On was an interdisciplinary graduate periodical established by RISD graduate students in 2006. It featured essays and student work that related to a general issue theme. On was intended as a quarterly publication, but it is unclear if further issues beyond the first were ever published.
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Common Thread
RISD Archives, Edna W. Lawrence Nature Lab, and Southeastern New England Fibershed
Poster for The Common Thread, a collaboration between the RISD Nature Lab and Southeastern New England Fibershed. This 4-part virtual series explores the commonalities within the systems of land, waste, material, and color and how they can intersect with various modes of thought to drive positive change. The Common Thread will build a base for an 8-part conversation taking place after this series focusing on international issues around regeneration. More information and registration at series website.
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Temporal collisions
Lizzie Baur
We live during a time of smoothly effortless design that encourages instant gratification. In this sea of pre-existing content, most of which we experience through layers of mediation, my practice encourages drifting. As a graphic designer, I try to decondition myself from reductive thinking. In response, this thesis operates on the fringe, cycling attention to unexpected associations, harnessing temporal collisions and formal play towards diminishing cultural baggage and preconceived notions. I deliberately attune the reader to the labyrinthine as an experience by which to interrogate common sense and steer the imagination towards moments of uncertainty.
This work engages a kind of dialectical movement, an edging of contact that makes the original more malleable. The familiar, the singular, local events and vernacular languages are my raw materials. I systematically collect and entangle trace elements from cultural, historical, geographical and personal experience. I invite inconsistencies and peculiarities within these new narratives as a challenge to remain open and engaged. Slippery and hard to grasp, this dysfunctional movement, which I’ve framed in this thesis, de-centers singular messages and allows new forms of reasoning to emerge.
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Conquer Racism Providence Street Poster September 28 2020
Dan Blakeslee and RISD Archives
Anti-racism poster designed by local Providence Musician and Illustrator Dan Blakeslee photographed on RISD campus.
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Exploring multimedia storytelling as a novel tool to inspire Americans to participate in wildlife conservation
Megan Brief
Human and nonhuman animal lives are intimately entangled. In the age of the Anthropocene, it is imperative to reexamine our proximity and kinship with nature. Human-wildlife conflict can evolve into coexistence through conservation efforts marked by creativity and compassion. To inspire conservation action among North American audiences, we must enact novel ways of disseminating scientifically technical concepts. Multimedia storytelling can encourage equitable involvement among lay participants in conservation spaces. When inclusive of Indigenous knowledges, and conscious of damage narratives, such innovative stories can empathetically communicate wildlife degradation and injustices, as well as animate vulnerable human and nonhuman communities.
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The Common Thread with Rebecca Burgess and Tareq Alzawawi
Rebecca Burgess, Tareq Alzawawi, and Edna W. Lawrence Nature Lab
The third live session of The Common Thread virtual series features Fibershed Executive Director Rebecca Burgess and Designer Tareq Alzawawi (RISD MID '19).
This conversation will focus on MATERIAL and SOIL HEALTH. In thinking about what we source from the soil (from food/vegetation, to fiber, to biomaterials), how do we determine the sustainability profile of the things we harvest and use for various needs and applications? -
Keeping Score: Some Lessons for Artists from the Later Wittgenstein
Nickolas Calabrese
This text rounds up a few lessons fashioned after the idea of keeping score as it relates to the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. These lessons are emphatically related to the production of art, so this text might be at its best in the hands of an artist. They all loosely demonstrate the normative dimension of aesthetic production, which amounts to the claim that one is committed, by the act of production, to a communal endorsement for why an artwork ought to exist at all. The final part of this text will expand on this principle of normativity, but it should be kept in mind as one goes through the lessons that precede it. This particular aspect of Wittgenstein’s legacy might help better acquaint artists with why we make things: the epistemological groundwork for why an artist feels compelled in the first place.
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EMPOWERING ACTIONS THE PARTICIPATORY RENOVATIONS OF A SHELTER
Christian Campagnaro and Nicoló Di Prima
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2020 MLK Keynote Address: Michelle Alexander Presentation
Center for Social Equity & Inclusion, Michelle Alexander, Rosanne Somerson, and Matthew Shenoda
2020 MLK Series Keynote Michelle Alexander brings audiences profoundly necessary and meaningful insights on the practice of mass incarceration that plagues the US justice system, as well as eye-opening conversation on how we can end racial caste in America. Lecture Wednesday, January 22, 2020 at 5:30pm, RISD Auditorium, 17 Canal Walk, Providence, RI.
