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Every now and then one wonders how a student decides to come to RISD. For Jamie Goldstein ‘11 PT the journey from Los Angeles to RISD involves Cranston and a RISD|Continuing Education connection that goes back to the 1950s.

Parents’ Council Co-Chair Erica Di Bona and her husband, Vincent Di Bona, Executive Producer and creator of America’s Funniest Home Videos and 2007 recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, are very happy with Jamie’s decision to attend RISD, even though it meant she attended school across the country. At the end of Jamie’s freshman year, she enthusiastically told her parents how much she had benefited from having the best teachers in her life, and that she had definitely made the right decision to come to RISD.

Jamie, her father Josh Goldstein, Erica and Vin reside in Los Angeles; the Cranston-RISD connection came through Vin. When Vin grew up in Cranston, RI, in the late 1950s, he took Continuing Education art classes at RISD with his best friend Alfred DiCredico ’66 PT. Vin went on to study film and radio at Emerson and UCLA, and eventually became a television producer. Alfred is a well-known painter and RISD professor. When Jamie knew she wanted to pursue an education in the arts, Vin, Alfred and David Schoffmann ’78 PT, Jamie’s mentor at Brentwood Art Center, who pointed her to RISD.

After Jamie completed the Precollege program her mind was made up. Jamie is now entering the sophomore year as a Painting major and her parents are on the RISD Parents’ Council, with Erica serving as one of the Co-chairs.

From Cranston to L.A. to Providence - many roads connect to RISD!

RISD remains a frequent focus of The New York Times, having been featured as part of articles the past two Sundays: in the “Education Life” section (July 27) and in yesterday’s “Travel” section (”36 Hours in Providence”). In addition to naming Providence among the “Towns They Don’t Want to Leave” (see this earlier post), the the “Education Life” editors sent Laura Buckman ‘10 PH out to capture the colors and vibrancy of the RISD campus. The RISD students featured in the slideshow of Laura’s work are Matt Leifheit ‘11, Scott Stevenson ‘10 AP, Allison Wucher ‘09 PT and Elizabeth Englander ‘11.

Yesterday’s travel feature on Providence dubbed the RISD Museum’s collection as “up-to-date and comprehensive” and made special mention of work by RISD alumni on view in the galleries. The piece also singled out Al Forno, the famed restaurant run by alumni George Germon ‘69 CR and Johanne Killeen ‘71 PH, as having “put Providence on the culinary map three decades ago”.

You can see the Times‘ visual take on Providence in this slideshow.

Work by Kim DeMarco ‘88 IL — “Night Cap,” on the August 4 issue — is once again the cover illustration of The New Yorker. Between freelance commissions that include work for The New York Times and others, Kim also manages to keep up a fun visual blog, which includes her design work and photographs, among other items of interest.

I now increasingly feel that it isn’t a matter of a preference for the left- or right-brained approach to an issue. Instead it’s a matter more of how well and how nimbly one can shift between their two hemispheres and come to a set of possible solutions that lean left (logic), right (feeling), and smack dab in the middle.

I’m certainly not alone in my comfort for the middle-brain approach. In the book Governance and Leadership by Richard Chait et al he names an extremely constructive mode of collaboration called “generative thinking.” Relatedly Roger Martin at the Rotman School refers to a mode of thought where “ambiguity is okay” as integrative thinking; David Kelley at Stanford refers to a kind of experiment-provoking line of breadth-first problem-solving as design thinking. Essentially the world is converging towards a divergent mode of thought — today we can do both. We can be an artist and an engineer; we can be an accountant and a graphic designer; we can be a computer programmer and a CEO; we can be one thing and another even when we’re using diametrically opposed thinking styles.

Given that I grew up in a large family where I often had to sit in the back seat squished in the middle “on the bump,” I am now glad that I was pre-conditioned to being a middle-ish kind of guy.

Devotion to excellence in teaching is a way of life at RISD. I know perhaps the greatest joy as a teacher is when you experience your students grow to surpass your own capabilities. It’s a humbling experience when it happens and puts your entire creative life into perspective.

When my former student Peter Cho sent me an update on his recent piece it made me smile in that way you feel when you’ve been bested by your child in a running race, and at the same time being proud that they have won the race on completely fair terms.

The joy of life is the opportunity to learn. If not from your students, from the people around you, and also the people that came before you. Books. Lifelong university printed on pulp and available in large quantities everywhere. Everything is connected. Peter’s work reminded me of one of my “professors on the bookshelf” — Calvino.

Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium changed my life. I know for many students at RISD, if it is not Calvino it is some other book they have read … that shapes how they see, touch, smell, taste, and consummate the creative acts in which they engage. Literature has the quality of making that which is abstract stay abstract and thus open for more interpretation than most.

I wonder if Peter had read Calvino and if it influenced the way he thinks. I read Calvino, and touched Peter’s mind when he was younger and perhaps Calvino went in that way. Forever I could imagine what Calvino thought, but could not see it as reality and am so glad that Peter was able to take a step in that direction. He made it real. For it is the artist and designer that can take raw imagination and make it into something real to admire, or criticize, or simply ignore. I thank them for their courage.

Professor Dean Snyder is showing his lusciously organic work in a one-man show at Skidmore through August 31. If you’re in Saratoga, NY do check it out! If you can’t go ahead and visit virtually.

I sat for lunch the other day with Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rafael Moneo who designed the soon-to-be-opening Chace Center here at RISD. During our conversation we spoke about street grafitti with RISD Museum Assistant Director James Hall. A variety of ideas to stem the growth of grafitti were proposed, with Rafael presenting the most radical idea. He suggested that by simply putting the name of a building on a building … that the building would be less likely to be defaced. In essence Moneo was saying that that once an anonymous artifact becomes “outed” as having an identity that it somehow becomes more invincible to an external challenge.

An abstract object is easy (and free) to interpret by nature of its being abstract. Once it becomes concrete, it loses its interpretability. One might say in defense of objects left “un-texted” that they remain as free citizens without prejudice or constraints imposed by a perceived norm.

Open to criticism versus closed to opinion. It’s better to be labelless … is how I summarize this free thought today.

The Glass House Conversations are meant to preserve the house as a “living museum” with ongoing salons emulating those that Johnson himself hosted. Among those participating in President Maeda’s Conversation were Diego Rodriguez of IDEO, Jason Fried of 37signals, Ambra Medda of Design Miami, Michelle McMurry of the Aspen Institute and Linda Tischler of Fast Company.

In the video below President Maeda shares his impressions and talks about how the Glass House relates to his theories of “simplicity”.