(gentle music)
- The world of higher
education is quite divided
between schools that provide
a pure liberal arts education
and schools that are
very much more focused on
technical or professional education.
I think one of the really
exciting things about
receiving RISD education
is that it combines
making and thinking together.
(students talking)
- Liberal arts are incredibly important.
We're creating art in context of
history and language and to create work
that doesn't talk to those things
is creating work that
doesn't live in our world.
- You have your studio
classes that you're taking
simultaneously to these
liberal arts classes
and so they always have
some sort of relevance
or they feed into your studio practice,
whether consciously or unconsciously,
in really interesting ways.
- Our liberal arts curricular
is provided by three departments,
History, Philosophy, and Social Science;
the department of
Literary Arts and Studies,
and the department of Theory and History
of Art and Design.
More broadly though,
we have a science
curricular and we also have
a range of concentrations and
over 180 electives beyond that.
- Liberal arts can give you something that
studio can't give you.
It gives you inspiration.
It gives you new concepts
for making a piece.
- They try to push the
creativity side of the field,
whether it be philosophy
or english or history.
They try to relate to artists senses
when giving out the assignments.
- What you learn is
how to work with people
who have a completely different way of
approaching things than what you do.
There's something useful to be gained
from learning about the world using
a different set of tools than
what you might of already
been familiar with.
- The proximity of the
art and design discourse
in this school, makes
for a inbuilt and instant
interdisciplinarity, a
strong liberal arts presence
within an equally strong
art and design context.
- One of the main things that we're trying
to do in our classes and
literary arts and studies,
is to help students think about how
form and content and
context all work together.
So we're asking students to assess
how a cultural object is working.
How it has material
consequences in the world
and how a particular text
might help them understand
something about their own practice.
- Right now I'm reading
Genesis for one of my liberals.
So it's like how does that
creation myth fit into
the context of human
history. I mean it's immense.
To understand that you
can see how people would
maybe perceive a work
that has an apple in it.
You're creating an object that
other people have to interpret.
You are learning a language and
it's how to create your
message clearly and
that translates across any medium.
- There's a very deep long
standing tradition at RISD
of forcing ones self to be understood
across disciplinary boundaries,
and the liberal arts is an area
in which people from a range of
disciplines all live together.
It's precisely that diversity among fields
that leads to productive friction.
- The way that they
connected a lot dots between
things that you may not have realized
were influenced by each other.
Learning about our history
is so directly applicable
to how you then create work and I think
my artwork has definitely been greatly
improved by just knowing more about
the history that I'm creating on top of.
- They inform each other, so often times
in the studio critique you
might bring up something
that you learned in your
history of visual culture class
that made an impact on you
and why you made this piece in studio
or vice versa. I've given
presentations about the work
that I do in studio in a liberal course
in relation to philosophy
and I think its always
really important to keep both of those
interests active.
- Something that's really fascinating
to me about RISD
professors in liberal arts
is they're very much aware that they're
teaching liberal arts
to art school students.
- I often say one of the reasons
I love working here is the students create
the culture we live in.
The films we watch, the
books we read our kids,
the clothes we wear, the
buildings that we inhabit,
and that's in some ways
a big responsibility,
so part of that responsibility is
learning about the world that
you're gonna have an impact on.
- RISD's one of the great
places where imagination
flourishes or is taught.
Alternate ways of practicing,
alternate ways of thinking
are all acts of imagination.
- We want to think about
the broader human being
that is emerging from this
art and design experience.
Connecting you to history,
philosophy, poetry, literature,
from all kinds of peoples,
from diverse times and places
is not only gonna make
you a more reflexive,
thoughtful, creative
person, but it's gonna
situate you in this world.
(upbeat music)
