legacy professors
These portraits are available as prints for $100.00 with 25% of the proceeds donated to the RISD scholarship fund. Shop & Cart
'Wow, just WOW! So honored to have a piece in your rich and provoking concept." -Andrea Valenti
"This was a beautiful tribute to our mentors...participating brought a connection I was not expecting. It eclipsed the years and brought a lovely sense of optimism for the power of design to create a human conneciton, community and shared purpose."
-Jeanine Spence
"you made it so easy, memorable and most importantly...FUN!"
-Yomi Matsuoka
175 Alumni from around the world, collaboratively made epic portraits of seven RISD faculty; Bob O'Neal, John Behringer, Ken Hunnibell, Marc Harrison, Mickey Ackerman, Seth Stem and Tage Frid. We assembled them at the RISD reunion in 2015. You can see a video of the assembly, a facebook blog of our process, or visit them live at the RISD archives.
Organized by Susan Bickford, Alumni from around the world each made an eight inch square contribution to portraits of our mentors. "Everyone is so busy but we made a moment to make some art, to reflect with an elemental process, to remember, to bring back into our bodies, our connection to RISD, our connectedness to our mentors and those years, and in that process so many of us found a forgotten connection to ourselves. This intangible connection that we all have with our mentors is being made visible by these portraits, as they come back together we come together again to form an image of those who informed our thinking. In this process, I realized it was precisely the analog interaction that was important, it was a primary product of the portraits and not a by product at all, so I did the organization by hand, and not digitally. In so doing, I became the vessel for all of the participants love for their mentors, it was amazing to be on the receiving end of that and I'm really thankful that I didn't give that up to an algorithm in a machine."
- Susan Bickford