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RISD GLASS Updates from the Rhode Island School of Design's Glass Department. This notion of wonder is at the very heart of RISD Glass and our lecture series.

Visiting Lecture Program
Since its inception, RISD Glass has had a dynamic visiting lecture series in which an interdisciplinary mix of artists, curators, critics, scientists, craftsman, and others engage the department through lectures, special projects, discussions, and events. The experimental nature of RISD Glass flourishes through its long standing commitment to contemporary dialogue and research. In celebration of our 50th year, the Department has partnered with Denise Markonish, Curator from Mass MoCA and part time faculty in Glass, to publish a book that highlights a series of themes that have been of recurring interest to RISD Glass over the years. These themes are grounded in the concept of wonder — a slippery state, between knowing and not knowing, a state that includes awe, the marvelous, and the uncanny. Look for our posters around campus to find out when and where each lecture will be held and also who is visiting. All lectures are open to the public. Hot Nights
RISD Glass initiated Hot Nights as a means of cultivating a greater understanding of glass and its significance to an array of disciplines. Through a series of hot shop demonstrations, projects, and workshops, Glass faculty and students partner with the larger community to research and experiment the intersection between glass and its ubiquitous presence in the world. Hot Nights has led to significant developments combining emerging digital fabrication technologies with traditional glass processes, investigations of optical properties of glass and light, and has collaborated with student groups to assist in the fabrication of ambitious cross-disciplinary projects amongst others. Research and Special Projects
Research in RISD Glass takes many different forms, from special studio courses, to semester-long sequences in the Hotshop, to extended work with visiting artists.

Our first HotNights event of the year! We welcomed Masha Ryskin’s EFS class into the hotshop to draw with molten glass, ...
09/25/2026

Our first HotNights event of the year! We welcomed Masha Ryskin’s EFS class into the hotshop to draw with molten glass, make molten glass stamps, paint with Prince Rupert’s drops, and more!

Department potluck, glass style!
09/19/2026

Department potluck, glass style!

We are back! Started off with a field trip to the Tomaquag Museum and Rhode Island Desert!
09/10/2026

We are back! Started off with a field trip to the Tomaquag Museum and Rhode Island Desert!

Closing out the year together with a department picnic at Tillinghast
05/28/2026

Closing out the year together with a department picnic at Tillinghast

Spring 2026 final critiques!
05/27/2026

Spring 2026 final critiques!

Celebrating our second-year MFA cohort in the RISD Grad Show. On view now!
05/27/2026

Celebrating our second-year MFA cohort in the RISD Grad Show. On view now!

RISD Glass Celebrates our 2026 graduating cohort.Through deep disciplinary inquiry RISD Glass students develop an indivi...
05/21/2026

RISD Glass Celebrates our 2026 graduating cohort.

Through deep disciplinary inquiry RISD Glass students develop an individualized studio practice reflecting their unique perspective.

Meet Lingyi (Ada) Hu, ‘26 RISD Glass MFA 

Lingyi Hu (Ada) is a glass artist from Nanjing, China, currently based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work considers glass not as a stable object, but as a condition of suspension where perception and material are continuously in negotiation. Moving between object, image, and installation, she constructs situations that ask viewers to look at glass rather than through it.

Her works explore the tension between permanence and ephemerality. Treating glass as a site where time is both held and interrupted, she develops arrangements of fragments, images, and structures that resist fixed interpretation. Drawing from imaging, systems of creating context, and archival forms, her work examines how knowledge is translated and stabilized, and what is lost in that process.

Lingyi Hu received her BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island of Design in 2023 and is currently pursuing her MFA in Glass at RISD. 

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What Arrives Denies Us, 2026
Glass, Walnut, Padauk, 280 working hours
Glass: 61in H x 44in W x 14in D
Side Wood Sculptures: 62in H x 26in W x 5in D
Center Wood Sculpture: 63in H x 52in W x 5 in D

Distillation of Nine, 2025
Glass, Padauk, 96 hours working time
3in H x 36in W x 4in D

On Edge of Seeing, 2026
Glass, Print, 26 hours working time
Glass 2in W x 3in H x 0.5in D, Print 102in W x 115in H

RISD Glass Celebrates our 2026 graduating cohort. Through deep disciplinary inquiry RISD Glass students develop an indiv...
05/19/2026

RISD Glass Celebrates our 2026 graduating cohort.

