Rhode Island School of Design - Portfolio Yearbook (Providence, RI)

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Samuel F. Hershey Mrs. Martha Paisner Robert H. Miller

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It is a pleasure to be invited each year to address the senior class in this way. Rhode Island School of Design is a special place. At its best, it has asked of you a difficult task, daily creation in design. Again at its best, it has urged you to deploy your talent in the service of significant problems. Those are professional goals in our education. There is, also, a moral aim, to develop character that is dependable, intelligent, purposeful and ethical, quali- ties that are basic in professional conduct. Thus your college holds no picayune educational pur- pose. You, now as Seniors, later as Alumni, can rejoice in that fact. Since your future partly depends upon the continued excellence of Rhode Island School of Design, | urge you as Alumni to represent your college well and to nourish its resources so that students yet unborn may, in future generations, find excellence here. Albert Bush-Brown

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This is in answer to a request for a statement on the Divi- sion of Fine Arts that might still be meaningful ten years hence. Lacking the gift of foresight | have addressed myself to the present. What follows is a series of obser- vations and thoughts occasioned by the continuing proc- ess of assessing our programs as we plan for the future. In many ways the initiative in education has been seized by the student as a result of his impatience with older methods and a desire to become engaged in the shaping of his world more quickly than older schedules will allow. Three qualities identify the good student here. One, his deep concern for his own education; two, his realization that in the process of learning he may achieve self-identity; and three, a desire to place himself mean- ingfully in the context of his civilization. Responding to activities within and without our walls, Fine Arts education is changing at a tempo not thought of a few years ago. Some of the change is clearly good, some must await a judgment made possible only with the passage of time. One thing stands out very clearly, how- ever, despite the fact that the college has taken the po- sition that its business is education and quite reasonably disclaimed any special power to produce artists, it is inescapable that our students increasingly act in the be- lief that the educational process and that of becoming an artist are not necessarily two separate functions. Such a posture suggests a revolution in design education if it is viable in the organizational framework necessary to any institution of higher learning. Increasingly it is evident that learning to brush on paint, to carve stone, or to throw a pot may hold less significance for our students than the exercise of men- tal powers and physical skills necessary to accomplish these functions. More importantly the possible by-prod- ucts of self-identity and the realization of emerging cre-