Faculty Newsbits Earlier this year Professor of Architecture Gabriel Feld completed an artist residency at the Siena Art Institute, where he worked on Dal diario di Siena, a series of watercolor experiments about the inspiring Italian city.
JAN BAKER | 1950–2018 In 2012 Baker curated an exhibition called Bookmark, which celebrated her decades of teaching the art of books at RISD. It featured 350 of her students’ best artist’s books—which she also donated to the RISD library’s phenomenal special collection of artist’s books. An avid traveler throughout her life, Jan served for two years as RISD’s chief critic at the European Honors Program in Rome, led a textiles workshop in Vietnam for UNESCO and taught book design at the National Institute of Design in India with support from a Fulbright. Jan spent coveted sabbaticals discovering such marvels as the Rosetta Stone in London, Bodoni’s Manuale Tipografico in Parma, Arabic manuscripts in Doha, palm leaf books in Bhubaneswar, scholar’s stelae in Hanoi and Suminagashi in Echizen. With each venture abroad, she made innovative travel journals packed with drawings, jottings, visual lecture notes, photographs, tickets and ephemera—and used them all as ongoing inspiration for new work. An outpouring of grief, love and gratitude followed the news that Jan Baker, a well-loved professor of Graphic Design who taught here since 1981, died on Saturday, April 28 in Providence. Fellow faculty and staff members, along with scores of current and former students, shared just how much she meant to them. Throughout her life, Jan made extraordinary works of art using handmade paper, handwritten lettering and an exquisite level of craftsmanship matched by conceptual rigor. At RISD she taught what she loved: book arts, letterpress, papermaking, bookbinding and visual poetry—and made these a signature part of the Graphic Design curriculum.
The ABCs of her life sum it up best: Artist. Alphabet. Aunt. Books. Baker. Calligrapher. Collections. Cousins. California. Design. Devoted. Daughter. Empowering. Energetic. Family. Friend. Fulbright. Generous. God-mother. Handmade. Hearts. Inquisitive. India. Italy. Judaism. Japan. Kind. Love. Lucky rocks. Lecture notes. Mark. Meditation. Maps. Mentor. Notebooks. Optimist. Professor. Polka dots. Persistent. Perfectionist. Quilts. RISD. Sister. Sabbaticals. Students. Traveler. Textiles. Tea. Thirteen. UCSC. Valentines. Venice High. Wise. X-pert. Yale. Zany... Contributions in Jan’s memory may be made to the Jan Baker Artists’ Book Fund (online at support.risd.edu or via mail c/o Amanda Wright, Institutional Engagement, Two College Street, Providence, RI 02903).
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Partners, an amazing new documentary by Professor Henry Horenstein 71 PH/MFA 73, premiered on May 12 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The hour-long film explores the wonderful idiosyncrasies and synchronicities of relationships. The University of California Press recently published William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises by HAVC Department Head Leora Maltz-Leca. Critics are describing her scholarship as “lucid, erudite, rigorous and poetic.”
Tenderheaded, a solo exhibition that continues through July 8 at Brandeis’ Rose Art Museum in Waltham, MA, presents paintings by Assistant Professor of Painting Jennifer Packer that reflect on the ways black Americans navigate within the present political landscape. Longtime FAV faculty member Erminio Pinque 83 IL has earned a $200,000 Carter Fellowship for Entrepreneurial Innovation from the Rhode Island Foundation. As founder and director of the Providence-based creature-making and performance studio BIG NAZO, he’s using the grant to transform vacant storefronts across the state into hubs of cultural activity. // RISDXYZ
spring/summer 2018
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