View additional visiting speaker recordings:
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Visiting Designer Aroussiak Gabrielian
Liberal Arts Division and NCSS Graduate Program
Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies welcomes Aroussiak Gabrielian, an environmental designer and bioartist working with living organisms, natural systems and atmospheric phenomena. Her work aims to torque our imaginaries to help us rethink our interactions with both human and non-human agents on this planet.
Aroussiak’s work has received numerous design recognitions including the Emerging Designer Awards from the Design Futures Initiative, the Tomorrowland Projects Foundation Award administered through the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Word Changing Ideas Awards recognized by Fast Company, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She has exhibited internationally at various institutions, including SXSW, Ars Electronica, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, the Eli & Edith Broad Museum Art Lab, A+D Museum Los Angeles, Science Gallery Detroit, among others.
Aroussiak is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the School of Architecture at USC, where she teaches design across ecologic and biologic scales. She is an Affiliate Faculty of Media Arts Practice at the School of Cinematic Arts and founding director of the Landscape Futures Lab - a design-research incubator focused on climate innovation and imagination. Outside of academia, Aroussiak is co-founder and Design Principal of foreground design agency, a critical design practice that aims to dismantle structures of power and privilege that render specific humans, species, and matter silent.
Organized by the NCSS Undergrad Concentration
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Huma Bhabha
Huma Bhabha and Painting Department
In addition to delivering a lecture about her evolving practice, the Pakistani-born maker met with graduate students in Painting to discuss inspiration, process and composition.
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Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors
Liberal Arts Division, Grist Magazine, Fix Solutions Lab, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and Orion Magazine
Lecture, October 6, 2022. 6:30 pm, Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center/RISD Museum. Fix, Grist Magazine’s Solutions Lab, invites you to join a conversation about decolonizing and diversifying climate storytelling, as explored in its climate fiction contest, Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors. Imagine 2200 judges Grace Dillon, Arkady Martine, and Sheree Renée Thomas will join Fix’s Tory Stephens on the RISD campus to discuss the relationship between climate fiction and climate solutions. They’ll also touch on the craft of weaving climate into all forms of storytelling, and how building deeply intersectional worlds helps create visions for a planet grounded in justice and abundance.
This event is presented in partnership with the RISD Division of Liberal Arts and the RISD Nature–Culture–Sustainability Studies Master’s program, Orion Magazine, and with support from NRDC.
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Chitra Ganesh
Chitra Ganesh and Painting Department
Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh discusses her work in relation to contemporary art and visual culture in India and South Asia, as well as her plans as the first Kirloskar Visiting Scholar in Painting.
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Imagine a World without America
Dread Scott, Theory & History of Art & Design Department, Academic Affairs, Graduate Studies, Liberal Arts, and Fine Arts Division
Dread Scott makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. He doesn’t accept the economic foundation, social relations and governing ideas of America. His work encourages an audience to explore important questions based upon this perspective. He first received national attention in 1989 when his art became the center of controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. President G.H.W. Bush called his art “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed this work.
His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Walker art Center and the Whitney Museum. In 2012, BAM presented his performance Dread Scott: Decision as part of their 30th Anniversary Next Wave Festival. His work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum and has been featured on the cover of Artfroum and the front page of NYTmes.com.
He is a recipient of a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship and grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Open Society Institute and the Pollock Krasner Foundation. He works in a range of media including performance, photography, screen-printing and video. His works can be hard-edged and poignant. Dread plays with fire—metaphorically and sometimes literally—as when he burned $171 on Wall Street and encouraged those with money to burn to add theirs to the pyre.
The talk will look at a sampling of his art from the past thirty years. Scott works in a range of media including performance, photography, screen printing, installation, and video.
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Salman Toor
Salman Toor and Painting Department
Toor offers intimate views into the imagined lives of young, queer Brown men residing between New York City and South Asia. Recurring color palettes and references to art history heighten the emotional impact of Toor's paintings and add a fantastical element to his narratives drawn from lived experience. Taken as a whole, Toor's paintings consider vulnerability within contemporary public and private life and the notion of community in the context of queer, diasporic identity.
