The Year of Providence Initiative

Last Wednesday, a group of RISD staff, faculty and administrators gathered to celebrate the accomplishments of the Nelson Mandela: Honoring His Legacy initiative.

2008-2009 marked the first attempt to build a cross-campus dialogue around a specific theme, working with students, faculty and staff to integrate these conversations into the classroom and extracurricular activities. A full report of the activities contained within the initiative can be accessed here, including the Free Food 4 Thought dinners (with creative cuisine by RISD Catering), cross-programming with Foundation Studies, English Department, the RISD Film Series, Brown's John Nicolas Brown Center for Public Humanities, and more.




At the closing reception on Wednesday, the co-sponsors of the Nelson Mandela Initiative, the Office of International Programs, the Office of Multicultural Affairs and RISD | Public Engagement announced the launch of the 2009-2010 initiative: The Year Of Providence. This year-long acknowledgement of place and concept will kick off next September with an exhibition of Latino(a) artists at the Ewing House. Featuring work by three RISD students, three RISD faculty and 3 local artists, this exhibition encapsulates the spirit of the initiative, to connect RISD to the rich diversity of the larger Providence community, giving voice to lesser known histories of this city and its residents.

To find out how to get involved in this initiative, feel free to contact RISD | Public Engagement over the summer at 401-427-6906.

All these conversations, heading...

I just returned from a conversation around collaborative research at RISD, which was sponsored by the Landscape Architecture Department in honor of the 10th anniversary of Innovation Studio. These past few weeks have seen a congregation of thoughts and actions around the ways in which RISD as a community is stepping up to the social, political and design challenges of our times. Some of these other events and occasions include the panels around David Orr's visit, Marjetica Potrc's talk to the Sculpture Department on interdisciplary practice around issues of self-articulated communities, and our own office's Student Visioning Gathering this upcoming weekend.

In all of these gatherings, there exist a number of emergent themes that belie the imagined divide between the fine arts and design disciplines and offer up a compelling vision for really "what we do" here at RISD.

Just briefly, themes I took away include:

1) While innovative, integrated learning and research is happening at RISD, people are operating in discrete pods, which decreases the impact of the work. How do we create nodes of knowledge gathering and dispersal for students and caulty to know how to approach cr0ss-departmental collaboration and resource sharing?
2) As an institution RISD needs to shift gears to recognize the rapid speed at which financial, ecological, social, and political reorganization is progressing, lest we be left out of the conversation.
3) Research at RISD is classroom & studio-based, ultimately tied to the interests and passions of the student body. Therefore the school has an obligation to students to find ways of accumulating and dispersing information about what research they are doing and support faculty who are formulating new seminars and studios to push this learning.
4) The ways that we work with communities, whether local collaborations or in system analysis of developing countries, there needs to be an acknowledgement of the informal strategies (informal cities, design solutions, high-low technology interfaces, etc) that are also impacting these investigations.

With all of the incredible creativity here at RISD, there are no shortage of ideas of how to best address these issues. However, I keep returning to a place of caution - that we don't need to wait for leadership (and its subsequent financial resources) to come from above. We can do more by learning to want less, to make concrete steps forward that fit current financial realities. As an institution of creative learning, I am confident RISD can put forth innovative strategies for moving the agenda of ethical and sustainable education into the new paradigm that lies ahead.