On Saturday, October 10^th join RISD Ceramics students and faculty not at the ISB lot on campus, but at Tillinghast Farm (231 Nayatt Road, Barrington) for an Earth, Water, Fire and Air experience in a beautiful country setting.

From 11:30 to 3:30 pm, Larry Bush, Professor and Department Head of Ceramics, will orchestrate a multi-firing extravaganza for RISD By Design featuring these ongoing events:

• Medieval Japanese Raku glaze firing. Glaze your own piece and see it fired for a nominal cost. All proceeds go to the RISD Clay Club Scholarship Fund.
• Ancient Egyptian Paste firing, also known as “Egyptian Fiance” (see Treasures of the Nile catalog at the RISD Museum). Make your own amulet with this ancient material of royalty!
• Down by the river, join students from Brown’s Archaeology Department as RISD demonstrates the firing of objects fabricated from native Rhode Island clay using a 35,000-year-old method from prehistoric Europe.

Take the designated shuttle van from Chace Center that runs between the campus and Tillinghast Farm. Shuttles will loop on an hourly schedule.

What’s on their mind?  Today’s RISD students share many of the hopes and aspirations that you did, and will soon face some of the same challenges you did as you began to make your way in the worlds of art and design beyond RISD’s walls. Come to the Alumni Cafe in The Met on Saturday, October 10, from 5-7 pm, and share your experiences, including some examples of your work (photos or a laptop) with the next generation of RISD artists and designers. light snacks will be provided.

Recently Etsy, the popular online retailer of handmake and vintage items, took a tour of RISD’s amazing Nature Lab and put together this video - “There’s No Place Like Here,” the latest in their series.    You can check out the Nature Lab yourself during RISD by Design– on Saturday, October 10th The Nature Lab will host an open house and session, Drawing from Nature, where you can take charcoal and paper and do your own drawing from their wonderful array of specimens.

Hard to believe that the time has come to plan again for reunion and parent weekend.  We are looking at making some changes to the weekend to enhance the experience for both alumni and parents, so stay tuned for updates as details become confirmed.  Of course, now would be a great time for you to share any thoughts on the type of programming you would like to see as well, and if it’s something we think we can pull off we will make every effort to!

If you missed out on being a part of this year’s RISD by Design, or if you just want to relive the fun, visit our photo gallery. It was a beautiful weekend and an exciting time to be back on campus!

Alum and Alumni Council member Joe Gebbia ‘05 ID/GD set up a table at the Alumni and Student Art Sale this past weekend to promote his newest venture, AirBedandBreakfast (something we’ve mentioned on the site before) and produced some pretty interesting promo boxes:

In his words, “The limited edition boxes were produced by the team at AirBedandBreakfast.com; the peer-to-peer travel site that encourages hosts to provide breakfast for guests each morning. 5% of proceeds on Saturday went to support the RISD Student Leadership Scholarship. As the first recipient of the award back in 2003, it was a welcomed cushion to my tuition payments. You can imagine it felt good to give a little something back.

The project was art directed by myself and AB&B co-founder Brian Chesky (ID ‘04). We collaborated with illustrators, photographers, copywriters, a design shop that includes Scott Thorpe (MFA GD ‘05), and a very cool printer, General Printing, run by Fred Fassett (Arch ‘69).  He’s on the alumni council.

More images, and the hilarious jingles, can be found at http://www.airbedandbreakfast.com/obamaos and http://www.airbedandbreakfast.com/capnmccains”

If you didn’t get a chance to make it to the inauguration of RISD’s 16th President, John Maeda, do the next best thing.  Visit our Inauguration Station at the old risd|works, at 20 Westminster Street (across from the library) this Saturday from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm.

We’ll have lots of gorgeous materials with the START HERE theme, put together by Michael Rock’84 GD and other alums at 2×4, a NYC-based award winning design studio, including START HERE t-shirts and screen printers, so you can have your own personalized version of our shirt.

We’ll also have photos from the day, so you can see what you missed, hot coffee to perk you up, tables to sit at and rest your aching feet, and an Ask Me station, to pick up any materials you might have forgotten to grab at registration.

Come join us!

How does our work at RISD function in the world once we leave? If you were speaking with children interested in art & design, what would say about your experiences in this field? How does our work draw us to opportunities we cannot anticipate? Come hear recent graduates Brooks Hagan ‘02 TX, Naomi Kaly ‘06 D+M,Carmen Montoya ‘07 D+M and Meredith Pingree, ’03 SC, start the conversation on Friday, October 10th, in a panel discussion moderated by Interim Dean of Graduate Studies Chris Rose. The discussion, along with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, will take place in the newly designed internal atrium at the Westminster Lofts in the Peerless Building (150 Union Street), a half block away from Tazza, from six to eight pm.

I just came back from a VERY exciting weekend at RISD and…I’m not exaggerating…you’ll hate yourself if you don’t get up there and see the new Chace Center (where the parking lot was on Main St), and the special Chihuly show and David Macaulay show. 

The spaces created by the Chace Center are so beautiful, functional and remarkable I want to sign up as a student again. There is now a gallery for student work, classrooms for freshmen, a spectacular gallery for contemporary art, special exhibits, an auditorium, works on paper….and the stairs up to Benefit St. are bigger and already are a collecting place for students. The back wall of Mem Hall has been exposed and is a work of art in itself. The views out the windows frame the Providence landmarks. I was really impressed ! 

The Chihuly exhibit is something that you can get immersed in. The lighting, colors, shadows and shapes surrounded me with such drama and beauty. There’s a wall of his drawings which are masterpieces in themselves.

Here are two iPhone photos…..one of my classmate, Stuart Murphy ( Sorry, Stu, I didn’t consult you! ) at the Chace Center opening last week and one from the Chihuly exhibit.

See you next week !

We know you’re all aware of the opening of the Chace Center and the Chihuly at RISD show, but what, you may ask yourself, is going on with Glass at RISD today?  Well, here’s your chance to find out!  Come check out a FREE and LIVE Glassblowing Demonstration, going on Saturday, October 11th from 10 am to 6 pm in the Metcalf building, on the 4th floor, in the Hot Glass Studio!

Sean Salstrom MFA ‘06GL and his students will demonstrate the intricacies of  the glassblower’s skills.  Glassblowing techniques were fully developed two thousand years ago and still serve as the most demanding of glassmaking processes.  Hot glass working is just one aspect of why RISD Glass is a world wide leader in training contemporary artists.