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RISD Emerging | July 26 - August 16
​with Guest Curators President Crystal Williams and Director of Exhibitions Mark Moscone
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Opening Reception:  Sunday, July 26, 4-6PM
RISD Alumni Panel: Thursday, July 30 at 4PM
Please join Featherstone CEO Ann Smith and RISD President Crystal Williams for a panel discussion with Featherstone artist instructors and RISD alumni who will share how RISD shaped their creative experience and artistic journey from RISD to Featherstone. 
Featuring Featherstone instructors and RISD alums:
  Nancy Crossley Blank, 65 AE (Painting and Art Education)
  Sabrina Kuchta, 11 IL (Illustration)
  RISD Trustee Katherine Megrue-Smith, 88 GD (Graphic Design)
  Rory Valentine, 93 TX (Textiles)
Curator Talk:  Tuesday, August 4 at 4PM
with Crystal Williams and Mark Moscone

At a time when funding and opportunities for artists are increasingly scarce, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) is creating opportunities to elevate the work of emerging artists for broader audiences. For the first time, RISD President Crystal Williams and Director of Exhibitions Mark Moscone are curating an off-campus exhibition of art by recent RISD alums. The exhibition will feature the work of alumni from the classes of 2023 to 2026.

Quote from RISD President Crystal Williams, co-curator of RISD Emerging: “What I want for emerging artists and designers—and all artists and designers, which includes, it’s important to say,  those who have not been centered in the world of art—is that they have access to the opportunities and audiences that allow them to develop their singular vision and gifts. At RISD, we aspire to be a place that welcomes students who have the talent and will to study and emerge from our institution as artists and designers with incredible mastery, indelible vision, and who are able to freely and ambitiously express their creative ambitions. That is whence the best art and design emerges. We have been tending to this principle, the principle of encouraging and amplifying unique creative vision for nearly 150 years. We also aspire to amplify our alums after they leave our institution so that they may share their artistry with the world in furtherance of our collective. This exhibition is a celebration of the fact that artists and designers enable, inspire, and illuminate the human project. And I hope attendees leave feeling hopeful, invigorated, and excited by what they’ve seen.”

FEATURED ARTISTS:
Amadi Williams
Annemarie Cabrera
Asmaa Amadou
Boluwatife Oyediran
Cassidy Sage Argo
Dominick Cocozza
Dora (Yiden) Chen
Elliott Golden
Florian Okwu
Ireoluwatoni Asojo
JaLeel Marques Porcha
Jennifer Choi
Katherine Hofmann
Lisa Sacco
Paree Rohera
Priyanka Kumar
Ricky Vasan
Samuel Aguirre
Samuel Sherman
Tony Torres

RISD Emerging

by Abby Reemer

​Walking into the striking new exhibit at Featherstone, “RISD Emerging,” you know you’re seeing something special. The gallery showcases remarkable works by recent Rhode Island School of Design alumni—a prestigious art and design college established in 1877. Take one look around, and you can see why the school is renowned for its rigorous studio-based education, cross-disciplinary approach, and impact on culture and industry. The 20 artists and designers were selected not for a shared subject or material but for something harder to name: works that already speak in a singular, ambitious voice, even for those whose post-graduate practice only just began.

The show was birthed when Featherstone CEO and executive director Ann Smith approached RISD president Crystal Williams. She relates, “I said to Crystal, we are the community art center of Martha’s Vineyard and help students go to RISD, to Savannah College of Art and Design, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. For them to see the next level of graduating artists would be absolutely incredible.” Furthermore, the RISD-Vineyard connection continues, with alumni teaching at Featherstone and represented in galleries all over the Island. Williams shares, “The value systems that drive our institutions are exactly the same: to honor artists, designers, and creativity. It’s to amplify and foster talent and to create community. That Featherstone is a center of education on the Vineyard was very important to me. It feels delicious.” Williams decided to focus on those fresh from their studies, having graduated between 2023 and 2026. “There is something lovely about seeing the beginning of a career. It seemed important to me to have emerging artists.” Smith adds, “I added a challenge that I wanted to show the type of design and art that is never featured in our gallery so that when folks walk into this space, they are going to be blown away.”

