I don’t know, Goya did that, Charles Burchfield, and a lot of other artists I admire. They weren’t married to “reality”—you know, recreating the world in their own vision. I guess that’s what I was trying to do, though I don’t think I thought about it consciously, whether it was the sculpture or the paintings or the automatic drawings or the comics…

I had rubber gloves at the end. And one was the seven plagues of Egypt—I just stuck things on me…. What happened to those days? We used to construct things. Now we don’t have room to keep them. That’s true. That was a big element in why I gave up doing sculpture—even though they were meant to be disassembled, I still didn’t have space to put them anywhere. ••••• Before you were making comics did you have an interest in telling stories? No! I’m a terrible storyteller. I’ll disagree with that. Well, it’s a lot of work for me. It’s not something that comes naturally. The way I construct a story is just taking different elements and putting them together. I want to keep playing with the reader’s expectations, not just of the plot but of the actual storytelling—and that’s really tricky because a story is built on certain clichés that we’ve built up over the ages—

And Halloween costumes. You were always coming up with interesting Halloween costumes. I remember one in particular that cracked me up. It was a shirt with like 20-foot-long sleeves and your hands were just dragging behind you—

tedstearn.com

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

Let’s call them “conventions.” Yeah, that’s better. And I became especially exposed to these because I was working in animation where we come up with certain conventions to explain quickly—as in, “Okay, we’re gonna have a scary shot!” These kinds of shots… got me thinking a lot about how much I despise clichés because they don’t really come from a genuine place anymore. They’re xeroxes of xeroxes. We don’t realize how conditioned we are to act and react…. My favorite is “waking up from a bad dream.” There they are in bed having a bad dream, they wake up and do a sit-up! Like who ever does a sit-up waking up? People do it all the time—I’ve seen it in the movies! Exactly! So, this kind of lack of originality is partially laziness, partially habit, because it “works.” And I think that’s based on fear. We’re afraid to go outside of a certain convention, because we don’t really know. It’s uncharted territory.

The Moolah Tree, Stearn’s third book in a well-received series that began with Fuzz & Pluck (1999) and continued with Splitsville (2008), was released last fall, building on the adventures of the two mismatched protagonists, Fuzz and Pluck. The books have also been translated into French and are popular in Europe.

// seeing funny

Ted Stearn 83 PT

When I’m thinking of a story, usually the first idea is going to be pretty cliché. So I have to go beyond that and that’s the scary part, because it’s like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen if I try this. Will it work?” ••••• When you came up with the story for The Moolah Tree, were you thinking more about what you wanted the characters to go through or where you wanted to send them or what kind of things you wanted to draw? In all the stories I think about what would be fun to draw, and what—nobody else, just me—what would really be fun to sit and look at and read. So, I think of certain scenarios, really generally, and I came up with this one because I was having a lot of trouble getting work, and I was bleeding money and I was kind of scared and nervous, like the characters are.

There was the whole housing crisis—I was actually looking for a house just as the whole thing was crashing. So I think I wanted to take the idea of economic insecurity and have a fresh take on it. I didn’t want to do something that was too “real” or too dark and sad, I just wanted to play with the desperation I felt at the time (and still do, now and then, when I’m unemployed). You actually do talk about the housing collapse by having the three bankers who show up on Segways. That becomes one of the main lines of the story, that [the character] Despera is losing her house. Right. Well, it has to do with the theme of money. But what really concerns me is how the characters react to the issue, not so much what the issue is. That’s really what’s fascinating to me about people—how they’re so blinded by their beliefs. They feel strongly about certain things that aren’t true (which, you know, I’m number one guilty of that). But the politics of how people relate to each other and how they relate to issues and problems and make decisions and figure out who they are—that’s more interesting to me than the housing market. At one point the vagabond character makes a comment on what’s going on around him. He says, “Boy, everybody is looking for something.”

tedstearn.com

Yeah, I think one reviewer put it pretty well. He said, “He’s teasing with the idea of ‘money doesn’t buy happiness,’ but he never pulls it out completely in this grand cliché.” And I’m like, “Yes, that’s what I’m saying! I’m saying, I don’t know. Maybe we do need it. Maybe we don’t—I don’t know.” But this is how people are dealing with it, and that’s the fun part. As soon as something becomes a pat answer—and this is in life, too—I have big problems with it because it never is. I’ve changed my mind about a lot of issues. I’ve changed my perspective on love and life and family and all these things, and so if it’s written in stone, I’m there with my sandblaster…. To me the absurdism of whatever I’m doing kind of reflects how I see the world, because I think everything in this world is weird and funny. I don’t understand books and stories that don’t have any funny in them. I mean the world is so absurd and funny to me!

“ I don’t understand books and stories that don’t have any funny in them. I mean the world is so absurd and funny to me!” Ted Stearn 83 PT

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

everyday absurd

ities Insatiably curious and joyfully iconoclastic, Allan Wexler loves probing and playing with the rituals of daily life.

by Liisa Silander

In Hat for Bottled Rain Water (1994, hat, epoxy, wood, Evian water bottles, tubing), Wexler coated the hat he’s wearing with waterproofing compounds. The attached tubes lead rainwater into empty water bottles that are worn on a belt like machine-gun cartridges.

Allan Wexler BArch 72 has been going about his business—“sculpting with gravity,

painting with rain and inventing ways to walk through walls”—for almost half a century now. Building on decades of work that pushes what we think we know, he experiments in his “laboratory” studio, “making things magically” every day. And he’s still finding the magic in the everyday. “When you make a cup of coffee in the morning it should be a miraculous event. It should be wonderful,” Wexler tells his students at Parsons, where he continues to teach as an adjunct faculty member. Though he doesn’t practice as an architect and happily admits to being “an architect in an artist’s body,” Wexler came to RISD to study architecture. It was at the height of the Vietnam era, students “were disenchanted with politics (not unlike today)” and no one was under the illusion that building a new building would change the world. But it was at RISD that Wexler quickly confirmed several very basic facts that continue to drive his thinking today: 1. Real learning has nothing to do with memorization. 2. Studying architecture could mean more than marrying his interest in science

with a lifelong urge to make things, which is what brought him to the discipline in the first place. 3. He wasn’t going to get anywhere until he tapped into his innate sense of play. // RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

“ When I got to RISD... I was floundering because learning wasn’t about memorizing.” Allan Wexler BArch 72

“RISD was such a great education for me,” Wexler said during a recent three-way conversation with his wife Ellen (Schwartz) Wexler 71 AE. “It was such a formative time of my life.” After meeting as freshmen, Ellen and Allan started dating as juniors, got married as soon as she graduated the following year and have been inseparable ever since. They were back on campus in March at the invitation of the Architecture department, so that Allan could speak to students in conjunction with the release of Absurd Thinking: Between Art and Design (2017, Lars Müller Publishers)—a book that illuminates the development of his ideas and process over five decades. Its publication comes on the heels of an invitation from renowned designer and publisher Lars Müller, an immensely supportive, 30-year relationship with Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York and renewed validation in the form of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship.

// everyday absurdities

Allan Wexler BArch 72

ID Shirt (1971) is a riff on McLuhan’s 1968 concept of the global village. The questionnaire, filled out with permanent marker, is intended to spark connections when worn in public. In a city of eight million people, the shirt holds the power to reveal coincidence. Two strangers passing on the street, one wearing the ID Shirt and both born in a remote town in Alaska, could have a delightful encounter initiated by the shirt.

In the late 1960s, t-shirts with commercial advertising and protester messages had only recently come on the market. Wexler felt that his body should not be available for corporate images but could be a good place to advertise himself. “When Ellen and I moved to New York in 1972, graffiti was suddenly everywhere and the ID Shirt became another way to visually establish personal identity,” he says.

When Wexler was at RISD the Sculpture and Architecture studios were adjacent and working methods comingled. After too much architectural rendering dampened his spirits, he fabricated a wire-reinforced rubber T-square as part of I Want to Become an Architect, the title of his final show at RISD. It’s a tool

that questions precision and the notion of a straight line. It’s about understanding that when you draw a straight line with a T-square it doesn’t account for elevation, so the mind has to imagine an infinite amount of possibilities that that line can become.

E M E RG E NT BAD BOY

Body Language (detail) documents social interactions. Pencils are embedded in the legs of a chair with springs attached behind each pencil to prevent the point from breaking. When positioned around a dining table, the chairs record the movements of diners over the course of a meal, creating drawings on the floor as representations of the dinner. Eating, sitting and socializing generate art.

allanwexler.com

Looking back Wexler describes himself as “a very good student in high school,” but in a limited, “good boy” kind of way. “I was good at memorizing but I didn’t learn anything because I just learned facts rather than learning to think,” he says. “When I got to RISD, that first semester I was floundering because learning wasn’t about memorizing. It was about expression and ideas. So I was doing terribly, making terrible drawings. But by the end of the semester, I thought, ‘Well, I’m messing up and I’ll probably flunk out and I’m not having any fun, so why not just give in and have some fun and enjoy the process?’” Once that dawned on him, he relaxed a bit, began to play and experiment in the studio and allowed his renegade side to emerge. “And suddenly,” he says, “people started taking note and saying, ‘This work is really interesting.’” Now, through a self-perpetuating practice that he got off the ground with the encouragement of Architecture professors like the late Raymond Abraham and Stan Thomasson, along with Michael Webb and Friedrich St. Florian—all of whom Wexler describes as “really important teachers” and “major influences on me”—he’s continuing his lifelong explorations of everyday rituals. Both left- and right-brain thinking come into play as he considers the daily habits of eating, sleeping, cooking, bathing, gardening, sitting, socializing and other mundane activities. Like his new book, Wexler’s practice focuses on ideas, conceptual thinking and human behavior. “It’s not a traditional monograph,” he and Ellen explain. “We worked with Lars to make it for the reader—to look at where ideas come from. It’s important for students to understand that an idea doesn’t have to be profound to begin with but it generates profundity if you keep working at it. By exploring and going deeper unexpected and surprising ideas emerge.”

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

How can an American appropriate the spirit of the Japanese tea ceremony? Coffee became the vehicle by which Wexler addressed this question through multiple projects. In Coffee Seeks its Own Level (1990) four people gather for coffee. When one cup is lifted, coffee flows into the lower cups. The group must drink simultaneously, requiring concentration and collaboration so that they raise their respective cups, sip and lower them in unison. Braun Aromaster 10-cup Coffeemaker (1991) is a disassembled coffee pot with each manufactured piece securely mounted for transport. The shape and form of the elements are “beautiful, so obviously functional and yet slightly mysterious,” Wexler says. The ritual of making coffee each morning is extended by the need to assemble the coffeemaker first and then disassemble it afterwards.

3 4

// everyday absurdities

Allan Wexler BArch 72

“Clearly, Wexler is far more interested in a joyous subversion of restive conceptual ideas…than more established and resolute qualities of built architecture and conventional habitation,” writes Patti Phillips, a former dean of Graduate Studies at RISD, in one of three essays in Absurd Thinking. “Objects of the physical world—chairs, tables, vehicles, buildings, landscape—and habits of animacy… form a studio practice as recursive research where influence, provenance and purpose are dynamically in tension. Wit, whimsy and paradox careen and course through the work….” HARASS I NG ARCH ITECTU R E

These days, whether working in his studio in Chelsea or his country place on Long Island, Wexler feels an ongoing need to dig deep to externalize what’s on his mind. “I’m really trying to overemphasize the illogical,” he tells me—“the softer side of idea-making, the poetics of space and materiality and function. But in the studio, I’m always appropriating the scientific method. With every project, I set very strict guidelines—the rules of the game. I keep lots of things constant and then make one change at a time so that I can understand the result of that change.”

allanwexler.com

“I’m really trying to overemphasize the illogical—the softer side of idea-making, the poetics of space and materiality and function.”

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

3 6

// everyday absurdities

Allan Wexler BArch 72

above: In Two Too Large Tables (2006), a public art commission the Wexlers created at Hudson River Park in NYC, people sit within and become part of the two floating structures supported by chairs. The chairs are positioned to create atypical juxtapositions so that users sit at angles and need to negotiate new relationships with one another. left: In Wexler’s decade-long Breaking Ground series, he explores the human spirit and the deep-seated origins of the search for shelter, protection and refuge.

top: photo by HRPT upland

Among the many delightful surprises that surface from that experimentation is humor—unintentional, unfiltered, often absurd. It’s just something Wexler considers a natural “byproduct of looking so closely,” he says, whether it takes the form of modeling one of his roof hats, contouring a brick wall around his body or rendering a T-square useless by making it of rubber. After graduating from RISD and going on to earn a Master of Architecture degree from Pratt, Wexler “immediately began to play hide-and-seek with the discipline,” writes architect and curator Michele Calzavara in the closing essay in Absurd Thinking. “Bypassing it or attacking sideways, landing blows that shape its familiar features into something disorienting at the same time, [he] harasses architecture with what we usually think of as its very foundations.”

Cones of Vision (2016, wood, fabric, paint, 49 x 34 x 45") is one of a series of wearable constructions that disrupt the senses, functioning as low-tech versions of bio-artificial organs. Clumsily integrated into the human body, they magnify and focus vision.

Through a series of projects, Wexler has considered how nature is transformed by technology. In the process, he ripped, crosscut, sawed, planed and jointed tree branches — and in this case, straightened an originally curved branch with wedges.

“ I love playing around with materials and ideas... and trying to push thinking beyond what I already know.”

“Harassment” isn’t off the mark, says the renegade who first found his stride at RISD. “I’ve always wanted to explore the realm of architectural thinking without making architecture. I love viewing architecture from the vantage point of an artist.” Calzavara goes on to point out that “Wexler is a sort of entomologist of the everyday artificial, [and] also a playful pedagogue.” Playful perhaps, but through a rigor that doesn’t waver, he proves day in and day out just how serious he is about his work. “I love the studio practice,” he says matter-of-factly. “I love the loneliness of being in my studio playing around with materials and ideas and manipulating them—putting them together in unexpected ways. I love trying to push thinking beyond what I already know.”

allanwexler.com

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

Now that his commitment to Adventure Time is over, Andy Ristaino is looking forward to exploring new directions.

by Robert Albanese + Liisa Silander WH ETH E R STORYBOAR D I NG for the cult phenomenon Adventure Time on Cartoon Network or making crazy comic books, Andy Ristaino 97 FAV creates wonderfully surrealistic worlds bursting with hyperkinetic creatures. He’s super high energy and hard working, but as his process has evolved, so, too, has his imagination—and lately that’s leading him towards wanting to infuse his work with increasingly more clarity and meaning. “When I was at RISD and the first few years after I graduated, my goal was always to make the craziest thing possible,” Ristaino recalls. “But as I get older I want my work to be more controlled. And I want the most bang for my time.” In 2013 the artist earned an Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation for his character design work on Puhoy, an episode of Adventure Time that hardcore fans consider among the best ever. He went on to devote four

3 8

// wrangling ideas

Andy Ristaino 97 FAV

more years to doing storyboarding and revisions, along with background and character design, and is now both relieved and wistful about the show coming to a close. Since his work recently wrapped on the ninth and final season of Adventure Time—now in production through November—Ristaino has begun to shift gears and fully concentrate on personal projects for the first time since he got involved with the show in 2010. He has already pitched a few animated pilot ideas and plans to work on an art book and several comics—a medium that has always afforded him the expressive freedom he prefers. “I love that you can make comic books all on your own and control the entire process,” says the Los Angeles-based artist. “I can be completely unrestricted in how I work, and that’s almost like leisure time for me—when what I’m making is as close to uncompromised as possible.”

Regardless of his other professional commitments, Ristaino continues to make as much of his own work as possible and is now hoping to create an art book compiling his drawings of wonderfully weird creatures.

S PONTAN EOUS I NTE NTIONALITY

Drawing has been Ristaino’s main form of recreation since he was a kid, when allergies and asthma kept the Massachusetts native from participating in sports and other typical outdoor play. “Luckily I was also completely obsessed with making art,” he says with a laugh, recalling afternoons spent drawing massive battle scenes across 10 pieces of paper or poring over issues of Mad magazine, X-Men and, as he got older, manga and indie comics. “In high school I was the kid who drew at parties. I would talk to people, but I was drawing the entire time.” As a Film/Animation/Video major at RISD, Ristaino felt right at home with students whose joyous dedication to making art matched his own. “I was a complete workaholic at school,” he remembers, “and for my friends and me, our socializing was just hanging out and drawing—and maybe watching Star Trek.” In addition to making work on assignment for studio courses, Ristaino was usually working on multiple comic books at any given time—a process he still prefers 20 years later. “I like juggling projects, working on something until I get sick of it and then moving onto the next thing for a while.” Though he makes it look effortless, Ristaino is the first to admit that not everything about making comics comes easily to him. “Writing is hard work for me. It’s tough to quiet down my brain, wrangle my ideas and get into a zone,” he says, “whereas once I get to draw, I can cut loose and have fun.”

“ Writing is hard work for me. It’s tough to quiet down my brain, wrangle my ideas and get into a zone.”

When working on his own material, Ristaino “assigns” himself projects that appeal to him personally as a way to maximize the space he has to play. “I’ll set part of a story in a spooky forest because I want time to draw weird, gnarly trees or I’ll just add some aliens into the mix so I can get to draw them.” And even though he spends more effort nowadays preplanning or editing down stories, he definitely doesn’t think that spontaneity and intentionality are mutually exclusive. “I still want things to feel funky and weird,” he says, “but that can happen as long as I’m doing my job right.” Ultimately, he’s aiming to make art that “feels like it just exists,” ready for audiences to discover and appreciate. The three comic books available on his site (skronked.com) strive for that, presenting self-contained fantasy worlds that coexist with more mainstream reality. Take one of his earlier comic books, The Babysitter (created between 1999 and 2004 and published in 2008). In pitching it to readers, Ristaino calls it “a depiction of modern Japan that only a completely uninformed and rather stupid American could make.” The story focuses on Setsuko Kagaku, “the world’s leading babysitter. Equipped with her trusty rocket pack, she jet-sets all around the globe keeping the world’s greatest resource (the children, silly) safe. But by day she is just another teenager dealing with the same problems that any other Japanese schoolgirl faces: giant robots, big angry kaiju bakumono (monsters), crazy science experiments gone awry, weird tentacled beasties, global conspiracies, alien invaders, not to mention good grades, plenty of teen angst and boys!”

skronked.com

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

“ Storyboarding is the most heartbreaking job I’ve ever had.”

For his 128-page graphic novel Night of the Living Vidiots (2013), a project he crowd-funded on Kickstarter, Ristaino let loose again, playing in the weird unknown of his own head. “Sci-fi, horror and comedy melted together and topped with a Twilight Zone twist,” he writes in summing up the gist. “Darkly funny tales featuring mad science, gothic anime, TV zombies, kaiju, giant robots, monsters from the deep—and even a haunted sweatshirt.” SU BVE R S ION R EQU I R E D

Now that he’s once again self-employed, Ristaino is clear about where he hopes to go, if not exactly how to get there. “I want what I do to feel like the work of an individual, not some cleverly designed thing that is made to manipulate people,” he says, alluding to much of what goes on in the American entertainment industry. It’s something that he and his Adventure Time collaborators prided themselves on—the desire to keep the surreal, post-apocalyptic adventures of Jake the Dog and Finn the Human smart and sincere rather than calculatedly “kid-friendly.” For almost a decade, they were able to do that so successfully that Rolling Stone dubbed Adventure Time “the trippiest show on television,” Wired applauded it as not only “a whole lot of fun, but [a] bildungsroman of epic proportions” and The New Yorker’s TV critic Emily Nussbaum admitted that it was “time to drop the snotty attitude” about the animated series being nothing more than “stoner humor” and “admit the truth: [it’s] one of the most philosophically risky and often emotionally affecting shows on TV.”

