John Ryan 73 GD John’s animation studio DAGNABIT! created this signature design for the 2015 Atlanta Jazz Festival, held over Memorial Day weekend. It’s “so evocative that you can practically hear the music flowing from [the trumpeter’s] horn,” raved the director of Atlanta’s Office of Cultural Affairs. John is based in Sandy Springs, GA.
year’s Meltdown, a two-week summer festival of edgy music at Southbank Centre in London. Memories of Inhabited Spaces, a solo show of work by Robert Dilworth PT, was on view for a month this fall at Rhode Island College’s Bannister Gallery in Providence.
To help make prospective built-environment improvements clear to participants in planning charrettes, Denverbased architect and urban planner Jim Leggitt BArch (studio-insite.com) devised an easy “overlay and trace” method utilizing his iPhone, laptop, tracing paper and
Colgate Searle BLA 71 Earlier this fall paintings by Andrew Stevovich PT (Northborough, MA) were on view in Five Artists at the Adelson Galleries in NYC. As his rep, Adelson Galleries also showed his work at the Seattle Art Fair in late July and early August.
After losing his partner in life and work, Cecilia Searle BLA , several years ago, Colgate recently relaunched his Providencebased landscape architecture firm as the Searle Design Group (searledesigngroup.com), welcoming two new partners: Taber Jossi Caton BLA 99 and Melissa Bagga MLA 10. Master planning, historic landscapes, residential gardens and the design of environmentally sensitive landscapes remain central to the group’s practice, but the plan is to also take on more projects related to school planning and residential and senior housing. Colgate also continues to teach at RISD.
1971 45th Reunion October 7 – 9, 2016
1973 1970 continued When gallery director Adam Adelson visited Marcus Reichert PT at his home in France a couple of years ago, he was moved by a series of beautiful works on paper—
flowers Marcus had rendered during a time of personal sadness. The solo show Marcus Reichert & Les Fleurs was on view all summer at Adelson Galleries in Boston.
Artistic innovator, composer and musician David Byrne, who did his Foundation year at RISD in the early ’70s and founded the band Talking Heads with Chris Frantz 74 PT and Tina Weymouth 74 PT, guest directed and hosted this
PUSHING POSSIBILITIES
A F T E R AC C E P T I N G T H E 2015 S M I T H SO N I A N
and serving as honorary chair of the Smithsonian Craft Show in Washington, DC last spring, Toots Zynsky 73 GL dove right back into her studio work, preparing for three solo shows — one in Taipei in November, another at Themes & Variations gallery in London (November 5–December 5) and a third opening in January at Liuli China Museum in Shanghai. Toots has been making sensuous fused-glass vessels for four decades, some of which are included in more than 70 museum collections worldwide. Known for stretching the limits of the medium, she co-invented a unique machine to digitally fabricate glass threads that she fuses together in a signature technique known as filet de verre. “I develop technology as I need it to make the work I want to make,” she says —“not the other way around.” V I S I O N A RY AWA R D
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// undergraduate class notes
Toots Zynsky 73 GL
Toots’ fascination with glass began in the early 1970s when she worked with fellow glass pioneer Dale Chihuly MFA 68 CR at RISD and then helped him develop the renowned Pilchuck Glass School north of Seattle. She then headed the New York Experimental Glass Workshop (now UrbanGlass) before relocating to Amsterdam in 1983, living in Europe for the next 16 years and returning to Providence in 1999. Toots thrives on collaboration and loves working with a team of assistants in her Providence studio — built between the former locations of old haunts from her RISD days, Leo’s and Lupo’s. She still loves the unpredictability of glass, too. “Sometimes there are disasters along the way,” Toots admits with a smile. “If you push it too far — if you miscalculate — it’s done. Game over. But you get used to the idea that things break, and you learn that those ‘failures’ teach you the most. It’s like skiing. You can’t be afraid to fall.”
For more on Toots’ work, go to tootszynsky.com.