Senior Suzanne Alward 17 CR uses a model to consider how best to present her work in a gallery setting.
As every RISD student knows, there’s a lot more to earning a degree in the arts than mastering technical skills and developing a strong aesthetic point of view. Ceramics majors and MFAs enrolled in a fall seminar co-taught by thriving Brooklyn-based sculptor Nicole Cherubini 93 CR and historian/curator/studio potter Sequoia Miller are developing strategies for cultivating ideas in the studio and presenting their work to the wider world.
The seminar has two principal goals, says Miller. The first is to teach students research methods and provide other tools for advancing their studio practice. The second is to build a greater awareness of the context in which artists operate – to consider ways of shaping the public’s experience of their work by writing a meaningful artist’s statement, for example, or thoughtfully presenting their work in a gallery setting.
“It’s challenging to translate abstract ideas into a known language without narrowing them down too much,” Cherubini explains. She organized field trips to NYC and Boston, where students toured clay-based exhibitions, garnered ideas and discussed real-world practices with gallerists and museum curators at the Museum of Art + Design in NYC and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.