Where Designers Come From

In eighteen seventy-six, a woman named Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf attended the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. She came back to Providence with a specific idea: the city needed a school where women could be trained in design and the applied arts, where the gap between fine art and commercial craft would be treated as a problem worth solving. She founded the Rhode Island School of Design the following year, in eighteen seventy-seven.

RISD, pronounced "Riz-dee" by everyone who matters, sits on College Hill adjacent to Brown University, and the two institutions have cross-registered students since nineteen hundred. The school runs a museum with approximately one hundred thousand works, ranking it as the third-largest art museum attached to an educational institution in the United States.

What the school is really known for is what comes out of it. David Byrne and Tina Weymouth, two of the four founding members of Talking Heads, studied here. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, who co-founded Airbnb, were RISD graduates. Kara Walker, one of the most significant American artists of the last thirty years, holds a degree from the school. Collectively, alumni have earned eleven MacArthur Fellowships, nine Emmy Awards, and three Academy Awards.

Helen Metcalf wanted to train artisans to understand design as a discipline. What she built was an institution that has shaped the visual culture of the United States across a century and a half, from album covers to app interfaces to gallery walls in every major museum in the country.