// wrangling ideas

Andy Ristaino 97 FAV

Ristaino has devoted the past seven years to working as a character designer and storyboarder for Adventure Time, now entering its final season.

Remembering their own childhood experiences, Ristaino and the rest of the creative team “liked the things that we did as kids that didn’t insult our intelligence—that were interesting and thought-provoking and hit you in a place that made you say ‘wow.’” And when they got corporate pushback on their ideas, they usually took that as a problem to solve, a restriction to subvert. “As an artist [working in the entertainment industry] you need something to hold on to and fight for. You need to feel like you’re making something with a point to it.” Although the creative ethos at Adventure Time synced up nicely with his own, Ristaino admits that the sheer volume of drawings he had to produce as a storyboard artist was at times overwhelming. “Storyboarding is the most heartbreaking job I’ve ever had,” he says. “Sketching out every second of an entire episode is so much work and takes up all of your time… and then someone comes in and tears what you’ve done apart. But that’s just the way it has to be,” he concedes, when storyboarders are hard-pressed to write, sketch, revise and turn each episode over to the show’s animators in the four weeks they’re given. “There’s no time to mess around. You have to let go of the ideas that you like because a lot of the time that stuff is getting cut.”

skronked.com

As time has allowed, Ristaino has kept his own work going over the past seven years with one-panel comics and sketches of “weird creature clumps” that he plans to compile into an art book. But it’s really only since production on Adventure Time ended in April that he has been able to think more clearly about next steps. “I haven’t published anything in a few years, and that feels weird,” the artist says, especially given his high-octane creative output for the show. But that’s first on his agenda now. “Putting out a book or two is a way of saying ‘I still exist’—as a person and an artist.” And, he concedes, “I’m still struggling to get to the point where I’m getting things exactly how I want them to be. I’ve been doing this a long time and it’s funny to think that I haven’t gotten there by now. But I feel like I’m still on this journey to get to the ideal place where I’m making things exactly as I see them in my mind.”

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

reflect

// a message from the president

THE ESSENCE OF PLAY I R E M E M B E R A TI M E when play was unfettered—when my imagination dominated and invented games that took on their own reality. Impulses that drove those childhood games correspond to the impetus behind any creative endeavor. Back then my cousins and I would invent the rules of the game, create a framework and then amend parameters as we discovered something funnier—or further beyond the reach of our everyday. To our parents’ dismay, our favorite game was “orphan,” where, though we often played safely in the basement for hours, we imagined we were children lost deep in foreign woods inventing our own creative survival. Looking back, those were really imaginative adventures, especially as the game evolved over several years. We would fall into roles, concoct our own vocabulary and face our spookiest fears with creative solutions. Time became irrelevant. We carried on for hours and when called to go home, we had to make an effort to extract ourselves from our fantasy world. Later, during the decades I taught at RISD, I used some of the same tools I learned in those games, where no challenge was too daunting and no fear insurmountable. In the studio, faculty encourage presence, curiosity and experimentation as a means of bringing forth the infinite possibilities that lie deep within each student—creations from their own inner worlds. For me, teaching was about guiding this playful but serious energy in my students. In fact, in order to make the giant leaps expected at RISD, they learned to take their own imagination on an intense journey and to slay the dragons of judgment along the way.

“Artists and designers can train themselves to be better at play—to move beyond themselves and their inhibitions, driven by pure curiosity, joy and delight.” 44

E NGAG E D U N PR E D ICTAB I LITY

While the focus of play is generally assumed to be for enjoyment and recreation, artists and designers understand the seriousness of purpose that comes from playing with ideas. Many of the heads of companies I meet explain that when they aim to instigate change and inspire innovation they use techniques that are more circuitous and game-like than linear or predictable. Often the very notion of engaged unpredictability is the starting point for positive transformation. One of the drawing assignments I used to use was a take-off on one by a colleague from a different college. I asked students to choose and studiously observe an object and then to put it away and draw it from memory, repeatedly. They were to free-associate a series of 60 one-minute timed drawings, so that only the first drawing was directly from their memory of the object and the second drawing was a derivation of the first and so on. Students started the process willingly enough, but after about 35 drawings or so, most of them would start to squirm and get uncomfortable, running out of ideas. I had asked them to remain seated and draw throughout this hour-long process without taking a break. Time and again, right after this “antsy” point of total frustration, something completely unexpected would emerge. When the body was forced to sit still and persevere, the brain took over, spewing out new possibilities. By drawing #50, students were frequently creating shapes, marks and ideas they had never seen before. And by the end of the exercise, they had hit on some truly original conceptual frameworks. We would then review each student’s individual rhythm and talk about when in the process they noticed a breakthrough. This led to a sort of personal “brain concentration map” to use as a reference. Many of the hundreds of students I have taught over the years have said that drawing excercise continues to influence them still, years later.

“Play often involves movement—sometimes of the body but always of ideas.”

SU R PASS I NG OU R S E LVE S

Everyone who does any kind of creative work is familiar with the feeling of flow—when you get out of your own way, stop restricting yourself and move into a place where ideas seem to evolve of their own accord. This is perhaps the essence of play, and a great way to understand creativity itself. Artists and designers can train themselves to be better at play—to move beyond themselves and their inhibitions, driven by pure curiosity, joy and delight. To many adults—especially those who don’t work in creative realms— play may seem trivial and unproductive, silly and impractical, in large part because it is often unpredictable. But this is precisely why it is so valuable to creative practitioners. My drawing game had rules that encouraged a new kind of awareness. Some artists like to invent their own rules as a framework, while others prefer breaking them. Play offers a space for true experimentation—a place to test assumptions, analogies, interactions and exchanges. It offers a space where we can surpass ourselves and create a conduit for radical new thoughts, objects and approaches—where we can touch something bigger than ourselves, test it, try it out and perhaps even take it over the finish line. Follow Rosanne on twitter.com/somerson.

Learning how to play productively is, in fact, a valuable antidote to the fear so many people feel as systems and societies are changing and the world seems to spin out of control. The urgent situation we find ourselves in—nationally and globally—simply cannot be remedied using familiar tools. Here on campus, when I visit our studios and classrooms and speak to students, faculty, staff and alumni, I see serious play at work. Play often involves movement—sometimes of the body but always of ideas. In almost any game we play, we assume different positions and change our perspective in ways that can help us clarify our understanding and our strategic approach. Because it’s participatory, active, improvisatory, rule-based—and yes, fun—play also helps individuals connect with themselves, their environments and their communities. Now, as autonomous intelligence becomes increasingly more omnipresent, I think about the simple gains to be derived from human imagination. If we are to move things forward—if we are to make impacts that will really change the world—there might be no better place to begin than with play.

—Rosanne Somerson 76 ID // RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

two college street

//â&#x20AC;&#x2030;â&#x20AC;&#x2030;campus community newsbits

Half a Century of Activism

God Is a Flower (left) by Dove Drury MFA 17 CR, whose work “explores a queered sense of domesticity,” brightened a corner of Woods-Gerry Gallery in January as part of Flux, the Ceramics department triennial. “Given the draconian climate of current politics,” he notes, “it feels really critical that I utilize my art practice to create spaces, objects and ideas that conjure the joy of community, color and selfhood.”

In delivering RISD’s 2017 Martin Luther King, Jr. keynote address on January 20, artist, activist and pioneering Black Panther Party (BPP) member Emory Douglas connected the organization’s revolutionary spirit in the 1960s to present-day resistance movements in the US and around the world. “All power to the people,” the BPP’s former Minister of Culture declared, invoking the influential group’s watchwords mere hours after the US presidential inauguration and emphasizing, “[It’s] much needed today.” Speaking to a full house in the RISD Auditorium, Douglas wove together commentary on the artwork he created for The Black Panther newspaper and the party’s legacy of community service with insight into his creative process and lifelong fight for global human rights. In response to a question about the value of political art, he emphasized the importance of remaining informed. “You have to adjust to the reality of the times,” he advised. “You build on [the past] in the context of what is.”

PLAY VS PERFECTIONISM When Virgil Abloh—the designer best known for his Milanbased fashion label Off-White and as Kanye West’s longtime creative director—visited RISD in early May, students packed the Auditorium to hear him speak about his trajectory and approach to design. His brief intro morphed into a conversation with President Rosanne Somerson 76 ID in which the two talked about the importance of transcending boundaries, building credibility, maintaining integrity and moving fluidly across time, space and medium as a designer. “You already beat me,” Abloh told students. “You got accepted into RISD and I didn’t. But no hard feelings.” The affable designer (who grew up middle class, the son of Ghanaian immigrants living outside of Chicago) went on to talk about the “ready made principle of art” and the importance of “leaving designs undone”—to allow users to bring their own ideas to the table. He spoke of his brand Off-White as “a thought process…. a playground so the world can understand what I’m thinking.” Seeing his visit to RISD as a major research opportunity, Abloh was eager to fill every possible moment interacting with students, hungry to learn what’s on their minds. “I learn more through feedback” and collaboration, he said. With the help of sophomores hanging out in the Apparel Design studio, Abloh reworked a hoodie he had bought at the RISD Store in the 20 minutes he had before speaking. While the outcome wasn’t perfect, he held it up at his talk, noting, “perfectionism doesn’t advance anything. The only failure is not to try.” For more campus news, go to risd.edu/news.

// RISDXYZ

During a whirlwind visit to RISD, designer Virgil Abloh dropped by studios and talked to as many students as possible, eager to find out more about their thinking and process.

spring/summer 2017

SALUTING SUCCESS AT COMMENCEMENT 2017 RISD grads and Airbnb cofounders Brian Chesky 04 ID and Joe Gebbia 05 GD/ID are among the honored guests who are celebrating the achievements of the 726 undergraduate and graduate students collecting their hard-earned degrees at Commencement on Saturday, June 3. Chesky, who was class speaker at his own graduation ceremony in 2004, will accept an honorary degree and deliver the Commencement address this year. As CEO and head of Community at the online community marketplace, he sets Airbnb’s strategy of connecting people to unique travel experiences—now available in more than 65,000 cities and 191 countries around the world. Gebbia, Airbnb’s CPO and RISD’s youngest trustee, will also accept an honorary degree at Commencement. He serves on Airbnb’s board and executive staff while also leading Samara, the company’s in-house design and innovation studio. In these capacities, he instills a culture of creativity at Airbnb while leading new initiatives such as one focused on humanitarian issues (see page 6). Christina Kim, another special guest who will accept an honorary degree, has transformed her Los Angeles-based studio dosa from an

Honorary degree recipient Kehinde Wiley is known for stunning paintings such as Morpheus (2008, oil on canvas, 108 x 180") that reference classical portrait artists throughout history.

// two college street

Graphic Design senior Ruth Lin 17 GD created a playful look and feel (top) for this year’s Commencement site and program. Airbnb cofounders Brian Chesky 04 ID (above left) and Joe Gebbia 05 GD/ID (above right) are accepting honorary degrees, as is designer Christina Kim (right). Chesky, who was the student speaker at his own graduation ceremony in 2004, delivers this year’s keynote address.

artistic experiment started in 1984 to a focused and articulate design firm known for creating sustainable apparel, accessories and other goods of enduring value. A contemporary descendant of a long line of classical portrait painters, Kehinde Wiley is also accepting an honorary degree at Commencement. He uses the visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and sublime in his representations of urban people of color and has work in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan in NYC and more than 40 other major museums.

END GAME FOR GRAD STUDENTS The Graduate Thesis Exhibition at the Rhode Island Convention Center draws a huge crowd every year eager to see where RISD grad students are headed with their final bodies of work. This year 235 master’s degree candidates—including MJ Tyson MFA 17 JM (left) and Caroline Cable MFA 17 FD (below)—are presenting wonderfully unique points of view at the show, which continues through the day they become alumni on June 3.

right: photos by Matt Francis

BARELY THERE

Playing with form, transparency and materials, 17 Apparel Design seniors graduating this spring presented plenty of surprises at Collection 17, the department’s popular runway show, held this year at the skating rink at Brown. Work (l–r) by Jamall Osterholm 17 AP, For more campus news, go to risd.edu/news.

Noah Pica 17 AP and Paige Ryan 17 AP clearly expresses their individuality as designers. Most of the other revealing mens’ and womenswear shown will surface again when graduates bring their work to New York Fashion Week in September. // RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

Holi with Lassi On April 23 the RISD South Asian Student Association hosted its annual celebration of Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, on Nickerson Green. After weeks of gray skies and endless rain, students welcomed the arrival of spring and clearly loved letting go by playing with color and literally dousing each other in it. The lawn party was also full of great music, lassi and delicious Indian sweets.

CRAZY ABOUT CYCLING In late April RISD Cycling co-captains David Kessler 18 ID

and Lizzie Wright 18 ID competed in the 2017 USA Cycling Collegiate National Championships in Colorado, where he first got into cycling with his father (who had just passed away weeks earlier). High-altitude racing in the Nationals topped off a great year for the team, with the co-captains coming in first in their levels in the rough and tumble cyclo-cross race at the Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference (ECCC) in December and Kessler taking first in the Men’s A Road Race in the Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference Championships in April. While Kessler and Wright each came to the sport differently, they’re equally passionate about leading the co-ed team. “My friends ask me how I find time to get work done when I spend my weekends riding,” Wright says, “but I wouldn’t be able to get my work done if I didn’t ride.” Kessler, who first got inspired to apply to RISD after reading Bicycle Diaries by Talking Heads founder and onetime RISD student David Byrne, 50

// two college street

agrees, saying, “It’s a great outlet and a great way to create a balance between work and play.” Now, Kessler also sees his ongoing commitment to RISD Cycling as a perfect way to remember his father. “I want to

represent RISD in a way that inspires people,” he says, “not necessarily to ride but simply to pursue whatever it is you love— to live a life in which you love your craft and constantly challenge yourself.”

Low Tech in the High Desert

facing page, left: photos by Daghan Perker | facing page, top: photos by Clare Jessey 18 ID

Over spring break, grad students in Digital + Media conducted research at various desert sites in Nevada and California as part of the Technological Landscapes research studio co-taught by Department Head Shona Kitchen and Critic Aly Ogasian MFA 15 DM . Through collaboration and field research, students were encouraged to consider how advancements in technology

alter physical spaces and create virtual ones. In this experiment, they used an assortment of high- and low-tech tools — including a modification of the familiar cup-and-string relay device — to manipulate the travel of sound waves across one of the two massive trenches that make up Double Negative, one of the first “earthworks” by pioneering land artist Michael Heizer.

QUESTIONING STATS Grad students Anina Major MFA 17 CR (who is from the Bahamas) and Vanessa Nieto Romero MFA 17 PR (from Colombia) jumped at the opportunity to co-curate Mutual Encounters, an early spring exhibition at the Gelman Student Exhibitions Gallery. “The impetus for the show was the surprising demographic breakdown of America’s recent presidential election results, which revealed that 63% of white women voted for Trump versus only 7% of black women and 38% of Latina women,” Major explains. “We wondered what these statistics say about feminism and the relationship women have with one another.” The two invited all female students to participate and then asked each artist to pair up with someone who works in a different medium and respond to a series of prompts centered on social justice. “These artistic collisions produced incredible and unexpected results,” Major says. Find more RISD news at our.risd.edu and risd.edu/news.

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

Recognizing RISDiversity At its annual conference in September, the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources will present RISD with a 2017 CUPA-HR Inclusion Cultivates Excellence Award for its RISDiversity Community Narratives project. Designer Rene Payne 83 GD, who served as a Diversity Fellow at RISD this year, and photographer Adam Mastoon worked closely with RISD’s HR office and many others in the RISD community to develop the collateral around the project, which includes a book published last fall. To buy the book or learn more about the RISDiversity project, go to diversity.risd.edu.

SEEING THE LIGHT

After the horrific events at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Massey created a series of four collages entitled Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You But What You Can Do To It (2012, collage, distressed paper, 15.5 x 7").

// two college street

Light & Dark, a retrospective of more than 60 multimedia works by Professor Emeritus Jack Massey, was on view over the winter at The Cambridge School of Weston’s Thompson Gallery. Curated by artist Todd Bartel 85 PT, a former student of his who now teaches at the school in Weston, MA and directs its gallery, the exhibition revealed the essence of Massey’s approach and appeal over six decades of practice. At age 93, he remains creatively prolific, with half of the works on view at the Thompson Gallery exhibited for the first time. “Light & Dark provides an overview of Massey’s artistic production and sheds light on his interdisciplinary approach, which often borrows from and blends artistic genres, including minimalism, abstraction, trompe l’oeil, object trove and conceptual art,” Bartel explains. A Foundation Studies professor, Massey

taught at RISD for more than half a century (1963–2014) and made a huge impact on generations of students. “Jack is and has always been a person of wit and of creative good will—generous and flexible, not fixed,” notes Professor Mike Fink, a longtime colleague. “Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed all artists should post the word ‘whimsy’ on their doorposts, Jack has always shown humor and a light touch.” “Well before the establishment of the Internet, Jack Massey developed a network of connections between artistic genera that would define—if not explode—his studio practice into an interconnected universe,” Bartel wrote in introducing the show. “When we humans find things, when we make discoveries, the human mind gets a spark of enlightenment—a shot of endorphins that inspires—a light in the darkness. Massey’s art is like an out-of-body synapse.”

GLOBAL FUTURES LAB As globalization continues to reshape the world, the western vision of progress—as exemplified by Hollywood and Silicon Valley—often seems to prevail.“We discount the fact that there are other visions of the future that come from different cultures,” notes Associate Professor of Industrial Design Paolo Cardini (right). As the second recipient of RISD’s Global Faculty Fellowship (GFF), Cardini has been leading a project called the Global Futures Lab—a series of international workshops aimed at reflecting local realities of non-western communities in articulating alternative visions of what’s to come. This year the Italian designer has led workshops at the Art University of Isfahan in Iran, the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru in Lima and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, where he worked with local students in developing “souvenirs from the futures”—artifacts inspired by their own speculative fiction and then fabricated in cooperation with local artisans.

Last year, as the program’s inaugural fellow, Assistant Professor of Literary Arts and Studies Avishek Ganguly conducted research into translation in global contexts and next year, as RISD’s 2017/18 fellow, Assistant Professor of Architecture Emanuel Admassu will launch a project titled Where is Africa? that engages architects, designers and artists across that continent in a series of dialogues.

UNEXPECTED INSIGHTS On March 31 and April 1, RISD hosted The Unexpected Conference, the 2017 gathering of the northeast division of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). Two days of panel discussions and workshops gave members of the RISD community and designers from throughout the country—including those from organizations like Google, Johnson & Johnson and Sesame Workshop—valuable time to talk about the importance of design in everyday life. Industrial Design Department Head Charlie Cannon, Associate Professor Claudia Rébola and adjunct faculty members Mark Guarraia 05 ID, director of design at the

Providence-based medical device company Ximedica, and Nick Scappaticci 00 ID, a cofounder of the award-winning design firm Tellart, helped host the conference, while also bringing their own perspectives to the discussion. The questions raised by both speakers and participants “focus on some of the core ways designers… think about where innovation and real substantive improvements come from,” Cannon noted. “That means thinking about people’s experiences, how to translate them and how to alter and play with them in fundamental ways.” // RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

LEE HALL 1934–2017 Artist, author, academic leader and former RISD President Lee Hall (above) passed away in Northampton, MA on April 17. She was 83. Lee served as dean of Visual Arts at the State University of New York/Purchase before being appointed president of RISD in 1975 and serving until 1983. At RISD she is remembered for inaugurating an annual President’s Fellows Awards gala in New York City and for serving during a period of conflict and reform on campus that included the unionization of RISD’s faculty. Lee’s work was frequently reviewed favorably in ArtNews, Art in America, The New Yorker, Artforum and The New York Times, among others. She was represented by Betty Parsons, one of the most important gallerists of the period, and eventually became her close friend and biographer. An exhibition of Lee’s work will be on view in July at the Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, NC.

