The RISD Museum builds a culture of creative learning to inspire lifelong relationships with art and design. We invite the people in our community—here at RISD, in Rhode Island, and well beyond—to engage with the museum and collection in a number of ways, including visits to the galleries, free online and in-person programming, class visits, digital access to the collection, professional development opportunities, special events, and more.
In This Section
This year our in-person attendance rebounded to 97.5% of our pre-Covid numbers and included several record attendance days. We also continued to offer online programs, classes, workshops, and virtual gallery talks for people who could not join us in person, and those attendance numbers are reflected here, as well.
The RISD Museum offers many ways to engage throughout the year, including family programs, teacher-training opportunities, educational materials for self-guided visits, and more. The museum's education department provides up-close and in-depth learning experiences that are responsive to audience interests and needs. This year, 20% of our total visitors engaged in facilitated programs.
Public Programs
Adult programs offered this year included musical performances, readings, talks, and more. For example, the intersection of climate, environmental justice, and creative practices inspired the public program Art, Climate Crisis, and Activism, connected to the exhibit "Take Care.” Artists Meredith Stern, Dana Heng, and Erik Gould were in conversation with Dr. Sage Gerson, Assistant Professor, Literary Arts and Studies, RISD, and Dr. Hilda Lloréns, Associate Professor, Departments of Marine Affairs and Anthropology, University of Rhode Island, and joined by moderator April Brown, Director, Racial and Environmental Justice Committee. They discussed their work and the multidisciplinary connections with a standing-room only audience. We also launched Museum Professional Practices 101, a series of programs in which museum staff share their processes and recent projects as a way to demystify internal museum practices. In partnership with RISD’s Textiles department, we hosted Dr. Sharbreon Plummer for a gallery talk focused on Ruth Pettway Mosely's "Nine-Patch Quilt" (ca. 1955) and considered the Gee's Bend quiltmakers through a Black feminist lens, pulling out stories of autonomy, artistry, and intellectual, emotional, and physical labor. Dr. Plummer’s ongoing creative and academic endeavor to re-situate Black women’s voices and lived experiences in fiber art narratives highlighted stories of community, resistance, and self-determination in the past, as well as in contemporary textile-focused work.
Image
▲ Gee’s Bend gallery talk
College & University Programs
The RISD Museum supports faculty using the museum and offers programs for students' academic and co-curricular growth. Classes across institutions and disciplines utilized the museum this year, covering topics as wide-ranging as Design for the Anthropocene (RISD Graphic Design), Ancient Grains & Hearth Breads (Johnson & Wales Culinary School), and Intermediate and Beginning Yorùbá Language (Brown Center for Language Studies). A day-long visit for the Watson Institute's Policy-in-Action Initiative exemplified the museum's customized approach to teaching and learning: with the goal of considering how the visual arts can engage with and respond to the environment, the students engaged in close looking, creative writing, and conversation around current exhibitions. Meanwhile, we supported students individually through pre-professional work positions, office hours, and orientation sessions, including workshops and community-building experiences for RISD's Project Thrive, Roger Williams' Queer and Trans Living and Learning Community, and Brown's Computer Science grad students. The Museum Guild, a group of undergraduate students from local colleges and universities, closed the year with an event inviting visitors to engage with handmade instruments (sourced from local organization Anarchestra and from a RISD foundations class), then to hear the sounds mixed live into an immersive soundscape by a RISD student artist.
▲ Night at the Museum event
Family & Teen Programs
Family and Teen Programs offer learning opportunities that engage young people from toddlers to teens during their out-of-school time. For instance, Super Art Sunday, sponsored by the Museum Associates, is a day-long, museum-wide program featuring artist driven projects for visitors of all ages. We welcomed a new cohort of students for RISD Art Circle, a group of high school artists and enthusiasts who explore the collection and activate the galleries through interpretive projects, community collaborations, and hands-on activities for their peers. Through the Partnership for Providence Parks (P3) program in conjunction with Providence Parks and Recreation, we also welcomed four local recreation centers for gallery activities and conversations.
K–12 Teacher Programs
The museum offers learning opportunities during the academic year for adults including K–12 educators, museum educators, informal learning professionals and university educators. This year, we offered Stories Objects Can Tell, a 7-session course that took place in March and April. In thematic sessions, this introductory art history course focused on objects from a variety of cultures, times and perspectives while considering social contexts. Participants developed knowledge, interest, and comfort approaching and contextualizing art, while making new friendships and connections.
Image
▲ Stories Objects Can Tell
K–12 Class Visits
Through in-person gallery and classroom visits for local and regional schools, museum educators led explorations of art and design through discussion, writing, and drawing, making connections to different subjects, skills, and interests. The museum continued our robust in-school and in-museum learning and teaching with both new and returning K-12 students on one-part, multi-part, and in-depth school partnerships.
Image
▲5th and 6th grade students make connections to poses, compositions and storytelling by exploring Greek and Roman art and artifacts. Theater class from Achievement First Iluminar Middle School, Providence
College & University Class Visits
This year, the museum hosted class visits from:
Brown University
Bryant University
Community College of Rhode Island
Harvard University
Johnson and Wales University
New England Institute of Technology
Tufts University
UMASS Dartmouth
RISD
Roger Williams University
Wheaton College
Image
▲Uses of Animals class
If you came to the museum this year, you might have been invited to share feedback about your visit with us. The RISD Museum’s survey helps us better understand how we are meeting our visitors’ expectations. Getting to know some of the people who come to the museum helps us make more informed decisions about our exhibitions, programming, outreach, and more.
Between June 1, 2022, and May 31, 2023, 858 people self-selected to complete a survey. We learned that 47% of our respondents came to the museum for the first time. 20% were from Providence, 54% visited from states other than Rhode Island, and 2% were international visitors. Additionally, 83% of respondents were White (down 4% from 87% last year); 8% were Asian/Asian-American (up 1%); 6% were Hispanic, Latinx, or Spanish origin (up 1%); 4% were Black, Afro-Caribbean, or African-American, 1% were Middle Eastern/North African (1%); 1% were American Indian, Alaska Native, or Indigenous North American (1%); and less than 1% were Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander. 3% of respondents were of some other ethnicity (up 1%).
Reporting from the survey includes only individual visitors 18 or older. It does not include visitors who came to the museum for pre-registered programs, class visits, college students under 18, or K-12 students, and therefore is just one snapshot of who comes to the museum. Nonetheless, it is a helpful tool to understand both our strengths and areas for improvement in serving our community.
Image
Membership to the RISD Museum is for everyone. Joining the museum also supports access to art and design for others, in the galleries and beyond. We offer membership options for Rhode Island Artists, recent RISD graduates, newly naturalized U.S. citizens, colleges and universities, and libraries and community organizations.
Museum members enjoy a rich variety of special programming such as behind-the-scenes exhibition tours as well as specially curated events. These moments provide our members more opportunities to engage with each other, the museum staff, and the community.
▲Conor Moynihan, Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs, leads a member tour of The Performative Self-Portrait
Website
The RISD Museum website is both a place to access helpful information about the museum like hours, admission, directions, and events, and also a place to learn and engage with our collections, exhibitions, and dynamic digital materials like teaching resources, articles, videos, podcasts, and our digital publications.
Social media
The museum maintains social media accounts on several platforms to share announcements and timely information, engage followers with creative prompts and project ideas, share multimedia and web content, promote virtual and in-person programs, and invite close looking at objects interspersed with behind-the-scenes perspectives.
Connect
Connect is the RISD Museum’s e-newsletter, where we announce new exhibitions, events, special offers and more. If you don’t already receive Connect, you can sign up here.
Board of Governors
The Museum Board of Governors and Fine Arts Committee provide oversight of the RISD Museum on behalf of RISD’s Board of Trustees and assist and support the museum in fulfilling our mission.
Staff
The RISD Museum’s dedicated staff makes it possible to share our collection with the community. Over 100 people work across a wide range of departments comprising curatorial, conservation, registration, installation, education, programs, security, facilities, finance, visitor services, fundraising, and marketing. You can view our full staff list here.
Every year, the museum offers a range of paid positions for students, faculty, artists, and early-career museum professionals to work in-depth on projects and research opportunities alongside museum-staff mentors. These opportunities support individuals from RISD and throughout the country in exploring museum practice and theory while gaining tangible skills and experience.
Student Opportunities
These 100-hour paid internships for high schoolers were made possible by the city’s One Providence for Youth grant, and the PITCH grant from the Governor’s Workforce Board. Community Action Partnership of Providence (CAPP) served as the employer of record for these internships, and worked with Providence Public Schools to onboard and support all students through the process. The RISD Museum hosted 4 high school seniors and thirteen 9th graders as part of this program, introducing them through hands-on projects to the work and skills of design and video production, as well as introducing them to the work, skills, and personal and career paths in preparation and installation.
The RISD Museum offers both summer and academic year internships in departments throughout the museum. All of our internships are paid positions.
The Andrew W. Mellon summer internship program introduces students to museum work and offers in-depth experience working in a specific department of the RISD Museum. Interns contribute to departmental projects with museum staff as supervisors. As a cohort, interns discuss museum practice, build professional skills for working in the arts, and learn about how museums live up to their missions. This is designed as an introductory experience for students without prior experience or access to similar opportunities.
The RISD Museum also partners with the Studio Institute’s Arts Intern Program to offer full-time summer internships. This program provides opportunities for college undergraduates to learn about nonprofit professions through internships at museums and other cultural institutions. Each intern works closely with a staff mentor on a project relevant to their areas of interest. In addition, these interns participate in an educational component of the program, when they visit other institutions in their city as a cohort and have the opportunity to learn about other jobs in the field and to complete program assignments.