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On Repair
Kader Attia, Theory & History of Art & Design Department, RISD Museum, Academic Affairs, Graduate Studies, Liberal Arts, and Fine Arts Division
For many years, Kader Attia has been exploring the perspective that societies have on their history, especially as regards experiences of deprivation and suppression, violence and loss, and how this affects the evolving of nations and individuals — each of them being connected to collective memory.
His socio-cultural research has led Kader Attia to the notion of Repair, a concept he has been developing philosophically in his writings and symbolically in his oeuvre as a visual artist. With the principle of Repair being a constant in nature — thus also in humanity —, any system, social institution or cultural tradition can be considered as an infinite process of Repair, which is closely linked to loss and wounds, to recuperation and re-appropriation. Repair reaches far beyond the subject and connects the individual to gender, philosophy, science, and architecture, and also involves it in evolutionary processes in nature, culture, myth and history.
Kader Attia (b. 1970, Dugny, France), grew up in Paris and in Algeria. Preceding his studies at the École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and at Escola Massana, Centre d’Art i Disseny in Barcelona, he spent several years in Congo and in South America.
The experience with these different cultures, the histories of which over centuries have been characterised by rich trading traditions, colonialism and multi-ethnic societies, has fostered Kader Attia’s intercultural and interdisciplinary approach of research.
In 2016, Kader Attia founded La Colonie, a space in Paris to share ideas and to provide an agora for vivid discussion. Focussing on decolonialisation not only of peoples but also of knowledge, attitudes and practices, it aspires to de-compartmentalise knowledge by a trans-cultural, trans-disciplinary and trans-generational approach. Driven by the urgency of social and cultural reparations, it aims to reunite which has been shattered, or drift apart.
In 2016, Kader Attia was awarded with the Marcel Duchamp Prize, followed in 2017 by the Prize of the Miró Foundation, Barcelona, and the Yanghyun Art Prize, Seoul.
Conversation followed with Kate Irvin and Leora Maltz-Leca.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the RISD Museum, as part of Repair and Design Futures.
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Sonya Kelliher-Combs | A Sense of Place
Center for Social Equity & Inclusion, Painting Department, and Sonya Kelliher-Combs
The Center for Social Equity + Inclusion and the Painting department sponsored an artist talk and conversation with Alaska-based artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs as part of the ongoing RISD Indigenous Arts Series. The lecture took place on February 26th, 2019 at 5:00 pm in the Michael P. Metcalf Auditorium, Canal St., Providence, RI. Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Inupiaq/Athabaskan)was born in Bethel, Alaska, in 1969 and raised in Nome, she holds a bachelor of fine arts (1992) from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and a master of fine arts (1998) from Arizona State University, Tempe. Her artwork continually references a sense of place, history, culture, and family. Kelliher-Combs is the recipient of numerous awards including the Eiteljorg Museum Fellowship, the Anchorage, Alaska, Mayor’s Individual Artist Award, the Arctic Education Foundation Academic Excellence Award, and the Best of Show honor at the Visual Arts Center of Alaska’s Vision of New Eyes exhibition. Her work can be found in numerous private and public collections including the National Museum of the American Indian, Anchorage Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, British Royal Museum, Institute of American Indian Art Museum of Contemporary Native Art, and Alaska State Museum.
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Contesting Borders: Interchanges Between Uncredentialed Artists and American Vanguards
Lynne Cooke, Academic Affairs, Graduate Studies, Liberal Arts, Fine Arts Division, and Theory & History of Art & Design Department
Since the last century, the relationship between vanguard and self-taught artists has been defined by contradiction. The established art world has been quick to make clear distinctions between trained and untrained artists, yet at the same time it has been fascinated by outliers whom it draws selectively and intermittently into its orbits. Curator Lynne Cooke explores shifting conceptualizations of the American outlier across the twentieth century. She reveals how these distinctions have been freighted with a particularly American point of view as she investigates our assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture.
