View additional visiting speaker recordings:
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Murray Moss | Interdisciplinary Design Becomes the Norm
RISD President and Murray Moss
Visiting designer Murray Moss, founder and creative mind behind MOSS design gallery in NYC, presents, Interdisciplinary Design Becomes the Norm, the second installment of a two-part guest lecture series. The late 20th century was marked by a tearing down of the walls between disciplines. How does this revolution lead to evolution in the way we imagine new possibilities of “making”? Do the cracks in the now anachronistic silos expose more expansive, integrative forms of design we see today? Moss will draw on his seminal role in setting the stage for contemporary design in the US.
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Our Literal Speed presents Everythingism
Our Literal Speed, Graduate Studies, Liberal Arts, Fine Arts Division, and Academic Affairs
It could be argued that the most compelling art is no longer defined by particular media (painting, sculpture, photography, video), or by particular subjects (portraiture, landscape, still life, devotional image), or by particular strategies of representation (Cubism, Surrealism, Pop Art, Appropriation); instead, the true art of our time might best be described as being distinguished by activities that employ everything to evoke everything by means of everything.
Our Literal Speed is a text and art undertaking located in Selma, Alabama.
For more information on Our Literal Speed please visit their website here: Our Literal Speed
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Asim Waqif: Strategies for Disruption
Asim Waqif and Painting Department
Asim Waqif's projects attempt to span architecture, art and design, with a strong contextual reference to contemporary urban design and the politics of occupying/ intervening/ using public spaces. Concerns of ecology and anthropology weave through his work, and he has done extensive research on vernacular systems of ecological management, especially with respect to water, waste and architecture. His artworks employ manual processes that are deliberately painstaking and laborious while the products themselves are temporary or even designed to decay.
He has worked in sculpture, site-specific public installation, video, photography and with large-scale interactive installations that combine traditional and new media. -
From Allies to Accomplices: Refiguring the Roles of Design in 21st-century Civics
Carlo DiSalvo, Academic Affairs, and Industrial Design Department
Carlo DiSalvo will discuss the issues of civics—of
how we live together—are pressing matters of concern. In this talk,
Carl DiSalvo will share a series of themes and projects for
considering how designers might move from allies to accomplices in
addressing and participating in 21st-century civics. Together, we will
explore how our practices, professions, and institutions of design
might transform to be even more engaged and accountable in
contributing to how we live together, in these times.
This lecture is sponsored by the RISD Academic Affairs Academic
Enrichment Grant and the Industrial Design Department.
Carl DiSalvo is an Associate Professor in the Digital Media Program in
the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia
Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech he directs the Public Design
Workshop: a design research studio that explores socially-engaged
design and civic media.
DiSalvo is also co-director of the Digital Interdisciplinary Liberal
Arts Center and its Digital Civics initiative, funded by the Mellon
Foundation, and he leads the Serve-Learn-Sustain Fellows program,
which brings together faculty, staff, students and community partners
to explore pressing social research themes (the 2016-2017 themes are
Smart Cities and Food, Energy, Water, Systems). He has a courtesy
appointment in the School of Interactive Computing, and is an
affiliate of the GVU Center and the Center for Urban Innovation.
DiSalvo also directs the Digital Media track of the interdisciplinary
M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction.
DiSalvo’s scholarship draws together theories and methods from design,
the social sciences, and the humanities, to analyze the social and
political qualities of design, and to prototype experimental systems
and services. Current research domains include civics, smart cities,
the internet of things, food systems, and environmental monitoring.
Across these domains, DiSalvo is interested in how practices of
participatory and public design work to articulate issues and provide
resources for new forms of collective action. -
No Exit: An Evening with Annie Mok on Fear, Comics, & Magic
Annie Mok, Illustration Department, and Fine Arts Division
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Documentary Proof Which Leaves No Reason For Doubt
Pallavi Paul and Painting Department
Pallavi Paul leads a collaborative text reading and talks about her artistic practice.
The evening incorporates a participative performance: a collective reading, in morse, of the official file of a secret agent Noor Inayat Khan who worked for the SOE during WW2. The file has been reproduced on a 73-foot scroll—it hosts many provocations about the nature of history writing, story telling, time, and disappearance. The piece takes on a sculptural quality: it produces a sensation of being in a state of meditation and cacophony at once.
In her talk, Paul explores some of the philosophical ideas around formal non-fiction, cinema and the notions of truth. Drawing from a background of storytelling, filmmaking, and experimentation, her ideas push boundaries to explore new horizons and unravel new meanings and possibilities. For Pallavi, the medium of documentary becomes “resistance, possibility, a second horizon on which things can happen.”
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Virgil Abloh | Theoretically Speaking
RISD President and Virgil Abloh
Best known for his Milan-based fashion label Off-White and as Kanye West’s longtime creative director, Virgil Abloh visited RISD May 2–3, 2017, packing the Auditorium with students eager to hear him speak about his trajectory and approach to design. His brief talk quickly 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.
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Devotion | Patti Smith
Patti Smith and RISD Museum
September 27, 2017, 7:00pm - 8:30pm, RISD Museum. Renowned artist and author Patti Smith reads from her latest book, Devotion, a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections. Sold out event. Limited seating, pre-registration required. Limit of 4 tickets per person. All prices include a copy of Devotion and are non-refundable.
Live simulcast available at the RISD Museum’s Metcalf Auditorium, 20 North Main Street, for free on a first come, first served basis. A limited number of free student tickets available through a lottery system through RISD’s Center for Arts & Language.
