Artistic Research and Collaboration

We provide spaces and opportunities for the intersection of artistic practice and research. Such creative investigations might take the form of collaborative and open-ended forms of exploration and inquiry that lead to new work and insights.

Propose a project or program

Share your vision for activating our collections: Submit a proposal

Research Residency for Artists 

By supporting the local creative community, the RISD Museum and its audiences are fueled by the imagination and innovation of the artists and designers it serves. This year-long research residency offers a local artist the opportunity to explore new ideas and ways of working that challenge conventional methodologies. The research resident investigates Museum collections related to their areas of interest, with support and mentorship from curatorial staff, conservators, and educators, and engages in research that benefits their personal practice and delves deeply into ideas, materials, and processes. The research resident receives a stipend, professional-development support, and the opportunity to work closely with the Museum’s collections and staff members to realize a proposed project.

Past Artist Fellows/Research Residents

2024: Moy (Adam) Chuong
Moy (Adam) Chuong (they/them) is a queer Teochew American artist and educator whose work explores domestic objects as containers for identity, grief, and care. Their practice draws upon their personal, familial, and cultural archives, using objects such as vessels, chairs, and altars as stand-ins for a lived experience within our everyday. Through reproduction of and disidentification with the veneration of ancestors, including Buddhist, Taoist, and animistic rituals, their practice seeks new meaning for trans, queer, and disabled bodies that are so often denied physical and emotional shelter. Working within ceramics and Chinese iconography, their work seeks to reconsider the regimented and often gendered conventions of these traditional forms, using these vessels as a means to locate community, find collective power in trans and queer alienation, and map out the possibilities for a freer and more unruly future.

2024: Renée Elizabeth Neely-Tanner
Renée Elizabeth Neely-Tanner is a self-taught visual artist. She is a 2024 Artist Research Resident at the Museum of The Rhode Island School of Design. Neely-Tanner grew up in the 1960-70s Black community of Berkeley, across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk, VA. The culture and kinship of that experience has shaped her worldview as an artist and as a person. She honors her mother Allison Virginia Tanner Neely, an ever present witness to her life and work, by adding 'Tanner' to her name.In April 2024 The Leadership Alliance, Brown University honored Neely-Tanner at its Presidential Forum held at The Kennedy Center. Her painting Glory was commissioned to visually celebrate the achievements of 1000 Doctoral Scholars. 

2023: Aymar Ccopacatty
Aymar Ccopacatty is an artist, culture bearer, conservator, teacher and community organizer. Through sculpture, textiles, performance and installation, Ccopacatty’s work uses traditional weaving techniques that speak to indigenous knowledge and environmental activism.In addition to his artistic practice, Ccopacatty consults with art institutions, such as the Smithsonian Institution, on collection care. He has a BFA in Sculpture  from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Science with a concentration in Textiles Conservation from the University of Rhode Island.
See documentation of Aymar's time at the museum here.

2022: Susanna Kim Koetter
Susanna Kim Koetter is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, printmaking, textiles, and ceramics. Koetter works with images derived from popular culture and graphic trash as a way to contend with their own relationship to spirituality/spiritual practice, imperial power, and the terms of their identity as queer, mixed-race Korean-American woman.

2020: Jazzmen Lee-Johnson
Jazzmen Lee-Johnson’s practice centers on the interplay of animation, printmaking, music, and dance, informed by a yearning to understand how our current circumstance is tethered to the trauma of the past. Through her visual, sonic, and movement investigations across time and technology she disrupts and asserts ideas of history, body, liberation, and otherness. She received her BFA in Film, Animation, and Video at RISD, her MA in Public Humanities at Brown University, and a heavy dose of education working with youth in Baltimore, South Africa, and New York City. She is currently a music mentor to teens at New Urban Arts and the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Rhode Island Department of Health utilizing the arts to confront health disparities and shape health equity. She is always eager to radically reimagine the possibilities of the present by disturbing fixed notions of the past, and conjuring a future that might come to be.
Read more about Jazzmen's first months in the fellowship here.

2019: Dana Heng
Dana Heng is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in unceded Narragansett land, so-called Providence, RI. Most days, she is running the youth mentorship program at New Urban Arts--of which she is an alum--supporting adult artist mentors and high school teens to learn together, develop their creative practices, and build community. She strives to foster this creative and social practice that was instilled in her as a teen brought up in the Providence youth art scene. She co-founded Binch Press in 2018, a member-based print shop centering queer and BIPOC artists, and she co-organized Queer/Trans Zinefest in Providence, RI, which was a zine fair and event for independent publishers and artists. Woven throughout her grassroots community and collaborative based practice is work reflecting on identity and personal experiences in life. In her personal creative practice, Dana makes work based on food culture and memory as it relates to identity and belonging. She was the recipient of the 2019 RISD Museum Artist Fellowship, 2021 Santa Fe Art Institute Labor Residency, 2022 Interlace Project Grant, 2024 Steel Yard Ceramics Residency, 2024 Providence Commemoration Lab, and has shown her work in galleries around Providence. In her spare time, she is a collector of fortuitous skills and hobbies driven by curiosity and a desire to learn and to share.
See documentation of Dana's time at the museum here.

2018: Becci Davis 
Becci Davis was born in Fort Benning, Georgia. She spent her early years playing in her grandparents' backyard in nearby Columbus and her teenage years exploring the fields and forests of her parents' farmland in Louisville, Georgia. She earned her BFA with honors from Columbus State University and her MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design. Becci is an interdisciplinary artist, collecting images, documents, and oral narratives, which, combined with her own interpretation and response, create a new history and personal geography. Currently, she lives with her family in Wakefield, RI.
See documentation of Becci’s time at the museum here. 

2017: Walker Mettling
Walker Mettling is a Providence printmaker, cartoonist, and educator. Since 2010, he has directed the Providence Comics Consortium, a micro-publisher that offers free comics-making workshops in libraries and prints the work of kid and adult artists alongside one another. In 2016 he won the Dorry Award in Best Public Art for his Dirt Palace window installation of arcane winter-themed mythological characters. Most recently Mettling edited a few issues of the oversized full-color comics newspaper The Providence Sunday Wipeout.
See documentation of Walker’s time at the museum here. 

2016: Xander Marro
Xander Marro has been living the good life in the feminist sub-underground for too many years to count on her long bony fingers.  She draws pictures (usually narrative), makes movies (usually not narrative), produces plays with elaborate sets and costumes (usually narrative, but confusing), and then makes stuff like posters, quilts and dioramas (probably narrative?). Her work is often about spiritual relationships to the material stuff of this world. Co-founder of the Dirt Palace in 2000 (feminist cupcake encrusted netherworld located along the dioxin filled banks of the Woonasquatucket river, which is to say in Providence, RI USA). Her studio (and heart) is still there. Xander cut her teeth in arts management on the jagged edges of spreadsheets at AS220 while working as the Managing Director. She currently serves as Co-Director of Dirt Palace Public Projects. She's been involved with issues around affordable housing, and equity within the changing landscape of urban America for over two decades.
RISD Museum project pre-fellowship.

2016: James Falzone 
James P. Falzone is a composer and musician. He performs regularly throughout New England, both as a soloist (organ/piano) and as the coordinator of the Providence Research Ensemble⁠—a group he founded in order to promote new music by contemporary composers, including his own work as well as pieces by his fellow ensemble members. His work ranges from formal compositions following a conceptual or algorithmic systems approach to more intuitive techniques such as tape collage. 
Read a 2016 profile on James here. 

 

Projects, Publications, and Programs

Read and experience how some artists have expressed their research: