Faculty Forum

New performances, projects, research and scholarship from RISD faculty in conjunction with the Biennial Faculty Exhibition on selected dates at the Museum.
Sea-Level Rise in Boston: A Geographic Artistic Intervention
Recent maps of potential sea-level rise in Boston show significant loss of land, especially in those areas where land was "made" over the last 380 years. This presentation and short discussion by Marie Cieri, Professor in the History, Philosophy and Social Sciences Department, will focus on a series of public art interventions I propose over the next several years on billboards and street furniture in areas of landfill around Boston to call attention to possible consequences of anthropogenic climate change as well as to the potential fate of land building in this and other cities abutting major bodies of water around the globe.
Marie Cieri: Professor in the History, Philosophy and Social Sciences Department. Marie Cieri is a social and environmental geographer, cartographer, arts producer and artist based in Cambridge, MA. Currently, she teaches part-time at Rhode Island School of Design in History, Philosophy and Social Science and is founder (1987) and director of The Arts Company, a non-profit based in Cambridge, MA, that works closely with multidisciplinary, experimenting artists from a variety of cultures to produce and present socially engaged, collaborative art projects. From 2004 - 2008, she was assistant professor of geography at The Ohio State University, and she also has held professional positions at Walker Art Center, the New England Foundation for the Arts and two daily newspapers. Her freelance work has included long-term cultural projects for The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (current); The Rockefeller Foundation; Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Kitchen in New York City.
In her own work, she often combines geographic techniques and perspectives with ones drawn from the arts to create alternative representations of space and place with populations who have little access to the tools and forums of the public sphere. Since 2007, some of this work has appeared in exhibitions at LACE in Los Angeles; Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn, NY; the RISD Museum of Art in Providence; and Spoke Gallery in Boston. Among her publications are two books, including Activists Speak Out: Reflections on the Pursuit of Change in America (2000, Palgrave/Macmillan), which contains activist profiles from a variety of fields, including the arts. In July 2009, she was a geographer-in-residence at Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada.
From 2009 - 2014, under the auspices of The Arts Company, she co-directed Artists in Context (AIC), a project that supported creative thinkers from a variety of fields in collaboratively addressing critical social issues of our time. She was curator, producer, editor and a writer for AIC's Artists' Prospectus for the Nation, a multimedia work (texts, visuals, sounds and participatory elements) through which artists, designers and other creative thinkers have presented innovative ways of thinking about and responding to key issues of our time. Artist and designer contributors include Mel Chin, Natalie Jeremijenko, Robbie McCauley, Alfredo Jaar, Ellen Driscoll, Wendy Jacob, Daniel Peltz, Dan Borelli, Ben Norskov, Catherine D'Ignazio, Hiroko Kikuchi and Jeremy Liu, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nancy Andrews, Kelly Dobson, Mahmood Rezaei-Kamalabad, Deb Todd Wheeler, Joseph Krupczynski and Zea Mays Printmaking.
For additional program dates and more information on the RISD Faculty Biennial, click here.