This is a comprehensive course designed to test the student's ability to create, complete, and document a Degree Project of his or her choosing. The Degree Project should be a distinct, carefully conceived, exhibition-ready body of work which reflects the issues and objectives of your art. The Senior Degree Project is distinct from your Woods-Gerry Gallery exhibition, although its work can overlap with that exhibition.

Open to Senior Painting Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Painting

This is a comprehensive course designed to test the student's ability to create, complete, and document a Degree Project of his or her choosing. The Degree Project should be a distinct, carefully conceived, exhibition-ready body of work which reflects the issues and objectives of your art. The Senior Degree Project is distinct from your Woods-Gerry Gallery exhibition, although its work can overlap with that exhibition.

Open to Senior Painting Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Painting

This is a comprehensive course designed to test the student's ability to create, complete, and document a Degree Project of his or her choosing. The Degree Project should be a distinct, carefully conceived, exhibition-ready body of work which reflects the issues and objectives of your art. The Senior Degree Project is distinct from your Woods-Gerry Gallery exhibition, although its work can overlap with that exhibition.

Open to Senior Painting Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Painting

This period is designed as an advanced critique course which involves visits by resident faculty, visiting artists and critics, with special reference to current issues and concerns in contemporary art.

Open to Graduate Painting Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Painting

This period is designed for development and presentation of a body of work supported by a written thesis in consultation with resident faculty, visiting artists and critics during the semester. A final exhibition of work will be evaluated by a jury of Painting Faculty Members.

Open to Graduate Painting Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Painting

Three Critics will offer graduate students the opportunity to get inside the art critic's head and learn how writers think about the visual. Students will be exposed to a wide range of viewpoints and discourse on contemporary art issues as defined by the interests of three different, practicing critics. Each critic will become part of the RISD community for approximately one month, conducting 3 sessions on campus and one in New York or Boston. On-campus meetings will consist of lectures, reading and writing assignments, group critiques and one-on-one studio visits. Off-campus trips will include visits to museums, galleries and artist studios. Small groups of students will be expected to lead several classes. Outside coursework and full participation in class discussion required for successful completion.

Open to Graduate Painting Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Painting

This course will explore the synergism between creative writing and visual arts practices. Through conversation, free-writing, editing, and curating, we will address questions about the relationality and hybridity of images and texts. As we investigate the disciplines of ekphrastic writing and artist books, students will delve into the various ways that text may be integrated into photo-based and other visual art mediums. In our weekly readings, we will analyze the work of visual artists who feature creative writing prominently in their practices and respond to prompts that help us build upon our own visual/verbal vocabulary. At the culmination of this course, each student will produce a body of work featuring original writing and images that exhibits clear attention to curation, style, and content in the form of a book or exhibit. 

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $150.00

Elective

This winter session class is devoted to the color blue.  Through the historical photo process cyanotype (aka the blueprint), students will create unique prints that can be used in artist books, clothing, sculpture, quilts, collages, or as stand-alone imagery. We will print on various surfaces such as fabric, objects, hand-made and store-bought paper.  Students will bring items, darkroom negatives, drawings, and digital images to convert into digital negatives in class.  Other mediums can be put on top of the cyanotype, so we will explore its multimedia capabilities. Finally, we will also change the blue by natural toning our cyanotypes.  Please bring a sense of curiosity, and experimentation.   

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

The Image & Difference explores the ways in which photography is and has historically be central to the production of a wide array of forms of difference, and to the normalisation of inequities within and between communities and nations. It explores the various social and political uses to which photography (and the moving image more broadly) have been put, as well as an array of creative strategies devised by communities or artists to evade or subvert or refuse these exercises of power. The class operates from an explicitly antagonistic stance against the intersecting violences of white supremacy, heteronormativity, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, and the many other ideologies that work to devalue minorities, and to reassert a narrowly defined definition of normativity. The class demands a willingness on the part of all its members to confront unpleasant, ethically reprehensible acts, events, objects and images and to speak to and about them openly, and with care.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00

Majors are pre-registered by the department. This course is a requirement for Sophomore Photography students.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography

This course aims to investigate the importance of aesthetic decisions made within the photographic frame, both as a form of artistic identity building, and as an expression of social context. Through hands-on explorations of composition, equipment choice, experimental editing, lighting and conversations on the history of aesthetic styles, students will learn how decisions made before and during construction of a frame can aid conceptual intention and visual outcome. In the first half of the semester students will be asked to take risks, trying different photographic approaches–some of which will inevitably be less successful than others. It is important that students enter this course with an eagerness to work and a willingness to fail. Only through our class discussions of these missteps can we begin to establish the techniques of visual analysis that will allow students, in the second half of the semester, to create a visually nuanced body of work.