// two college street

ROBERT TODD O’NEAL 1939–2016 Professor Emeritus Bob O’Neal, (above) who made a memorable impact on the RISD community during his 34-year tenure here, died on December 7. He was 77 and a resident of Rehoboth, MA. After earning both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Philadelphia College of Arts and a second master’s from Cornell, Bob joined RISD’s Industrial Design department in 1974. He served as department head from 1983–88 and as a graduate program director from 1994–99. Former students and colleagues remember Bob’s thoughtful mentorship and leadership along with his many contributions to the theoretical development of the discipline. A passionate advocate for humane housing solutions, he devoted years to helping to develop Project Ujima, an affordable, flexible and culturally sensitive system of shelters for global refugees. In 2001 he was in Quetta, Pakistan field-testing a prototype of Ujima when the 9/11 attacks changed the trajectory of the war.

DEREK BRADFORD 1936–2017 Professor Emeritus Derek Bradford (right), a landscape architect who taught at RISD from 1968–2004, died on January 23 from complications associated with Parkinson’s Disease. He lived in Providence with his wife Sara, a landscape architect who also taught at RISD for many years and founded the RI-based firm Bradford Associates with him. During his tenure at RISD, Derek served as head of Landscape Architecture several times and also led the Architecture department for a period in the 1970s. In 1979 he earned RISD’s first-ever Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in addition to his gifts as a teacher and architect, was a talented photographer and painter. Born in London, Derek earned a Diploma in Architecture from the University of North London and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Just prior to coming to RISD he taught in Zaria, Nigeria for a year and later went on to share his knowledge and expertise through projects in Pakistan, Tanzania, Egypt, England and Scotland.

Skolos-Wedell Earn AIGA Medal Dean of Architecture + Design Nancy Skolos and Senior Critic Tom Wedell earned national attention this spring as recipients of a 2017 AIGA Medal “for pushing the boundaries of art, design and technology” through their longstanding design partnership Skolos-Wedell. “I think the biggest achievement of our work is that it manifests a true love for each other and a true trust in collaboration,” Skolos says in a wonderful video about their partnership on the AIGA site (aiga.org/medal).

Faculty Newsbits Culminating years of research, this spring Literary Arts and Studies Professor Jonathan Highfield celebrated the release of Food and Foodways in African Narratives: Community, Culture, and Heritage (Routledge), which examines dynamics of power and resistance in the production and consumption of food throughout the continent.

ROCKEFELLER LEGACY When David Rockefeller, the renowned art collector, banker and philanthropist, passed away on March 20, 2017, members of the RISD community lost one of the museum’s most genuine supporters. For decades, his philanthropy, along with that of his aunt Lucy Aldrich and his mother Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, has enhanced nearly every aspect of the collection. Most recently, his 2015 gift established an endowed curatorial position in Decorative Arts and Design, while also providing funds to name a fifth-floor gallery. Almost 50 additional pieces of decorative arts bequeathed from Rockefeller’s personal collection will further enhance the collection. Find more faculty news at our.risd.edu and risd.edu/news.

Amy Kulper, an associate professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan who has earned multiple awards for excellence in teaching, has been appointed the new head of RISD’s Architecture department effective July 1. Jen Liu, an adjunct faculty member

in Sculpture, has earned a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video. The Brooklyn-based artist plans to use the unrestricted $55,000 grant to continue her explorations of national identity and political and socioeconomic conditions around the world. Steven Subotnick , a longtime adjunct faculty member in FAV, is one of only two animators to win a coveted 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship this year. In March Strange Fish, his playful look at “the blindness of evolution,” won the Grand Prix for short non-narrative animation at this year’s Holland Animation Festival. As a Creative Arts Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society this summer, he intends to research a forthcoming series of animated shorts on tall-tale characters in 19th-century American folklore. // RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

six degrees

// connecting through the alumni association

RECOGNIZING TRUE GENIUS The book also caught the attention of the Heinz Foundation, which recognized Chast’s “uncompromising body of work” with a 2015 Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities for “brilliantly translating the mundane into rich, comical observations that reflect her acute observations of the human experience.”

“I’m very good at worrying... and horribly, relentlessly serious.” S E R IOUS D R IVE

In presenting its 2017 Alumni Award for Artistic Achievement at Commencement, the RISD Alumni Council applauds cartoonist Roz Chast 77 PT (pictured in the self-portrait above) for her extraordinary body of work. I N TH E FOU R D ECAD E S S I NCE ROZ CHAST landed her first cartoon in The New Yorker—just a year after graduation—she has been playing with the material of human behavior, poking at our everyday neuroses and preoccupations with the precision of a neurosurgeon. Her idiosyncratic genius stems from the ability to use seemingly simple, quavery line drawings and a few choice words to nail the absurdities of everyday life—repeatedly. So far The New Yorker has published more than 1,200 of her cartoons (a fraction of her overall output) and she has also written and/or illustrated a dozen books, with her most recent, Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York, due out in October. In 2014 Chast’s memoir about the challenges of caring for her elderly parents hit a chord with readers across the country. Conveyed through cartoons, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? quickly rose to the top of The New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists for graphic novels, was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award in the nonfiction category and made it to The New York Times’ coveted list of The 10 Best Books of 2014. “I think it’s an interesting story, but I don’t guess that it’s terribly unusual,” Chast noted in a National Book Award interview about focusing the book on her parents’ end-of-life issues. “As I said to my editor, they should really shelve this in the travel section, because this is definitely like going to another country.” Dealing with elderly parents suffering from the frailties of aging and in need of assisted living and hospice care are “a part of life that I knew nothing about,” she says, “and that we don’t really talk about.”

For more on Roz’s work, go to rozchast.com.

Having grown up “uneventfully” in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Chast moved only once as a child—across the street. The one highlight: her parents subscribed to The New Yorker and she found the morbid wit of Charles Addams (among her favorites) so inspiring that she began drawing her own take on the world. At RISD Chast majored in Painting because it “seemed more artistic” than her true love and in the 1970s RISD wasn’t really much of “a cartoon kind of a place,” she says. But after graduation, she quickly amassed a portfolio of cartoons and illustrations and did what every aspiring young artist did at the time: networked on foot by carting it around to editors across Manhattan.

Chast’s moving memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? became a bestseller in 2014. It presents a candid look at issues of death and dying too rarely discussed in America.

“Happy people don’t do this,” Chast says in explaining the New Yorker cover of a motherboard she embroidered for the May 15, 2017 Innovators Issue — just in time for Mother’s Day. “I like taking on complicated, detailed projects, especially if I’m not 100% sure how they’re going to turn out. With this embroidery on muslin, there was always a possibility that the result would be horrible and hundreds of hours would go down the drain,” she said, laughing.

Unlike many aspiring cartoonists, Chast discovered that her lifelong New Yorker fetish actually paid off when she nervously dropped off her first stack of cartoons at the revered magazine in 1978. To her surprise, longtime art editor Lee Lorenz jumped at the opportunity, noting that her work was a breakthrough in the genre. Four decades later, Chast no longer lives nor works in the city but continues to submit weekly batches to the magazine from her studio in southwestern Connecticut. In addition to the wit she contributes to its pages, she has also produced dozens of covers—most recently an embroidered motherboard as a nod to Mother’s Day. Chast’s work—which also includes textiles, large paintings and painted pysanka eggs—has been exhibited in several well-received solo shows in recent years. Among the growing number of books she has written and/or illustrated, she especially liked collaborating on The Alphabet from A to Y, with Bonus Letter, Z, the bestselling children’s book by Steve Martin. Despite her uncanny ability to tap into and make light of our fears and anxieties, Chast is the first to admit she’s “very good at worrying.” A bird lover, she talks to the resident parrot in her studio but calls herself “horribly, relentlessly serious.” Pointed, honest, probing, prolific and wry, she shares a view of the world that not only resonates with viewers, but leads New Yorker editor David Remnick to dub her “the magazine’s only certifiable genius.” // RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

RISD X MILAN

Neon lighting by Jessica Carnevale 04 ID and seating by David Weeks 90 PT were among the wonderful work by RISD alumni, students and faculty on view as part of Milan Design Week and the Salone del Mobile exhibition of the world’s best furniture and home goods. On April 5 President Rosanne Somerson 76 ID and alumni host committee members Bill Hilgendorf 02 ID, Jason Horvath 02 ID and Tanya Singh 05 IA welcomed participants to a special RISD reception at Nina Yashar’s atmospheric design space, Nilufar Depot (above).

RISD X NYC RISD X INDIA

Timed to coincide with a visit from President Rosanne Somerson 76 ID (above center)—who met

with alumni, parents and prospective students in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore—the show brought together work by 20 alumni from across India who work in a wide range of disciplines, from graphic design to photography to furniture, sculpture, jewelry and carpets made from recycled saris. While in India, President Somerson spoke to prospective students at G5A in Mumbai, where Anuradha Parikh BArch 83 also presented. In Bangalore, the Himatsingka family (parents of Priya Himatsingka 00 JM) graciously hosted a RISD reception. 58

// six degrees

With NYC hopping again with special design events throughout the month of May, more than half a dozen alumni spoke and led discussions, while dozens more presented work at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), Surtex, Friedman Benda, Sight Unseen Offsite and Wanted, among other locations. Danny Giannella 04 ID of Bower (above right) exhibited at the ICFF, Chris Wolston 09 GL is showing Garden Party (right) at Patrick Parrish Gallery through the end of June and Christopher Specce 01 ID exhibited the Shaker-inspired products (above) he created for the new Furnishing Utopia collection at Design Within Reach. In addition, Jonathan Glatt MFA 04 JM, Robert Highsmith MArch 08, Ryan Mahoney MArch 06, Sara Ossana MIA 05, Theo Richardson 06 FD and Alexander Williams 06 FD helped President Somerson host this year’s RISD reception on May 22.

See more at risdxmilan.com and risdxnyc.com.

Christopher Specce rake image: photo by Charlie Schuck

Alumni involved in the RISD/India club hosted their first-ever exhibition in early February—a pop-up show at The Viewing Room in Mumbai, along with related events.

Come Play @RISD Weekend October 6–8 Once a year RISD goes all out to host an inspiring weekend full of talks, workshops, dinners and more to entice alumni and parents to visit campus and reconnect with each other, while seeing what’s going on at RISD today. This fall we’ll mount the juried RISD Craft exhibition and celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Nature Lab, along with a lot of other special programming. So please remind your friends and classmates and plan to join us. Registration opens in late June at risdweekend.com .

Making it Work In late February four alumni with remarkably different real-world experience came to RISD to speak to students as part of a panel discussion called Working it. Making it Work. Moderated by Dean of Experimental and Foundation Studies Joanne Stryker (above), the discussion between (l – r) Lois Harada 10 PR , Martine Gutierrez 12 PR , Ryan Cunningham 02 FAV and Rafael de Cárdenas 96 AP proved to be warm, animated and insightful.

LIFE-CHANGING REDISCOVERIES Marissa Halewijn Brown 90 ID + Colin McGreal 91 FAV

More than 30 years ago, Marissa Halewijn Brown 90 ID and Colin Patrick McGreal 91 FAV first met during their Foundation year at RISD. “I thought she was the most beautiful student in our class but way, way out of my league,” he admits. So after a couple of casual interactions that first year, the two essentially didn’t cross paths for three decades—even though in those days Industrial Design and Film/Animation/Video studios were close together, abutting Market Square. Once they graduated, both also ended up in New York City for many years but never ran into each other. Fast forward to October 2015, when the two alumni returned to campus for their 25th reunion. They had sort of dragged their feet about showing up since their respective marriages had ended and they were both unhappy.

Marissa had worked as a design director at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia for nine years, supporting three girls, and Colin had worked as a creative director in advertising and had recently relocated to a new job in Dallas. But spotting Marissa at a table in Carr Haus—decades after they had first met—Colin sat down, “feeling as though the universe had granted me a gift.” After finally mustering the courage to ask her out, they had their first date in New York City the following week—which led to a year of long-distance dating as the two went back and forth between Dallas and NYC. A year to the day after they re-met at RISD, Colin proposed to Marissa on a remote Icelandic hillside. They got married on December 28, 2016 at her parents’ home in Alexandria, VA and are now in the process of combining their two households in NYC.

If you met your partner at or through RISD, please tell us your story at risdxyz@risd.edu.

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

impact

// who’s giving to risd + why

HONG KONG CLUB INVESTS IN STUDENTS Donald Wun Hing Choi BArch 82, founder and president of the RISD/Hong Kong alumni club, and fellow club member Norman Chan BArch 85 have officially created the Hong Kong Alumni Club Endowed Scholarship, the first RISD endowment ever established by an international alumni group. Together the two friends have contributed the first $100,000 to the fund and are now encouraging other alumni to join them in building the endowment, with the goal of offering the first scholarships to talented students in need of financial aid as of the 2018/19 academic year. “Studying at RISD started me on an amazing journey to fulfill my potential,” says Choi. “I learned that hard work and creativity can change the world and I’m now committed to helping more young people enjoy the benefits of a RISD education.” Choi is also in the process of establishing a separate $250,000 endowed fund in support of an area of need in the Architecture department, which he credits with sowing the seeds of his success in managing the Hong Kong real estate giant Nan Fung Development Ltd. and working at Foster and Partners as the lead architect for the Hong Kong International Airport. In addition to supporting the HK club scholarship, Chan has also pledged $1 million to create a separate endowed scholarship fund to benefit undergraduate and graduate students in Architecture. The founding principal of the high-end interior design firm BTR Workshop says that he owes his success to RISD’s willingness to “take a chance” on him as 60

a transfer student after an Architecture summer course he took totally captivated him. “Before RISD I was at a crossroads in my studies,” Chan recalls, “drifting from college to college and losing focus. But studying there made me the architect I am today, and I have always been thankful. My friend Donald inspired me to give back to RISD, and I am both humbled and honored to do so.”

Architects Donald Choi BArch 82 (left), president of the RISD/Hong Kong alumni club, and fellow club member Norman Chan BArch 85 (above) have provided seed funding for the first-ever endowed scholarship at RISD offered by a group of international alumni. Chan’s firm BTR Workshop handled much of the interior design of Frank Gehry’s recently completed Opus high-rise in the heart of Hong Kong (top).

Supporting Educational Travel Gifts to RISD’s Travel Fund make extraordinary opportunities beyond campus available to students who are otherwise unable to afford them. The fund helped all 14 students in the Architecture studio Collect(ive) Rio — taught by Petra Kempf and Pedro Aparicio — visit Rio de Janeiro in March for an eye-opening immersion in the city’s multifaceted, post-Olympic urban life.

SOMERSON SCHOLARS SOAR Since RISD’s Board of Trustees established the Rosanne Somerson Scholarship Fund in 2015, it has grown to a $1 million-plus endowment, with four exceptional students already benefitting from much-needed support. Seniors Kathia Luc St. Hilaire 17 PR and Nadine Zaza BArch 17 saw significant reductions in their final tuition bills thanks to the Endowed Scholarship, while sophomore Levi Campello 19 AP (bottom right) and graduate student Sanié Bokhari MFA 18 PT (right) each received substantial, need-based gifts that are renewable for as long as they continue their studies at RISD. “This scholarship means that I don’t have to take out any loans to cover the cost of my education,” says Campello, “which really lifts a burden off my shoulders. And it also confirms that this community cares about me.” A native of southern California who intended to study painting at RISD, Campello was as surprised as anyone when he chose Apparel Design as his major instead. His current work in menswear and athletic apparel “celebrates the male physique,” he says, adding that he looks forward to a summer internship in the menswear industry.

“This scholarship… really lifts a burden off my shoulders. And it also confirms that this community cares about me.” Somerson Scholarship recipient Levi Campello 19 AP

A native of Pakistan, Bokhari notes the difficulty of getting loans and scholarships as an international student. “The Somerson Scholarship is crucial for me,” she says. “I worked in Pakistan for two years after earning my undergraduate degree—doing everything I could to save up for grad school—but it wasn’t enough. This scholarship allows me to concentrate on my studio work.” A first-year grad student in Painting, Bokhari is exploring contradictions in Pakistani society through her work, which is becoming increasingly more sculptural. “I’m taking classes in the Photography and Sculpture departments,” she says, “and incorporating those mediums into my work.” RISD welcomes gifts at any level at support.risd.edu.

When she’s back in Pakistan this summer, Bokhari will gather more reference images and reflect on the incredible feedback she has received at RISD so far. “This first year has been an overwhelming experience,” she says. “But I’m understanding and articulating my own concepts much more clearly than when I started, and everything is beginning to make sense.” // RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

moving forward

// undergraduate class notes

“Reading The Limbo Lounge was dreamlike and upsetting and ultimately gorgeous on so many levels. It’s completely original and people will go crazy for it.” screenwriter/playwright Paul Rudnick referencing the graphic novel California-based illustrator Dave Calver 76 IL has been working on for five years. It’s due to be released this fall by IDW/Top Shelf/Yoe Books.

exhibited sculptural works in Twist of Nature, a two-person show at Cerulean Arts in Philadelphia, where she lives.

1963 Dinah Maxwell Smith PT (see next page)

Jean (Prignano) Winslow 60 IL + Will Winslow 60 IL The Winslows showed Evolving (oil on canvas, 36 x 48") by Jean and other recent work in Evolving…together, a month-long exhibition in May at UnchARTed Gallery in Lowell, MA, where they live. “We have returned to full-time studio art after careers for both of us as book illustrators, then for him art director/ graphic design studio owner and for me as an art therapist, psycho-dramatist and licensed clinical mental health counselor,” Jean explains. “This exhibition represents the culmination of a lifetime of our work side by side and head to head.”

1964 I Love You Today, a new novel by Marcia Gloster Ammeen IL, tells the story of a young woman determined to succeed in the male-dominated publishing and ad world of the 1960s. “Some of it is based on my own experiences after I graduated from RISD and came to New York—in an era of great cultural changes—in search of a job,” she says. “In many ways it echoes what’s still happening across today’s media.” Marcia’s first book, 31 Days: A Memoir of Seduction, was released in 2014.

have been shown in two exhibitions this year: The Crit Group: 30 Years and Still Quilting, which ran from mid January to late April at the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, MA and BECAUSE, which ran from March 6–April 30 at Mother Brook Arts & Community Center in Dedham, MA. Her work is also included in the traveling SAQA Exhibit, which opens on June 23 at the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, KY and continues through September 19 before

moving on to other venues in 2018 and 2019. A painting by Sherrill Edwards Hunnibell AE (Rehoboth, MA) is included in Expanding Abstraction: New England Women Painters, 1950 to Now, an invitational group exhibition on view through September 17 at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. Her work Rangefinder in Four Parts (1977, acrylic on canvas) is part of the museum’s permanent collection.

One-of-a-kind quilts by Nancy Crasco AE (Cambridge, MA)

Stan Mack 58 IL Consulting with a cybersecurity expert, Stan (stanmack.com) has created a new 15-part comic strip for MediaPost. In April design critic Steven Heller interviewed him about the series for his Print column. Stan pioneered his “real-life” style of cartooning in the Village Voice and Adweek and has published several graphic books.

1952 Two paintings by David Seccombe PT were included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ spring show in NYC. Paintings and wall-to-wall constructions

were on view in two solo exhibitions earlier this year at the Westbeth Project Room in NYC, where he lives.

1962 In February Linda Brenner SC

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

Robert Alberetti 59 AE Intangibles Made Tangible, a solo show of Robert’s most recent abstract paintings, was on view in December at Blue Mountain Gallery in NYC. Drawing on his travels through Ireland, Morocco, Italy, Turkey, Spain and New England, his oil paintings bring to life remembered images coupled with imagination. Robert taught at Western Connecticut State College for 40 years before retiring in 2003 and lives in New Fairfield, CT. // RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

Elizabeth Resnick 70 GD/MFA 96 An expanded version of Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, a poster exhibition curated by Elizabeth, continues through July 30 at the oldest poster museum in the world — in Warsaw, Poland. Since last fall, smaller versions of the exhibition have been shown at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (where she’s a professor emerita who still teaches part-time) in Boston; in a public square in San Luis Potosi, Mexico; and in galleries in Boston, Taipei and Seoul.

Dinah Maxwell Smith 63 PT FIve Suits (2004, oil on canvas, 5 x 5') was among the work Dinah exhibited in Artists Choose Artists, an exhibition on view from November through mid January at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY. Dinah is based in Southampton, NY.

1965 Painting and ceramic sculpture by Maggie Wells PT is on permanent display at DeVera, a gallery in NYC, where she lives.

featured in What Goes Around Comes Around, a two-person show at Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland, CA, where she lives.

1969 Judith Unger PT (St. Johnsbury, VT) showed her ceramic sculpture in the spring invitational exhibition at the Museum of Russian Art (MoRA) in Jersey City, NJ.

1970

1967

In December and January, RI-based artist Jeffrey Watson GD exhibited work in The Really Big Group Show at Candita Clayton Gallery in Pawtucket, RI.

50th Reunion October 6–8, 2017

1971

Earlier this spring work by Mary Curtis Ratcliff AE was

Sam Gibbons PT provided chapter header illustrations for Driven (Bartaway, 2016),

a book by Tred Barta and Donna de Weil about fishing and overcoming adversity. Sam is based in Harbor Springs, MI. As chairman of the Blackstone Boulevard Park Conservancy Committee in Providence, landscape architect and RISD Professor Colgate Searle BLA has been working with the Providence Parks Department on updating the scenic boulevard’s tree inventory and walking path, a project that will continue throughout this year and beyond. Searle Design Group is also continuing its 20-year collaboration with Swan Point Cemetery in Providence—one of the first “garden cemeteries” in the country—through a proposed new cremation garden and burial area. Colgate and crew

Phyllis Tildes 67 IL Building on an ongoing series of books with Charlesbridge, her publisher since 1995, Phyllis has released three new board books this year. She wrote and illustrated Baby’s First Book of Birds and Colors and provided illustrations for Baby Animals Take a Bath and Baby Animals Take a Nap (both written by Marsha Arnold). “I was a lucky child growing up in Connecticut in a home filled with pets and an occasional orphaned wild animal,” Phyllis says. “With my picture books I hope to instill a sense of wonder and discovery in young readers.” 64

// undergraduate class notes

also continue to work renovations for Brown University’s Olney Margolies Athletic Center and recently renovated the upper portions of RISD’s Frazier Terrace.

1972 45th Reunion October 6–8, 2017 Allan Wexler BArch (see pages 30-37)

1973 David Byrne*, who studied at RISD in the early 1970s and connected with fellow Talking Heads bandmates here, continues to make an impact on the arts through his wide-ranging interests. Over the winter his experimental “haunted house, science exhibit and art installation” The Institute Presents: Neurosociety— about how we perceive reality and why we make the decisions

Eva Kwong 75 CR Love Between the Atoms, a solo show of recent ceramic sculpture such as this piece, Arosso (2016, wheelthrown stoneware, 20.5 x 8 x 9"), was featured at Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati, OH from early February through the end of April. Influenced by biological sources such as bacteria, diatoms and cells, her work explores the philosophical connection in the union of opposites.

we do—attracted a lot of attention at Pace Art + Technology in Menlo Park, CA. David also reunited with director Alex Timbers—his collaborator on the musical Here Lies Love—to produce the rock opera Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, which opened in February at The Public Theater in NYC and received largely unfavorable reviews before closing at the end of April. Last winter Richard Kattman BLA (Holliston, MA) was among the artists invited to participate

BEYOND THE LINEAR by Jonathan Kaplan 73 CR

B E FO R E T R A N S F E R R I N G TO R I S D

John Gallagher 68 PT Rising (2016, acrylic on Arches paper, 45 x 35") is among the paintings on view in a two-person show (with Bill Drew 69 IL/MFA 72 PT) at Studio 53 gallery in Boothbay Harbor, ME. Inspired by life in coastal Maine, John says, “there is something here in the constant, unrelenting surround of woods and ocean, of rocks and fields, that suggests a continuum — a pulse that runs through everything and seems to imbue various objects and forms with a sense of mystery and meaning.” The exhibition continues through June 25.

in Then and Now 2017, an exhibition at the Attleboro [MA] Art Museum. Each artist selected one or more designated pieces from the museum’s permanent collection as a point of departure for creating a response in whatever medium he/she chose. Glass artist Toots Zynsky GL (Providence) has earned the 2017 Masters of the Media Award in Glass from the James Renwick Alliance. As one of five masters recognized this year—in the specific mediums of glass, fiber, ceramics, metal and wood—she presented a talk on her work and accepted the award at an April 1 gala at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.

1974 Last December designer, architect and artist Joseph Brin PH founded JoeStudio (joestudio.us) to market sculptural objects and functional art that are designed

and made by hand by a network of artisans working in the Philadelphia area. “These works merge art and life,” Joe says on his site, “elevating the simple rituals, joys and interactions of daily life by design.”

1975 For the past year James Harmon SC has been establishing a 3D Print Center at Keystone College in LaPlume, PA, where he runs the Glass Arts Program. “It’s been an exciting time getting up to speed and learning about the 3D print world,” he writes, adding that the second semester of intro classes is helping to inform the new curriculum he’s developing for the coming academic year. Domus Illuminator, a glass piece by Rory Marcaccio AE/MAE 79 (Vienna, VA), was on view last fall in the Artist Teacher Exhibition at Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, VA.

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

to study ceramics, I had thought that I might consider a career in architecture. The core classes I had been taking at another university focused on the philosophies and theories behind architecture and the architectural method and at RISD I continued taking classes in architecture. I remember countless conversations revolving around Louis Sullivan’s phrase “form follows function.” Those pivotal years studying the physical structure, history and construction of buildings — as well as architectural design philosophy — were the beginning of a journey to find my own voice in ceramics. After completing my BFA at RISD and earning an MFA from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, I began a studio practice outside of Philadelphia in 1976. The timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous. Wholesale and retail markets were beginning to offer viable sales opportunities. Galleries were opening every month. There was an insatiable demand for utilitarian work. I produced a line of stoneware pottery that I sold at major wholesale and retail craft events throughout the country. The pots I made were totally market driven, but they sustained me for 13 years. In the 1990s, after a three-year break working in the ski and bike industries in the Colorado mountains, I returned to making pottery in the Colorado High Country. The demand for handmade ceramics was in decline, so after floundering for several years, I established Ceramic Design Group, a design and manufacturing business I ran for 16 years.

During this time, I managed to make a series I called Neo-Industrial Art Objects, which combined found objects with my own slip-cast forms. Making these non-utilitarian objects was the first step in finding my true voice in ceramics. I liked playing with the visual counterpoint between handmade and machinemade parts, and finally began thinking and working in a non-linear fashion. In 2006 when I moved to Denver to focus on a personal studio practice and open a gallery for contemporary ceramic art I was still frustrated with my inability to produce a really personal body of work. After many false starts, I finally realized that my new studio explorations had a very strong connection to my early studies in architecture and the writings of Christopher Alexander (including important books like A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order). Now I know that whether form follows function or vice versa is really irrelevant. Much as architecture is about the creation of buildings and their environments, ceramics is about the creation of physical objects relative to the spaces they inhabit. And over time I have become less comfortable with the tags potter, ceramic designer, maker, ceramic artist. While all are applicable, I am a designer working primarily with clay and am not bound by constraints in method, material or historical imperative, or by a strict adherence to utility. Instead, with deference to the deep history of ceramics, I endeavor to make choices in my work that will continue to engage and interest me and, I hope, others. Perspective is indeed a wonderful thing. My voice resonates quite clearly now.

A lengthier version of this article appeared in the Summer/Fall issue of Studio Potter. Kaplan serves on the magazine’s board and was recently elected to the International Academy of Ceramics, accessCeramics and Artaxis. See more of Jonathan’s work at plinthgallery.com.

Linda MacNeil 76 SC Jewels of Glass, a comprehensive retrospective of Linda’s work from the past 40 years, continues through October 1 at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA. Renowned metasmith Jack Prip “always kidded me for being too serious about my work,” she says. “He wanted me to loosen up and have some fun. After I left the studio one night, Jack rearranged the parts of a very important project I was working on — upside down, etc.— to make a point. When I saw it the next morning, I got the message.”

1976 Dave Calver 76 IL (see page 62) President Rosanne Somerson ID is one of several RISD alums recognized in an Artsy editorial called 16 Women Pushing Design Forward in the United States, which ran on March 8 to coincide with International Women’s Day.

1977 40th Reunion October 6–8, 2017 A solo show of new work by Karen Rand Anderson CR (Providence) was on view for a month earlier this year at Onochoko Creative in Warren, RI.

This spring BONFIRE, the gallery Bill Gaylord BArch runs in Seattle, hosted a show called ARTRUMPS: Resistance and Action (April 1–June 3), featuring work by 33 artists responding to “this unprecedented time of political upheaval through provocative questioning and creative humor.” Roz Chast PT (see also page 56) and Liza von Rosenstiel 78 PT are among the RISD alums with work in the exhibition. Half of the proceeds from sales go to nonprofits working for social justice and related causes. Accomplished glass artist Michael Glancy GL/MFA 80 (Rehoboth, MA), a longtime adjunct faculty member at RISD, exhibited work in a solo show

that ran for one month this spring at Heller Gallery in NYC. An exhibition preview in the April 2017 issue of IN New York made note of his exquisite use of metal in carving “complex cellular structures” into glass. Youngchee Choi Martin PT showed two paintings in On the Shoulders of Giants, a group show that ran in March at Westbeth Gallery in NYC, where she lives.

1978 Dreaming of Another World— Nomadic Reflections, a solo show of work by Valerie Hird PT, was on view in February and March at McGowan Fine

Nancy Reyner 79 IL Create Perfect Paintings (North Light Books), Nancy’s fourth how-to book on process and technique, offers artists inventive ways to critique and enhance their own work, along with advice about making art while pursuing other career options. She uses her own paintings — like Blue Danube (acrylic and gold leaf on panel, 48 x 60") to help explain key concepts. Nancy works out of her studio in Santa Fe. 66

// undergraduate class notes

Julia Santos Solomon 78 PT The Julia Santos Solomon Papers — a collection of sketchbooks, diaries and various other printed materials, along with original artwork and projects by Julia’s former design students in the Dominican Republic and at Parsons in New York — are now part of the research collection at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington, DC. Other materials were also recently acquired by the Dominican Studies Institute Archives at City College in Manhattan. Now based in Woodstock, NY, the Dominican-born artist spoke in April at the biennial Latino Art Now! conference at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Art in Concord, NH. The work featured is based on her 25 years of travel with nomads in East and Central Asia as well as the Middle East. Valerie teaches at the Community College of Vermont in Burlington, where she lives. Explorations, a solo exhibition of Egyptian archeological drawings by Susan Osgood PT (Brattleboro, VT), is on view through August 27 at the University of Leipzig’s Museum Georg Steindorf in Germany. Her drawings are complemented by her contemporary paintings, prints and travel sketchbooks.

1979 Jean Blackburn PT, a longtime professor of Illustration at RISD, showed works on paper

and an installation in Warp, a solo show on view in March and April at Rafius Fane Gallery in Boston. As a commentary on “these fraught times,” as the gallery puts it, her work “examines our concept of home and how it may or may not live up to the shelter, comfort and familiarity we seek.”

1981 As part of an ongoing collaboration, Anna Boothe SC (Zieglerville, PA), Frances Middendorf 82 IL (Rome and RI) and master perfumer Leonardo Opali exhibited work from The Scent Project at Tambaran Gallery in NYC during the month of January. The trio also looks forward to showing their work later this year in Italy.

ORDER + CHAOS by Laurie Rosenwald 77 PT

H E LLO. I am a single, white, female, German Jew, homosapien. Design Crone? Delusional Genius? Adorable Pariah? Imaginary Swede? I came out on Valentine’s Day 2015 as a bikesexual. Yes, I am in love with my own bicycle. His name is Jopo. He is white. He is Finnish. I have an identical Jopo in Sweden, too. She/he/it is black. Nota bene: This has yet to be celebrated. Lavish floral tributes should be addressed to my Hudson Street address. I have been working since 1957, when I was two. Before that time I was mostly just playing. I couldn’t really draw at all. I was a flunky at The New York Times Magazine and then a ghost designer all over Condé Nast. For 21 years I designed a zillion layouts for Mademoiselle, GQ and many other magazines. I was never on a masthead. Nah — I like to make stuff and then be done with it. My own choice. I didn’t wanna go to meetings. Also, I care what I wear, but I don’t care what you wear. In addition to both editorial and advertising work, I do a lot of animation lately, which is fun to write. And I have designed a huge line of products for the Japanese market. What I do depends almost wholly on what materials I happen to grab. The medium is literally the message, the kernel of the poodle! Sometimes it’s colored paper (which I make myself with gouache) or squeeze bottle paint or scratching lines out of wax or using a lumber crayon or Caran d’Ache Neocolor 1. Or casein, homemade milk paint or a dip pen with a Waverly nib and Sumi ink on paper towel or Denril. I also use photo-collage in a very basic way. I never really draw in any program, I just combine digitally the things I make with my digits. Almost everything I do is both computer-strict and handmade gooky and organic. I love the fight between order and chaos.

“I spend all my time making stuff and none on ‘getting it out there’—for the same reason I don’t go to the gym, iron or eat kale.” I have two obsessions: makeup and art supplies. Or maybe that’s one obsession. Color is my pash. Especially vermillion and cobalt. And viridian, ultramarine and cadmium lemon. And Burnt Umber with Rose Madder. The more lethal, the better. A soupçon of lead white makes a refreshing amuse-bouche.

I teach an incredibly popular workshop called How to Make Mistakes on Purpose or “What to do when it’s too late to get burrs stuck on your pants and invent Velcro all over again.” I’ve held it for Google, IKEA, Artek, ADC, AIGA and Starbucks, among many others. It is not a creativity workshop. Trying to be creative works about as well as trying to be charming. And it’s not just for designers. Anybody can do it. In Canada a herd of elk showed up. I don’t promote myself. I try a bit with Facebook and Instagram and Twitter but my followers know me already. How do you reach the ones who don’t? Send a singing telegram? A corned beef hashtag? A Snapdragon? I’m such a Twit. In terms of social media presence, I hide my light under a bushel. If a bushel is not available I hide my light under a barrel. I spend all my time making stuff and none on “getting it out there”— for the same reason I don’t go to the gym, iron or eat kale. My personal style is fifth grader on the way to a Menemsha softball game (circa 1966), but

The text above is excerpted from a much longer American Illustration profile (1.12.17). Find a link to the full story at rosenworld.com.

with way more eyeliner than is appropriate. I’ve been dressing like an elderly French pirate clown since about 1989. For almost 20 years I’ve spent at least the whole summer on Sweden’s rocky west coast, because I want to have my cake — eat it too. And then I want more cake. Nature is part of that but I’m embarrassed by this — because darling, everything you see I owe to exhaust fumes and New York City tap water. And yes, I speak Swedish like a native New Yorker. My Chrystie Street studio rent increased by $1,000, so next stop: GowanaCrownDumbBushGreenewickJerseyburg. I loved that building, but it became full of model agencies and artists can’t afford it now. The Lower East Side — like more and more of New York — is a touristy faux-hipster mall. But I still love New York, and everybody in it. I’m a lifer. If you want to be creatively fulfilled, be free and have fun. I love to complain, but frankly, I have more fun than anybody — because I love to work, and I work every day. 67

1981 continued Thirty of the inspired paintings Trine Bumiller PR (Denver) made for the exhibition Centennial: 100 Paintings for 100 Years, which stems from an artist residency at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, were on view earlier this spring at Cozens Museum, a historic museum in the nearby town of Fraser, CO. Her installations were included in Sarajevo Winter 2017, the 33rd international festival in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The work was inspired by her recent trip to Bosnia and her memory of her mother’s stories about Denmark during WWII. In January Trine also showed new work in Interference, a solo show at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in NYC.

PENCHANT FOR PLAY when Pam Prichett 82 GL worked with a professional business coach (aka her brother) to identify her core values, the importance of unstructured time and opportunities for play in her life landed near the top of the list. Sometimes all it takes is time to draw in her sketchbook or tend the garden behind her NYC apartment building. “That’s the only thing I do religiously,” she says. “I go down there every day — rain, shine or snow — just to look at things growing.” This joy in discovery has led to a recent career shift for Prichett, who realized several years ago that the branding and marketing design work she was doing for a children’s yoga instructor proved to be “much more fun” than the corporate graphic design she had been doing for years. That inspired Prichett to write and illustrate her first children’s book as a way for young kids and their families to think about yoga and the relationship of humans to animals. As she was working on Downward Dog with Diego (2016, Blue Apple Books), she also began designing and sewing yoga animal play pillows based on the characters in the book. The line is now available through a new online startup called Zoomorphik and at the Museum of the City of New York gift shop. In addition to the Yoga Animals, Prichett has designed two other collections: NYNY Icons and US of Animals. “Zoomorphik is really a reinvention of my life’s work,” she says. “Rooted in a heartfelt connection to the values of creativity, play and well-being,” it’s about “creating well-crafted, unique goods in collaboration with progressive and conscientious people that bring imaginative design, great color, cool shapes and a sense of humor into our homes.” As her reinvented career gains momentum, Prichett continues to draw inspiration from playing well with others. She’s working with a photographer on CrossPollination, a project inspired by her garden, and is getting ready to launch a new series of children’s books A CO U P LE O F Y E A R S AG O

For more go to pamelaprichett.com.

with a publisher she met through Zoomorphik at this year’s NY NOW show. As for her lifelong penchant for play, Prichett says that her greatest influences were her mother, a ceramic artist, and her father, a graphic designer and filmmaker who worked in children’s television in the 1950s and ’60s. “They both believed that being creative and making art was important work for everyone, not just artists,” she says. “I grew up making things in my father’s studio, where work and play went hand in hand.”

