Many students spend their summers at home with friends and family, taking time to recharge after an intense school year. But for a few students at the Rhode Island School of Design, the summer months provide the best opportunity to explore the world and learn beyond College Hill.
This summer, RISD’s Global Summer Studies program offered three unique courses in Japan, Italy and Brazil. These three-to-six week programs taught by RISD faculty in foreign countries aim to promote “cross-cultural exchange and experiences that inspire creative agency,” according to RISD’s website. The programs are also open to Brown students and students in art and design programs across the country.
For RISD sophomore Jolin Zhang, taking “Looking At, Looking Through, Looking Back: Glass as an Intervention of Existing Architecture” presented an opportunity to immerse herself in Japanese culture while advancing her degree in glassblowing.
As part of the course, Zhang spent one week in Toyama, a city near the western coast, and two weeks in the Tokyo area. During her time in Japan, Zhang’s class worked in a local studio to create an exhibition of glass pieces.
Like Zhang, Brown-RISD Dual Degree student Maximos Spatharakis ’29 also participated in the program in Japan in hopes of exploring art beyond RISD’s borders. For him, the experience brought “new people, a new place (and a) new activity,” he told The Herald.
Both Zhang and Spatharakis emphasized the differences between RISD’s approach towards glass production and that of the local studio.
The local studio had “a completely different setup,” said Zhang. “If we’re building a wall, the RISD glass department is using bricks. … But in Japan, we started straight from concrete.” Due to these differences, the final result is a “lot smoother, so the optics are a lot clearer,” she added.
According to Spatharakis, there is a larger focus on teamwork at RISD, whereas in the Japanese studio, the work was more “solitary.”
He also noticed that the pieces produced in Japan were much more “fragile” and “methodical” than what he was used to producing at RISD.
Although Zhang had never taken an architecture class before, the course encouraged her to think more about “how a space can guide a viewer or affect their experience,” she said. As an example, she described how the hot shop — the glass studio — was designed to stay cool during hot summers through architecture that promoted ventilation.
The experience of working in the shop, Zhang said, was, “eye-opening.”
Over 8,000 miles away from the Japanese glass studios, RISD junior Victoria Gambill spent her summer taking “Letterpress Letterscape” in Rome.
As an illustration student, letterpress was uncharted territory for Gambill. But she was drawn to the program due to the opportunity to learn “something that (she) wouldn’t be learning here” at RISD, she told The Herald.
At first, Gambill struggled to adjust to life abroad. “Everybody speaks Italian, and I don’t really speak Italian, so you have minimal capabilities to talk to other people around you,” she said.
But eventually, she settled down in the nation’s capital and was awestruck by its history. During her three weeks there, she explored works of art that have long inspired her, such as the Sistine Chapel and the Pieta in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Like Gambill, Zhang believed that one of the best parts of the program was exploring the Japanese cities in which she was located. Zhang recounted forming strong connections with local students and attending festivals during her time abroad.
For Spatharakis, studying abroad helped him realize that even though artists across the world may use different approaches when creating, there is a universal appreciation for the practice.
As artists, he said, “we see the same beauty in different ways.”
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Gambill called the study-abroad experience highly “valuable,” and she encouraged other students to try it.
“I definitely think I’d want to go back” to Rome, she said, already having signed up for another stint abroad.
AloJapan.com