"There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard."
Arundhati Roy
News and Events
The creative minds behind the massive Providence portrait honoring Rhode Island’s Indigenous population discuss its creation and impact.
From its on-campus Pre-College program to online classes and a new Summer Teen Art Institute in Shanghai, RISD CE focuses on accessibility.
As We Are opened during Pride month and showcased work by a number of local queer artists.
Shey Rivera Ríos and Ruchika Nambiar collaborate with research designers from the MIT Game Lab to explore how games can be used to subvert oppressive narratives.
Many Hands, Many Voices: Textile Histories and Entanglements, taught by RISD Museum curator Kate Irvin, highlights marginalized makers of the past.
Grad students Claudia Peck, Priyata Bosamia and Shivani Pinapotu gain hands-on experience working with museum staff.
Korina Emmerich and Liana Shewey of NYC incubator Relative Arts participate in ongoing Indigenous and First Nations Artist Series.
A brief interview with one of RISD’s Schiller Family Assistant Professors in Race in Art and Design.
The LoveFrom founder and RISD honorary degree recipient is launching a new scholarship program to support aspiring designers in the US and UK.
New Say Your Pain app developed in conjunction with creative agency WongDoody aims to improve outcomes for non-English speakers.
Undergraduate students Pei-Yu Hung and Andres Guevara organize a wide-ranging storytelling series for a Collaborative Study Project focused on Indigenous oral traditions.
A brief interview with one of RISD’s Schiller Family Assistant Professors in Race in Art and Design.
The second-year teaching and research fellow shows students how the built environment can shed light on issues of race, class, gender and more.
RISD’s 11th annual MLK Series keynote speaker addresses public art and the importance of creating space for Black artists.
SEI Teaching and Research Fellow Zoé Samudzi explores images of violence and death and how humanitarian photography may or may not influence the viewer’s behavior.
Brown|RISD Dual-Degree student Njari Anderson discusses the emotions behind Fountain, his Dorner Prize-winning sculpture now on view at the RISD Museum.
The latest speaker in RISD’s Indigenous and First Nations Artist Series discusses her own abstract work honoring generations of strong Indigenous women.
SEI Research Fellow Nichole Rustin engages RISD students in contemporary political questions and develops their skills as liberal arts scholars.
A Pause Is Not A Break is an exhibition on the intersection of sound and architectural practice. Curated by Assistant Professor Jess Myers, the show brings together three sound works by Myers in collaboration with Adriene Lilly, Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia of WAI Architecture Thinktank, as well as Ilze Wolff of Wolff Architects in collaboration with Cara Stacey.
A SPUR-funded project by grad student Zoë Pulley presents positive images of Black people to counteract the negative imagery flooding the media.
A brief interview with one of RISD’s Schiller Family Assistant Professors in Race in Art and Design.
Providence-based dance company Haus of Glitter speaks at RISD about using an activist dance opera to transform a racist national historic site.
A month-long, student-curated exhibition brings together artists and designers of color from RISD and beyond to illuminate the diversity of the Black experience.
A month-long, student-curated exhibition brings together artists and designers of color from RISD and beyond to illuminate the diversity of the Black experience.
Ghanaian-Scottish educator Lesley Lokko reflects on the global architecture community’s response to this unprecedented moment in racial justice history.
A brief interview with one of RISD’s recently hired Schiller Family Assistant Professors in Race in Art and Design.
A brief interview with one of RISD’s recently hired Schiller Family Assistant Professors in Race in Art and Design.
A brief interview with one of RISD’s recently hired Schiller Family Assistant Professors in Race in Art and Design.
A brief interview with RISD’s recently hired Schiller Family Associate Professor in Race in Art and Design.
A brief interview with the assistant professor of Architecture and member of RISD’s Race in Art and Design cluster hire.
A brief interview with one of RISD’s recently hired Schiller Family Assistant Professors in Race in Art and Design.
A brief interview with one of RISD’s recently hired Schiller Family Assistant Professors in Race in Art and Design.
2022 MLK Series keynote speaker Eddie Glaude, Jr. invokes legendary jazz musician John Coltrane in a powerful and forthright call to action.
2022 MLK Series keynote speaker Eddie Glaude, Jr. invokes legendary jazz musician John Coltrane in a powerful and forthright call to action.
