Awards
Announced February 24, 2021 Grand Purchase Prize If We Could Make It Out Alive by Jonathan Dewanto, BFA, EFS 2024 Laurie Whitehill Purchase Prize Waiting for Democracy by Naya Lee Chang, BRDD, Furniture Design 2024 American Printing History Association - New England Chapter Purchase Prize A Book of Happiness by Shuyan Chen, BFA, Illustration 2023 Librarian's Choice The Woman's Way by Yukti Vishal Agarwal, BRDD, Textiles 2024Honorable Mentions
It's all "now" by Mario Fernandez-Moreno, BFA, Apparel Design 2022, How to be a CaNniBal in the 21st Century? by Vidhi Nayyar, BFA, EFS 2024, Ramen with White Privilege by Sarah Park, BFA, Apparel Design 2022, Secret Communication System by Jocelyn Salim, BFA, Illustration 2023.JUROR We are very happy to announce that Nafis White is this year's juror. Nafis White works in sculpture, photography, video, collage, sound and performance exploring issues of identity, equality, politics and landscape, using personal narratives to facilitate and build conversations with the viewer. Her approach is one that is heavily influenced by conceptualism, aesthetics and climate, both political and social, with much of her work inspired by the current Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Nafis employs many different strategies in the way that she visualizes and creates work, utilizing a multidisciplinary approach to her art making. White received her BFA in Sculpture with a Concentration in Art History from the Rhode Island School of Design before embarking on a year-long program at the University of London, Goldsmiths in the UK. Nafis returned to RISD in 2016 to study Digital Media and Printmaking and graduated with her MFA in 2018. You can see more of Nafis White's artwork at nafiswhite.com.
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How to be a CaNniBal in the 21st Century?
Vidhi Nayyar, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
Intended as an assignment on climate change, this book addresses our existence and growth's hypocritical nature. Through industrialization, urbanization, and development, we are causing drastic changes in the climate. While many consider climate change to be a joke, it results in suffocating pollution, earthquakes, tsunamis, raised water levels, toxic water, and alteration in the ecosystem, all of which will eventually eat the human species alive. Ironically we are all slowly eating up our own kind. This book portrays our illogical methods of consumption and production with satirical undertones.
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Tale of Two: The Visual Mixtape
Emma Noel, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
Tale of Two is the story of sound, sight, and memory. A stimulant to the visceral sensation of place and duality of identity. Each of the boxes’ eleven cassette tapes reveal found items from the two places my heart is tied down to; the rural stomping grounds of New England and the tumultuous New York City. As cassettes are pulled and examined the viewer is invited to experience their contents, providing opportunity for memories of specific sounds to be evoked. Too often the sounds we familiarize ourselves with fade away ever so slowly. It is through sight, however, that we can truly know sound. The box portion of my artist book was handmade and assembled.
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Stories of the Lost
Elizaveta Parinova, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
The narrative about this project, is the idea of the lost objects and the stories behind them
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Ramen with White Privilege
Sarah Park, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
What if Ramen tasted like White Privilege? Would you taste the bitterness of colonialism? Would you taste the saltiness from implicit racial biases? Would you taste the mordant flavors of legislative and systematic injustice? Taking a traditional, oriental dish, I wanted to create a book that educated and brought awareness to the ignorance that I have personally witnessed and experienced growing up in America.
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Secret Communication System
Jocelyn Salim, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
This is an artist book that tells the story of how two unlikely inventors, inspired by the mechanics of a player piano, invented the frequency hopping spread spectrum. Determined to help with the war efforts, Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil turned to music for inspiration to create a secret communication system for torpedoes.
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Rewind, unwind, replay
Mridvika Shah, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
This piece is an attempt to rewind the clock. It illustrates images of the extinct Woolly Mammoth, Tasmanian Tiger, West African Black Rhinoceros, Pyrenean Ibex and Sabre-toothed Cat. It is a way to project our hope to go back and save these animals and the planet from the extremities of climate change. The flip book machine is made using the illustration provided at the start of the video. The illustration is made using illustrator and procreate.
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Letterforms in the Unexpected
Lucy Shao, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
In a zine catered towards children, the reader is encouraged to find letterforms in pictures of a neighborhood in Providence. Each spread has a monochrome picture and a polaroid viewfinder with a letter printed on it. The reader can then match the printed letter to the picture on the page. On the last page, there is a blank polaroid viewfinder that the reader can take and consequently find letterforms on their own. I wanted to create something to encourage a change in perspective, causing them to be on the lookout for letterforms in the unexpected. Children can use this zine to learn letters in a new and interactive way, helping them to solidify their education in the classroom and encouraging interaction with the space around them.
