Founders Spotlight: Kelly Walters MFA 15 GD
Celebrating RISD’s alumni founders and entrepreneurs
We celebrate RISD founders by remembering their work and shining a light on the entrepreneurial spirit that remains strong in our students and alumni. In this series, alumni founders share thoughts on getting started, taking risks, and how their education prepared them to create something entirely their own.
Kelly Walters MFA 15 GD is the founder of Bright Polka Dot, a multidisciplinary design studio and art practice that works across platforms to create exhibitions, installations, publications and digital design experiences for cultural and commercial institutions.
I’m really interested in projects where collaboration is at the heart. I like doing research and I tie my work to themes of Black representation and how society informs and shapes design.
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I didn’t necessarily think I was going to start my own business. It was more organic, I’d say. Founding Bright Polka Dot was a way for me to contextualize the different aspects of my practice—writing, art, design.
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When I was starting out, I realized that as a founder, I was the one making the decisions. I could decide what types of projects I wanted to take on and clients I wanted to work with. I could make decisions about the values that are important to my practice. I would ask myself, “What do these projects say?” or “Can I connect this to my own values and support underrepresented groups in art and design?”
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At RISD, I had opportunities to engage deeply in planning, in setting and meeting deadlines. Whether it was in the classroom as a teaching assistant, or in studio projects or curatorial work, I had to be organized. I learned a lot. I feel like a lot of my classwork provided me with a landscape to practice that kind of work. And then when you’re done with school, you’re on your own, you’re figuring it out. But I’d had the opportunity to learn, so I was ready.
The ideas that led to the founding of RISD were nurtured by a small group of women who had joined forces to raise funds for Rhode Island’s contribution to the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. In 1877—four decades before women in the US gained the right to vote—Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf and the 34 other members of the Rhode Island Women’s Centennial Commission invested their group’s surplus in founding a school of art and design.
In 1877, 35 women, armed with $1,675 and a vision, founded RISD. Understanding that a school for art and design could produce world-changing critical thinkers and makers, the founders were innovators whose impact stretches across the globe.