Lynne Cooke is the Senior Curator for Special Projects in Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, where she recently curated “Outliers and American Vanguard Art.” Prior to her present position, she was the deputy director and chief curator at the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, and the curator at the Dia Art Foundation. Cooke has taught and lectured regularly at the University College London, Syracuse University, Yale University, Columbia University, and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She was a co-curator of the Venice Biennale in 1986, the Carnegie International in 1991, and was artistic director of the Biennale of Sydney in 1996.
Dr. Cooke established herself during the mid-80s as a writer on contemporary artists of the period, including British sculptors Anish Kapoor and Bill Woodrow, and American artist Allan McCollum. During her years at Dia, Cooke organized a number of exhibitions of younger American women artists and worked to bring greater recognition to women artists who contributed to the minimalist period; she also organized significant exhibitions aimed at introducing European artists of the 1980s to the American public.
Cooke has curated exhibitions at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol; Whitechapel Art Gallery and Hayward Gallery, London; Third Eye Center, Glasgow; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Tamayo Museum, Mexico; and elsewhere. In 2006, she was the recipient of the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and in 2007, she co-curated the exhibition “Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has written widely about contemporary art in exhibition catalogues and in Artforum, Artscribe, The Burlington Magazine, and Parkett, among other magazines.
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Farming While Black: African Diasporic Wisdom for Farming and Food Justice | Leah Penniman
Liberal Arts Division, Center for Social Equity & Inclusion, and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, April 24, 2019. 4:30 pm, 20 Washington Place Auditorium. Some of our most cherished sustainable farming practices - from organic agriculture to the farm cooperative and the CSA - have roots in African wisdom. Yet, discrimination and violence against African-American farmers has led to our decline from 14 percent of all growers in 1920 to less than 2 percent today, with a corresponding loss of over 14 million acres of land. Further, Black communities suffer disproportionately from illnesses related to lack of access to fresh food and healthy natural ecosystems. Soul Fire Farm, cofounded by author, activist, and farmer Leah Penniman, is committed to ending racism and injustice in our food system. Through programs such as the Black-Latinx Farmers Immersion, a sliding-scale farmshare CSA, and Youth Food Justice leadership training, Soul Fire Farm is part of a global network of farmers working to increase farmland stewardship by people of color, restore Afro-indigenous farming practices, and end food apartheid. And now, with the new book Farming While Black, Soul Fire Farm extends that work by offering the first comprehensive manual for African-heritage people ready to reclaim our rightful place of dignified agency in the food system. Join us to learn how you too can be part of the movement for food sovereignty and help build a food system based on justice, dignity, and abundance for all members of our community.
WEBSITE FOR BOOK: www.farmingwhileblack.org
WEBSITE FOR FARM: www.soulfirefarm.org
SOCIAL MEDIA: @soulfirefarm @farmingwhileblack
Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol educator, farmer/peyizan, author, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. Li co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2011 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. As co-Executive Director, Leah is part of a team that facilitates powerful food sovereignty programs – including farmer training for Black & Brown people, a subsidized farm food distribution program for communities living under food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system. Leah has been farming since 1996, holds an MA in Science Education and a BA in Environmental Science and International Development from Clark University, and is a Manye (Queen Mother) in Vodun. The work of Leah and Soul Fire Farm has been recognized by the Soros Racial Justice Fellowship, Fulbright Program, Grist 50, and the James Beard Award, among others. Her book, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Landis a love song for the land and her people.
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Decolonizing Design, Imagining Alternative Futures | A talk by Arturo Escobar
Liberal Arts Division, RISD Museum, and NCSS Graduate Program
Decolonizing Design, Imagining Alternative Futures lecture, April 18, 2019. 6:15 pm, Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center. Exploring Nature-Culture-Sustainability and design with author, anthropologist, and philosopher Arturo Escobar in conversation with RISD faculty, Namita Dharia, Jess Brown, Ramon Tejada, and Ijlal Muzaffar. This conversation is planned in conjunction with the Museum’s exhibition, Repair and Design Futures.Co-sponsored by RISD’s Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies and Global Arts + Culture graduate programs and the RISD Museum’s exhibition, Repair & Design Futures.