In April Marc Kehoe FAV (NYC) showed work in RESIST, a group exhibition at Van Vessem Gallery in Tiverton, RI. Marc was joined by fellow alums Deborah Baronas 79 TX (Barrington, RI), Linda Leslie Brown MAE 87 (Boston), Tayo Heuser 76 PT (Providence), Nermin Kura MFA 97 CR (Providence), Marcus Reichert 70 PT, Kristin Street 80 TX (Providence) and Susannah Strong 90 PT (Exeter, RI) in presenting creative responses to the current political climate in the US. The gallery donated half of the profits from all sales to the ACLU.

Sandra Enterline 83 JM Sandra’s work in gold, steel, diamond slices, sterling silver, white gold and mica was featured last fall in Lucent, a solo exhibition at the contemporary jewelry gallery Courtesy of the Artist in Sydney, Australia. She’s based in San Francisco.

Mel Prest 81 PT Mel created Mami, her first portrait in more than 20 years, for With Liberty & Justice for Some, a winter show at Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles. The portrait is of her good friend Rama Sene Fall, a Sufi Muslim who immigrated to the US from Senegal. This year Mel’s work has also been on view in Lilac Aura, a spring solo show at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary in Oakland and was included in Spectral Hues: artists + color at the Palo Alto [CA] Art Center and in Big Idea at The Painting Center in NYC. In addition, the San Francisco-based artist co-curated a group show called Echo Spectrum at Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn.

1982 35th Reunion October 6–8, 2017 David Mazzucchelli PT (see pages 22–29)

1983 After reviewing her work last fall, a jury officially welcomed Susan (Harvey) Dubrunfaut IL (Elkins Park, PA) as a member

of the American Color Print Society. Earlier this year, she also exhibited water-based prints in a solo show at 705 West Printshop & Gallery in Jenkintown, PA. An essay by David Langton GD titled A Doctor, a lawyer and a minister walk into a logo development meeting… ran in February on the How magazine

website. David’s NYC-based firm Langton Creative Group was also the subject of a recent GDUSA article that focused on their new Progress by Design brand identity.

Fred Lisaius 81 IL above: Illumination (acrylic on wood, 36 x 48") was among the new, acrylic-on-wood paintings on view this spring in Thrive, Fred’s solo show at Rovzar Gallery in Seattle. He lives nearby in Bellevue, WA.

Ted Stearn PT (see pages 22–29)

Mimi Robinson 81 PT below: Color Theory (2017, Princeton Architectural Press), a new series of notecards, presents six simple color studies exploring key principles that are explained on the backs of the cards. Mimi teaches at California College of the Arts in San Francisco/Oakland.

Bruce Fifield 81 ID Bruce’s Mimeo™ chair has earned a 2017 Green Good Design Award from the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design. Produced by Allsteel, the chair is made of a 100% post-consumer recycled polymer and is ergonomically designed for maximum comfort and support. Studio Fifield is based in Milan. Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

A F T E R A P RO LO N G E D P E R I O D Designs from Handmade Felt by Chad of creative retreat many years back, Alice Hagen. Juliane Gorman 84 TX reemerged with “It was my Eureka Moment,” Gorman renewed vigor and passion for a gushes in explaining the genesis of medium she first toyed with as a RISD FeltHappiness, her current business. student. “It was an extracurricular, “I knew what to do with my life and how haphazard affair,” she confesses, full to be happy.” of “dancing and snow.” Yet back then Once the love of colors and fibers she her fling with felt proved to be so had relished as a Textiles major suddenly compelling that the Textiles major chose synched with her love of hats, she dove to forego weaving as the basis of her in and began making and marketing senior project in favor of making a her hats — first in Norwich, England, where series of sculptural felt headpieces. she lived for 11 years, and since 2014 A few years after RISD, Gorman in Gibsonia, PA, where she relocated. actually learned “how to make proper This year three of Gorman’s felted hats,” studying with Ann Albrizio, hats were selected for inclusion in the an esteemed milliner at the Fashion international juried exhibition Wearable Institute of Technology, and going Expressions, which was on view from on to work at several costume shops. mid February through mid April at But then her enthusiasm waned. California’s Palos Verdes Art Center in “I stopped,” she says. “And I stopped Los Angeles County. making things.” In fact, for many years “Felt comes alive in my hands with “the magic of felt and hats lay dormant”— every piece I create,” Gorman says. until she was suddenly moved to “And it creates life within me, [making borrow a book from her local library increasingly more] ideas bloom. It truly called Fabulous Felt Hats: Dazzling invigorates me.”

Find more about Juliane’s hats at felt-happiness.com.

1984

Leslie Weinstein 87 GD

In 2015 landscape architect Kwame Addo BLA released a book called Visions of Ghana: Decoding Development (Partridge Publishing Africa). A product of years of extensive research, the book highlights how harnessing Ghana’s natural resources could help raise the standard of living for the 27 million citizens of this relatively stable and increasingly more prosperous West African nation. Based in Colombia, Kwame teaches at Javeriana University, the Universidad del Valle and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Since moving to Madrid in 1989, Leslie has been working as a graphic designer and a Sogetsu Ikebana teacher. Last December she exhibited her Ikebana arrangements at the Espacio Valverde Gallery in Madrid. “Memories from RISD are always a part of me,” Leslie writes, adding that she thinks often of faculty mentors Aki Nurosi, Franz Werner and Malcolm Grear, along with fellow classmates.

Rae Broyles PT* (Roswell, GA) has been accepted as a National Artist Member at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. As one of the 20-plus women chosen for the two- to four-year program, Rae is showing work in the gallery’s A.I.R. National Artists exhibition, which runs through June 27. In late winter she also participated in the New York Art Week Show 2017 at Caelum Gallery in Chelsea. In February Stephen Kenny IL was one of six artists to receive

a Professional Artist Fellowship from Creative Pinellas, a local arts nonprofit just outside of St. Petersburg, FL, where he lives. The $5,000 award helps steward a vibrant local creative community by supporting the work of “artists at the pinnacle of their career.” Colleen Kiely PT showed her artist book 13 in NXNE 2017, a winter group exhibition at the Brattleboro [VT] Museum & Art Center. The artist lives in Medford, MA. Jennifer Schab BArch contributed an original piece of writing to Not Neutral: For Every Place, Its Story, a monograph published by Rios

far left: photo by Lauren Zurchin Studios | top: photo by Susan Guenun

FULLY FEELING FELT

Michael Sloan 85 IL Since January Welcome to the New World, a graphic narrative focused on the lives of an actual family of five Syrian refugees living in the US, has been appearing regularly in The New York Times’ Sunday Review. A freelance illustrator based in New Haven, CT, Michael has been collaborating on the series with author Jake Halpern. It highlights the challenges of a family living outside a war zone but still on edge due to the climate of fear and uncertainty in the US.

Clementi Hale Studios (RCHS) in April. Titled A Good Story, Jennifer’s section of the monograph includes two of her own recent projects: the China Retail Center and The Resort at Playa Vista in Westside Los Angeles. A project architect at

RCHS, Jennifer lives in Santa Monica, CA.

1985 From early March through late April, Stephen Burt IL showed work in Imagining Nature, a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn

Public Library. Stephen is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Creative and Fine Arts at the University of New England in Biddeford, ME.

1986 This year Kenneth Leap GL (Runnemede, NJ) is working as an artist in residence at Vineland [NJ] High School, where he’s guiding students in the creation of glass art that celebrates the history of their community. He’s also an ambassador artist at the WheatonArts and Cultural Center in nearby Millville, NJ.

1987 Nader Tehrani BArch 85 Nader’s Boston-based architectural firm NADAAA won its 17th Progressive Architecture award — a 2017 P/A Awards honorable mention — for this 6,354-sf retreat in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It also won Interior Design magazine’s Best of Year award and ARCHITECT magazine’s Custom Home Grand Award for the Rock Creek House in Washington, DC. His recent collaboration in Boston’s South End with architect Cristina Parrero was also featured in Boston Home magazine. Nader is dean of Cooper Union’s Chanin School of Architecture in NYC and visited RISD in April to deliver a talk about his work.

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

30th Reunion October 6–8, 2017 Earlier this year, Eileen Ferara IL exhibited work in Borderless, a group exhibition that ran from early February through late March at the Jersey City [NJ] Theater Center, and Invasion, a solo “printstalla-

Daniel Clayman 86 GL Composed of 10,000 glass “raindrops,” Dan’s 60-foot-long installation Rainfield was unveiled in January at the new Design and Media Center at MassArt, where he has been a visiting professor and worked with students to create the piece. In addition, Daniel Clayman: Radiant Landscape opened in early May at Grounds for Sculpture (GFS) in Hamilton, NJ. In the GFS museum building, hundreds of strung glass tiles create glass “curtains” that act as a lens projecting and bending light and projecting pattern onto the “stage.” Outdoors, three of the Providence-based artist’s glass boulders are on view through February 2018.

tion” project on view during the month of March at gaia Studio, also in Jersey City, where she lives.

of Crate & Barrel’s collection of original work by artists and designers around the world.

Two prints of mimosa flowers by Kim Sweet PT (Phoenix, AZ) are available online as part

Kimberly Fuller 86 PH

// RISDXYZ

Kim recently published her first book, Finding, a moving memoir about how her adopted son became her greatest spiritual teacher. Last November she also presented a TED talk (now available on YouTube) in New Bedford, MA about the same life-changing experience.

spring/summer 2017

HAPPY ACCIDENTS by Peter Barrett 90 PT

I N 2 0 0 6 I WA S LI V I N G I N B ROO K LY N , working full time as a painter, and had just returned from opening a successful show with my gallery in Miami when I started a blog about my dinner. I barely remember the circumstances, but I liked to cook, and Blogger was free. At the outset I posted no pictures. The only digital camera I had was a shitty consumer-grade thing; my good camera was a 35mm that I used to shoot slides of my paintings. Remember slides? I hated slides. About 15 years earlier, I had been a pretty good photographer, but those skills did not translate to the garbage point-andshoot technology of 2006. Nonetheless, over time I began shooting shitty food shots with my dismal little camera because the Internet wanted photos and would not be denied.

We moved upstate, and I put in a big garden. I upgraded to a better shitty camera and the pictures got better. Over the next few years the blog started to take off; I landed a couple of local magazine gigs writing about food, the blog got mentioned in New York magazine, and I won a charcuterie contest where the prize was a trip to France. So I bought a real DSLR and a good flash, and built myself a light box, and set about understanding how to use them all. The pictures continued to improve, as did the writing. The whole time this was happening, I was still working in the studio. But because of the financial collapse, painting was fraught with pretty serious anxiety; sales had dropped way off and I was having trouble justifying my studio practice as anything more than an expensive hobby. The food writing kept chugging along, though. The pay sucked, but other forms of validation flowed and I enjoyed it. My midlife crisis — such as it was — centered entirely on my identity as a creative person. I’d been drawing almost daily since I was two. What the hell was I supposed to do now? 72

During this period of adjustment I painted, I cooked and wrote about it, I gardened, I kept writing for magazines —and I made a lot of ceramics. The sole criterion I brought to all these endeavors was that they had to satisfy the same creative desires that painting exclusively had for so long. Then Edible Hudson Valley assigned me a story: “Remember Fatty Crab? Pelaccio moved upstate and is opening something in Hudson next year. Go find out what it is.” I met Zak, Jori, Kevin and the crew at Fish & Game in February of 2013, spending four consecutive Thursdays with them, taking photos and notes and getting a sense of what they were up to as they worked on recipes and techniques amid the ongoing construction. I filed the article. It was well received. Edible Manhattan wanted an updated version for their next issue. At the end of March, after the first Edible piece came out, I sent Zak and Jori this email: … surely a Fish & Game cookbook is in the future. I think the book could be unique and beautiful and it could do something that cookbooks don’t do: depict the flow, the rhythm of a kitchen and the evolution and change of dishes… Instead of only being fixed recipes, it could be a portrait of the process… I could also photograph the living shit out of it. We met a few days later at their place and shook hands on the deal there and then. I became an artist in residence at the restaurant: embedded, with total access and with full autonomy. They would email me about various off-campus

For more information, go to project258.com and acookblog.com.

activities like garlic planting or cider pressing or fish sauce making. I attended all those, plus wine tastings, the honey harvest, maple sugaring and the first anniversary staff pool party. And I shot (and ate — strictly for research purposes) damn near every seven-course tasting menu they ran in the first two years (and then edited the more than 50,000 photos I took for the project).

“My midlife crisis—such as it was—centered entirely on my identity as a creative person.” It didn’t happen right away, but making the book — called Project 258: Making Dinner at Fish & Game — eventually felt like my work. While totally unlike painting or ceramics or making dinner for my family, it nonetheless fit squarely into what I wanted and needed to be doing. The angst faded; I had a creative purpose again. People ask me if I miss painting. I don’t, which might seem strange but doesn’t feel that way. It turns out that I just need great projects to work on, irrespective of medium. Now, almost exactly four years after we shook hands on the deal, the book is out: an unlikely collaboration between an accidental food writer and some brilliant chefs.

James Williamson 89 IL left: James recently received an Award of Merit in Print magazine’s 2016 Typography & Lettering Awards for this handlettered piece. He’s based in Brooklyn and works as a freelance illustrator.

In February Randy Guillot BArch, a design director at Gensler in Chicago, was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the highest honor bestowed by AIA.

1989 Liz Jaff PT exhibited large-scale ink drawings and an installation in Wallflower, a solo show that ran from late February through early April at Robert Henry Contemporary in Brooklyn, where she lives.

1990 This spring Boston-based artist and critic Franklin Einspruch IL

launched Delicious Line (deliciousline.org), a new site for art criticism based on a refreshingly simple concept: 1,000-character reviews of limited-run exhibitions, from anywhere (with the writers being paid!). “Of course, simple is hard,” he admits. “This publication is 18 months in the making. I am its editor-in-chief, the director of the 501(c)(3) that produces it and the Chief Janitorial Officer of the codebase.”

In April David Weeks Studio, the NYC-based design firm run by David Weeks PT, debuted Amaca, a chair designed in collaboration with the Italian studio Moroso, at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan. The form and color of Amaca are inspired by the traditional materials and local weaving methods of craftspeople in Dakar, Senegal, where the collaborative piece was developed and produced for the Moroso M’Afrique collection.

1991 Brooklyn-based artist Liz Collins TX/MFA 99 has already exhibited work in a trio of group shows in NYC this year: the SPRING/BREAK Art Show that ran for a week in March at various locations; Expanded Visions: 50 Years of Collecting, which ran in March at Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art; and Thread by Thread, a mid March-late April exhibition at LMAK Gallery. As a finalist for the Laguna Art Prize, she also created a collapsed woven wall sculpture for the competition exhibition that ran during the spring at

Katherine Daniels 91 PT Earlier this year Katherine’s work was included in Miniartextil 2017, an international exhibition highlighting the world’s best textile art, at Le Belfrey in Montrouge, France. Based in NYC, she works at the intersection of painting, sculpture and craft because she wants “to touch, push and pull the forms more physically than with just a brush.” With that in mind, she often turns to sewing, beading and weaving — techniques she learned as a child growing up in West Virginia. Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

Greg Foley 91 AP In COOL: Style, Sound, and Subversion (Rizzoli, May 2017), Greg and co-author Andrew Luecke offer an overview of the evolution of global youth subcultures and street style over the past century. His 250 color illustrations — along with contextual timelines, streamable playlists and notes on hairstyles — provide a vibrant picture of each movement and the subsequent groups it inspired.

the Arsenale in Venice, Italy. Last November Liz’s work was featured in a Portfolio essay on the BOMB magazine website. Leah Oates IL showed work in Made in NY, a spring group show at the Schweinfurth Art Center in Auburn, NY. She also continues to mount intriguing shows at Station Independent Projects, the gallery she founded and runs in NYC.

Looking, the first in The Non-Finito series of planned lectures, appeared in the Italian Insider Newspaper, a publication produced in Rome.

LeeAnn Herreid 91 JM When the famous Sputnik Chandeliers in Lincoln Center’s Metropolitan Opera House were reconditioned, the crystals were removed and replaced, but LeeAnn — who runs Individual Icons in Warren, RI — turned the originals into jewelry. “What a fun project,” she says, adding that she has also been making cufflinks out of the Met’s original 1966 curtain and had her second trunk show at the Met Opera Shop in April. LeeAnn also had two recent solo shows at Eileen Fisher at The Shops at Chestnut Hill [MA].

Michael Riley GD and his team at the LA-based studio Shine designed and animated vintage studio film logos and produced the main titles and other typography for La La Land, the Golden Globe-winning film for Best Picture/Musical or Comedy and winner of six Academy Awards out of a record 14 nominations. Kate Mrozowski 06 GD also works at Shine and was part of the La La Land team, which the producer called “quite simply, exceptional—and an utter joy to work with.” Last December Cornelius Sullivan SC (Naples, FL) gave a talk titled Looking Over Michelangelo’s Shoulder as He Carves Marble at his gallery in Gloucester, MA. Last fall // RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

Marion Wesson 93 PT Cluster Fail, a solo show of Marion’s new paintings and sculptures, opened in May and continues through June 17 at Galleri Urbane in Dallas. She’s based in Los Angeles.

collages were inspired by her recent trip through billionyear-old rock canyons in Utah.

1992 25th Reunion October 6–8, 2017 A site-specific chalk-onblackboard wall drawing by Richard Barlow PT was included in Sense of Place, a group exhibition that opened last December and ran through mid

February. The artist’s drawing was housed inside the museum’s McCormick House, which was designed by Mies van der Rohe. As a product design engineer at Mamava, David Jaacks BArch has created “lactation pods” in support of the Burlington, VT-

based company’s mission to provide nursing mothers with “private, clean and comfortable places to use a breast pump or breastfeed anywhere, anytime.” He installed eight pods at Miami International Airport—in time for last December’s Design Miami and Art Basel/Miami events—

RISD ALUMNI REUNION PARENTS OCTOBER 6–8 2017

WEEK— END17 risdweekend.com

// undergraduate class notes

with similar units installed in more than 150 locations nationwide.

1994 Jason Amendolara IL (see page 13) Deborah Forman FAV showed recent work in Canyon, a solo exhibition in January at AS220 in Providence. The artist’s

Earlier this spring Alyce Santoro CEC (Alpine, TX) presented her audiovisual project Tonal Relativity in Imaging Sound, a solo exhibition at Central Features Contemporary Art in Albuquerque. In March she gave a talk about the project at the UNM ARTS Lab in Albuquerque and performed works based on Tonal Relativity with Julian Mock, the composer/guitarist who Alyce collaborates with as the experimental duo Prepared Ear. Lora Shelley IL is having fun working on a yearlong project to make a painting a day of her cat, Charley—on recycled cardboard panels from boxes. “It has become quite a challenge but a good one,” she writes from her studio in Hurley, NY. “I am learning constantly and this project is keeping me fluid

Jennifer Shaw 94 PH Flood State, Jennifer’s new series of photogravures, was on view from December through mid February at Guthrie Contemporary in New Orleans, where she lives. A response to rising seas due to climate change, the series deftly imagines a dreamlike floating world that may soon become reality not only for Louisiana, but much of the globe.

Rebecca Hannon 95 JM

Amanda Dow Thompson 94 PT The carved basswood sculpture Amanda exhibited in Slippery When Wet, a December solo show at her gallery Causey Contemporary in NYC, were created from single chunks of wood. The work explores “the construct of gender roles within society, and the transient, illusory nature of identity,” the NYC-based artist explains.

and engaged in my studio work.” You can follow her progress on Instagram (@lorashelley).

1995 Dean Welshman GD, the lead designer of Providence College (PC) Magazine, is pleased that the publication recently earned a Bronze Award in the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) District 1 Excellence Awards Competition. Competing with colleges and universities in New England and northeast Canada, the PC publication won recognition based on photography, writing and overall design.