Throughout the course, we will trace how photographic practices and subject matter such as The Obsessive Artist, Evidence, The Commercial/Cinematic, The Spiritual/Occult, and The Body have developed complicated aesthetic histories that trap artists, as often as they point to the path forward. Through our community-driven engagement with each participant's images, we will attempt to struggle through the merits, and pitfalls, of alignment within visual genre.

Students do not need any prior photographic experience, though any time spent shooting digital or analog will surely be helpful.

What does 'research' mean for contemporary photographers? For artists using photography within their practice? This hands-on studio course investigates and critiques the nature and scope of research and its practical application to current practice, and how research provides a critical context to help develop awareness, extend subject knowledge, and inform the creation of new artistic work. We will learn through current case studies, unpicking what kinds of processes photographers use when making work. We will investigate to what extent individual practices differ and what analogies can be drawn across those practices. We will look at the roles of instinct and serendipity in allowing for other ideas to emerge. You will develop and hone your own research methods through a wide variety of experimental making and writing assignments, and through critique. This course is also a research project in itself, bringing together examples of photographic practice for you to ponder and engage into our own ideas, processes, and projects.

Estimated Materials Cost: $50.00

Elective

Over the past decade, photography books have seen a resurgence within the art world, this time transcending their original use as survey or catalog to become ideal spaces and platforms to experience and disseminate work. Today image-based printed matter functions in a multitude of ways, all of which at their core are driven by the mechanics of sequence and editing. Through class discussions, using RISD's Fleet Library and Special Collections, and individual research - students will form a personal vision of what images mean in the book form. Our focus will be equally on content, concept, production & technique. The semester will culminate in each student having devised, sequenced, edited and produced a fully resolved and realized photography book.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $125.00

Elective

This is a basic course in the techniques of photographic seeing. Students will be given exercises to develop their ideas concerning the fundamental visual problems of photography. Students will also learn technical aspects of exposure, developing and printing in the darkroom as they explore and respond to the visual qualities of the medium. Students must provide their own 35mm camera with manual controls.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

This is a basic course in the techniques of photographic seeing. Students will be given exercises to develop their ideas concerning the fundamental visual problems of photography. Students will also learn technical aspects of exposure, developing and printing in the darkroom as they explore and respond to the visual qualities of the medium. Students must provide their own 35mm camera with manual controls.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

This is a basic course in the techniques of photographic seeing. Students will be given exercises to develop their ideas concerning the fundamental visual problems of photography. Students will also learn technical aspects of exposure, developing and printing in the darkroom as they explore and respond to the visual qualities of the medium. Students must provide their own 35mm camera with manual controls.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

This is a basic course in the techniques of photographic seeing. Students will be given exercises to develop their ideas concerning the fundamental visual problems of photography. Students will also learn technical aspects of exposure, developing and printing in the darkroom as they explore and respond to the visual qualities of the medium. Students must provide their own 35mm camera with manual controls.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

This is a basic course in the techniques of photographic seeing. Students will be given exercises to develop their ideas concerning the fundamental visual problems of photography. Students will also learn technical aspects of exposure, developing and printing in the darkroom as they explore and respond to the visual qualities of the medium. Students must provide their own 35mm camera with manual controls.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Elective

The Sophomore Studio is focused on the of each student's expressive vision so that she/he can create photographs with compelling content. Through group critiques and individual meetings with the instructor, students will refine their skills as photographers and learn how to verbally articulate issues in their own work as well as the work of others. The greater part of the class will geared towards creating an open an dynamic environment where students engage in the give and take of constructive feedback on their progress. The critique schedule will be enriched by readings, multimedia lectures and class field trips throughout the semester. Attendance at all department visiting artist lectures is required.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography

A continuation of PHOTO-5302, providing an open and dynamic environment where sophomore can create photographs and engage in constructive feedback on their progress.

Enrollment is limited to Sophomore Photography Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography

The Junior Studio continues the process begun in the Sophomore Studio but moves it to a more ambitious and sustained level of production and critical feedback. Students will be expected to work more autonomously and will explore their ideas with more focus and depth, with the goal of working toward the successful production of several bodies of work over the course of the year. Group and individual critiques will continue to form the basis of the course curriculum, supplemented by visiting critics, field trips and class exercises. Attendance at all departmental visiting artist lectures is required.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $150.00 - $200.00

Enrollment is limited to Junior Photography Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Photography