Quickies and Questionings

Arete Xu

→ BFA SC 2026

Nicole Yee

→BFA ID 2024

Where’s My Mark?

Recently, I have been thinking about the things that stay and the things that go, about embodying time, about urgent actions and stoic patiences. I am hopelessly aware of the now. Reason, season, and lifetime—these landscapes have collapsed like quicksand. I can’t help but ask an endless chain of questions: Why am I here? Have I really been here? If so, where’s my mark? In asking them, I find myself running up against issues too deeply embedded in systemic roots, challenges I can’t solve as an individual. What change can one person initiate in the grander scheme?

RISD Quickies exemplifies everything that’s been on my mind.

_{2019 featured 20 Quickies; the posters’ QR codes—innovative at the time—drew the crowds.}

Where’s My Belief?

RISD Quickies was a student-run club supported by CSI that held interdisciplinary workshops (“quickies”) during Wintersession for about a decade starting in 2009. Quickies paired well with Wintersession as a time of year set aside for new experiences and passion projects. Students, staff, and faculty had the opportunity to teach community members their hobbies and skills. Nicole Yee stumbled onto Quickies in her freshman year in 2017. “I was feeling that ‘freshman loss.’ I went to a performing arts school, so I was like, where’s my theater? I went down the rabbit hole [in the RISD Archive] asking where all the theater stuff is at RISD and what’s the weirdest club at RISD. And I found Quickies.” By then, all but one of the student organizers of Quickies had graduated. A CSI staff member put Nicole in contact with that last student in the nick of time. Together with her friend Vielka Marmolejos (Apparel ’21), Nicole promptly revived Quickies. “I thought, where do I find people who want to learn wacky things?” It turned out they were everywhere. “Every student, staff, and faculty—no one came to us with bad ideas.”

Nicole and Vielka worked with a wide array of bodies (offices, departments, student groups… let’s just call them bodies) on campus, from RISD Dining to the RISD Museum; their team of student organizers represented every academic department. They ran Quickies for two years, 2019 and 2020. In 2020, roughly 1,000 students attended the 22 consecutive Quickies workshops, which ranged from practical to fun, from portfolio critiques to dumpling making. Nicole and Vielka were persistently planning for a third year when Quickies came to a halt with COVID-19.

One of Nicole’s fondest memories is the first Quickie of Wintersession 2019: Introduction to Knitting. At first, she was anxious, thinking, “It’s just going to be really sad, having an instructor with no students to show up to the workshop. But then we saw the ‘Workshop is Full’ sign outside. We thought, this is Ewing House. The capacity is like a hundred or something. The second we opened the door, everyone had their skewers up in the air. I didn’t know it was possible to have so many happy people in the winter.”

^{A packed room for Intro to Knitting, Ewing House, 2019}
Nicole loved “the gratification of convincing people that your wacky idea is real and doable.” She also believes in the workshops’ educational value. She notes in retrospect: “RISD Quickies determined my future in ID. It was my identity. That was what I did. What I really liked about it from an ID learning standpoint was that no one really taught me systems design or anything around organization at that point. Sophomore year, all I knew was how to work with wood. We spoke to every single department coordinator and a lot of department heads, and by working with all of the departments on campus, I learned how they are structured. It was like a backward class. Instead of a department telling you how to do stuff, it was me connecting with people. And that’s what I love, connecting with people.”

^{Nicole learned all the locations where you can have an open flame on campus in her freshman year.}
Nicole continued, “We skipped all of the hesitations around crazy ideas [when we started Quickies] because people were like, we believe in you. They said, take this budget and run.” I paused and wondered, where did that belief go? Where did that budget go? When I asked Nicole whether something like Quickies could happen now, she confessed that it would be tough for her to do. I couldn’t help but speculate that it’s not just her. Which begs the question…

Why Can’t It Happen Now?

For some reason, the feasibility of Quickies feels doubtful in the current climate, if only because, for all of Nicole’s and others’ hard work, no one from my class and onward knows what Quickies is. Nevertheless, I see Quickies as a dream of what RISD can be. It’s a vivid moment of interdisciplinarity, a brief opening of a door towards endless possibilities, and just what the community needs. Reflecting back, Nicole and I sifted through the workshop history to identify an underlying Quickies philosophy and figure out the why. Instead, we landed on three key how questions:

How do we learn from the past (e.g. from Quickies)?
How do we let students carve out spaces for themselves?
How do we make school-wide interdisciplinarity a reality?

