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This Wintersession the Writing Center is hosting five different workshops designed for all RISD writing—from function to fiction, research to rhetoric, professional to personal.
See below for details (click to enlarge), get inspired, and reserve your spot today! (RSVP to mbarrett01@risd.edu)
A view of the RISD Graphic Design Triennial 2010–2012
Is it just us, or are art and text getting notably cozy in the chilly fall air? For your consideration:
The Graphic Design Triennial, up this week at Woods-Gerry, is a feast of form and language. The curators (including Writing Center tutor Anther Kiley) boldly organized their selection not by media but by thematic tags, including “writing,” “narrative,” and “authorship” alongside “tools,” “systems,” and “pedagogy.”
Tutor Malcolm Rio presenting on the "rhetoric of design"
As of this fall, the Writing Center’s Sunday night tutor meetings feature a Tutors’ Salon, at which we each present on a subject of interest, then talk about it together. Subjects so far have included: the “rhetoric of design”; composing comics; and the essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” in which the writer Gloria Anzaldúa argues that controlling accents controls culture itself.Tomorrow (3:30, Metcalf Auditorium) new media artist Ben Rubin visits RISD to talk about his Shakespeare Machine. A “linguistic supercollider sculpture (that’s also a chandelier)” (per ArtNews) installed at New York’s Public Theater, the Shakespeare Machine algorithmically combines phrases from thirty-seven of the bard’s plays.
Last week’s National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists, held at SVA in New York, took as its theme “WORDIMAGE/IMAGEWORD,” and RISD showed up in force. Professor Mike Fink presented “A Shared Legacy: To Read Pictures and to See Sentences”; ID grad alum Kyung Hoon Hyun presented “Design Democracy”; and Writing Center Director Jennifer Liese presented “Toward a History (and Future) of the Artist Statement.” Keynote speaker Bill Beckley’s talk, “Image Boink Text: The Erotic Relationship of Language and Art,” was a tour-de-force of speculative notes on the many ways in which image and text commingle, from the literal (e.g., the captioned documentary images of the Earthworks artists) to the invisible (e.g., the historical narrative embedded in The Raft of the Medusa).
And finally …
Photographer Sally Mann visited RISD a couple of weeks back and in a sold-out lecture shifted the audience’s gaze from her images to her text, reading from her forthcoming memoir, If Memory Serves.
No, it’s definitely not just us.
Today we attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Mike Fink Aerie, a reading alcove in CB 521 (aka, the Old RISD Library, the hallowed shelves of which have been all but bare since the Fleet Library’s opening in 2006). Poet and English professor Mairéad Byrne introduced the space and the guest of honor, noting that she hoped this reclaimed nook would be the first of many here that would “redefine the library by going back to its original roots.”
The Mike Fink Aerie ribbon-cutting ceremony, in the Old Library
Mike Fink, RISD English professor for some 50 years, storyteller extraordinaire, and keeper of collective memory, reminded us of the Old Library’s long history as a place for contemplation and, in wartime, respite from a troubled world. He described the provenance of the wicker chairs in the aerie (they once belonged to RISD professor George Sullivan, for whom the Library was the heart of the campus), as well as the inspiration behind his selection of books on birds, recalling his recent course on the topic and likening himself to the hummingbird, which “flies backward like my mind. I like to go back and tap the past.”
With that, a group of well-wishers applauded professors Byrne and Fink, who invite the whole RISD community to visit. Enter the Old Library and look up: like the real thing—a bird’s nest perched on a cliff—this aerie is nestled up high, on the balcony.
The RISD Writing Center began this academic year with a new brochure. Designed by Max Ackerman (BFA GD ’11), it features on its cover an installation by Jason Huff (MFA DM ’11) that inspired us because it embodies one of our core beliefs—that writing can be a generative force in the making of art and design. (Jason turned his studio into a black box and spent two days and nights in it fasting. On the first day he cleared his thoughts through meditation; on the second day he wrote five hundred descriptions of “every piece I may make someday.” A bell rang approximately every three minutes to keep things on track.)
This brochure, which is full of quotes from RISD students about what writing means to them, text-based student art, and an overview of how writing is practiced at RISD in and out of the curriculum, suggested that the Writing Center just needed a blog. Today, almost a year later, thanks to technical support from Erica Morse (BFA GD ’12 and editor of the amazing All-Nighter), we finally launch that blog.
Stay tuned for posts on all sorts of art + design + writing events, news, workshops, happenings, and more.