RIIHEA

The sour economy is leading some colleges to adopt free e-mail services from Google or Microsoft for their official faculty and administrative accounts. So when the president of Abilene Christian University or Boise State University gets e-mail from a donor or a professor, the messages are stored on servers beyond the universities’ control.

No one, it seems, is safe from the mighty blow of a ruined economy. We’ve long since lost count of how many museums and other cultural institutions we’ve talked about here who have found themselves in troubled waters. But this one in particular hurts extra bad, because we’ve always been such fans. Caught on Brown University’s Daily Herald and also recently written about at The Providence Journal, the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art is the latest to be hit.

After a year at the helm, president John Maeda is balancing broad shifts in the worlds of art, design, and business

So there was more than a little anxiety when John Maeda — sneaker designer, MIT professor, digital media rock star — took over as RISD president last summer.

FOR A TOPIC that is usually downright depressing, the city mayors and administrators who gathered over bagels and eggs to talk about vacant and abandoned properties sounded remarkably upbeat.

PROVIDENCE — The approximately 144 members of the full-time teachers’ union at the Rhode Island School of Design have voted to voluntarily freeze wages and stipends for the next fiscal year.

The vote Wednesday night by the Full-Time Faculty Association of RISD, a union affiliated with the National Education Association, will modify their contract to keep wages at the current level for the 2009-2010 fiscal year. All other terms of the union’s three-year pact with the school will remain in place.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 27 /PRNewswire/ — Today Gap unveiled works of original art from Rhode Island School of Design [RISD] students and faculty. Their canvas? Gap’s new spring cardigan. In a unique partnership, Gap enlisted leading RISD students to deconstruct, rethink and rework its latest spring cardigans to create original pieces that reflect their own fashion point-of-view. Thirty one-of-a-kind cardigans [$68] are now available exclusively at Gap’s rotating concept venue adjacent to its flagship store at 54th and 5th Ave.

Digital guru shakes up campus

This is how John Maeda, six months into his job as president of the venerable Rhode Island School of Design, describes his daily duties. But instead of dust, he collects information. The collecting began the week he arrived, when he asked 600 high school students attending a summer art program to applaud for the vision of the university that resonated most with them.

Proof that taking over at the Rhode Island School of Design hasn’t changed his ways, John Maeda has stayed true to his cooler than cool roots and has just teamed up with Threadless, being the first guest-curator for their Select Series t-shirts. Maeda came up with a concept to base the designs off of, newness, and then chose the artists to put their pens to fabric to come up with something. The shirts were just unveiled last night at the RISD’s Chace Center building and we were fortunate to get an early sneek peek before they’re officially launched on Threadless’ site on Monday the 10th. Here’s a bit, with images of the shirts after the jump:

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