1996 Lighting designer Lindsey Adelman ID (NYC) is one of several RISD alums recognized in an Artsy editorial called 16 Women Pushing Design Forward in the United States, which ran on March 8 to coincide with International Women’s Day.

Contemporary Camouflage, a fall solo show at Galerie Noel Guyomarch in Montreal, included pieces like Wave Neckpiece, based on a folk-art linking system. Made from laser-cut laminate and other materials, the work will also be on view in a summer solo show at Ornamentum Gallery in Hudson, NY and at SOFA Chicago in November, where she’ll present a Society of North American Goldsmiths lecture. Rebecca teaches at Nova Scotia College of Arts & Design in Halifax and worked on perfecting the linking system during a residency at Techshop in San Francisco while on sabbatical.

Marc Cavello FAV (Locust Valley, NY) recently launched marccavellorart.com and marccavelloalbums.com, two websites featuring 20 years of his art and music. In a recent interview with the Lectra Fashion Network, Michelle Courtois AP spoke about her experiences in design and her work for The Design Library, a compre-

hensive textiles archive. Based in NYC, Michelle is also a part-time instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Last December Rafael de Cardenas AP landed at the top of Sight Unseen’s 2016 American Design Hot List. The NYC-based architect says that his studio, which also celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, has been working

on a larger scale but he still loves smaller-scale projects like a recent collaboration with the eyewear designers at Gentle Monster.

1997 20th Reunion October 6–8, 2017 Andy Ristaino FAV (see pages 38–43)

Lesley (Bartholomew) Malouin 92 GD Twenty abstract paintings were on view in February in Lesley’s first solo show — at Bridgewater Public Library’s Flora T. Little Gallery in Bridgewater, MA, where she lives. An award-winning graphic designer (malouin design.com), she says her paintings are “influenced by do-it-yourself punk and street art, found objects, social memes and the Italian futurists.” She donated a portion of the proceeds from the sales exhibition to the American Lyme Disease Foundation. Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

Leigh Ledare 00 PH A 2017 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Leigh (NYC) exhibited Vokzal (2016, still from 16mm film, approximately 60 minutes) in a spring solo show by the same name at The Box in Los Angeles. Shot in Moscow, the film focuses on individual behavior that indicates social breakdown and is included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which continues through June 11.

KEY CURRENT MAJORS Apparel Design

Arch Architecture CR Ceramics 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

5 T H -Y E A R D E G R E E BArch Architecture MASTER’S DEGREES Art Education (formerly MAE)

MArch Architecture MAT Teaching MDes Design in Interior Studies MFA

Fine Arts

MID

Industrial Design

MIA

Interior Architecture

MLA Landscape Architecture FORMER MAJORS Advertising Design

AE Art + Design Education LA Landscape Architecture MD

Machine Design

Textile Chemistry

Textile Engineering

F O R M E R 5 T H -Y E A R DEGREES BGD

Graphic Design

BID

Industrial Design

BIA Interior Architecture BLA Landscape Architecture OTHER BRDD Brown/RISD Dual Degree CEC Continuing Education Certificate FS

enrolled for Foundation Studies only

* attended RISD, but no degree awarded

// undergraduate class notes

1998 Earlier this year Joshua Abelow PT (Harris, NY) exhibited work in Miss You, a solo show on view at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, NY. While on sabbatical this year, long-time RISD faculty member Clara Lieu IL has collaborated with a number of alumni and others to build and expand Art Prof, a new online educational platform she cofounded with digital strategy and production expert Thomas Lerra. Through the site, she and a team of practicing artists in various disciplines offer free video tutorials and interactive content for art students around the world. Inspired by living in Kansas City right after graduating from RISD, Cory (Greeson) Wright PT illustrated City Market! (written by Jill Ballou and published by Bicycle Bell Books), her first children’s book. Her

Annie Evelyn 99 FD/MFA 07 Currently an artist in residence at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, Annie is known for her alternative upholstery techniques—using everything from concrete to metal scales to handmade paper flowers (see back cover) in unexpected ways. This year she earned a $25,000 John D. Mineck Fellowship from the Society of Arts and Crafts, which dubs her “a superstar” capable of “really great things.”

playful watercolors help tell the tale of two friends as they discover the world close to home at the City Market.

1999 Sarah Madeleine Tierney Guérin BArch recently won an Awesome Foundation grant in support of her Ten Footer project, which is aimed at

establishing a new generation of shoemaking and other shops for craftsmen in the Boston area. Pierre St. Jacques PT participated in Small Works Salon, a group show curated by Leah Oates 91 IL that ran last December at her gallery, Station Independent Projects in NYC.

The RISD Museum recently acquired Untitled (Tablet, Aluminum 11.12), a 2013 work by Ryan Wallace IL (NYC). The artist also showed work in Process, a group exhibition that ran from January through mid May at Barrick Museum in Las Vegas.

2000 Megan Biddle GL is exhibiting new sculptures and drawings in Folded Mountain, a solo show that continues through June 18 at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery in Philadelphia. Using paper-folding techniques to generate forms, she explores

Antoine Revoy 99 FAV Invited to contribute an illustration for last fall’s Sequel 2 show at the iam8bit gallery in Los Angeles, Antoine created a poster for a fictional documentary called Purple Rain “Encore”— as an homage to the late musician. The illustration has since been featured on such sites as Fast Company, Slashfilm and Gizmodo, among many others. Antoine is a long-time adjunct faculty member at RISD.

notions of time through materials and process: the spontaneity of glass as it goes

from molten liquid to a crystalline solid and the compressive strength of

Jennifer Palmer 98 IL The Wompananny Witches Make One Mean Pizza (Abrams Books for Young Readers), Jennie’s first picture book, is due out this fall. After a 14-year career as a TV and Macy’s parade production designer, she rediscovered the joy of drawing and storytelling a few years ago when her family relocated to Burbank, CA and she began caring for their three young children full time.

concrete as sediments solidify and cure over time. Her mixed media sculptures combine the weightlessness of paper and the density of concrete into objects that could be relics of a geologic event. Megan lives in Philadelphia, where she teaches in the Glass Program at Tyler School of Art. In response to congressional efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Cullen Boudreaux IL—a freelance illustrator based in Baton Rouge, LA—contributed to a Philly Soapbox campaign that made postcards available for US citizens to petition their elected officials.

2001 Holly Gaboriault CEC is now the Providence Athenaeum’s permanent director of programs after recently serving in that role on an interim basis. Robert Geller AP (see page 7) Chris Specce ID (see page 58) Having already competed on HGTV’s White Room Challenge Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

Matt Lamothe 02 FAV + Jenny Volvovski 02 GD For the past couple of years, Matt and Jenny have collaborated on the newly released book This Is How We Do It (Chronicle Books). Meant to foster cross-cultural understanding, the story presents a day in the life of seven real kids from around the world (Iran, Russia, Japan, India, Uganda, Peru, and Italy). Matt wrote and illustrated the book while Jenny designed it.

and Ellen’s Design Challenge, Melissa Rivera Torres Moir ID/MA 05 (Little Rock, AR) was one of the first designers to participate in The Toy Box, a new design competition series on ABC with kids in the judges’ seats. She presented her proposal for a Lightbox Terrier on the episode that aired on April 21. Mattel manufactured the winning toy design, which was sold at Toys “R” Us immediately after the final episode aired. Brooklyn-based artist, composer, performer and vocalist Sarah Small PH created a vocal arrangement of the Bulgarian folksong Sadila Jana for Sing Me Home, a new album by cellist Yo-Yo Ma that won the 2017 Grammy for Best World Music Album. // RISDXYZ

In January she also got a good response to her performance Secondary Dominance, a theatrical interpretation of her upcoming solo record that debuted at this year’s PROTOTYPE Festival in NYC.

2002 15th Reunion October 6–8, 2017 Jessica Frelinghuysen PR (see page 11) Uhuru, the Brooklyn-based furniture and home goods studio founded by Bill Hilgendorf ID and Jason Horvath ID, was included in Sight Unseen’s 2016 American Design Hot List. Uhuru also recently opened a showroom in Manhattan and launched a new collection of steel furniture. spring/summer 2017

GROWING WONDER B U I LD I N G O N A P L AY F U L S T Y LE that extends to her Boygirlparty brand of gifts and stationery, Susie Ghahremani 02 IL has released two new picture books since the start of the year. Stack the Cats (Abrams Appleseed), which surfaced at the beginning of May, marks the illustrator’s debut as an author. With few words, the cat-infested concept book is “as fun as it is clever,” according to Booklist, conveying early math skills for toddlers in a way that Publisher’s Weekly finds both “impossibly adorable” and “sublimely silly.” What Will Grow? (Bloomsbury Kids), Ghahremani’s most recent book with author and longtime collaborator Jennifer Ward, has also been warmly welcomed since its release on Valentine’s Day. Her gouache on wood artwork captures the wonder of growing a garden from seed to full bloom. “Featuring rounded, simplified botanical forms, the book’s decorative gouache paintings are playful and satisfying,” notes the Booklist review. “Quietly lovely… Ghahremani’s art is playful yet refined,” writes the reviewer

Nita Yuvaboon BArch 03 + Prow Puttorngul BArch 05 for Publisher’s Weekly, which gives the book a starred review. Between illustrating picture books, designing stationery and gifts, shipping orders, painting tiny paintings and exhibiting her work, it’s a wonder that Ghahremani has time for anything beyond sleep. But she also teaches at RISD, maintains an active online presence and makes time for fun in sunny San Diego with her husband and zillions of pets.

Ghahremani’s original paintings for What Will Grow? were on view earlier this spring as part of a month-long solo show at Giant Robot’s GR2 Gallery in Los Angeles. She also recently earned a Mentorship Award at the portfolio show held in conjunction with the 2017 Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference in NYC.

For more on Susie’s work, go to hello.boygirlparty.com.

Through their studio Nitaprow Architects (nitaprow.com) in Bangkok, Nita and Prow have been practicing architecture and interior design together since 2013, working on projects ranging from new construction to interior and exterior renovations, exhibitions, custom furniture and master planning.

2002 continued After 10 years as cofounder of her previous creative agency, Tana Llinás GD started a new company in 2016 called Brand Poets (brandpoets.com). Based in Miami, the 10-person firm

specializes in brand development and digital media strategy across a range of industries. Family life with her husband and two sons helps her balance the challenges of running her own business.

Caitlin Keegan 02 IL The Illuminated Tarot: 53 Cards for Divination and Gameplay (Clarkson Potter), the first book Caitlin has both written and illustrated, was published in April. The guidebook also offers a tarot deck that can be used for playing cards. Caitlin is based in Brooklyn.

Natalie Nakazawa 04 PT Natalie’s work for Multilocational, a two-woman show on view from mid March through June 25 at The Old Stone House in Brooklyn, conveys both the struggles and joy of holding on to memories of an original home while embracing a new one. As an educator in the NYC public school system, this spring she has also been presenting public programs and related work created in collaboration with local students.

2003 Jessica Hess IL has participated in several exhibitions this year, including the Urvanity Art Fair in Madrid, Six Women at Diana Felber Gallery in Stockbridge, MA, the Twenty by Sixteen Biennial at Morgan Lehman Gallery and Pretty Creepy at Booth Gallery, both in NYC. Based in Oakland, CA, she’s also showing work in Moleskine Project VI, which runs from July 8 through August 7 at Spoke Art in San Francisco, and in Less is More, a solo exhibition

that opens in September at Hashimoto Contemporary, also in San Francisco. Coloring My Military Life: Book 1, a coloring book by Christina Rodriguez IL that’s part of a new series of illustrated books about military families, was released last November by Elva Resa Publishing. She lives in Providence and works in RISD’s Alumni Relations office. Amy Voloshin TX, founder and creative director of the 10-yearold company Printfresh in Philadelphia, launched a new line of stationery last December, which she exhibited at the National Stationery Show at the Javits Center in NYC in May. The notebooks and other products in the line reflect her own bohemian aesthetics.

2004 Shara Hughes PT (see pages 18-21)

Freelance cinematographer and editor Nick Marcouz FAV recently filmed and edited two music videos for Lovely Hoffman: A Kwanzaa Song and My Black is Beautiful, which debuted in January. Nick is also the founding teaching artist and filmmaker in residence at Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts (TAPA), a grade 7–12 charter school in Providence, where he lives.

2005 At the 2017 Design Indaba

Sonjie Feliciano Solomon 02 ID After exhibiting at The Curator Gallery in Chelsea last spring, Sonjie was invited to participate in the gallery’s Artists of the Year show last winter. While raising three kids in Brooklyn, she also recently released a new PockeTeez shirt through her brand, Hatch Things. “I miss RISD so much,” Sonjie writes. “I was in the ID program when I was a new mom… and graduated pregnant with my second! I already brought my child up to RISD for a college tour. Circle of life.”

conference in South Africa, RISD trustee Joe Gebbia GD/ ID spoke about how he and Brian Chesky 04 ID helped launch the sharing economy in 2008 with their popular home-

sharing site Airbnb. Now they lead a $30-billion company that provides accommodations for more than 150 million guests in 191 countries worldwide (see also pages 6 + 48).

Asher Penn 04 PH In 2012 Asher launched Sex (sexmagazine.us), a super satisfying online cultural magazine that has now been anthologized as a book. Sex Magazine #1–10 2012 – 2015 (powerHouse Books) features a series of pithy interviews with a huge range of artists, including many from RISD (ranging from Eckhaus Latta to Brian Gibson 98 IL , Quinn Taylor 02 SC , Rachel B. Glaser 05 PT, Jamie Krasner 11 PR and others). Asher is based in NYC. Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

Hayley Morris 08 FAV As the mastermind behind Shape & Shadow animation studio in Providence, Haley has been attracting welldeserved attention for a new stop-motion video she made for The Ecstatics, a track from Explosions in the Sky’s new studio album The Wilderness. In the trippy three-minute piece, she deftly transforms paper, glass and translucent objects into human body parts (simulating breathing lungs and blood coursing through veins).

also in Hong Kong. Hilda also curated the Art Basel show for Gallery Exit in Hong Kong, where she works. In November ESPNW ran an interview with textiles designer Pascale Gueracague TX about her current role as concept director at lululemon lab in NYC, where she experiments with new textiles, fabric techniques and dye treatments in helping to develop the company’s reflective apparel for runners. During the month of January, Alice O’Neill PR exhibited a new collection of paintings in a solo show at AS220 in Providence, where she lives.

Becky Fong 05 GD Becky gave birth to Lillian Sum-Yin Hughes (aka Lulu) on December 28, 2016 at Women & Infants Hospital in Providence, RI. She and her husband Aaron are thrilled to be new parents and are enjoying family life in Millis, MA. She was also recently promoted to director of Graphics & Design at Honorcraft in Stoughton, MA.

2005 continued Based on the strength of Paulina & Fran (2015), her first novel, Rachel B. Glaser PT has been named to Granta’s list of the 21 best young American novelists to watch. As the 2017 Creative Fellow at Providence Public Library (PPL), Keri King IL created a new mural that was installed at the library last winter. She drew inspiration from the PPL 80

// undergraduate class notes

archives in creating the mural, which is on view through the end of June in the library’s spring exhibition On the Table.

2006 Sojourn with Stranger, a book project curated by Hilda Chan FAV, was on view in late March at Tai Kwun gallery’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong. The book was launched last December in an exhibition that ran for three weeks at Mur Nomade,

Last winter at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, Alexander Rosenberg GL (Philadelphia) debuted Pretium Certum Constitutum, a chimerical sculpture made of pipes from glass artists who earn some of their income from the fast-evolving cannabis economy. Hoping this “super bong” will help support the banking rights of members of that community, he has arranged for proceeds from the sale of his work to go to civil rights organizations chosen by his collaborators. Last fall Newport, RI-based artist Eleanor Sabin SC participated in Crystal Clear,

a group exhibition at the Bristol [RI] Art Museum. Julia Sherman PH (see page 15)

2007 10th Reunion October 6–8, 2017 Sight Unseen named Grain, the company on Bainbridge Island, WA founded by husband and wife James Minola ID and Chelsea Green Minola MID, to its 2016 American Design Hot List. “Our design education taught us how rewarding it is to collaborate and learn from one another,” said the designers, who debuted their latest collection—which is inspired by a recent residency in Northeastern Oregon—as part of NYCxDESIGN in May.

2008 Earlier this spring Josh Chodorow IL started working at RISD as a coordinator in the RISD Global office, serving as the initial point of contact with students, faculty and international partners. Prior to returning to campus, he worked as a teacher, nonprofit administrator and freelance artist. Six years ago, just a month after her father died from pancreatic cancer, Emily Habansky JM (emilyhabansky.com) dove into a pool and suffered a C-5

fracture that left her paralyzed from the neck down. With tremendous effort, she has worked to recover increasingly more mobility and has begun actively painting and exhibiting in the Bay Area. Years of self-discovery as a shaman and ongoing questions about what it means to live with a significant disability inform her work.

Charlie Leese 08 SC Editions Shells is among the work Charlie exhibited this spring in Divided Attention, a two-person show at Bass & Reiner Gallery in San Francisco, where he lives. He makes use of enduring materials such as cast bronze, welded steel, carved stone and so forth to build forms suggestive of landscapes and architectural models.

Brandon Polansky and Samantha Elisofon star

in Israel’s award-winning film Keep the Change, a romantic comedy that focuses on and features a cast of people on the autism spectrum.

EXCEPTIONAL COMEDY WINS BIG J U S T G E T T I N G her feature-length film accepted at this spring’s Tribeca Film Festival was enough to send writer-director Rachel Israel 07 FAV over the moon. But to top that, the romantic comedy she poured her heart and soul into for more than five years went on to win top honors as the Best US Narrative feature at the festival. And she was also thrilled to accept the festival’s award for Best New Narrative Director. Based on her well-received 2013 short film of the same name, Keep the Change is a love story about a charming guy named David (played by Brandon Polansky ) who struggles to hide his high-functioning autism. Forced to attend a support group for people on the spectrum, he falls in love with Sarah ( Samantha Elisofon ), who challenges his belief that he’s “normal.” Israel was moved to make the film when she first became friends with Polansky, the protagonist in her film, 15 years ago. “The story was inspired by his real-life struggle to find and ultimately maintain romantic love,” she says. “The project grew into something bigger as I got to know the autism community at the JCC Manhattan, which is where Brandon met his first girlfriend. I came to know some amazing people there and became obsessed with bringing them to the screen. I had never seen characters anything like them portrayed in narrative film before.”

After earning two Sundance grants, Israel turned to crowdsourcing to clear the rest of the fundraising hurdle and, with a cast of people on the spectrum, was finally able to shoot the film in NYC in 2015. Fellow RISD grad and TV and film producer Ryan Cunningham 02 FAV, who works with some of the leading comedians in the business through her NYC-based production studio Running Man, co-produced the comedy. In presenting Keep the Change with the award for this year’s best narrative feature, film festival jurors called it a “heartwarming, hilarious and consistently surprising reinvention of the New York romantic comedy, which opens a door to a world of vibrant characters not commonly seen on film.” And the jurors who also unanimously chose Israel as winner of this year’s new director award note that in their search for “a filmmaker with a fearless, authentic voice,” they found in her a writer/director not only able to create “a world full of vibrant characters often under-represented in cinema” but tell a “unique, yet universal love story in a way we’ve never seen.”