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January 23
Hili Slav, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
This piece was made for my drawing class for our 'zine' project, although it feels more like an artists’ book than a zine. It measures 5” by 5”, has an accordion structure, and is bounded in fabric on both sides. Each side of the book represents one day: January 23, 2019 and January 23, 2020. It is comprised of 12 individual illustrations- each illustration depicting a scene from each day in chronological order. The illustrations are based off of a journal in which I write the events of my day before going to bed. I have been writing in this journal for the past three years, and so I’ve accumulated descriptions of hundreds of days. January 23 is not a unique date for me but was picked at random. This book is a sort of reflection of the past two years. What has stayed the same, what has changed, how I feel and so forth. Working on it felt like an exercise is gratitude – delving into my personal history and picking out both the positive and the not so positive moments. I am curious as to how it will be perceived- both by people who know me and by people who do not. I greatly enjoyed working on it and I would like to continue my personal exploration of memory and time.
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Strangers In The Night
Teddy Smarz, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
I was interested in combing the artist book with the lookbook by taking aspects of both that would add to my knitwear pieces and final project. My ideas of artists books in general have changed throughout the semester being my perception has become that the artist book is whatever the artist makes out of it and tends to break the mold of what a traditional book is. I wanted to take this idea of breaking the mold to create a lookbook that is not about the outfits as the focus on photography with the setting, mood and history/culture that can shine through what a can photo hold. I want my outfit to be worn by my model in photos but use photography as the narrative. Being focused on angel and composition while also highlighting my final outfit in the setting/atmosphere that I directed. I looked to set a scene much like how a movie director directs actors to create shoots and compositions within film to evoke mood, message and setting. I looked towards photography to shoot from a certain angles and to showcase a certain mood, message and aesthetic. I would like to have this photoshoot for the lookbook in Federal Hill for the Italian-American history and culture that has and continues to take place, it feels natural that the “Little Italy” of Providence would be the place I would flock to for shooting the photoshoot of my final knitwear piece. I have centered my Design and Draw concept around the Italian-American Mafia with the family, friends and camaraderie aspects of this with having outfits that are a balance between cool/comfortable and sophisticated. I looked to shoot in and out of stores, churches, restaurants, grocery stores and iconic places in Federal Hill for the culture and history that would become embedded in the feeling of the photos. I tend to pick my friends as my models because I enjoy the vibe that the photoshoot takes place. It’s easy, fun and comfortable for both parties being the designer (photographer in this case) and models. I think this shows in the photos and ends up with photos that are not forced and stronger with being authentic. The photos of the lookbook/artist book would take this form of being more focused on the setup of the shots, setting and the composition that would become the realistic view of the way I would like for my final outfit to be worn.
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BR/LEACH Montage
Damisa Vanaswas, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
The more we use resources from the environment to fill our lives with color and comfort, the more we are reaching/breaching into nature to leach on its vitality, its precious ecology, therefore bleaching it of its "color". However seemingly perpetual and cyclic this process may be, it is a finite relationship. Our saturated world is cruelly fueled by exploiting our earth tones.
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Edition(s)
Zhiwei Wang, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
Edition(s) was designed, printed, and assembled under the notion of time, volume, and the void of unsettling. Edition(s) is an expansion of the concept of editions. Each edition contains a year mount of journal card, and the total editions are 10. So the single edition became the edition of the year, and the complete editions became the edition of a decade.
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Herbal Honey and Loquet
Xuandong Zhou, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
As a kid, I often catch cold and sore throat, mom will give me a spoon of Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa. It was sweet the and still is.
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Looking-Glass Mixology
Xu (Susie) Zhu, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
(Looking)-Glass Mixology, an artist’s book, was designed, bound, typeset, and in many other ways created by Xu (Susie) Zhu in quarantine in Beijing, China, May 2020 (in the time of COVID-19). Xu has been spending a significant amount of time in/in front of her windows, contemplating on invented space and the possibility of inventing space during her self-quarantine period. In quarantine, window becomes the most spacious “space” in the house. Window is beyond 2-dimensional: Reading the window throughout the endless days of stay-home is a reading of the plane opening up into space that’s possible but not possible, accessible but not accessible anymore. The book is a “looking-box” that is inspired by the experience of looking out window for 14 days during quarantine. For a lack of things to do, I began by observing what’s on and out the window but eventually the window becomes a frame around imagination: endless images emerge from that one limited square of glass as I contemplate on what I see and I what I am thinking about seeing. The book is made up of one light box; one “looking box” with structures constructed using photos taken from my window as materials to generate abstract, morphing images when peered through the tiny hole on its front; and a transparent, “ambient text“ block with its head and end connected to each other thus loses its beginning or ending. The text is the least “book” part of the book, it is like wall paper, an ambient text. The book all together resembles building blocks——that I have been trapped in, by COVID, but as also by the city life that I have grown up living.