It’s hard to argue against the common wisdom that RISD is siloed, that we have too few opportunities to talk with each other, and that accessible interdisciplinary opportunities are rare. Quickies is an exception to the rule. It is all about navigating the system, creating space, and connecting different groups of people. So, why can’t it happen now? In puzzling out this article, my first instinct had to do with the lack of communication at RISD across the board, and the administration reshuffling post-COVID. It is currently unclear who’s facilitating communication—not to mention collaboration—across RISD’s students, staff, faculty, and administration.

Going off this hunch, I first looked to Student Life staff to ask what potential they see for Quickies, or something inspired by it. I contacted Sarah Knarr, Director of the Center for Student Involvement (CSI) to ask how we might draw lessons from past student-directed programs for future initiatives. She answered that and elaborated more generally on how student organizations survive and thrive:

The use of the RISD Archive has been helpful in understanding the history of the Center for Student Involvement and student interest over time. It is typical that some organizations are long-standing and some ebb and flow. Student organizations are a space for experimentation and are reliant on student interest and leadership commitment. Our longest-standing clubs are those that plan for succession, consistently engage with CSI, have support from committed advisors, and responsibly use their budget to meet broad community interests.

Furthermore, we are considering how this might look different at RISD where the economy of time is pressing and academic priorities are high. We want students to know that we are always open to feedback and that our goal is to maximize the impact that student engagement can have.

I also spoke with Sara Rothenberger, Associate Dean of Students, who offered her insights on some of the systemic issues at RISD in relation to student engagement. She replied:

I’ve observed since my start at RISD in June that the RISD curriculum is highly time-intensive. Here, the culture is iterative, sometimes full of competition and pressure, both internally and externally. I believe the systems need to find space for students to be more holistic humans who have academic and outside-of-academic pursuits. …I (broadly Student Life) want the students to know that we see the demands on time, the systemic ways in which students feel pressure to perform, to create, and for some, how that is buoyed or weighted by your intersectional identities.

What I take away from these conversations is this: it’s challenging to sustain student organizations and projects in higher education given student turnover. The weight of engaging and collaborating intersectionally often comes down to a passionate individual, which is not an enduring model. We agreed that there should be more support to navigate spaces within the institution. Most of all, we agreed that what students need most is more time.

Yet the buried root of the problem, to me, is that no one on staff can comment directly on Quickies. Originally, I tried to advocate for another Quickies revival to connect students, staff, and faculty members. But the very idea of a new Quickies—which could potentially be a platform, a series of programs, or an entirely new department to facilitate more collaboration and interdisciplinary efforts—was difficult to convey because neither of these Student Life staff were here when Quickies was running. What is Quickies’ value when it belongs to a different RISD? Despite affiliating with RISD for eight years, Nicole says she still doesn’t know “the space” of the institution any better because of how much it’s changed. If Quickies is all about navigating the system, and Nicole doesn’t think she can run Quickies herself when the system keeps changing, what hope is there for Quickies?

With the conversation taking a drastically more complex turn, I had to confront the new questions that surfaced: Is it worth reviving Quickies if it belongs to the past, to another RISD? Is it possible to foster continuity among RISD’s shifting body?

Shifting Body or Steady Body?

Let’s rewind for a moment: Quickies represents interdisciplinary, student-led, co-curricular collaboration, a rare exception in a siloed RISD. It died out because of COVID initially, and stayed dormant due to changes in “the system,” a system with constantly shifting constituents. No matter, because Quickies belong to a different era. What if we are part of a continuous thread through RISD’s history, steadily sharing the same conversation?

RISD’s strategic plan, Next: 2020-2027, is the most recent echoing voice in this conversation. It lists reducing “undergraduate and graduate credit-hour requirements to allow for flexibility, review[ing] student work patterns and implement[ing] a common scheduling grid across divisions … to encourage cross-disciplinary exploration and cocurricular participation”¹ as a foundational goal. It also mentions adopting “a new enterprise management system to break down siloed functional processes and advance our operations.”² These objectives seem promising, and they feel well-matched for the current climate. Efforts like the current Holistic Student Wellness Committee are digging deeper into these goals in ways that make me cautiously optimistic.

It turns out the conversation about siloed departments and singular disciplines go way back. In 2014 Painting Professor Kevin Zucker conducted research investigating how RISD might better reflect the interdisciplinary realities of art production beyond academia.³ He offers sound frameworks for accomplishing the goal, and also cites documents from the RISD Archive that speak to perennial issues.