Israel teaches at RISD but has been on leave this year, busy giving birth to Charlotte Hannah Enger, who accompanied her to the Tribeca Film Festival awards ceremony. She and her husband Kurt welcomed their daughter on October 19, 2016.

Michael Stoddard 10 IL Michael recently created these life-sized steel zebras for the entrance to a new mixed-use building in Lucerne, Switzerland designed by his friend, architect Thomas Etienne BArch 11. The building currently houses an electrical engineering firm and local university on the first three floors and apartments on the top floor. Michael lives and works in the Boston area.

created by Mike Eckhaus SC and Zoe Latta TX, is one of five labels chosen for Nordstrom’s new Space Lab incubator program, which is designed to help emerging designers market their products. Lab designs are available at Nordstrom’s Space boutiques in Chicago, LA, Seattle, Toronto and Vancouver as well as online.

2011

2008 continued James Viscardi PT is among New American Paintings’ Northeastern Competition winners featured in the February/March 2017 edition of the magazine. “I am working

toward bringing movement and passage into the static stillness of painting,” says the artist, who lives and works in NYC. 16 Women Pushing Design Forward in the United States, an Artsy editorial published

Annie Bailey 10 IL Annie’s recent paintings, mixed media works and time-based moving images will be on view in Beneath the Surface: Reflections on the Underbelly, a solo show at North Haven [ME] Gallery from July 30 through August 5. She also recently made a “crankie” illustrated scroll (shown in process below) for the Art of Disaster, which ran from October through April at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, ME.

// undergraduate class notes

on March 8 to coincide with International Women’s Day, highlighted designer Jessica Walsh GD of Sagmeister & Walsh in NYC as one of several RISD women serving as positive role models in maledominated professions.

2009 Jennifer Hom IL (see page 4) Manuel and Kayoung Lee ID celebrated the birth of their daughter Luna Ava on October 31, 2016 in Stony Brook,

NY. Kayoung is senior web designer at Gilte Group in NYC. Joshua Vizzacco GD and Carolyn Spinney ID got married on July 9, 2016 in Harvard, MA. The couple is based in Boston, where Carolyn works as an art director for Wayfair and Joshua runs Vizzacco, a graphic design and branding studio he established in 2009.

2010 Eckhaus Latta, the largely gender-neutral fashion brand

Providence-based designer Miles Endo ID launched a series of hexagonal LED pendants and chandeliers, along with a new dining table and storage unit, at this year’s Architectural Digest Design Show in NYC. After months of preparation and then working in her Westchester County, NY studio, Rebecca Manson CR completed The Sphere, a massive sculpture based on her ceramic “bone motif.” A 2016 Windgate Project Grant helped her literally get the piece off the ground. In late March Alexander McCarger BArch and fellow

Francesca Capone 09 TX In February Text means Tissue, an exhibition featuring Francesca’s woven textiles and highlighting the relationship between text and textiles, was on view at Nationale in Portland, OR, where she lives. Both the show and an accompanying publication with writings by 30 artists explores interstices of the body, cloth and language, with a focus on femininity and how textiles have historically served as a means of expression for women.

Fulbright alum Tashrika Sharma exhibited their collaborative installation

Perhapsburg at the Museumquartier in Vienna, Austria, where Alexander lives.

Charlap Hyman & Herrero, the bicoastal studio led by Adam Charlap Hyman FD and Andre Herrero BArch, were included in Sight Unseen’s 2016 American Design Hot List. “The intersections of different disciplines are particularly exciting for us,” the designers note. Dubbed “the wunderkind of furniture” by The New York Times, Brooklyn-based maker Misha Kahn FD was among those selected for Forbes magazine’s 2017 list of 30 Under 30 promising artists and designers.

Aaron Perry-Zucker 09 GD On Inauguration Day, Creative Action Network, the organization Aaron cofounded in 2013, launched What Makes America Great, a poster initiative celebrating aspects of life in America that citizens cherish and want to uphold. The San Francisco-based designer and community organizer contributed this poster to the series and invited 99 other artists to contribute their own work so that he could release one poster a day for the first 100 days of the new administration. Proceeds from poster sales support DreamCorps, a social justice accelerator dedicated to advancing economic, environmental and criminal justice issues. Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

Susanne Lamb 10 IL, Lorraine Nam 10 IL + Laura Korzon 10 IL Last December the three illustrators and former roommates at RISD launched Illustrated Impact, a not-for-profit website and newsletter meant to remind people about the importance of compassion by using illustration to educate and inform. So far they’ve posted original illustrations by a wide range of artists to draw attention to such organizations as the ACLU, America’s VetDogs (that’s Susanne’s illustration above), Planned Parenthood, the Native American Rights Fund, Immigration Equality and the Boys & Girls Club, among others.

A January story in Forbes focused on Mishcat Co., the startup Ishrat Sahgal IA founded in 2013 to design interiors around beautiful carpets. Working in New Delhi, // RISDXYZ

India, she’s offering an alternative to the country’s maledominated textiles industry by hosting training sessions and providing other opportunities for women weavers. spring/summer 2017

Max Levi Frieder 12 PT Now a PhD candidate in the Art & Art Education department at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Max is also continuing his global arts advocacy work through Artolution, a nonprofit he cofounded to bring the healing power of community art projects to people in need throughout the world. Here he’s shown shaking hands with a boy in Cali, Colombia.

deranged, ugly and demented into their lives through usable objects.”

2013 In January Forbes magazine named Jamie Wolfond FD, founder of the Brooklynbased design company Good Thing, to its annual 30 Under 30 list. Since 2014 he and his small team of designers have been creating “useful tools that are more thoughtful, better looking and longerlasting than their existing counterparts.”

Tom McFarland 14 PT of design, craft and process, resulting in holistic approachable design.”

2012 Chicago-based filmmaker Anne Beal FAV was thrilled to earn a seven-week artist residency earlier this year at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH, where she began work on a new animated film loosely based on Emily Post’s approach as detailed in her book Etiquette.

Zarela Yaluk Mosquera 11 ID Zarela recently worked with Marshall Moya Design to create The Walkway, a public project commissioned by the mayor’s Vision Zero initiative in Washington, DC. Designed to encourage people to reflect on interactions that occur in public spaces, the temporary pavilion on 14th and U streets NW invited people to walk through it and activate motion sensors that trigger different voices and comments. The structure got narrower and lower towards the back end, creating a physical feeling of claustrophobia and discomfort similar to what happens when a person is harassed on the street.

2011 continued Work by Malvika Vaswani ID was selected for inclusion in 20 under 35, a winter exhibition at 84

// undergraduate class notes

the Alliance Francaise in Delhi. She operates an eponymous brand in Mumbai that she describes as “the meeting point

In May Monocle magazine named Visibility, the Brooklyn-based studio run by Sina Sohrab FD and Joseph Guerra FD, to The Roll Cool, its list of their “favorite 25 design pieces in the world right now.” The two focus on the concept and design of products like mirrors, chairs and desk accessories, working with manufacturers to handle the production and marketing through retailers such as Matter and Kontextür. “The work frees us up to be very agile,” Sina says. “I just want to make beautiful things that are really useable,” Joseph adds.

Furniture designer Katie Stout FD was named to Forbes magazine’s 2017 list of 30 Under 30 in the category of Art & Style. Based in Brooklyn, the designer says she wants her playful designs to “encourage people to invite the slightly

Red Hot Potato Chips (2016, inkjet print on vinyl mesh, coated steel tube, hardware) is among the work Unix Gallery New York, which represents him, showed last summer at Art Southampton 2016 and in a September gallery show. Tom (tommcfarland.com) works out of his studio in Brooklyn.

ORGANIC GROWTH O F T H E H U N D R E D S O F N E W T H I N G S Otis Gray 14 SC made at RISD, one of the most personally

satisfying was a seemingly simple chicken dinner. “I honestly had never cooked anything until I got to college,” he recalls, “so that first real meal I made was eye-opening. I realized right away that I had started something I wished I had done a long time before.” Now Gray is pursuing his obsession with food from a different vantage point — telling the stories behind the things we eat. Since last year he has been sharing them via Hungry, a podcast that explores connections between food, history, politics and identity. This year’s season has tackled the Syrian refugee crisis, taken listeners to a restaurant called Trump Café in rural Texas and featured an innovative lettuce farm in the middle of Appalachia, replete with a brief conversation with Bernie Sanders.

“Just like your creative process, if you let your life after school grow organically, it can take you to some really cool places.” “Just like your creative process, if you let your life after school grow organically, it can take you to some really cool places,” says Gray. While working 11-hour shifts in a Philadelphia-area bronze foundry, he discovered the allure of podcasts and soon saved enough to buy the best sound recording equipment he could and give it a try — initially by reporting on the “killer food scene” in his South Philly neighborhood. Since relocating to Brooklyn last year, Gray now works in a Chelsea restaurant, where he asks the chefs “probably way too many questions” Tune in to Hungry at hungryradio.org.

in his ongoing efforts to take Hungry in exciting new directions. A recent grant from the New Mexico-based Owl Peak Farm Foundation has helped him travel outside the northeast and bring fellow alumni into the mix for season two. “At RISD I met insanely talented people who I want to involve in whatever I do,” he says of artists like Jia Sung 15 IL, who has created artwork for two Hungry episodes. For Gray one of the biggest challenges of podcasting is learning to work in an audio versus visual medium — to tell strong stories verbally.

“But RISD taught me that you can do anything,” he says. “It just takes time and making a shit-ton of mistakes to get there.” Although Gray still fills his sketchbooks with visual observations and “would really love to get dirty [in the studio] sometime,” for now he’s committed to focusing on food as a means of building bridges in an increasingly polarized society. “The world is so batshit insane right now that we really need to sit down and listen to one another,” he says. “And I really believe that happens best over food.” 85

2014

LOVING LEARNING

In March Jordan Seaberry PT earned a MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation, a $25,000 award that supports “emerging and mid-career artists whose work demonstrates… significant artistic merit.” Since graduation he has worked with a variety of nonprofits and community-based organizations in Providence and now serves as director of public policy at the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, where he’s continuing an ongoing series of painted portraits that pays homage to local victims of gun violence. He plans to use the grant funding to expand his

Grace Rivera 15 PH

Kimberly Corday 14 TX

A F E W W E E K S S H Y O F G R A D UAT I O N

in 2015 I was recruited as a summer intern on the Art Production team at Wieden + Kennedy HQ in Portland, OR. At the time I had absolutely no idea what that meant, nor had I ever been to the West Coast. All I knew was that it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I packed my car the day after graduation, cried my goodbyes and drove west for the next six days. Two years later I’ve gone from an intern, to production assistant, to lead image researcher and in-house photographer. A big part of the art producer’s role is to find the right photographer or illustrator for a print concept. As the image researcher, it’s my job to know

where to source imagery that will be used in client presentations, to aid art directors in visualizing their ideas, to provide reference for a shoot and so on. Already this job has given me an elevated taste level and an improved lighting sensibility as a photographer, along with the knowledge and confidence to articulate my opinions to some of the most seasoned creative professionals in the industry. On the photography front, I create a variety of in-house content for PR, clients and use on social media. I’m also the photographer for a recurring publishing project called On She Goes, which is a travel site specifically geared towards women of color. Beyond W+K I’m freelancing and constantly working on my personal work. I’ve collaborated with a number of local musicians and rappers, shot for beauty brands based here in Portland and in LA, and frequently been commissioned for portraits and lifestyle content. Ultimately, I’m looking to continue down the avenue of fashion photography and find representation when the time is right. I’ve still got a lot of learning to do, but am thoroughly enjoying every step of the way.

For more go to gracerivera.me or instagram.com/gracerivera.

Kimmy’s new wall hangings were on view this spring at Three Squares Studio in NYC. “My process is Frankensteinian,” she writes from her home base in Toluca Lake, CA. “Borrowing aspects of weaving, embroidery and collage, I make textured objects that conjure up an amalgam of natural phenomena like threadbare pelts, nests or overgrown brush…. This series spotlights organic, sometimes misshapen forms as well as the relationship between beauty and decay.”

repertoire through experimentation in sculpture, mixed media and larger 3D projects.

2015 In March photographer Nicole Buchanan PH (Atlanta) spoke at the RISD Museum about The Skin I’m In, a portrait series of fellow black students she made during her senior year. The museum recently acquired 10 portraits from her series of 50 and exhibited several this spring at Café Pearl. Haejin Park IL (see pages 96–97)

2016 Saad Moosajee GD and Barron Webster GD collaborated with other NYC-based creatives on RegisterMeFirst, a campaign launched in March by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Seeing the #registermefirst hashtag that gained traction last fall as a strong “symbol of resistance against Islamophobia,” they contributed to the design of merchandise, branding and the registermefirst.com website, which encourages people to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans targeted by the policy proposals of the current presidential administration.

Jes Fan 14 GL Jes Fan: No Clearance in Niche was on view in March and April at MAD’s project space in NYC. The exhibition showcased the artwork Jes produced while in residence at the museum as a 2016 Van Lier Fellow and was accompanied by a talk and workshop. The Brooklyn-based artist, whose trans-disciplinary practice is based on a material inquiry into otherness as it relates to identity politics, also recently completed a residency at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn that culminated in a performance piece making use of the silicone barbells developed during the MAD residency.

Deaths Richard Carpenter 40 GD of Newtown Square, PA on 2.4.17.

Delos Brown 61 MD of Seneca, SC on 7.25.15.

Natica (Bates) Satterthwaite 41 LA of Freeport, ME on 8.12.15.

Donald Lavallee 61 Arch of Hampton, NH on 3.21.17.

Jean (Young) Haley 43 AP of Barrington, RI on 3.4.17.

Paul Donham 64 LA of Wayland, MA on 1.31.17.

Esther (Dudley) Prisloe 43 AE of Guilford, CT on 3.19.17.

Ludwig Caminita 66 SC of Dallas, OR on 10.17.15.

Sara (Manheimer) Ulman

Robert Ornstein BArch 68 of Hope Valley, RI on 1.25.17.

43 AP of Canton, MA on

12.22.16.

Annalisa van den Bergh 14 GD This summer Annalisa is bicycling across the US from Yorktown, VA to Astoria, OR. Over the course of three months, she’ll bike 4,000 miles through 11 states and will take a photo of everyone she meets along the way. Follow her progress at 4000miles ofportraits.com.

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

Dorothy Bolian 47 IL of Middleboro, MA on 5.12.16.

Richard McConnell 70 Arch of Saratoga Spring, NY on 12.1.16.

Lewis Bennett 51 ID of Bend, OR on 2.9.17.

Randall Darwall 73 AE of Bass River, MA on 1.9.17.

Pietro Audino 52 ID of Yarmouthport, MA on 3.16.17.

Carolyn (Hall) Young 75 PT of Santa Fe, NM on 12.24.16.

Joseph Shekerow 54 GD of Cranston, RI on 12.11.16.

David Wilder 77 SC of Cleveland, OH on 3.25.17.

Helen (Soos) Penhale 58 TX of Walled Lake, MI on 12.1.16.

Patrick Henry 95 FAV of Santa Monica, CA on 1.9.17.

Conrad Bousquet 59 ID of Rockville, MD on 3.2.17.

Venus (McCrea) Winston 03 IL of Hyattsville, MD on 12.11.16.

James Dolan 60 AE of Warwick, RI on 3.27.17. Carol (Dooley) Westfall 60 AP of Jersey City, NJ on 12.11.16. // RISDXYZ

Scott Stevenson 10 AP of Brooklyn, NY on 1.26.17. Matthew Mahoney MFA 14 SC of Imperial Beach, CA on 1.25.17. spring/summer 2017

moving forward

Stephen March MFA 68 PT Forest III (2016 –17, tree and thicket branches, pennies, collage, red fabric, faux wolf fur, acrylic on paper, 30 x 22") is among the recent mixed media work and paintings exhibited in In the Forest, an April solo show at Amos Eno Gallery in NYC. Stephen works out of his home studio near Spring Grove, PA.

1968 Jim Dow 65 GD/MFA PH (see page 15)

1972 Kathryn V. Morrill MAE exhibited three paintings in the Instructors Show, a mid-winter exhibition at The Art Center Sarasota. After working as a textile stylist in NYC and an art specialist for the Fair Lawn, NJ school system, she and her husband have relocated from Bergen County, NJ to the Sarasota, FL area.

1974 Four by Six, a book of poetry by Sue Jensen Weeks MFA FAV (Salt Lake City), earned 88

honorable mention in the 2016 Utah Original Writing Competition. Competition judge Lola Haskins praised her poetry for how it “invokes a world with the fewest possible words.” In an ongoing series of international exhibitions, Arno Rafael Minkkinen MFA PH exhibited his photography this spring in Floating in the Air, a solo show at WILLAS contemporary in Oslo, Norway. Born in Finland, Arno has lived in New England most of his life and is now a professor emeritus at UMass/Lowell and a docent at Aalto University in Helsinki.

1977 In November Moth Vitals, a short film by Nancy Wyllie

Kate Blacklock MFA 87 CR Chinoise Panel #1 (detail, dye sublimation of aluminum) is among the work Kate showed in Looking Closely at What is Not There, a solo exhibition on view from mid January through early May at the Newport [RI] Art Museum. She teaches in RISD’s ID department.

MAE, became part of the permanent collection of the State Darwin Museum in Moscow. It was also screened at the museum last fall as one of 28 films selected for the Now & After International Video Art Festival. A professor of art and digital media at the Community College of Rhode Island, Nancy also participated in Navigating the Film Festival Landscape, a panel discussion that took place last November at the Aesthetica Short Film Festival in York, UK.

// graduate class notes

Cynthia Farnell MFA 01 PH Garlands (Constellation) (2017, pigment inkjet print on Belgian linen, 72 x 20") was among the work Cynthia exhibited in a winter solo show at {Poem88} in Atlanta, where she lives. The gallery now represents her.

1989 Last year John Armitage MFA GD (Berkeley, CA) released the book Bringing Numbers to Life: LAVA and Design-Led Innovation in Visual Analytics (Interaction Design Foundation, 2016), which demonstrates how people can use computing

technology to “discover and make sense out of the numbers that impact them.”

1995 Barbara Wong MA , an arts educator and social change agent who has served as executive director of

Kent Rogowski MFA 00 PH Last summer Kent exhibited in Fabulous Failures at the Les Rencontres de la Photographie Arles in Arles, France. An adjunct faculty member at RISD, he lives in Brooklyn and is showing this year in a show called Love = Love at the University of Mississippi.

In February Mark Shunney MFA SC launched the new Art Research Office (ARO) gallery in Santa Cruz, CA with Audiographa, an exhibition of work by web graphic designer Erik Zwierzynski. He recently told the county newspaper GoodTimes that he sees his role as that of an “artist/curator producing shows. I had been an installation artist, but now I feel like an environmental artist.”

1998

1997 As the creative director at Scrollmotion, a NYC-based software company that designs and produces mobile apps, Criswell Lappin MFA GD

recently worked on InGage, a digital presentation app now available on iTunes. He also teaches in the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.

Cathleen Gouveia MIA was named president of the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) California North chapter for 2016–17. In 2015 she also received the ASID California North Design Excellence Award for Best Showhouse Design and second place for the Best Project Under 3,000 sf.

2001 Linda Arbuckle MFA 83 SC Linda’s work was on view earlier this year in The Color of Daily Life: Majolica Pottery, a solo show at Southern Utah Museum of Art in Cedar City showcasing her pottery as an expression of everyday joys. “The work is not a plateau,” notes the professor emeritus at the University of Florida. “You don’t reach nirvana and then just coast. It’s a constant effort.” Linda lives in Micanopy, FL.