Arturo Escobar is the Kenan Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a Research Associate with the Culture, Memory, and Nation group at Universidad del Valle, Cali. His main interests are political ecology, ontological design, and the anthropology of development, social movements, and technoscience. Over the past twenty-five years, he has worked closely with several Afro-Colombian social movements, particular the Process of Black Communities (PCN). He is author of the well-known book Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995, 2011), and more recently, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (2008); Sentipensar con la Tierra. Nuevas lecturas sobre desarrollo, territorio y diferencia (2014); Otro possible es possible: Caminando hacia las transiciones desde Anya Yala/Afro/Latino-America (2017); and Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (forthcoming, 2018).
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Arjun Appadurai: Is Modernity Still At Large? Global Cultural Flows in the Digital Era
Liberal Arts Division, RISD President, and Center for Social Equity + Inclusion
Thursday, April 11, 2019 at 6:30pm in the 20 Washington Place RISD Auditorium. In this lecture renowned socio-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai will revisit some of the key propositions about globalization, modernity, and contemporary cultures first offered in his groundbreaking book Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) in light of recent developments in the digital, political, and economic spheres.
Arjun Appadurai is the Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. He serves as Honorary Professor in the Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Tata Chair Professor at The Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai and as a Senior Research Partner at the Max-Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen. He was previously Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New York City, where he also held a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences. Arjun Appadurai was the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School from 2004-2006. He was formerly the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of International Studies, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center on Cities and Globalization at Yale University. Appadurai is the founder and now the President of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), a non-profit organization based in and oriented to the city of Mumbai (India).
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An Inadequate History of the Projected Image
Chrissie Iles, Theory & History of Art & Design Department, Film Animation Video Department, Academic Affairs, Graduate Studies, Liberal Arts, and Fine Arts Division
This lecture proposes new readings of the history of the projected image in American art since the 1960s, foregrounding issues around the black cinematic to propose alternative models to the assumptions of whiteness that have dominated the history of moving image art, and challenging the presumed neutrality of cinematic tropes including the camera, the screen, light, the gaze, opacity, and surveillance.
Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her specialization is the work of emerging artists, moving image art, and art of the 1960s and 1970s. She has co-curated two Whitney Biennials, and numerous exhibitions of the moving image as well as sculpture, including a retrospective of Dan Graham. Her most recent exhibition, ‘Dreamlands’, explored the role of immersive moving image installations in the history of American art from 1905 to the present. She is responsible for building the moving image part of the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection. She is a member of the Graduate Committee of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and a visiting professor in the Art Department at Columbia University. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Art History Department at Bristol University, England, in 2015.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the department of Film, Animation and Video.
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A Close Look at The 2019 Whitney Biennial
Jane Panetta, Rujeko Hockley, Theory & History of Art & Design Department, Academic Affairs, Graduate Studies, Liberal Arts, and Fine Arts Division
Jane Panetta is a curator and director of the collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art; she joined the Museum’s curatorial department in 2010. In her new role as director of the collection, Panetta leads the curatorial department’s collection team and manages the museum’s acquisitions and display of its holdings. She co-directs the museum’s strategic plan for its collection, along with the Whitney’s Emerging Artists Working Group. Most recently at the Whitney, Panetta organized the 2019 Biennial alongside co-curator Rujeko Hockley. Prior to the Biennial, Panetta organized solo presentations of the work of Juan Antonio Olivares (2018), Willa Nasatir (2017) and Njideka Akunyili Crosby (2015–16) and the group exhibition Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s (2017), in addition to co-curating Mirror Cells (2016) with Christopher Y. Lew at the Museum. She served on the curatorial team for America Is Hard to See (2015, led by Donna De Salvo), the Museum’s inaugural presentation in its downtown location. Panetta collaborated on Signs & Symbols (2012, curated by De Salvo), as well as contributing to Robert Irwin: Scrim Veil—Black Rectangle—Natural Light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York [1977] (2013, curated by De Salvo). Prior to joining the Whitney, Panetta spent several years in the Museum of Modern Art’s Painting and Sculpture Department, where she worked closely on the exhibitions James Ensor (2009, organized by Anna Swinbourne) and Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (2007, organized by Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke). Panetta is a member of Madison Square Park’s Public Art Consortium.
Rujeko Hockley joined the Whitney Museum of American Art’s staff as an assistant curator in March 2017. Most recently at the Whitney, Hockley organized the 2019 Biennial alongside co-curator Jane Panetta. Additional projects at the Whitney include Julie Mehretu (forthcoming 2020), Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined with Melinda Lang (2018) and An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017 with David Breslin and Jennie Goldstein (2018). Hockley also serves as a member of the Museum’s Emerging Artist Working Group. Previously, Hockley was assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she co-curated Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond (2014) with Eugenie Tsai, and was closely involved in exhibitions highlighting the permanent collection as well as artists LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Kehinde Wiley, Tom Sachs, and others. She is the co-curator of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017) with Catherine Morris, which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and will travel to three U.S. venues in 2017–18. Hockley serves on the Board of Art Matters, as well as the Advisory Board of Recess.
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Art Design Life
Ed Schlossberg, Theory & History of Art & Design Department, Academic Affairs, Graduate Studies, Liberal Arts, and Fine Arts Division
Ed Schlossberg has been working all his life to engage simultaneously between and among these three ideas – goals, projects and tools. He will continue to explore this odyssey in his talk.
An internationally recognized pioneer in experience design and audience engagement, Ed Schlossberg launched his career in 1978 with the design of one of the world’s first interactive museums, The Brooklyn Children’s Museum.
Since then, he has been at the forefront of design and technological innovation, creating imaginative and unparalleled public experiences that bring audiences together to explore, learn, communicate and collaborate. Under Schlossberg’s leadership as founder, president and principal designer, ESI Design has created groundbreaking retail and corporate spaces, museums, and multi-player game environments for an array of corporations, brands and cultural institutions. Before he was known around the world for how he has changed museums, he was an artist and a poet. Over the last 50 years, Schlossberg has used words and images to create visual and poetic worlds in his art, using various and unconventional media. His artwork can be found in private collections and museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Schlossberg holds a Ph.D. in Science and Literature from Columbia University. In 2004, he won the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and in 2011, was appointed by President Barack Obama to the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. Singled out as “a leader in interactive design” by Wired magazine, he has authored 11 books. His artwork has appeared in several solo and group exhibitions and can be found in numerous museums and private collections.
Conversation followed with Liliane Wong, Markus Berger and Leora Maltz-Leca.
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Contemporary Art and the Global Turn
Alexander Alberro, Academic Affairs, Graduate Studies, Liberal Arts, Fine Arts Division, and Theory & History of Art & Design Department
A newly-formed transnational web of individuals and institutions has in the past three decades fundamentally changed the nature of contemporary art. Highlighting artworks and projects that have sought to make visible, analyzable and contestable the new forms of exchange, “Contemporary Art and the Global Turn” probes not only what has led to this complex transformation but also the impact it has had on the current conditions of artistic practice. In what ways is recent art distinct from previous modes of contemporary art? What are the conventions that contemporary artists face today? Where are they shaped? What precipitates them?
Alexander Alberro is Virginia Bloedel Wright Professor of Art History at Barnard College. He is the author of Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth Century Latin American Art (University of Chicago Press, 2017); Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (MIT, 2003), and has edited books on contemporary art including Working Conditions: The Writings of Hans Haacke (MIT, 2016), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists Writings; Art After Conceptual Art (MIT, 2009); Museum Highlights (MIT, 2005), Recording Conceptual Art (University of California, 2001), Two-Way Mirror Power (MIT 1999); and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (MIT, 1999).
