Rhode Island School of Design: Get Inspired

Sadly, my camera battery died as I took my first photo in Providence. All photos in this post are courtesy of their various sources online: click the photos for the source links.

I once advised a student who was academically very strong and who was interested in a career in the arts. She initially looked at a lot of arts-specific schools but was surprised that some of the places she researched were less than academically rigorous. "I don't want to go somewhere where I won't read books," she said. "I'm a good student-- I want to go somewhere that cares about that."

If you're a strong student looking for the perfect balance of academic rigor and with arts excellence, the amazing people and programs at RISD may be the perfect match for you.

As I mentioned in the post about Brown University, Providence is lovely. RISD and Brown are located in the College Hill section of the city (in fact, their admissions offices are a short walk from each other on the same street), and the area is a leafy, quiet residential neighborhood that provides both proximity to and respite from the busy city a few blocks away.

When you step onto the RISD campus, the first thing you notice is the art. Public art is everywhere: you walk around and over and through artwork. When you enter a building, there are galleries to the left and right, and a constantly rotating collection of student and faculty artwork graces the walls of each campus building. When I walked up the long creaky stairway to the admissions office, I was struck by the sheer number of pieces of art I encountered along the way; I saw bronze sculptures, human figures, impressionistic oil paintings, and mixed-media canvases. The back wall of the office's reception area was especially striking: from floor to ceiling, there were about 60 insects constructed from gold wire. These, the receptionist explained, were created by students from their work in RISD's nature lab (read more about it here--it's really neat.). Students were instructed to study and draw dragonflies, beetles, ants, butterflies, wasps, and bees and then construct the animal from wire, capturing its most essential shape. These shiny, somehow beautiful insects really embodied one of the best things about the RISD education. It's all about understanding the most basic elements of things in the world and then interpreting and representing those things through art.

I had a great conversation with our Texas admission representative. She emphasized that RISD is a place for people who are both outstanding artists and outstanding students. Indeed, she mentioned that RISD perhaps has a greater emphasis on education excellence than its peer institutions. Educational excellence is key: students should have SAT scores above 600 on each section of the test. Furthermore, there is a drawing component to the application, since drawing is so central to the RISD education. Again, the education here focuses on the fundamentals of art, so the portfolio and the required drawings (one of a bicycle, the other two for this year TBA) are very important.

I was also impressed with the openness and helpfulness of the admissions staff. Upon arrival, the admissions office receptionist issued me a security code so I could enter all campus buildings (why are they always locked? That struck me as a little weird, but I got the impression that they're alarmed less for dire safety reasons than to protect the amount of art all over the place.) I was also given a free ticket to the on-campus museum. I had a wonderful stroll around the campus and I really got a feel for the place. This campus is a place to get inspired, and it has all the tools for taking the next step.

Speaking of resources, this place has some remarkable things on campus. There's an electronic jacquard loom on campus. RISD has the largest collection of wood block letters in US, and it has a printmaking shop that allows printmaking students to add to their digital printmaking expertise the experience of working closely with papermaking and old-school printing techniques. They have their own foundry. They have a 30-acre farm campus on Narragansett Bay. They have over 80,000 works of art in the on-campus art museum. They have the Fleet Library, one of the oldest art college libraries in the world. The faculty is about half professors and half working artists, giving students a foot in theory and a foot in practice. There are lots of opportunities for on-campus collaboration and participation in others' works; this RISD blog offers an inside look at what's happening on campus. The university has a new dual-degree program with Brown--just one of many working partnerships with the major research university across the street. RISD students are heavily involved in the life of Providence and in the life of their campus, so it's an exciting place to study where you'll never lose track of the real-world possibilities of life as a working creative.

So if you're looking for an exceptional place to become a scholar and an artist, RISD may be the place for you. I highly encourage you to go check it out; Providence will pleasantly surprise you, and RISD will certainly inspire you.