Welcome to the RISD Museum 2024–2025 Year in Review, a snapshot of our work in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025. This year we completed and launched our 2025–2030 Strategic Plan, marking the first steps in bringing it from vision to practice. Critical to developing this plan was listening: we convened artists, educators, community partners, staff, and students, asking them to share their hopes, ideas, and perspectives on the museum’s future. Their voices helped shape a plan that reflects both the institution’s history and its evolving role in the community.

The Strategic Plan introduces the RISD Museum Way, a framework for engaging with art and ideas anchored in four guiding principles: Process, Meanings, Origins, and Connection. Blending museum practice with RISD’s teaching philosophy, this approach establishes the museum as an active site of making, meaning, and community, making art accessible to everyone. In fiscal year 2025 we have already begun to see how this framework fuels impactful outcomes. We’ve activated new hands-on programs that invite visitors to engage with materials and techniques, deepened interpretive practice to share the layered stories behind works of art, and explored how objects in our collection continue to find new relevance and resonance today. These efforts reflect our belief that museums are as essential to community life as parks or public squares—as places to convene, to discover, to decompress, and to find inspiration and connection.

We are also foregrounding well-being and joy in our work. In recent months we have hosted Museum at Night events that combine conversation, demonstration, laughter, and connection; offered interactive workshops tied to exhibitions; and welcomed thousands of school and community visitors whose curiosity and creativity bring new energy to our galleries—and new ideas to our staff. By shaping these experiences as a dialogue, we create space for ideas and inspiration to be explored collectively, making engagement less formal, more dynamic, and more reciprocal.

As we continue to put the Strategic Plan into motion, our focus remains on people: visitors, staff, artists, students, members. Our ambition is to make the RISD Museum a place where discovery, imagination, and connection are daily possibilities—not just for a few, but for all. I am grateful to every member of our community whose contributions helped inform our vision, and whose energy, ideas, and trust make realizing it possible.

—Tsugumi Maki
Museum Director