Ghanaian undergraduate Abena Acheampong Danquah wins a Creative Futures Grant from the Black Artists + Designers Guild.
Visiting scholar Namita Gupta Wiggers encourages RISD students to use research as a way of catalyzing community, action and visibility.
Full-time faculty members to join RISD in fall 2021 as a result of the “Race in Art & Design” cluster hire initiative.
RISD’s Continuing Education division partners with multiple nonprofits to support BIPOC youth interested in pursuing careers in art and design.
Three rising museum professionals help to make the RISD Museum a place where everyone feels welcome and represented.
New hub for community engagement will support and build upon existing initiatives and develop new opportunities for mutually beneficial relationships.
The Providence Journal reflects on Don’t You Sit Down: Shades of Jim Crow, 1960– exhibition designed by RISD’s Interior Architecture department.
RISD’s Center for Complexity designs a suite of solutions intended to advance health equity and reduce adverse medical outcomes for patients of color.
An interactive on-campus exhibition brings to life the civil rights movement and ongoing struggle against racism and segregation in the US.
Husband-and-wife educators endawnis Spears and Cassius Spears, Jr. kick off the Liberal Arts division’s spring lecture series.
New RISD First-Generation to College Pre-Orientation Program will offer a multifaceted experience for incoming students.
SEI Faculty Fellow Ernest A. Bryant III challenges students to find new meaning in the images that surround all of us.
SEI Fellow Jane’a Johnson studies violence, visual culture and how race is reflected in archives and museums.
SEI Fellow Jane’a Johnson studies violence, visual culture and how race is reflected in archives and museums.
Faculty, curators and librarians come together for a semester-long seminar on decolonization that builds on the institution’s commitment to advancing social equity and inclusion.
Faculty, curators and librarians come together for a semester-long seminar on decolonization that builds on the institution’s commitment to advancing social equity and inclusion.
Interior Architecture students debate the fate of Civil Rights leader Rosa Parks’ former home in Detroit.
Visiting artist Dionne Lee questions the makers and motives behind historical American landscape photography.
Since August 2019 RISD has raised $15 million to fund a new program that recruits and supports outstanding graduate students.
RISD launches a job search for no fewer than 10 new faculty members specializing in race, decolonization and cultural representation.
Rhode Island School of Design is hiring 10 faculty members focused on race and decoloniality in the arts as part of a wider plan to tackle systemic racism.
Director John W. Smith announces deaccession of Head of a King (Oba) and plans to bring needed focus to Native American art and design via New Americas Research Initiative.
Activists Lucas Michael and Mary Ellen Carroll rally fellow artists to help children still detained at the US border.
Connecting from home this spring, Graphic Design students and faculty are rethinking what—and how—they make.
The Rhode Island Foundation names Assistant Professor of Illustration Eric Telfort a 2020 MacColl Johnson Fellow.
Visiting artist Dread Scott shares his vision for change with RISD students.
Students in three Wintersession travel courses learn through hands-on work with local artisans in Mexico.
Multidisciplinary artist Jazzmen Lee-Johnson works to transcend the legacies of enslaved peoples and gender inequality.
Social justice visionary Michelle Alexander delivers RISD’s 2020 Martin Luther King, Jr. keynote address.
RISD’s 10 new full-time faculty members are bringing new perspectives to campus and helping to diversify the curriculum.
An ongoing exhibition highlights the work and personal stories of 20 RISD community members living with disabilities.
Associate Professor Paula Gaetano-Adi experiments with an interesting way of helping first-year students let go of their assumptions.
Thanks to two generous gifts, exceptional graduate students selected for the Society of Presidential Fellows will have tuition-free access to a RISD education.
Commencement keynote speaker Bryan Stevenson urged the Class of 2019 to combat injustice with hope and creativity.
Consider new visions of design theory and practice with author, anthropologist, and philosopher Arturo Escobar in conversation with RISD faculty, Namita Dharia, Jess Brown, Ramon Tejada, and Ijlal Muzaffar. Studio practices are explored through the lens of justice, ethics, and the environment.
Interior Architecture students are working with the Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island to reimagine and reconfigure Providence’s Cathedral of St. John.
A conversation with Matthew Shenoda, RISD’s first vice president of Social Equity and Inclusion.
An ambitious symposium considers how the bones of a ruined house can spark dialogue about memory, preservation and institutionalized racism.