Now More Than Ever

RISD students thrive in the unknown. Creative impulses derive from new solutions or perspectives that evolve by utilizing processes that students learn at RISD. Studio assignments challenge students to express complex ideas, explore different ways of making and reframe questions to generate inventive solutions to vexing challenges. Our Liberal Arts classes teach students how to confront and contextualize new ideas and to question assumptions that might otherwise impede the essential nature of building new knowledge.

This realm of uncertainty is where artists and designers have inordinate influence. Unlike people trained in practices that derive from more linear thinking, artists and designers produce bold outcomes from uncertainty.  

RISD as an institution is charting the unknown as it adjusts its educational model to bring students back on campus safely. Our faculty and staff have reconfigured learning spaces, pedagogy and technology integration. Some of what we have learned through COVID-19 pandemic adaptations will resonate in new learning forms and opportunities long after this current crisis has abated.  

We are at our core a creative learning institution, and to be such requires constant growth and reevaluation of our structures, systems and methods. The pandemic and ongoing incidences of horrific police violence perpetrated against Black citizens have taught us that RISD must do more. Our students demand and deserve nothing less. We are confronting and beginning to dismantle systems of injustice and inequality built into our social and educational constructs. These changes are immediately reshaping our curricula and our student experience. This fall there is already a range of new courses and programs, and we have committed to searches for additional faculty who will bring new areas of expertise in anti-racism and decolonialization in arts and design.  

We are equipped to meet the dual challenges of the pandemic and systemic racism precisely because we are a community of artists and designers. We know how to employ self-critique, and how to use our values and creativity to build a better RISD. By doing so, we demonstrate every day the enduring value of an art and design education.  

Just as we know RISD must change, we know that systemic racism, climate crisis and societal injustices require deep and lasting change. Increasingly, artists and designers are at the forefront of leading these changes, illuminating these problems through their work and developing creative solutions to improve lives.  

Thank you for your generous engagement with RISD. I am grateful that you are on this journey of reinvention with us.

Rosanne Somerson 76
RISD President