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Friday, October 7, 2022
Opening Keynote Conversation
2:30–3:30 pm
Inauguration Tent, 220 South Water Street
Artist Shahzia Sikander MFA PT/PR 95, television producer Ilene Chaiken GD 79 P 18 and architect Michael Maltzan BArch 85 P 24 will discuss the power and potential of New Space(s) in art, design and entertainment.
On The Place of Art, Design and the Humanities
4:00–5:30 pm
RISD Auditorium, Auditorium Building
What role do or can the humanities, art and design play in shaping our understanding and our world? And what are the unique resonances between art and design and the humanities? In what way do these intellectual, material and creative spaces impact, inform and rely on one another to advance human knowledge?
Panelists
Frances Bronet, president of Pratt Institute
Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown University
Renée T. White, provost at The New School
Moderator: Anais Missakian, interim provost at RISD
On The Lands We Occupy
4:00–5:30 pm
20 Washington Place Auditorium
How is land—from individual property to a nation—turned into a political and economic entity? Does it necessarily require the binary of majority and minority, of inclusion and exclusion? What are alternative ways of coexisting with land(s)? Is the current rise of global fascism, rife with dreams of racial, caste, religious, and even political purity, a conclusion of the modern colonial regime of turning the land into property?
Panelists
Tanya Aguiñiga, MFA 05 FD, Mexican-American artist, community organizer and craftsperson
Shándíín Brown, Native American art professional, jeweler and citizen of the Navajo Nation
Lilly Manycolors, MA 22 GAC, interdisciplinary artist
Cassius Spears, First Councilman, Narragansett Indian Tribe
Moderators: Ramon Tejada, assistant professor, RISD and Angelo Baca, assistant professor, HPSS
On The Politics of Collecting and Display
4:00–5:30 pm
Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum
Among other things, museums are often archives of colonialism, institutions made possible by and for colonial expansion. Beyond reparations of stolen materials, what should the museum’s role be in advancing decolonized futures and creating new spaces? How can we reimagine the practices and pedagogy of collecting and displaying that disrupt historical and geographical hierarchies that are frequently established by museums (and galleries)? What other modalities of memorialization can we draw upon that do not chart their timelines through Western enlightenment or colonialism? And how might asking such questions in the classroom embolden our students’ critical knowing and making skills?
Panelists
Sarah Ganz Blythe, P 22, interim director, RISD Museum
Jody Graf, assistant curator at MoMA PS1
Christopher Roberts, game designer, film director and producer, RISD Schiller Family Assistant Professor
endawnis Spears, director of outreach and programming and founding member of the Akomawt Educational Initiative
Moderators: Kate Irvin, Costumes & Textiles curator, RISD Museum and Lisa Z. Morgan, associate professor RISD
Saturday, October 8, 2022
On The Politics Of Space
10:30 am–12:00 pm
RISD Auditorium, Auditorium Building
Sometimes we use the term space to mean a physical medium: the space of a building, of a city, of nation, the globe. At other times, we use it as a metaphor: the space of an institution, of society, of the mind. We use the term architecture to designate the arrangements of these spaces and their partitions. But what if space is the quintessential abstraction of (Western) modernity that necessarily privileges a measurable, knowable, extractable and controllable notion of the world over all others? What if Western space is, in fact, not space at all? Are there non-spatial ways of looking at the world in which bodies and matter, organic and inorganic, merge? Can we imagine and demonstrate in the classroom forms of world-making beyond the constructs we devise for space that emphasize unknowing, humility and limitation in the world?
Panelists
Lucia Allais, associate professor of architecture, Columbia University
Taylor Baldwin, associate professor, RISD
Mae-Ling Lokko, assistant professor, Yale University
Moderator: Ijlal Muzaffar, associate professor, RISD
On Translating Across Spaces
12:30–2:00 pm
RISD Auditorium, Auditorium Building
If we agree that translation is a culturally and socially significant practice, then how can we begin to think about it beyond its dominant sense of being a transfer between languages? How does translation work across different media like sound and music, platforms like stage and screen, and between movements and gestures? How does it operate between students and faculty? How do we address questions of in/visibility, responsibility, and accessibility in relation to translation?
Panelists
Avishek Ganguly, associate professor, RISD
Jon Kamen, P 09, founding chairman and CEO of RadicalMedia
Emma Ramadan, literary translator
Daisy Rockwell, artist and Booker Prize-winning translator from Hindi and Urdu
Moderator: Jess Myers, assistant professor, RISD
On Narrating Across Media
2:30–4:00 pm
20 Washington Place Auditorium
How do our myriad forms of media create, dismantle or otherwise inform our lives–the intellectual, material, psychological, spiritual and other spaces we inhabit? What is communicated across which media at what time in history? How do stories differ as they shift from drawing and painting to literature to design, and what do these shifts tell us about the historical emergence of these practices? How do some forms of media receive favor over others and how might they be subverted? In what ways might our pedagogical practices impact student thinking and learning concerning the power of narration in art and design?
Panelists
Amy Devers, MFA 12 FD, American furniture designer, fabricator, television personality, podcaster and RISD faculty member
Joel Christian Gill, American artist, chair of visual narratives
Ben Passmore, American comics artist and political cartoonist
Nadia Shammas, Arab-American comic writer
Qualeasha Wood, 19 PR, textile artist
Moderator: Eric Telfort, 05 IL, associate professor, RISD
On Seeing and Unseeing
2:30–4:00 pm
Metcalf Auditorium, RISD Museum
How do we understand the work of seeing? What is at stake in working with processes and archives of visual representation like photographs and documentation, given their implication in histories of colonial domination, enslavement and surveillance? What does it mean to “train the eye” and how do we approach this in the classroom? How might a practice of “unseeing” enable us to look more closely at the intersections of visual cultures, identity formation and affect?
Panelists
Ashleigh Axios, 08 GD, chief experience officer and a co-owner at Coforma
Jon Key, 13 GD, cofounder and design director at Codify Art
Conor Moynihan, assistant curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs, RISD Museum
Alisa Swindell, Associate Curator of Photography, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College
Moderator: Derrick Woods-Morrow, Schiller Family Assistant Professor, RISD
Closing Keynote Conversation
4:30–5:30 pm
RISD Auditorium, Auditorium Building
Author, scholar and anti-racist activist Ibram X. Kendi and President Crystal Williams will discuss how art and design can help build an antiracist society.
Map
1
Auditorium Building (RISD Auditorium)
17 Canal Walk
11
Inauguration Tent
220 South Water Street
18
RISD Museum (Metcalf Auditorium)
20 North Main Street
23
20 Washington Place