10. is this the revolution?

2018-19, series of sculptures, videos, and an installation
Graduate thesis, RISD Sculpture

In February 2016, while i was living and making work in Seattle, i got a call from the admissions officer at Cranbrook. they had a new department head at their printmaking department, Susan Goethell-Campbell, an artist who I had taken a two-week drawing workshop with at the Penland School of Craft the previous summer. Susan had asked Cranbrook to reach out to me. She wanted me to be her student.

I was shocked. I had always thought that graduate school was not in the cards for me, especially at a place like Cranbrook (which, I’ll be honest, was so outside of my field of vision that I hadn’t even heard of until the phone call). The two-week class I had taken with Susan was amazing. She gave me the first true crits and ‘studio visits’ of my life, giving individual attention to each students’ conceptual and material trajectory while we were together. Now that I’ve taught senior thesis courses at several schools, I understand that she was using that basic format for our class, but because MSU, where I went for undergrad, had no equivalent, at the time, this individual attention felt like a revelation.

The admissions officer sent me an abbreviated application that just required a few basic things and a portfolio. I submitted it the next day, and early the next week, I received a call from Cranbrook’s President, and she conducted a friendly, thirty minute interview in which we talked about my practice and my goals for my career.

Within a week of first getting the phone call, I was officially admitted. Although I did not end up attending, because I quite frankly could not afford to (they offered the same exact financial package to everyone despite income, because “everyone gives up their job to come here” lol okay cranbrook), this process changed my life completely.

I applied to graduate schools through traditional means the following year and decided on RISD after convincing the Sculpture Department Head Lisi Raskin, after multiple phone calls and numerous emails, to somehow give me a full fellowship. The voicemail that she left me, in which she excitedly exclaimed that she had procured the funds before ending with, “I’ll tell you how in ten years!” is a cherished one that I still have on my phone.

This is not to say that my time at RISD was simple. It was wonderful, but it was also fraught. It was my first time in an actual institutional setting where I was being instructed, which meant that my technical knowledge of sculpture increased exponentially, as did my understanding of the contemporary art world. I met amazing people who became lifelong friends and had studio visits with artists who I am still in contact with. But RISD was also a place where I was surrounded by a kind of wealth that I had never encountered before, as well as a kind of industry nepotism that astounded (and further radicalized) me.

It was 2017. Trump had been in office for a year, and suddenly, political art was in again. It was all anyone wanted to talk about or make. I knew I was in trouble when, during my first week of graduate seminar, someone asked “How do you make political work?” I looked around the room, hoping to meet the eyes of someone else who found the question appalling. Instead, everyone was nodding thoughtfully and taking notes. I couldn’t tell if I should laugh or cry.

Don’t get me wrong. I think people should make the kind of art they want to make. If Trump being president is the moment you realized that our entire lives our political, including our art, that’s cool. We should all continue to change and learn, and god knows I have been late to many realizations in my own life. But there was something discordant about thinking that a private, opaque, and inaccessible institution like RISD would be the place to teach you how to make true change through your art. As I worked two jobs to make ends meet even with my full-fellowship, I watched many of my fellow graduate students spend long nights at the studio, buy exorbenently expensive materials, and talk about how “the best way to make it in the art world was to move to new york and intern at as many galleries as possible” as if this was a reasonable lifestyle for most people.

I was jealous, and I was exhausted. There was something that felt, even of my own attempts to try to make change from within the institution, suspect and disengenuous. So I started to ask myself the question, “Is this the revolution?”

Everything i did, i asked myself “is this the revolution?” propelled by both an internalized pressure to make a difference and all the dialogue in our critiques and classes towards the same notion. what could one person, an artist, a student, really do in their work to make difference? did art propel change, or was it just an observer? what did i want the goal of my artmaking to be, beyond just the fact that it made me feel like i was alive in the world?

I gave myself the goal of making three “is this the revolutions” everyday, which quickly became shortened to a question i felt i was asking ad nauseum: “is this? is this??”

This practice eventually morphed into a continuation of a body of tenuous ‘beacon’-like structures that I had been making for the past year in school, but with the added component of long thin rods of steel, which caused the structures to sway and bow, their balance shifting with the slightest movement, making them next to impossible to keep standing.

They seemed like people to me, a slightly defeated populous that was still adomant about its agency, its power for self-determination. I connected them all together, and tethered together - them, me, the rocks I used around them with thread to act as balances and counterbalances - the negotation of all of our desires and inclinations became a kind of frustrating but beautiful-feeling dance. Even when it aggravated me, the thought of fixing these structures, making them so that they were static, felt akin to killing them. So we continued to dance.

The final presentation, at the Dunkin Donuts Convention Center, of all places, was a disappointment. My final critique was the harshest, by far, I had had my entire graduate career. In a way, it was the critique I had been waiting for, having a deep-running pentient for self -loathing and -punishment (don’t worry, I’m in therapy).

There was something about the pieces, once installed, in this giant room, surrounded by beautifully made furniture and renderings of designed landscapes made by grads in other programs at RISD, that felt dead, and I walked away from this body of work dissatisfied. In a way, presenting the work, and the question “Is this the revolution?” in an environment that was quintessentially RISD and feeling that the work had somehow, died, finally answered the question for me.

I do think change is possible through art. There are many artists I admire who work with and in community in an equitable, non-exploitative way. But most art doesn’t actually serve the most marginalized amongst us, nor does it result in actual material change for people on the ground. Especially not art made within an institution like RISD.

But looking back at the images and videos now, in 2025, there is something about them that still feels important and beautiful and worth revisiting someday, in a different setting, within a different conversation that feels closer to home. I’ll find it someday.

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