Fall Course: Investigating Water

The first time I had been exposed to a liberal arts professor who directly asked us to produce studio work instead of writing a final paper was this fall with Nicole Merola in "Investigating Water: Connecting to Narragansett Bay."  While always being assumed by students and faculty alike, the thought of responding to liberal arts courses with studio work had never been directly initiated by a RISD professor.  Being a witness to the process, I can say that it was an extremely effective learning tool.  

The process to the final project was unique.   Nicole created a multidisciplinary environment, drawing from field trips, readings, class discussions, and journaling.  With so many different informing mediums, we discovered our personal relationship and passion in regards to the subject of water and the environment.   A sense of freedom allowed us to cultivate our growing interests, culminating in the studio with a final project.   In John Maeda’s surprise critique, all responses were geared towards how positively the multidisciplinary style can work for art and design students.   The style applies to how we would work in the real world, by gathering source material from several different places and using it directly in our work, which happened in this course.  

The course was unusual in the way it addressed the invisible boundaries that are rarely crossed by the professor or student in the normal flow of life at RISD. Our class was required to engage with local organizations through field trips and also create final projects in our studios, instead of in the usual Word or PowerPoint. While our professor, Nicole Merola, seemed to think it the natural path to incorporate studio practice with liberal arts, it had never been done quite in this way. On the night of the gallery opening, it was clear that there was fascination with the atypical nature of the course. We experienced John Maeda initiating a video recorded critique and response from students in the class and others who were attending the opening.

It was also great to see how other people, from different departments, worked along side myself. The design majors’ processes aren’t so different from our painting processes. The only difference is the source material we normally look at. Overall, it unified different material and different people through a final exhibit, where none of these have been integrated before.

How To Win by Steve & Steve

Sometimes there are those moments. When the questions you are grappling with at work blend seamlessly into the questions you are asking of your art and your life-as-art.

Wednesday was one such day. After working for a chunk of the afternoon on a workshop/ interventionist proposal for a conference on civic engagement and social justice, I schlepped up to Harvard for a presentation by Steve Lampert and Steve Duncombe on their project How to Win. More tag-team talk than presentation and more investigation than project, How to Win boils down to a very simple concept: what happens when you ask 20 self-described political artists:

How can you know when you’ve been successful?

The people they interviewed for the project, including Hans Haake, Emilie Clark, Dread Scott, took this seemingly straightforward question into all kinds of interlaced territories. When asked to define success in their artmaking, themes emerged such as:

Media Coverage

One-on-One Conversation

Making It Real

Opening Up New Spaces

Provoking Discussion

Recalibration of Reality

Laying the Groundwork for the Unimaginable

(Click through to see links to projects that might fall under these categories)

All of these are workable definitions...depending on your goals. And though the idea caused a great deal of discomfort for some people in the room, when making self-proclaimed political art, having an end goal is not only appropriate but necessary if any change is to happen.

For some artists then, the next question is "...and then what?" If my latest project gets a flood media coverage, how do I leverage that press? Or do I just pat myself on the back and move on to the next project?

If my artwork raises awareness about a particular issue but includes no subsequent action on the part of the viewer, can I still call it a success?

These are questions that keep me up at night in terms of why I have chose art & music as my way of making meaning in the world. Thinking of art as just one piece of a larger strategy towards making change doesn't mean that it shouldn't be taken seriously (and at the same time, having fun with it!)

However, coming back into the office on Thursday, I started to explore how these ideas can be applied to the work our office does here at RISD. We are a young program, barely a year and a half out of the gates. As such, our definition of success is shifting and all over the map. Is this perhaps part of the problem? When you declare specific goals you suddenly open up clear way to evaluate (and be evaluated) as to whether you are making progress. Being so new, is it even appropriate to be pushing an Office agenda, when we are just two amongst a much larger RISD.

Still, if I were to hazard definitions of success chosing from those listed above, I would string several of them together: opening up new spaces between RISD and the city of Providence by provoking discussion by creating platforms for group and one-on-one conversations. This definition is nonetheless incredibly vague...what would happen if instead we set up specific benchmarks such as:

Increasing public engagement course offerings on campus from 12 to 20...
Creating a network of Teaching Assistants who meet regularly to discuss the interconnections between their course work...
To have 1/2 of the freshmen from our Leadership Institute Orientation group taking on leadership roles by the time they are sophomores...
Increasing the number of off-site federal work study students by 10%...
Two new collaborative projects between classes and local non-profits, with appropriate orientation to the ethics of community-engaged art practices...

Specificity in this context is complicated. In order to move many of these initiatives ahead, there needs to be institutional buy-in that RISD is, and should be, a civically-minded community of learners and educators and administrators. In the meanwhile we will continue to push the conversations where we can and leverage the strength of our relationships here on campus and out in the community to propose more concrete definitions.

There is more to be done.

They came, they played...and then they ate

On Wednesday night last week, the Graduate Studies program hosted the Non-Orientation Non-Luncheon Grad School dinner in the CIT Building. The office was invited to create an intervention into the evening, which also included screening of James Bond films and a sitar-tabla performance by local Indian musicians.

One of the things our office has been thinking about lately is the insular nature of the various departments on campus, especially within the grad school. The rigor with which students are expected to approach their studio and class work often precludes some of the risk-taking inherent in working across disciplines and/or collaboratively.

And at the same time, we recognized that this event was going to be held during one of the busiest times of the year for students, so any intervention that took itself too seriously would probably not get too far off the ground.

As such, I proposed that the Office work with students from the various departments to collect unused or discarded materials from the various studios and invite students to play with these materials to build a collaborative, interdisciplinary installation on the 2nd floor of CIT. We chose the 2nd floor in part because it is where our Office is located, but also because the installation would be strategically placed near the bar and desserts!

The collection of detritus was greatly aided by the help of Grad Student Liaisons; one of the side perks of this project was our Office making connections with students and departments with whom we do not normally have much cause for interaction. All in all we gathered materials from all but three of the departments, arranging them by department on tables outside the play room (aka the conference room!)


The only instructions that the students were given were to select an object with the label indicating their department and that as they built into the installation, their object had to interact with objects from a department other than their own. They were given tools reminiscent of elementary school art classes with which to build; the rest was up to their imagination.


And build they did!


At least until the upstairs got so crowded that a group of students coopted the playroom as their dining room, essentially stalling the project in its tracks.

On the plus side, the installation served as a launching pad for many great conversations overheard and instigated over the course of the night around any number of relevant topics including:


* What does the Office of Public Engagement actually do?
* What scares people about working collaboratively? Especially in the context of a project-based curriculum?
* What kind of framework is necessary in order for collaboration to be embraced?
* How can different departments share what they are working on with others in different buildings and sides of campus?
* What classes already exist that ask students to make interdisciplinary artwork?

Earlier this week, I was sent a link to a parallel project that j. morgan puett is orchestrating in Chicago: http://www.deptstore.blogspot.com/ I was particularly struck by the expansiveness of the physical space available for this project. It set my thoughts to spinning...

AmeriCan Preserves

In the process of putting together the website for the collaborative public art project that I have been working on for the RISD/Brown Public Art: History, Theory, and Practice class.

Sarah, age 21, Wenham, MA

For the project we made 50 jars of homemade applesauce and are distributing them to friends and family and unfamiliars around the country in exchange for their recorded responses to the question: "What American values would you like to be preserved for the next 106 years?"

These recordings and photos of people holding their applesauce are being posted on the website: www.americanpreserves.tumblr.com