In her acclaimed bestseller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Alexander peels back the curtain on systemic racism in the US prison system in a work that the New York Review of Books describes as "striking in the intelligence of her ideas, her powers of summary and the force of her writing." With equal force and candor on stage, she breaks the silence about racial injustice in the modern legal system to reveal how mass incarceration has come to replace segregation.
A legal scholar, social justice advocate, columnist at The New York Times and visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary, Alexander explores the myths surrounding our criminal justice system from a racial and ethical standpoint and offers solutions for combating this epidemic. Delivering an emphatic wakeup call from the "colorblind slumber" that our country has fallen under, she leaves audiences with a new perspective on the challenges facing the civil rights community and a call to action for a multiracial, multi-ethnic human rights movement for justice in America.
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Strata : lessons in latency
Mukul Chakravarthi
Every visual artifact, from a street sign to advertising commercials, is an event of culture, a cross-section of time. Crucial to my work as a designer is to build an interpretive understanding of these images as more than surface, more than banal. Embedded in their construction are dense, unseen contextual latencies— social, economic, and political forces — that combine to define a cultural moment.
This thesis offers a series of lessons in making visible visual infrastructure. It emphasizes design’s semiotic potential to examine and leverage a view on what these visual signs represent as ideological constructions. Through a conscious un-layering of their deep and complex structures, I make an ethical case for producing work that augments understanding of our socio-cultural milieu, while catalyzing larger structural reform.
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The Aesthetics of Social Situations: Encounters and Sensibilities of the Everyday Life in Japan
Garcia Chambers
What beauty could there be in mundane, interactive encounters in and observations of the everydayness of life in Japan? The answer rightly may be none whatsoever based on the Kantian, distancing, art-centered theory and practice of aesthetics. Refreshingly, however, contemporary social and aesthetic philosophers would argue that the use of the word ‘beauty’ was a misguided choice, as it repeats the common error of equating the aesthetic with the beautiful or pleasing. A more appropriate word, honoring the original sense perception meaning of aesthetics, would be ‘sensibility.’ True to this original meaning of aesthetics, this paper presents and analyzes two selected experiences of heightened sensibility of the author. Using Arnold Berleant’s aesthetic field model and Yuriko Saito’s works on everyday aesthetics in Japanese culture as theoretical anchors, this paper attempts to shine a light on the everyday life sensibilities for the engaged appreciator or observer in Japan.
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Zone: Apollinaire, Simpson, Chang
Naya Chang, Special Collections, and Fleet Library
HONORABLE MENTION | $100
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Experience the world: How the ever-present accessibility of hands-on opportunities & play enhance logistical learning
Mary E. Chavez
Living in a digital age, it is imperative--now more than ever--that children engage in hands-on, experiential learning activities to ensure that their ability to relate to the world is not compromised by technology. Children actively need playful, open-ended and self-directed mental stimulation for their young brains to develop and grow. Public school standards stifle a child’s right to succeed in alternative strengths and inhibit opportunities for self-exploration and self-expression. Game design and fort construction are examples of accessible, hands-on activities in which a child can creatively immerse themselves. In doing so, they can begin to interact with the tangible world, boosting confidence in their own ability to problem solve without digital interference.