Alberro is also the founding editor of the University of California Press’ book series “Studies on Latin American Art,” which commissions publications of art history and cultural practices emerging from Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Latin American diaspora in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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The Imperial Origins of Photography
Ariella Azoulay, Theory & History of Art & Design Department, Academic Affairs, Graduate Studies, Liberal Arts, and Fine Arts Division
Imagine that the origin of photography goes back to 1492. What could this mean? In this lecture, Ariella Azoulay will depart from the common theories and histories that present photography as a sui-generis practice and locate its moment of emergence in the midst 19th century around technological development and male inventors. Instead she would rather propose to locate the origins of photography in the “new world,” at the earlier phases of European colonialism and study photographs alongside early accounts of imperial expeditions. Obviously there are no photos from the mass destruction of the late 15th century, but viewing later images of destruction in the context of early expeditions, unravel the premises of what is called documentary and its role in minimizing the scale of the enterprise of destruction. Photography was institutionalized as a visual and communicative practice in a world that had already been colonized and enabled the reproduction of imperial divisions and imperial rights. It nailed down in images what Azoulay conceives as the right to destroy, to accumulate, to appropriate, to differentiate, to record what has been destroyed or appropriated, to study, rescue, salvage, and exhibit it. Interpreting these imperial rights as constitutive of the practice of the documentary, is key in understanding the power accumulated in the hands of image banks and corporations such as Getty or FB.
Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and author of Aïm Deüelle Lüski and Horizontal Photography (Leuven University Press and Cornell University Press, 2013), From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto Press, 2011), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012) and The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), co-authored with Adi Ophir, The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (Stanford University Press, 2012).
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Victor Papanek: Design, Ecology, and Global Activism | Alison Clarke
Liberal Arts Division, Theory & History of Art & Design Department, RISD Museum, RISD Global, and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, October 4, 2018. 6:00 pm Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center. The division of Liberal Arts, THAD department and RISD Museum welcome author and design historian Alison Clarke to RISD to give a lecture titled “Victor Papanek: Design, Ecology and Global Activism. "In 1968, Papanek described the design profession as a mode of “do-it-yourself murder” that generates waste, wreaks ecological havoc and excludes the most socially disadvantaged. Design, he warned, had become preoccupied with “the concocting of such inane trivia as mink-covered toilet-seats, electronic fingernail polish dryers and baroque fly-swatters,” rather than solving “real world” needs.
Based on the forthcoming book Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press) and research for a recent co-curated exhibition with the Vitra Design Museum, Germany, the lecture will explore how Papanek’s iconoclastic designs, provocative journalism and unique global pedagogic initiatives upended the complacency of the 1960s and ’70s design establishment. Clarke will examine how this shift in the perception of design as a political tool was part of a broader challenge to commodity culture that drew on feminist and counter-culture ideas of non-capitalist production, African-American civil rights and global post-colonial activism, and a burgeoning ecological movement. She will conclude by examining the legacy of Papanek’s ideas in contemporary design discourse. This event is sponsored by the Division of Liberal Arts graduate programs in Global Arts and Cultures and Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies in conjunction with the RISD Museum’s Repair and Design Futures Exhibition and RISD Global.
Alison J. Clarke is a design historian and trained social anthropologist. She is chair of Design History and Theory and Director of the Victor J. Papanek Foundation, University of Applied Arts Vienna, and taught previously at the Royal College of Art, London. Professor Clarke’s publications include Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America, which became the basis of an Emmy Award nominated PBS documentary, Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century (2017), and Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture (with Elana Shapira, 2017). She is currently completing a monograph for MIT Press titled Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World, as well as co-curating a related exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum, Germany.
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Climate Futures, Design, and the Just Transition Part I
Liberal Arts Division and NCSS Graduate Program
Symposium, Part I, Friday, November 9, 2018 | 1:30-6:30pm.
