Art, Design, and Architecture News

RIT's Cary Graphic Arts Collection has received a donation of books and printing equipment from the estate of a noted historian of typography and early printing technologies. Stephen Saxe was an expert on American type foundries from the 19th century and a founding member of the American Printing History Association.

Dan Gabber, digital fabrication specialist in RIT’s College of Art and Design, has developed a creative solution for users of chemical respirators who also must protect against the spread of COVID-19: valve covers.

Marty Pietras '17 (3D Digital Design) is a 3D materials artist for Sony, where he textures environments for PlayStation game titles.

Sales from t-shirts designed by faculty Carol Fillip and Lorrie Frear are benefitting Music is Art, a non-profit organization founded by Goo Goo Dolls bassist Robby Takac.

RIT’s annual celebration of graduate research begins this week with an online platform that reflects the new normal during COVID-19. The virtual symposium also expands the content to an audience of international graduate students who started their programs from their home countries.

An art installation depicting Anna Murray Douglass, the first wife of famed social reformer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, will be unveiled today at the site of where the couple lived at 297 Alexander St. in Rochester from 1848 to 1851. The piece was funded by RIT.

RIT will celebrate graduate research during the 13th annual Graduate Education Week and Showcase: A Vision into the Future. The virtual event—Nov. 16 to 20—creates a platform for sharing and exchanging ideas during the COVID-19 pandemic, with pre-recorded and live presentations, demonstrations, visual exhibitions, and an alumni panel discussion.

The RIT student-designers on Team Frears placed second in the 2020 Paperboard Packaging Student Design Challenge for their packaging designs of a toolkit for educators to be distributed by the national program Trees into Cartons, Cartons into Trees, (TICCIT).

Physical distancing and the inability to perform in front of a live audience during the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t stopped the cast and director of SOMNIUM, which premieres online Friday. SOMNIUM features actors and a green screen, which provides a virtual reality space allowing the audience to participate.

The Democrat and Chronicle features Ward Hartenstein ’83 MFA (ceramics), who is repurposing a homemade musical instrument shaped like a dragon to dispense candy from his porch on Halloween.

Women in the United States and in the United Kingdom fought for voting rights on either side of the Atlantic Ocean in the early 20th century, protesting for suffrage by picketing, going on hunger strikes, and using a savvy poster campaign. RIT students this semester dug into the suffrage movement’s use of graphic arts to design and create a digital exhibit of historical posters from Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library.

An HBO film about Alice Paul and the suffrage movement, Iron Jawed Angels, will be the focus of a campus discussion and part of RIT's centennial celebration of the 19th amendment and women’s voting rights, Moving Forward: Suffrage Past, Present and Future on Oct. 30.