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Visionaire 69: "2020" Guest Curated By Edison Chen
Edison Chen
1 box (10 laser-cut copper stencils, 1 face mask, 1 can of spray paint) wrapped in a silk scarf Title from infomation sheet Limited Edition of 500 hand-numbered copies include silk scarf by CLOT, wrapping a stenciled case housing; 1 face mask by Barbara Kruger, 1 can of spray paint, and 10 laser-cut copper stencils by 10 artists "Due to current shipping restrictions, we are sorry to inform you that the can of spray paint is not able to be sent inside the edition."--Information sheet
"VISIONAIRE 69 2020 guest curated by the inimitable, multi-hyphenate star, Edison Chen, comes as a “stencil kit” featuring 10 stencils made of laser-cut copper in response to a most challenging year by Nick Knight, Naomi Campbell, Tom Sachs, Dr. Woo, Zeng Fanzhi, Cao Fei, LeBron James, Kelly Beeman, Shayne Oliver, and Alaia Chen. Copper is imbued with antimicrobial properties making it the ideal material for this edition. Furthermore, copper remembers; it is an archive of all the hands that have touched it, and will oxidize over time to form a unique turquoise patina, thus altering its appearance. The edition comes wrapped in a Clot silk scarf and includes a face mask by Barbara Kruger. This is the first edition produced entirely in China with a Chinese brand through our joint-venture STARK VISIONAIRE, focused on artist collaborations for the China market. The editions were produced to include a can of VISIONAIRE-branded black spray paint, but with the current state of the world and the delays we have endured, we were forced to remove the cans of spray paint which now sit in our office in Shanghai." -- publsiher's website https://visionaireworld.com
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6th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2020
Special Collections and Fleet Library
Call for entries poster for the 6th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2020.
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6th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest Exhibition and Opening Reception 2020
Special Collections and Fleet Library
Exhibition and Opening Reception poster for the 6th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2020.
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Home. A Reflection
Special Collections, Fleet Library, and Aya Alghanmeh
Cover for Home. A Reflection, from the RISD Zine Collection.
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Slum Clearance Symphony
Special Collections, Fleet Library, and Brendan Leach
Cover for Slum Clearance Symphony , from the RISD Zine Collection.
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The knots on the underside of the carpet
Lily Colman
A woman enters marriage, guided by a rich lineage of strong, lifelong marriages, yet is also caught in a web of misplaced ideals and expectations deferred by culture. She carries the weight of these histories, as well as her own expectations. Throughout history, women have been minimized and shoved into their own separate, domestic “spheres.” Future generations inherit these traumas, which in turn affects how they experience life. When a woman realizes her marriage is not what it should be, that she has been turned into a flat and unfulfilled version of herself and ultimately files for divorce, the weight of all those expectations and her disappointment in her perceived failure has the potential to crush her.
Using photography, installation, video, embroidery, and the creation of photographic objects (through embroidery and alternative photographic processes), this work examines my own expectations upon entering marriage and my current values. The ideals and beliefs I once held dear about matrimony and family disintegrated very shortly after my own nuptials. I struggled with the weight of having broken a positive lineage. I am now trying to allow for a new formation as I reclaim my space and identity.
My own childhood led me to fixate on my ideas of what a successful and happy marriage is. Memory is influenced by photography and passed down via family histories. These stories and images often take the place of actual recollections, influence visions of our lives, and how we present ourselves to the world: as happy people with fond pasts to look back on. How do we examine those memories and histories after experiencing a related trauma? The Knots on the Underside of the Carpet investigates my own life by revealing the knotted underbelly that we do not usually see or acknowledge, and exposes the surface as a false veneer—one that society has bought into, but that ultimately falls flat.
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Revisionist histories : Parallels of monuments and absence in the present
Scott Craft
Monuments represent long-standing, ingrained social relations and beliefs. Monument architecture can also represent histories of significant, world-changing social and political events. One set of religious and cultural beliefs and practices alters and even eventually replaces another. Once accepted traditions of inherited political authority represented by emperors and monarchies are reformed, even rejected and overthrown by principles of human equality and the rights of all people. Constructs of racial and gender supremacy and authority are challenged, modified and overthrown by those considered inferior . Such social and political transformations challenge existing constructs while also using them in new transformative ways. The established and the new are intersectional and result in transformation of both. Monarchy becomes celebrity without political power, while popular elections rule. Women replace men as authority figures. Black-ness and queerness become identities and sources of personal power. Similarly, “new” architectural design philosophies and productions challenge existing design systems while often using the existing design traditions in transformative ways. Steel infrastructure replaces masonry construction reducing masonry to decoration. The technology of glass skins transforms external walls . When selected histories of social and political transformations are meshed with transformative design concepts then “new” monumental architecture can be created to memorialize the events. New monumental architecture will represent what is absent from the existing monument -- what history, what past culture, and what alternative history is not represented and what monument design will capture the negative.