Last fall Providence-based artist Jenine Bressner MFA TX participated in Crystal Clear, a group exhibition at the Bristol [RI] Art Museum.

Steve Jones MFA 98 GD Steve and Mamie Wong got married on February 7, 2016 at Castleton Botanical Gardens in Jamaica and welcomed their daughter, Harlem Éloïse Wong Jones, on May 6, 2016. The family lives in Oakland, CA. Two of Steve’s pieces of typographic art completed last year were featured in the 2017 Jamaica Biennial, which was on view this spring at the National Gallery of Jamaica in Kingston.

Providence CityArts for Youth for the past 16 years, has accepted a new position as director of community engagement at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

1992 For Ring of Fire, a site-specific atrium installation, digital

mixed media artist Anne Morgan Spalter MFA PT created an 800-sf charcoal sound drawing as an analog representation of rhythmic tribal drums. The piece was on view in early May as part of BKYLN IMMERSIVE at City Point in downtown Brooklyn, where Anne lives.

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

Jonathan Glatt MFA 04 JM + Sara Ossana MIA 05 O&G Studio in Warren, RI — known for high-quality, contemporary furniture crafted with traditional American Windsor techniques — has launched a new collaboration with Rejuvenation in Portland, OR to produce custom lighting and hardware, along with a few furniture pieces.

Last year NYC-based art educator Amy Charleroy MAE launched Juvenilia, a webbased platform that invites practicing artists and designers to share work that they made in high school or early college. The project—which includes contributions from Tom DesLongchamp 07 FAV and Rachel Branham MA 13—was inspired by her conversations with high school students about how individual styles, tastes and sensibilities develop in the beginning stages of an art practice. A doctoral candidate in Art Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College and a curriculum designer at the College Board, Amy also wants to use Juvenilia to introduce aspiring artists to the wide range of career options in art and design. In February perinatal psychologist Jane Hesser MFA PH co-led a session of the RISD Museum’s Clinical Arts program, an ongoing collaboration with Brown University’s Alpert Medical 90

// graduate class notes

School. During the workshop, she encouraged local doctors and medical students to carefully observe artworks in the museum’s collection as a means of understanding the importance of mindfulness in practicing medicine. As associates at the Philadelphia-based landscape architecture firm OLIN, Trevor Lee MLA and Demetrios Staurinos MLA 11 have been working together on the redevelopment of the 2.5-acre

2005 Los Angeles-based artist and designer Tanya Aguiñiga MFA FD is one of several RISD alums recognized in an Artsy editorial called 16 Women Pushing Design Forward in the United States, which ran on March 8 to coincide with International Women’s Day.

2006 Workstead—a design studio based in Brooklyn and Charleston, SC and led by cofounders Stefanie Brechbuehler MArch and

Robert Highsmith MArch 08, along with Ryan Mahoney MArch—participated in this year’s Architectural Digest Design Show in NYC. The trio launched two new products at the mid March exhibition: a coffee table and a new light from their Signal collection. Emily Fleisher MFA SC showed mixed media work in Flora, Fauna, Landscape, a solo exhibition at Artpace in San Antonio, where she lives. The show opened last September and ran through the new year. Earlier this year NYC-based photographer Amalia Mayita Mendez MFA PH wrapped up a three-year photograph-a-day project on Instagram highlighting people and nature. She is now selling prints and a book of images from the series, with a portion of the proceeds going

Mikko Keski-Vahala MFA 04 PR This hand-printed poster is among the works included in the Lahti International Poster Triennale, which is on view through September 24 at the Lahti [Finland] Art Museum. Mikko is based in Helsinki.

to the Luv Project, a philanthropic initiative of the SQ Foundation that helps restore sight to people in India with impaired vision. With support from a Pier 9 residency at Autodesk in San Francisco, Stephanie Pender MFA GL developed a Fused Filament Deposition Modeling (FFDM) printer that works in conjunction with a robotic arm to print 3D objects using glass fiber. In a short video recently released by Autodesk and

Saba Qizilbash MA 04 Cultures (acrylic + graphite on mylar in petri dishes) is among the varied work Saba exhibited in By Land, an April solo show at Koel Gallery in Karachi, Pakistan. Through her recent work, she evokes the geographic and humanitarian consequences of the 1947 partitioning of India and Pakistan. Saba, who lives in both Lahore and Dubai, was also one of 30 finalists in this year’s Sovereign Asian Art Prize, with her work on view this spring at Christie’s and The Rotunda in Hong Kong.

top right: photo by Juha Laitalainen

2002

Pier 26 in NYC. The design will provide “a physical and virtual space that brings to life the invisible dynamics of the Hudson River Estuary” while also creating areas for education, recreation and relaxation.

Lauren Was MFA 04 SC A Devil to Pay, the first solo show for Ghost of a Dream in Los Angeles, featured an installation and a set of collages made from casino carpets and cards. It was on view from late January through mid March at CES Gallery. In addition, Ghost of a Dream, Lauren’s ongoing partnership with Adam Eckstrom, participated in the Satellite Art Show at Art Basel/ Miami and in March did a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans.

the Nakajojo Biennale 2017’s “prelude” exhibition and will show in the main exhibition from September 9–19, both in Tokyo, where she lives.

available on Vimeo, she discusses her artistic practice and views on human-machine collaborations. In May the RISD adjunct faculty member spoke about her research as part of a spring lecture series celebrating 50 Years of Glass at RISD.

2007 Islay Taylor MFA JM has been promoted from a program director to associate director of The Steel Yard in Providence, where she has taught and worked since 2011. With more than 15 years of experience in art curation, teaching and jewelry making, she was also gallery director at Hera Gallery in Wakefield, RI and has exhibited her own line of jewelry both locally and internationally.

Last winter Stephanie Williams MFA SC (Washington, DC) showed work in Click Here, a group exhibition at Arlington [VA] Arts Center.

2008 Last fall Moon Jung Jang MFA GD showed recent work in But the Clouds, a solo exhibition at the Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art in Demorest, GA. The prints, books and anima-

tions in the show explored a variety of visual concepts in order to “translate paradoxical and inseparable relationships between space-time, structurelight, time-space, space-space, time-light-color, and time-age.” Moon is an assistant professor of Graphic Design at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art in Athens. Work by Courtney Leonard MFA CR is included in Without

a Theme, a group show that continues through November 2 at the Mashantucket [CT] Pequot Museum and Research Center. Earlier this year, Yuka Otani MFA GL (yukaotani.myportfolio. com) was the artist in residence at Pier-2 Art Center in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where she worked on Fluidness, a new installation on view from late March to the end of May. In May she also participated in

From late February through late March, Anna Pedersen MFA SC and Terra Goolsby MFA 10 SC exhibited sculptural works in Under the Skin, a two-person show at ICOSA in Austin. Anna and Terra are among the six RISD alums who in 2015 helped launch ICOSA, an artist-run gallery that mounts a new exhibition each month on the city’s Eastside. “The DIY spirit that characterizes the endeavor is directly influenced by our time at RISD,” says Jonas Criscoe MFA PT, who is also joined by David Bae MFA PT, Katy Horan 03 IL and Sara Vanderbeek 03 PR as ICOSA cofounders with RISD roots.

Christina Seely MFA 03 PH Next of Kin, Christina’s most recent installation, is on view through July 16 at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. After photographing extinct animals from the museum’s extensive taxidermy collection, she created mirrored light boxes in which their faces brighten slowly, gradually replacing the reflection of the viewer’s own face. Christina is an assistant professor of studio art at Dartmouth in Hanover, NH. Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

THE JOY OF MAKING by Yong Joo Kim MFA 09 JM

I WA S B O R N and raised in Seoul, the metropolitan capital of Korea with a population of more than 10 million. While it’s a beautiful city, what lies beneath is a seldom-talked-about cutthroat competition that permeates the culture. Immersed in that culture, I was taught that recognition was the ultimate goal. My peers believed that scoring high on exams and entering highly ranked universities were the only ways to gain recognition. For my female colleagues, beauty through plastic surgery was another way to do this.

A similar desire to achieve beauty was the goal of my undergraduate artwork. I spent a long time filing, sanding and polishing precious metals. I did not enjoy this, but I felt that it was a small price to pay to achieve the beauty that I so desired. All this changed when I moved to Providence for graduate work. Living in a different city came as a shock. I was completely alone, and it was hard to meet people. The culture shock, the language barrier and the workload all made it very difficult for me to feel at home. But I then realized that without the cultural restrictions of home, I was able to explore more freely. With nobody to stare at — and nobody to be stared at by — I started to dress down. Day by day, I felt the longing for beauty start to dissolve. Through this process of exploration, I realized that the world is full of unnoticed objects — objects that I find beautiful. As I became interested in their potential, I began taking these mundane objects and evolving them into something new. Instead of my usual repertoire of precious metals, my preferred materials now come from our everyday lives. By assembling, grouping, clustering and piling together small and simple elements, I learned that these materials possess beauty that I didn’t know existed. As the wearer approaches my work, I now hope to give them these sudden and unexpected realizations that spark wonder, discovery, tension, joy and play. This spring Kim’s work was on view in Infinity in Finity, her first solo show in Australia, held at Bini Gallery in Collingwood. In addition, three of her bracelets from a series called In Light of Space II have been acquired by the venerable Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and are now part of the museum’s permanent collection of Korean art.

For more go to yongjookim.com.

Laura Swanson MFA 11 DM As a Socrates Sculpture Park Fellow this summer, Laura will create and install her first public art sculpture in NYC, which will be on view from September through March 2018. Work such as Laura (above) from her new series Beauty will be on view in a solo show at the University of Leicester’s Attenborough Arts Centre in the UK from September 8 through December 10 and her work will also be featured in and on the cover of the book Anti-Portraiture: Challenging the Limits of the Portrait (October 2017, I.B. Taurus). In April Laura spoke about her NYC-based multimedia practice on the WAMC Northeast Public Radio podcast The Creative Process.

Brett Day Windham MFA 10 SC Earlier this year Brett exhibited new work in Encountering Masters, a group show at the Bristol [RI] Art Museum that also included new works by her father, Howard Windham 63 GD. The Brooklynbased artist also participated in Person of the Crowd, a spring exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and she and her husband George Terry MFA 08 SC celebrated the first birthday of their son Wolf Windham.

2009 In December Johnny Adimondo MFA PR , an adjunct faculty member at RISD, was the featured artist in The Hand magazine. He subsequently spoke about his work and process in an interview that ran in the quarterly art journal beautiful.bizarre, saying he is “hellbent on this idea of bringing the metaphysical to plastic/malleable form.”

Lumin Wakoa MFA 10 PT left: Last winter Lumin showed paintings in Meridian Atlas, a two-person show (with Claudia Peña Salinas) at Present Company in Brooklyn. In February the NYC-based artist discussed the show and her practice in a video interview for the documentary art project Gorky’s Granddaughter.

Monica Martinez MFA SC (see page 14) Late last fall Gabriela Salazar MFA PT showed work in Open Sessions: Cartography of Ghosts, a group exhibition at the Drawing Center in NYC. Laura Skinner MFA PH (see page 10)

photographers, “a lyrical study of the history of photography […] in a gathering of gemlike images.” Charlotte, who directs the Glass Studio at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA, married Patrick Kasic on January 21 and is expecting a baby girl this spring.

2011 On May 22, Egg Collective cofounder Crystal Ellis MFA SC (Brooklyn) participated in The New New York, a panel discussion at this year’s ICFF in NYC. Christina Kazakia MID (see page 13) Three years ago Leopold Masterson MFA CR left a career in psychiatry to devote his full energies to his studio practice.

Michelle Rawlings MFA 12 PT Untitled (2017, oil and mixed media on linen and acrylic frame, 7 x 10.5") is among the work exhibited in Michelle’s winter solo show at And Now gallery in Dallas. “Pictures are open,” the Dallas-based artist says about her motivations. “Nothing else seems so spacious.”

He now does print design and production from his studio in the East Village and makes ceramics and glass work at the Hudson, NY studio of his friend Nicole Cherubini 93 CR . Last fall Kendall Reiss MFA JM, who lives in Bristol, RI, participated in Crystal Clear, a group exhibition at the Bristol Art Museum.

2012 Austin Ballard MFA SC (Ridgewood, NY) participated in two group shows in January

and February: dog, tree, table at GRIN in Providence, and the PAAM Group Exhibition at the Provincetown [MA] Art Association and Museum.

Ted Gahl MFA 10 PT below: Ted exhibited work in Beaumont Sur Mer and Mind Reels, a pair of solo shows that ran earlier this year at Halsey McKay Gallery’s East Hampton [NY] and NYC locations, respectively. He lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Halsey McKay.

2010 Charlotte Potter MFA GL presented two new installations in a solo exhibition for the Association of International Photography Art Dealers’ 37th edition of The Photography Show, held this year at Pier 94 in NYC from March 30 through April 2. Titled Capturing Light and Cameographic, the installations connect cameo portraits of 100 notable

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

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

Amna Asghar MFA 14 PT Amna’s work is on view through June 24 in Cutting Room Floor, a group show at Karst and Gorse in Hudson, NY. This year she has also exhibited work in Nasty Women at The Knockdown Center in Queens, Through Thick and Thin: Image Painting Today at Erin Cluley Gallery in Dallas and The Armory Show in NYC. The Bronx-based artist’s work was also featured in Jhankaar, a spring solo show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in NYC.

in Tribeca. Originally from China, the artist/architect now lives and works in NYC. In February work by Brooklynbased artist Frances Denny MFA PH appeared in Intimate Photos Inspired by a New England Family, a feature in The New York Times magazine, T. The 13 images are from her recently released book Let Virtue Be Your Guide, which also received praise in a review on the What Will You

2013 Sophia Sobers MFA DM and Amanda Thackray MFA 12 PR participated in Cherry Blossoms in Winter, a public art project on view the entire month of

December at Essex County Branch Brook Park in Newark, NJ, where Amanda lives. Part of Newark’s 350th anniversary, the project aimed to “renew awareness of notions of art,

Cole Swavely MFA 13 PR Cole, a lieutenant in the US Navy, recently completed a deployment on the USS Wasp in support of Operation Odyssey Lightning, a mission to expel the Islamic State from Sirte, Libya. Based in Norfolk, VA, Cole is currently completing a body of work informed by his three-year experience at sea.

// graduate class notes

environment, public space and community engagement” throughout the city. Sophia is based in Pittsburgh, PA.

2014 Architectural drawings and digital collages by Sijie Chen MArch were on view in The Narrative of Lines: An Idiosyncratic Spatial Paradigm, a two-person show that ran in late March at Cloud Gallery

Soe Yu Nwe MFA 15 CR Cold Bloom (2016, glazed stoneware, 24 x 24 x 38") is one of the works that was on view last February in a solo show at Myanm/art. It was the artist’s first solo exhibition in her home city of Yangon, Myanmar. Soe Yu is currently a guest artist at Jingdezhen [China] International Studio and has earned a 2017 Artaxis Fellowship to attend a two-week workshop at Haystack this summer.

Remember? photography blog, which noted her ability to bring “fresh eyes and a sophisticated aura” to her look at her ancestry. NYC-based artist Doreen Garner MFA GL has teamed up with fellow artist Kenya (Robinson) to create a 17-episode talk show for Clocktower Radio. Called #trashDay, it elevates the vernacular of urban fiction, reality television, gossip publications, social dance and fashion, and uses it as a point of departure for satire and social commentary. Last winter Julie GautierDownes MFA PH showed photographs and installations in Scattered Remains, a solo exhibition at Zootown Community Center in Missoula, MT. She also exhibited works in several solo and group exhibitions in Spokane, WA, where she lives, including the SAP Show at Spokane International Airport, which runs through July 31. In March RaMell Ross MFA PH earned a 2017 MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation, a $25,000 award that supports “emerging and mid-career Rhode Island artists whose works demonstrate … significant artistic merit.” A research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and a professor of practice through the Brown Arts Initiative and its Visual Arts department, he plans to use the funds to move into postproduction on Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a feature-length film about black teenagers coming of age in rural Alabama, and to help support two future projects.

2016

McKenzie Gibson MFA 17 FD In addition to being on view through June 3 in RISD’s Graduate Thesis Exhibition, McKenzie’s work is being shown through June 15 at Newport [RI] Contemporary Fine Arts. The exhibition features new work by five emerging and established artists.

2015 In delivering this year’s Frederic W Goudy Lecture in Book Arts at Scripps College in Claremont, CA on March 23, Andre Bradley MFA PH spoke about his book Dark Archives, a “deeply moving meditation on narrative agency, on the family as archive, on being a young black man and on being Andre Bradley.” The Philadelphiabased artist’s talk coincided

with Of Color: Race & Identity in Artists’ Books, a group exhibition at the college’s Clark Humanities Museum. Last year Aashka Shah MFA DM (Edison, NJ) launched NeatClub, a dating app that encourages safer sex through clinical referrals and voluntary sharing of verified STD test results. In April Forbes ran a story about the app.

2017

Last fall, shortly after Rebecca Buglio MFA CR moved to Tennessee to assume her new position as program and studios manager at Arrowmont School of Arts and Craft in Gatlinburg, the region was engulfed in a massive forest fire. “The fire sort of solidified my working here,” she writes. “The way all the staff here came together and immediately started trying to help the community before we even were back up and running ourselves made me see that this is a good place for me to be.” Ling Chun MFA CR (see page 11)

As RISD’s student rep at the 2017 Design Indaba conference in Cape Town, South Africa, Bo-Won Keum MFA GD spoke about her work last summer as a RISD Maharam Fellow who worked with Books to Prisoners, an organization dedicated to providing inmates in the US with valuable reading material. In collaborating with the Seattle-based nonprofit, Bo-Won helped to develop a global archiving strategy and create a resource guide to share with other US prison book donation programs. She has also designed a book that presents inmates’ stories about the impact of the program.

Kate Aitchison MFA 16 PR + Laura Post MFA 16 PR For their Paper Genome Project — supported by a RISD GS Grant — the Providencebased printmakers spent a month last fall along the San Juan River in southern Utah making paper from native species and experimenting with sustainable practices. They also conducted artist workshops in the area, including one at the Bluff [UT] Arts Festival last October. Please email class notes submissions to: risdxyz@risd.edu.

// RISDXYZ

spring/summer 2017

sketchbook

// sketches, doodles, ideas in progress

FROTHINESS While Haejin Park 15 IL is a “duck” on Instagram, she calls herself an “egg yolk” when it comes to Plum, the four-woman (all RISD) illustration collective she’s part of in Brooklyn. And on her own site, she professes to like “eating eggs very much.” Maybe it’s the concentrated nutrition or the richness, color and flavor that appeal, but all that egg consumption also seems to have a leavening effect, making the buoyancy of the visual world Haejin creates palpable. Having learned to paint with watercolor as a kid 96

Find more of Haejin’s work at haejinart.com.

in South Korea, she has always gravitated to that medium first. “It requires attention and patience,” she says, “but I love the special texture it makes.” Haejin has also been experimenting with adding other textures through markers, crayons and colored pencils. Her sketchbook explorations are as rich in saturated color and playful patterns as the work she produces for clients such as The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Edible Manhattan and Narratively, among others.

Please submit sample pages from your own sketchbooks. Our favorites will appear in XYZmail and/or the next issue of the magazine. Questions? Email risdxyz@risd.edu.

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

Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage PAI D Burlington, VT 05401 Permit No. 19