1997 20th Reunion October 6 – 8, 2017
ABSORBING IDENTITIES by Lindsey Adelman 96 ID In a November 3, 2016 piece in T, the New York Times magazine, the owner of Lindsey Adelman Studio — a super successful design operation full of fellow RISD grads — explains why she loves the glass objects her now-husband Ian Adelman 95 ID made when they met as ID students.
As Ian’s girlfriend, I would always hang out in the Hot Shop watching my hot boyfriend blow glass. I’d just arrived at RISD as a transfer student and everything was new to me. I had studied The Faerie Queen, but I’d never used a drill press. My state of mind was totally open, and when you’re in that place, you pick up so much unintentionally. I remember watching Ian work with this sea creature language in so many different mediums — sheet metal, aluminum, glass. Coming from a family background steeped in design, he understood craft on a level that I didn’t. These skate egg pods (see below) represented something that came naturally to him. But it was an elusive thing that I was after. That also happens when you date someone. They have something that you want in yourself, a quality that you’re like, “Oh, I want a piece of that!” Not only do I want to date that person, but I want that quality….
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These glass skate egg pods represent so much of a common visual language that Ian and I share. We never talk about it, but we’re just drawn to the same signifiers. It’s like we both have this primary experience with source material that then becomes a shared experience — whether it’s through snorkeling, walking on the beach, collecting things or traveling. It happens naturally and becomes part of the work that we both make. Sharing that visual language with Ian has shown me by osmosis how to turn references like sea creatures into an abstract form that I could use in design. When we studied industrial design the process was rigorous: It’s about paring down a naturalistic form into a language that can be repeated and communicated. It’s a balance of picking up the emotional and visceral response you have to form and, at the same time, taking measurements, studying proportions and dimensions. Once you pick up on these proportions and refined details to capture the essence of natural forms, you start to understand why we respond to them. It’s like the golden mean… or the Fibonacci sequence. Or why models’ eyes are a certain distance apart. We can’t really explain why we’re drawn to these gorgeous creatures but it’s undeniable that we are. And that power can be harnessed as a designer. While the glass I design has to be technically perfect, it also has a mysterious quality that you can’t totally pinpoint or understand — a cryptic quality. It never gets old, because it’s inherently challenging to make work you can’t totally understand or predict. It’s a pretty fun lifelong chase.
Learn more about Lindsey’s work at lindseyadelman.com.
Takeshi Murata FAV (Saugerties, NY) showed work in The Limits of Control, a group exhibition that opened on August 12 and ran through September 4 at the Finnish Cultural Institute of New York. Presented by Station Independent Projects, the exhibition explored social identity within the context of the modern built and regulated environment.
Kim West 98 PT In expanding on a project she began five years ago, Kim completed a mural for Hauser Wirth & Schimmel Gallery in Los Angeles, where she lives. Last June she gave a talk at the gallery about the mural, which covers the entire east-facing exterior wall.
Charles Wilrycx BArch 96 As a principal at ARKITEKTUR, Charles (West, TN) is partnering with the Nashville-based firm Supportive Design on the design and development of the Meharry Pavilion in Nashville. The 120,000-sf structure is designed to be part of the campus of Meharry Medical College, one of the largest historically black academic health science centers in the US.
1998 Clara Lieu IL, who teaches in the Illustration department at RISD, has launched ART PROF, a free, online arts education program created in partnership with digital strategy and production expert Thomas Lerra of WGBH Boston. “In most schools, visual arts education is meager or simply