Patti Smith is a writer, performer, and visual artist. Her memoir Just Kids received a National Book Award, and her recent book M Train is a critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller. Smith was awarded the prestigious title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic. Her seminal album Horses has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time, and in 2007 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Smith lives in New York City.
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Ayad Akhtar: A Conversation
Ayad Akhtar, Shahzia Sikander, and Painting Department
On October 25, Pakistani-born artist and RISD alumna Shahzia Sikander, the Painting Department's 2016 Kirloskar Fellow, organized a lecture and conversation with playwright and author–and her frequent collaborator–Ayad Akhtar, at the RISD Metcalf Auditorium.
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Critical Encounters: Egúngún Masquerade Ensembles
Bolaji Campbell, Henry J. Drewal, Thierry Gentis, Kate Irvin, Alagba Babatunde Akinsegun, and RISD Museum
Discussion held October 16th, 2016 at 2:00pm in the Chace Center, RISD Museum, Providence, RI.
Egúngún masquerade regalia is constructed from disparate layers that are appliqued, patched, and sewn into panels or lappets. Some of the oldest cloth—often locally handwoven—is found at the core of each ensemble, while the outer layers present more contemporary textiles drawn from the global market. Bold and vibrant, these assemblages on view in the exhibition, Whirling Return of the Ancestors: Egúngún Masquerade Ensembles of the Yorùbá, are multidimensional feasts for the senses. During this lively exchange, curators, art historians, and artists unfolded the material lives of these ensembles. Drawn from the collection of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, and presented in an art and design context, intended to be animated by movement, but presented in stillness, made and remade, these ensembles allow us to consider the conventions and parameters of academic disciplines and museum practices as well as the interrelationships between ritual, trade, and processes of making.
Speakers included: Bolaji Campbell, co-curator, professor and department head in RISD’s History of Art and Visual Culture; Henry J. Drewal, co-curator, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Afro-American Studies; Thierry Gentis, Curator/NAGPRA Coordinator, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology; Kate Irvin, curator of costume and textiles at the RISD Museum; and artist Alagba Babatunde Akinsegun.
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Conversation: Rick Lowe, Julie Mehretu, and Shahzia Sikander
Rick Lowe, Julie Mehretu, Shahzia Sikander, and Painting Department
Pakistani-born artist and RISD alumna Shahzia Sikander, the Painting Department's 2016 Kirloskar Fellow, organized a lecture and conversation with Rick Lowe and Julie Mehretu (RISD MFA ’97) to discuss the cultural landscape from the 1990’s to present day and their part in shaping it. The friends developed a dialogue about artists supporting artists, collaborations, mentoring, and what lies ahead.
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A Conversation with Kara Walker
RISD Museum and Kara Walker
Accomplished artist Kara Walker (RISD MFA 1994, Painting/Printmaking), winner of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures that have appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. The RISD Auditorium was full to capacity for this much-anticipated Artist Talk. This video was produced by RISD Museum.
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Carolee Schneemann | Lecture
Graduate Studies and Carolee Schneemann
Visiting artist Carolee Schneemann gave a lecture on March 22nd, 2016 in the RISD Auditorium at 7:00pm, introduced by Patti Phillips. Carolee Schneemann’s legendary performances, installations, and video art explore and fuse a vitality of sensate experience and vivid imagination through ideas of the sacred, taboo, and erotic pleasure. With remarkable courage she disturbs conventions and trespasses boundaries, altering the conditions – and our expectations – of art. A pioneer of 1960s feminist art, her paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture, and strikingly independent writings reveal and animate a distinctive vision that continues to challenge and inspire artists today.
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Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities Symposium | Keynote Lecture: Bernard Tschumi
Architecture Department, Laura Briggs, Dietrich Neumann, and Bernard Tschumi
This two-day symposium, organized in conjunction with development of the newly planned joint Brown/RISD Masters of Architecture degree, engages leading thinkers on the nature of today's architectural education through questioning the meaning of curriculum development that emphasizes context and explores methods for architecture to intersect with other bodies of knowledge.
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Philip Glass | Lecture
Liberal Arts Division and Philip Glass
The local arts nonprofit FirstWorks brought Glass and violinist Tim Fain to Providence for a Wednesday evening concert Februrary 25th, 2015. The composer then stopped by RISD on Thursday afternoon, February 26th for an open discussion about his creative practice with Dean of Liberal Arts Dan Cavicchi, a cultural historian and author of several music-focused books. A large audience packed into the RISD Auditorium listened intently as Glass spoke about the process of producing emotionally charged soundtracks for The Truman Show, Notes on a Scandal, Hamburger Hill and many other moving films.
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Critical Encounters: Kicking the Machine | a discussion between Todd Oldham and Wendy Goodman
Todd Oldham, Wendy Goodman, and RISD Museum
Hacking traditional manufacturing processes and manipulating materials in unexpected ways defined Todd Oldham’s fashion design methodology—characterized by reinterpreting and reimagining embroidery, wool, crystals, dyes, sequins, and even historic textile manufacturing methods. Oldham and Wendy Goodman, design editor at New York magazine, reflect on this intensive design process in the context of the 1990s, and discuss how Oldham’s innovations to garment-making standards reverberate today.
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Beyond RISD | David Stark
RISD Careers and David Stark
Over-the-top event designer David Stark, Painting class of 1991, visited RISD on Tuesday, March 5, 2013 as the next speaker in the Career Center’s new series exploring the variety of paths alumni choose after RISD.