The places, the practices, the exchanges, the power dynamics…
Revisiting a collaboration with the RISD Museum
We begin 2023 with a look back at a conversation that took place during Carry Forward — our 2021 symposium. When we work with people new to strategic design, we like to emphasize the importance of “acting & reflecting.” This cycle is meant to help prevent paralysis in the face of complexity while encouraging continual adaptation or adjustment. It also encourages us to resurface old insights in new contexts.
For our first dip into CfC archives, Strategic Programs Lead, Julie Woods, revisits our final 2021 symposium panel, featuring Elizabeth Williams, Jean Blackburn, Anina Major, Clement Valla, Christopher Roberts, and Alero Akporiaye.
Carry Forward was our second remote-only symposium. We had chosen the theme amid a backdrop of ongoing national and international uncertainty, inviting a consideration of “what we as humans need to carry forward into a future that works for everyone, that embraces creativity, imagination and an ethos of integrity, honesty, decency and equity.”
From the Archives
In a Zoom discussion entitled Ceramics in the World, and the World in Ceramics, CfC team members Sahib Singh and Julie Woods worked with RISD Museum to design an interaction among five RISD faculty members from five academic disciplines on the topic of ceramics from the Museum collection. Collaborating with Elizabeth Williams, the David and Peggy Rockefeller Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Museum and Deborah Clemons, the Museum’s Director of Academic & Public Programs, CfC recruited five willing participants among RISD faculty to engage in an unscripted exchange, contemplating and interrogating objects Williams was assembling for the Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, Trading Earth: Ceramics, Commodities, and Commerce.
What ensued was a dynamic and expansive consideration of these objects and the stories conveyed and concealed, including the political and economic realities of their periods, and histories of colonialism, slavery, global resource exploitation, and other forms of systemic inequity and injustice.
As Williams inventoried the Museum’s almost 8,900 pieces of ceramics in storage, she came across some she had never seen before, including a pair of sugar baskets that depict Black figures “in servitude serving the sugar on the table and also indicating the enslavement associated with sugar plantations,” she told session participants. “So, in the spirit of this symposium, this discussion aims to inspire a deep consideration of how these ceramic objects can provide insight into the practices, mindsets, and values that we should carry forward or those that we should leave behind.”
“My artistic practice is a lot about mining through history and looking for contemporary kindred connections across the Black and African diaspora,” shared Anina Major, a Critic in Ceramics and the only ceramicist in the group. “I’ve found ceramics to be a material that can assist in a kind of cultural transmission of information that may have been lost.” Drawn to an African beer fermentation vessel and an American stoneware beer bottle, Major said that both objects prompted her to think about local economies, independence, claiming power, resourcefulness, marginalization, labor, value systems, class, ownership, and more.
Associate Professor of Experimental and Foundation Studies Clement Valla responded to the collaboration from the perspective of a self-described “picture maker,” selecting two ceramic pieces covered in quirky imagery that led him to talk about everything from perspective and memes to what we might want to carry forward besides today’s “dominant picture mode: the photograph.” Professor of Illustration Jean Blackburn raised questions about how objects “come to be in a museum” and the duality of seeing the “hand of the maker” in some pieces versus the “power of industrial production” in others.
Christopher Roberts, Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design, and Assistant Professor of Theory and History of Art and Design and Experimental Foundation Studies, raised questions about exhibiting historic and utilitarian objects out of context. “If people were to interact with that object, would it be breaking some sort of rule of the museum to actually use the thing in the way that it was designed to be used? I think we have to have larger conversations about our attachments to preserving these objects—like are we preserving the object itself or a colonial relationship to it?”
Alero Akporiaye, Assistant Professor of History, Philosophy and the Social Sciences, suggested that curators consider “presenting these objects in a way that de-centers the Western gaze,” adding: “I would center the stories on the places, the practices, the exchanges, the power dynamics, the marginalized people involved in the making of these objects. That seems interesting to me and is different from what we typically see in museums.”
In the months following the symposium, Williams continued to reflect on this conversation as she made further preparations for the exhibition. “For me, the session was a very welcome opportunity to bring in thoughts and perspectives of RISD faculty from multiple disciplines while the exhibition, Trading Earth, was in the planning phase,” she said. “I was able to incorporate elements of the conversation into the exhibition as it developed, and it significantly shaped the podcasts that accompany the exhibition.”
For the CfC team, this conversation stands out as a successful moment of collaboration across the community, bringing together staff and faculty to speak across disciplines and spark new connections of ideas. It has become a prototype for how we want to continue to link together members of the RISD community through our projects and events. We find ourselves returning to the Museum often to contemplate the exhibition as a whole. The ideas coming out of the exhibition and conversation have informed our work on harm reduction in the opioids crisis and our Design Beyond Crisis studio as well as our work on institutional architecture and our Design for the Anthropocene studio.
Field Notes
Trading Earth: Ceramics, Commodities, and Commerce opened at the RISD Museum on April 9, 2022 and will be on view through January 28, 2024. The museum has produced a soundwalk podcast about the exhibition. You can revisit the full conversation on the Carry Forward symposium website.
Join us for a panel. Social Practice: New Directions in Community-Engaged Art and Design — Join CfC and RISD's Office of Intercultural Student Engagement for a panel conversation on social practice art and design. Panelists include Sio Man Lam (Civic Arts Program Coordinator for Public Art, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs), Carlos Medellin (Assistant Professor, Architecture Department, RISD), Shey Rivera Ríos (Artist, MA ’23 in Global Arts and Cultures), and Elder Gonzales Trejo (Biologist and Climate Activist). Free and open to the public! | Wednesday, February 1 at 6:30pm | Ground Floor Auditorium | 20 Washington Place.
We’ve posted a retrospective and select videos from Collapse, our 4th annual symposium. We also have free books. We have a limited run of free copies of the Collapse anthology, produced from the 2022 symposium. Email us at complexity@risd.edu for more information and we’ll send you a copy.
A marriage in practice: The role of design research in the world of medical science is a paper published by the mainstay RI team including CfC Senior Lead, Tim Maly, CfC Fellow Leigh Hubbard, CfC alum Toban Shadlyn, and researcher Hannah Dalglish. It reports on the conversation we led at DRS 2022. “For decades, design and medical research have been courting with varying levels of success…”
10x100 In December, CfC team members participated in the first 10x100 mission quarterly. The session was focused on helping participants envision how they might incorporate the urgent demands of the climate crisis into the day to day of their respective practices and organizations.
Worth Reading
There's No Such Thing as a Free Watch Jenny Odell's investigation of supposedly designer watches offered for "free" on Instagram unfolds into an exploration of how the illusion of authenticity is created. Or is it an exploration of how our intuitions about the systems we interact with can be exploited to support a commercial effort?
Discard Studies (2022) by Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky. A critical read that problematizes how we define waste and why it exists in the first place — an especially important read at an arts/design school where waste is often thought of in the most literal, visible terms, but is not always considered as a system.
What is a Studio? CfC Studio Lead Katie Edmonds wrote this post in the early days of the pandemic as we were re-configuring our in-person practice to deal with the new realities of remote collaboration, while also needing to explain to people unfamiliar with the studio model about what and why we run studios.
Interesting Links
In Commons The annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture held in St. Louis this year, takes commoning and community design practice as its theme. (March 30 to April 1, 2023.)
Call for Papers: The Social Role of Art The Arts in Society is the preeminent international forum for sharing critical thinking, research and new practices and projects related to public and community impact in the arts across the globe. CfC team member Marisa Brown will be presenting on a panel that considers the arts in social, political and community life. (July 5-7, 2023 in Krakow, Poland.)