In 1966, Gordon Peers, Painting Department Head and Chair of Fine Arts, lamented, “At present there is no actual ‘RISD’ which has a faculty, status, or in any realistic sense, a means of operating. There is only a ‘RISD,’ which for all practical purposes is the sum of its departmental parts.”⁴ In 1986, Members of the Wintersession Subcommittee of the Instruction Committee concurred: “It is as though we are operating a house for a group of freelance people who are really never in contact with each other with few common interests … We should be operating as a community of artists.”⁵

So as much as the issue of a siloed RISD feels very “in the now,” the same old song has been sung before. The issue persists not from lack of trying. I feel a level of cognitive dissonance in my new discoveries: why does an obvious problem at the tip of everyone’s tongue feel so hard to articulate? How does a problem that clearly has solutions, with tangible work putting them into motion, somehow still feel too big to tackle? How did the problem of communication and action at a relatively small campus blow up to a point that efforts from the past four decades are rendered as fruitless as Sispyhus?

Shifting Interdisciplinarities?

I return to the question: How do we learn from the past? and wonder, are we even talking about the same “interdisciplinary”? The question is equally existential and practical. Historically, RISD’s bodies have long expressed a desire to embrace interdisciplinarity—a hypothetical platform for endless possibilities—amid material and systematic realities. But could we have a program for “Space Definition/and Unlimited horizons”—as a 1978/79 RISD Memorandum lists among “possible interrelationships”—today? I’m not sure. What kind of revenue would be generated from “an experimental interdisciplinary curriculum” anyway? The feedback loop between performative exceptionalism, specialized expertise and survival in a capitalist market is too strong. However high the desire for interdisciplinarity in theory, it might ultimately boil down to compromise with current realities. When I first arrived at RISD, I was surprised by its fairly rigorous discipline divisions. Although FAV and Sculpture in undergrad and Digital + Media come to mind as the most interdisciplinary majors, pathways for those in other majors (like ISPs, CSPs and one-credit workshops) seem underutilized, more like outliers from the norm. “Being interdisciplinary” seems to me like a hole unlikely to be filled anytime soon.

^{This report shows that RISD previously considered having collaborative courses with Brown.}

That being said, I continue to grapple with what “interdisciplinary” means in this shifting student body. At RISD, we have a beautiful and toxic phenomenon where we wholeheartedly identify with what we do. This person is the most “GD” GD student, and that person is “peak ID.” We swear our underlying love to our majors, till death do us part. It’s comforting to have a pillar of identity to lean on when you know that the person you are at RISD is temporary. Could it be that students’ longing to be “interdisciplinary” is not the opposite of specialization? Could it be that both come from a desire to present a unique identity and a distinguishing mark? Yes. I think so.

Your Then, My Now.

I am thinking about the now. With so many dangling questions left admittedly unresolved, I want to propose a new way to consider interdisciplinarity: being interdisciplinary across bodies and across time. I think time is where the personal and the systemic overlap. It is also the space to untangle the two. For Nicole, digging through the old Quickies Google Drive and reinventing her own Quickies was a way of collaborating with past students from all disciplines, ones she’ll never meet. To me, continuing something I’ve been doing for a long time, whether a passion project or hobby, is a collaborative process with myself. “Interdisciplinary” might simply mean you’ve done everything you’ve set out to do. Your “wacky ideas” came true. You were here.

In the last conversation Nicole and I had, she gave some sage advice: “I think we need to use the power of collaboration and not try to take [the current system] over. What really made my friend and I proud is that we didn’t go into it thinking Quickies is going to change RISD.” Perhaps the task of change will seem less daunting if we don’t have to change RISD and do something completely new. Well then, how about another round of Quickies?

WORKS CITED

RISD’s current strategic plan Next: RISD 2020-2027, 12. See www.risd.edu/about/strategy-and-planning/strategic-plan.
Ibid., 15.
Kevin Zucker, “A Department of the Relationship of Ideas and Problems” (Academic Commons Program, Spring 2014 Project Report), accessible on RISD’s Digital Commons.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 8.

Arete Xu is waiting for wonder.
Nicole Yee loves interdisciplinary spaces.

Kevin Zucker unearthed these telling images from the RISD Archive. Gordon F. Peers, “Framework of a Proposal For a Department of the Relationship of Ideas and Problems,” 1966

We’re grateful to the students, staff, and faculty who supported Quickies throughout the years and to the folks who engaged in this conversation through interviews. Special thanks to Eileen Tran ’21 GD, Mika Ando ’20 ID, and Yunxuan Wang ’20 ID for their help running Quickies in 2020 and to Fleet Library for archiving Quickies’ history on Digital Commons @ RISD.