September 8 - 28, 2104
On alternate and even years (2010, 2012, 2014...), the Division of Graduate Studies supports an exhibition in September that highlights the processes, dimensions, and dynamics of graduate students' research and the written thesis. The biennial thesis exhibition is the idea of faculty member Anne West, who has brought remarkable vision to this project in each of its three iterations.
The serial enunciation of Document. Document. Document. invokes the emergent, multiple, and malleable forms and persistent, if amendable, after-lives of documents that pre-figure, accelerate, unsettle, and invariably influence and guide the unfolding of thesis-based research. The evocative ideas and issues in this exhibition represent, and also question, a discursive epistemology of the document that exists restively, yet consequentially in the disciplines and fields of graduate education at RISD. Selectively inclusive and provocatively far-flung, the exhibition welcomes new graduate students to our lively, supportive, yet challenging community of research, inquiry, discovery, collaboration, and critical making. And for continuing graduate students, it is a generative prompt and cultural probe as many of them begin their final thesis year.
So much of our work at RISD at the graduate level is collaborative and cross-disciplinary. Document. Document. Document. is a richly performative documentation of the work of co-curators Kristina Lamour Sansone and Anne West; Sameer Farooq (MFA Graphic Design ‘14) who co-wrote the essay with Anne West; designer Gabs Melcher (MFA Graphic Design ‘16), and many graduate students from the class of 2014. As always, Mark Moscone, Director of Exhibitions, and colleagues Gunnar Norquist and Kevin Hughes worked with the co-curators to design and install a reflective, searching, and active space for participants to experience and engage a generosity and fluidity of visual concepts, translational opportunities, and intellectually vibrant inquiry and open-hearted making. - Patricia C. Phillips, former Dean of Graduate Studies + Research