And this is exactly what happens. Two things strike you immediately as you gaze about. The sheer force of the alum’s unique visions and the quality of their craftsmanship. You can feel the artists’ and designers’ ideas percolating. Each piece is more remarkable than the last. A small sampling includes work by Jennifer Choi, a Korean American designer who loves to play with modular units. She creates a sofa that beckons us to rest on its softly rounded geometric forms, which fit snugly together yet, like a giant flexible jigsaw puzzle, can be reconfigured at the sitter’s whim. Color, curved lines, textiles, and wood combine to invite tactile interaction. 

Mystery and a sense of myth emanate from Katherine Hoffman’s enormous watercolor painting, “She Crossed this Ecotone Inspirited with the Sky.” Hoffman layers elements on top of one another. For instance, the branches covering the two beautiful women who stare into the stratosphere literally intertwine. There is both exquisite delicacy and monumentality in Hoffman’s painting, which she creates using the unusual media of walnut ink and coffee to produce the varied hues of the ecotone—a dynamic transition area where two different ecological communities, ecosystems, or biomes meet and integrate.

Dominick Cocozza, a Guatemalan-born adoptee of Indigenous Maya Tz’utujil heritage, raised in the United States, works with a fascinating mixture of oil, grains of wax, sand, and glass beads, giving his surfaces a varied texture that recalls Guatemalan cloth. With its illuminated colors and enigmatic figures, the scene clearly suggests something curious is going on. These worry dolls originate in the Mayan traditions of the Guatemalan and Mexican highlands. As childhood toys, they “cast away” worries, and, as the artist says, “become stand-ins [for] myself, my partner, and address the political present…Each figure playfully and curiously addresses the viewer; they are confident and keen to occupy space, commanding whimsy, and addressing sincerity.”

Annamarie Cabrera’s enormous work on paper, “I Desire It Like a Child,” towers over us, featuring a toddler straddling a motorbike, peering down with baleful eyes. His penetrating gaze is transfixing, holding us in place. His mother, standing behind, looks on lovingly, perhaps not only at her child but beyond, at us, as we stare into her beatific countenance. Cabrera, a Dominican American mixed-media artist, works with paint, paper, and photographic archives to construct this intimate domestic scene. The paper’s wrinkles and crinkles draw our eyes across the piece, setting off the small family photographs, which invite us to imagine the stories of the mother-child pair, thereby immersing us in their narrative.

Caught mid-flow, hand-blown glass pours gently up and over a marble and also an iron I-beam, creating a contrast between movement and immobility. The dance between her materials in Lisa Sacco’s “Impossible Relic Series” reflects her interest in them “speaking beyond their use.” It’s almost impossible not to run your hands over her sensuous works to experience their temperature, texture, and sinuous flow. Sacco, a multidisciplinary designer specializing in furniture and sensory objects says, “[They] emerge from the elemental essence of raw material—what it’s made from, what it’s grounded in…By reducing function, I amplify the voice of the material.”

Sam Sherman’s handsome “Loop Chairs” invite us to sit on their smooth, unusual surfaces. He literally “loops” the composite byproducts of wood chips and dust from the manufacturing of the sturdy legs and backrest into the seat, creating chairs in which 100% of the material is valued. These pieces reflect the artist’s fascination with “the intersection of precise craft and material experimentation.” Asmaa Amadou’s distinct cascading tall textiles, carrying a central female figure surrounded by complex designs, scroll down from on high, gathering at the floor. The Togolese multidisciplinary textile artist, designer, and researcher weaves cotton, rayon, and linen yarns on a Jacquard loom. The titles “Cloth Speaks, Revealing Her Layers” and “There She Remained, Still” hint at their larger meaning. Amadou says, “My work begins with the belief that materials carry forms of knowledge. Drawing from anthropological methods, West African craft traditions, material history, and archival research, I investigate how knowledge is embedded within [them] and transmitted through acts of making.”

The exhibit bursts with many more arresting works that inspire awe at the RISD alums’ undeniable skill and singular imagination. Ultimately, the show accomplishes what Williams desires, convincing visitors about “the power and necessity of the arts, particularly now when so many aspects of art and design are under threat. I love the idea, too, that people come away understanding more about Rhode Island School of Design. It’s an extraordinary place full of stunning talent and students who are grappling with complex ideas and innovating in important and interesting ways.” Smith adds, “What I want is that even if people never leave the island, they see some of the best artists in the world and are exposed to new thoughts and ideas, and experience something they have never seen before.”