At a time when climate politics would seem to be stuck between a state of “melancholic paralysis” (Wark, 2015) and “passive nihilism” (Connolly, 2016), mobilizations occurring around just transitions stand as one of the few bright spots on the horizon. Discussions of just transitions are at different stages of development. They come with the usual bundle of issues, problems, controversies and setbacks. But they also come with potential and promise. In a bleak intellectual context, where the converging forces of climate destabilization and authoritarian populism would seem to be shrinking the ecopolitical imaginary to the propositions that we must either prepare for the worst or embrace a technocratic ecomodernist project to decarbonize the status quo, discussions circulating around just transitions are marked by a refreshing level of pragmatic concreteness and even a degree of hope.
Building on two previous meetings held at Brown and Northeastern by the Just Transitions Research Network in 2016 and 2017, this symposium will bring together a range of scholars and activists to map some of the different ways in which the search for just and rapid post carbon transitions now animates all manner of interventions--on the part of labor and climate justice activists, designers, architects, academics and artists--and is opening up intersectional spaces across movements fighting for racial and gender justice. We will explore the political, ideological, aesthetic, cultural and socio-technological barriers that stand in the way of just transitions in both the Global North and Global South. We will consider who is visible and who is rendered invisible in different kinds of transition discourses. This symposium will explore the potential material, political and ecological impacts of a renewables roll-out. Finally, we will debate the merits of just transitions premised on frameworks such as green growth, plenitude, degrowth, design futuring, decoloniality and beyond.
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Climate Futures, Design, and the Just Transition Part II
Liberal Arts Division and NCSS Graduate Program
Symposium, Part II, Saturday, November 10, 2018 | 9:00am-3:00pm. RISD Auditorium.
At a time when climate politics would seem to be stuck between a state of “melancholic paralysis” (Wark, 2015) and “passive nihilism” (Connolly, 2016), mobilizations occurring around just transitions stand as one of the few bright spots on the horizon. Discussions of just transitions are at different stages of development. They come with the usual bundle of issues, problems, controversies and setbacks. But they also come with potential and promise. In a bleak intellectual context, where the converging forces of climate destabilization and authoritarian populism would seem to be shrinking the ecopolitical imaginary to the propositions that we must either prepare for the worst or embrace a technocratic ecomodernist project to decarbonize the status quo, discussions circulating around just transitions are marked by a refreshing level of pragmatic concreteness and even a degree of hope.
Building on two previous meetings held at Brown and Northeastern by the Just Transitions Research Network in 2016 and 2017, this symposium will bring together a range of scholars and activists to map some of the different ways in which the search for just and rapid post carbon transitions now animates all manner of interventions--on the part of labor and climate justice activists, designers, architects, academics and artists--and is opening up intersectional spaces across movements fighting for racial and gender justice. We will explore the political, ideological, aesthetic, cultural and socio-technological barriers that stand in the way of just transitions in both the Global North and Global South. We will consider who is visible and who is rendered invisible in different kinds of transition discourses. This symposium will explore the potential material, political and ecological impacts of a renewables roll-out. Finally, we will debate the merits of just transitions premised on frameworks such as green growth, plenitude, degrowth, design futuring, decoloniality and beyond.
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Getting to Zero: What it will take to decarbonize electricity | Jesse Jenkins
Liberal Arts Division and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, September 26, 2018. 1:10 pm Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center.
Jesse D. Jenkins is one of the leading contemporary figures thinking about energy futures and the project of deep decarbonization. He is currently an Environmental Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on the rapidly evolving electricity sector, including the transition to zero-carbon power systems and the proliferation of distributed energy resources. Jesse earned a PhD in Engineering Systems ('18) and MS in Technology & Policy ('14) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked previously as a researcher at the MIT Energy Initiative, the Director of Energy and Climate Policy at the Breakthrough Institute, and a Policy and Research Associate at the Renewable Northwest Project.
