RISD Students Get Indispensable Feedback During Fall 2024 Crits

“Since this is probably the last opportunity I’ll have to design furniture completely outside the frame of historical context, I wanted to take advantage of that freedom and create a knock-down table out of mixed woods featuring drastic curves,” said sophomore Izzie Middleton 27 FD. The first-semester Furniture Design major explained her bold design choices to a roomful of peers, faculty members and guest critics, including faculty member Aspen Golann, Furniture Design Department Head Chris Specce 01 ID and RISD alum and new faculty member Urvi Sharma 17 FD.

From the top of College Hill to the far side of campus, fall crits at RISD were well underway, as students in every department presented their final projects of the semester, soaking in constructive feedback they’ll consider when they return to the studio in the new year.

“I really love the playful quality of this piece,” Golann offered, “and the toes you’ve incorporated in the feet make it really anthropomorphic.”

“I can easily imagine a version of this table for the dining room, with a longer, thinner top but the same leg structure,” added Specce as he crouched down beside the piece to get a closer look.

Nearby in RISD’s Market House, Jewelry + Metalsmithing critics considered a line of jewelry and tableware by senior Jolene Tao 25 JM intended to enhance the dining experience and foster communication around the table. “What I’m looking for in all of the work I see today is the perfect finishing,” noted guest critic Hansel Tai. “If the finish is rough, I want it to be perfectly rough. If the piece is geometric, I want the lines to be straight.” Across the table from Tai, Associate Professor Seth Papac responded to each piece with their usual thoughtful attention to detail, asking another student in the class to talk about their approach to color and surface.

Also in the Fine Arts division, new Sculpture department faculty member Savannah Knoop led a critique of immersive sculptures incorporating lights, motors and other electronics created by students in their class. Yoochan Choi 27 SC showed a noisy, spinning piece (see image, below) the group described as both “chaotic” and “magical.” Charles Matadin 26 SC presented an audiovisual piece that incorporated a plant and a reader (similar to an EKG machine) that used the plant’s bioelectricity to drive a mixing board and synthesizer.

The natural world played into work presented by seniors in the Textiles department as well, specifically themes of cyclicity and regeneration. Senior Clara Peterson 25 TX, a member of RISD’s student-run Regenerative Earth Collective, showed an installation featuring her hand-dyed textiles and soap, a material she frequently uses.

“There’s a kind of sacred quality in your work,” noted Associate Professor Mary Anne Friel. Faculty member Siena Smith 18 TX agreed and added that soap brings to mind both cleansing and documentation in the form of the residue it leaves behind. 

Sophomore Callie Kirchner 27 AP, an Apparel Design major, has been working with cotton yarns, wool and flax collected from a small farm in Vermont. “I’m really attracted to the idea of using leftover materials as well as mending,” she explained at her critique in RISD’s Canal Street Studios. Visiting critic Lydia Rodrigues, a collector of experimental apparel design based in NYC, described the work as “sculptural” and “beautiful” and really appreciated Kirchner’s tailoring skills.

Also in the Architecture & Design division, Kevin Thomas MFA 26 GD, a first-year MFA candidate in the Graphic Design department, explored questions of identity, culture and family in a multimodal project he shared with critics in the Design Center. One element of the design was inspired by his Filipino grandfather’s weaving patterns. “I feel a shift in direction from your earlier work,” Associate Professor Ramon Tejada noted during the crit. “There’s a clear throughline from the publications you created before, but the work is becoming looser and less controlled, which I love seeing.”

Finally, in the Interior Architecture department, grad students Kayla Duncan MDes 26, Sky Xing MDes 26 and their peers in a class called Community Connections cotaught by faculty members Jonathan Bell and Elizabeth Debs presented their visions for a culinary hub in Providence’s food-insecure Smith Hill neighborhood that would provide nutritious ingredients and cooked meals and promote community cohesiveness.

“Design is, by nature, unpredictable,” Debs explains. “By working through a series of carefully orchestrated steps—from predesign to schematics to final project development—the students in this class were able to consider a huge range of variables and come up with viable solutions.”

Top image: Associate Professor of Textiles Mary Anne Friel (left) and other faculty members examine a wide array of work by senior Clara Peterson.  

Simone Solondz / photos by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH
December 19, 2024