The Jean Segal Fain Memorial Summer Iinternship offers an undergraduate RISD student the chance to develop foundational skills in conservation, such as creating archival enclosures for a variety of materials and engaging in specialized design and fabrication for different 2D and 3D objects; participating in advanced-level work related to the framing of prints and objects for exhibitions; and identifying new systems for the organization, handling, and treatment of tools and materials. The intern builds skills and knowledge around the proper care and handling of valuable works of art under the supervision of one or more of the department’s conservators.
Offered by RISD’s Theory & History of Art & Design (THAD) Department, these fellowships invite RISD students in the THAD concentration to work on a semester-long project supported by museum staff in place of a course requirement.
The Spalter Teaching Fellowship is open to RISD and Brown graduate and undergraduate students from all disciplinary backgrounds. Spalter Fellows educators, teaching and working with children and youth ages 5 to 18. They undergo rigorous training with RISD Museum’s educators, who introduce them to the museum’s collection and pedagogy. Fellows support learning from works of art in the collection and the development critical thinking, problem solving, and creative interpretation.
The Joan Hall and Mark Weil Conservation Fund Fellowship is open to undergraduate students from any institution and all disciplinary backgrounds. The Hall/Weil Fellow receives professional conservation training from the museum’s objects conservator to introduce them to collections care and preventive conservation practices.
The museum participates in RISD’s Graduate Studies Research Assistantship Program, allowing selected graduate students to work in the museum during the academic year. Opportunities range from curatorial to museum education, installation, digital content, and graphic design, providing students insight into potential career paths in museums. RISD's Graduate Studies Department administers the program.
Many departments in the museum host work/study opportunities for RISD students throughout the year. Students work for a variety of reasons, whether to meet the basic costs of a RISD education or to learn/improve their skills and work habits.
These assistantships, administered by Brown University, offer graduate students pursuing a PhD in Brown's History of Art and Architecture Department the opportunity to gain experience in the museum field. Proctors are matched to curatorial departments based on their fields of study and learn the ins and outs of museum work over the course of the academic year.
The Museum Guild is a group of undergraduate students from local colleges and universities who work toward representation, inclusion, and advocacy for student voices in the museum space. Working as a group and with the guidance of the museum’s Academic Programs staff, they develop projects and programs that highlight student interests and promote diversity and community engagement while creating critical dialogue around the RISD Museum’s collection.
The Dorner Prize is awarded annually to RISD undergraduate and graduate students for temporary, site-specific projects at the RISD Museum. These artistic interventions may take the form of physical, digital, or programmatic encounters, that examine or critique the museum’s historical and contemporary contexts, collections, architectural idiosyncrasies, habits of visitation, and/or web presence.
Fellowships
The Henry Luce Curatorial Fellowship provides the opportunity for an outstanding scholar to assist in the interpretation and care of the RISD Museum’s Native North American collection through active engagement in provenance research, cataloging, building a network of experts and tribal representatives, reviewing storage and display requirements, and creating interpretation and programming based on this work.
The Nancy Elizabeth Prophet Fellowship at the RISD Museum is a 2-year, full-time position for artists and scholars embarking on careers in the arts and considering the museum profession and the roles museums play in an increasingly diverse society. Named in honor of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, an artist of Narragansett and African heritage and RISD’s first known graduate of color, this program provides significant professional-practice opportunities to high-achieving college and graduate school alumni up to 3 years post-graduation.
Each calendar year, the museum invites local artists and designers working in any medium to apply for our Research Residency for Artists (formerly known as our Artist Fellowship). One selected artist receives a stipend, professional development support, and the opportunity to work closely with our collections and staff members to realize a proposed project rooted in object-based research. The fellow has access to a range of resources at RISD, including support from museum staff and access to RISD faculty, technicians, and libraries. In collaboration with Museum staff, the fellow also has opportunities to share their work with the public through talks, demonstrations, performances, publications, or other formats.
Together with RISD Academic Affairs, the museum offers RISD faculty members a limited number of 2-year fellowships as residents in a curatorial department. The fellowships provide faculty members across disciplines the opportunity for in-depth research in the collection to enhance their work and teaching practices. They also provide an avenue for engaging in the day-to-day life of the museum.
The Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship is a three-year position for an outstanding junior scholar who wishes to pursue a curatorial career. The Mellon Fellow is fully integrated into the RISD Museum’s Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs and participates in strengthening the Museum’s engagement with the academic curricula at Brown University and RISD. The fellow supervises the department’s active study room and acts as the primary liaison between the department and faculty teaching from the collections, including making regular presentations to classes. They undertake research in their area of expertise, leading to an exhibition to be presented in the third year.