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Wartime Mobilization and Rapid Climate Change | Laurence Delina
Liberal Arts Division and NCSS Graduate Program
Lecture, November 14, 2018. 1:15 pm Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum/Chace Center. Laurence Delina’s work explores governance and institutional arrangements in the politics and policy of sustainability, focusing on sustainable energy transitions and rapid climate mitigation. His book, Strategies for Rapid Climate Mitigation (Routledge 2016), investigates what can be learned from wartime mobilization to achieve rapid deployment of sustainable energy technologies. As a Pardee Center Post-Doc, he is leading a research project on sustainable energy transitions in developing countries. This project led to his most recent book, Accelerating Sustainable Energy Transition(s) in Developing Countries: The challenges of climate change and sustainable development (Routledge 2017), which explores how transitions away from carbon-based fuel sources to renewables occur in fourteen developing countries.
Laurence Delina, a Filipino scholar and author, is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University. He is the author of Strategies for Rapid Climate Mitigation: Wartime mobilization as policy model?, Accelerating Sustainable Energy Transition(s) in Developing Countries: The challenges of climate change and sustainable development, and Climate Actions: Strategies for social mobilization.
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An Evening with Pulitzer Prize Winning Playwright Lynn Nottage
Liberal Arts Division, RISD President, Center for Social Equity + Inclusion, Experimental and Foundation Studies Division, and Fine Arts Division
Monday, November 5th, 2018 at 5pm in the RISD Auditorium. The President’s Office and Social Equity and Inclusion Initiative welcome Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, director, producer, activist and educator Lynn Nottage to RISD. Nottage engages some of our most intractable problems, both on and off the stage, and her practice is characterized by extensive research while writing and continued involvement with subject communities once the work is complete.This event is sponsored by the Office of the President, the Social Equity and Inclusion Initiative, the Division of Liberal Arts Humanities Fund and a Research Collaboration and Event Grant, the Division of Experimental and Foundation Studies and the Division of Fine Arts.
Lynn Nottage is among the most celebrated of contemporary American playwrights and the first female to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice (for Ruined in 2009 and Sweat in 2017). She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” a Guggenheim Grant, the Doris Duke Artist Award, PEN/Pels Award, National Black Theater Fest’s August Wilson Award, the Helen Hayes Award and many others. Following her studies at Brown and Yale Universities, she worked as an advocate with Amnesty International, where she found her artistic voice, and has since produced a body of work that makes “injustices too familiar to be ignored.” She is a co-founder of Market Road Films production company and a faculty member at both Columbia School of the Arts and the Yale School of Drama.
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Break Pot: Benefit St.
Liberal Arts Division, RISD President, Center for Social Equity + Inclusion, and RISD Museum
Thursday, November 8, 2018 at 1 pm in the RISD Museum Upper Farago Gallery. Amy Lee Sanford, a Cambodian-American artist with an international reputation, participates in the RISD Museum’s exhibition “Repair and Design Futures” through a powerful, one-afternoon performance of a gallery installation entitled Break Pot: Benefit St., a shortened version of the six day durational performance called Full Circle.
Born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and raised in the United States, Amy Lee Sanford holds a degree from Brown University in the Visual Arts. Her work references the deep personal significance of family separation, cultural destruction and death associated with the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s, and the long, slow process of reconstruction in the decades that have followed. She investigates the intersection of trauma and healing, the healing processes of repetition, recollection and repair, and the defragmentation of history. Sanford has been in numerous exhibitions internationally, most recently Memory | Commitment | Aspiration (Arkansas, 2018), Cinerama: Art and the Moving Image (Singapore, 2017-18), Love in the Time of War (San Francisco, 2016) and Images Biennial: An Age of Our Own Making (Denmark, 2016). This piece is a particularly powerful evocation of individual, social and cultural repair. The performance takes place over three hours; visitors are welcome to drop in for part of it or stay for the duration.
Photo credit: Amy Lee Sanford, Full Circle (Day 3) Amy Lee Sanford - 2012 Durational Performance.
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Walton Ford
Walton Ford, Illustration Department, Printmaking Department, Painting Department, Experimental and Foundation Studies Division, and Fine Arts Division
Ford (82 FAV) focuses on beauty and brutality in the natural world and spoke about the importance of establishing a strong point of view.