Through deep disciplinary inquiry RISD Glass students develop an individualized studio practice reflecting their unique perspective.

Meet Ashley Bedet, ‘26 RISD Glass MFA

Ashley Bedet, (pronounced like Bed-ETTE) is an interdisciplinary artist focused on subjects equally ubiquitous as they are transparent, or difficult to see, which naturally led her to join RISD Glass for her MFA. Recently, she has been exploring how post-consumer glass, and the contexts of their original use-cases could be resituated and reconsidered. Her final thesis is a study in glasses material history and how value alters as fluidly as our relationship to a material does.

The lack of vernacular information about glass lends to its mystique. It is everywhere, and the average person is left to consider it expensive, so commonplace it is rendered invisible, or burdensome and dangerous when broken. Bedet encourages a reconsideration of the familiar, as there may be more than meets the eye at first glance.

Shared here are two works, the first, ‘a Window as a Screen as a Blind’ 2026 pulls apart the many layers of two LCD screens and reorients them as vertical blinds in the Gelman Gallery.

The second, ‘Unskilled Labour’ 2025, recontextualized an unseen mirror from a rear projection TV (these models were popular in the 80s), into an uncanny optical interior object. It stands upon crystal claw feet of the artist’s own extremities.

RISD Glass Celebrates our 2026 graduating cohort.Through deep disciplinary inquiry RISD Glass students develop an indivi...
05/18/2026

RISD Glass Celebrates our 2026 graduating cohort.

Through deep disciplinary inquiry RISD Glass students develop an individualized studio practice reflecting their unique perspective.

Meet Abby Sunde, ‘26 RISD Glass MFA 

Abby Sunde (b. 1991) is an interdisciplinary artist who predominately works in glassworking, drawing, sound art, and installations. She was raised on Anishinaabe ceded territory of Northcentral Wisconsin and is currently living in Rhode Island. She is a first-generation descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe and is also of Scandinavian/European-American descent. 

Sunde’s practice explores the ways in which we might reconnect to the ancestral, embodied knowledge of nature that our minds may have forgotten. Informed by decolonial theory, indigenous epistemologies of relationality and belonging, and land-based pedagogies, she is interested in the cycles of the earth and how those cycles act as tethering points to our histories and the natural phenomena around us. 

Sunde earned her BA in Biology and Environmental Sciences from the University of Minnesota - Morris in 2013. Recently returning to school, she received here AFA in Studio Art at Normandale Community College in 2022, her BFA in Studio Art from University of Wisconsin Madison in 2024 and is currently pursuing her MFA in Glass at the Rhode Island School of Design as a Society of Presidential Fellow and LoveFrom Scholar. 

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Leaf Bodies
Installation of fused glass and traces of fallen leaves
15’x10’

Collective Heartbeats
Borrowed rocks from Anishinaabe and Narragansett lands, Ojibwe, phonetics, sound, time
8’4”x10’6”

Collective Heartbeats (detail image)
Borrowed rocks from Anishinaabe and Narragansett lands, Ojibwe, phonetics, sound, time
8’4”x10’6”

Earth shields
48”x24”
Dirt, graphite, copper foil, and sounds of the earth’s magnetosphere activated by touch

RISD Glass Celebrates our 2026 graduating cohort.Through deep disciplinary inquiry RISD Glass students develop an indivi...
05/17/2026

RISD Glass Celebrates our 2026 graduating cohort.

Through deep disciplinary inquiry RISD Glass students develop an individualized studio practice reflecting their unique perspective.

Meet Leah Baron, ‘26 RISD Glass BFA 

Leah Baron is a multidisciplinary artist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Currently, Leah works across a variety of mediums including glass, photography, painting, drawing, and various fiber arts. Her artistic practice is inspired by the awe-striking potential of luminous color, the history of mirrors, and her feminine experience. Through creative expression, she explores human emotional and sensorial experiences and her relationship with the Moon and spirituality. She uses pattern, texture, color, shape, and repetitive forms in series in order to create site specific installations. 

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Luminous Spirit
Glass
6’x5’x10’

If I Change The Mirror, Can I Change The Reflected
Glass, Silver
11’x6’

Reflections of Soul
Glass
6’x10’

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Rhode Island School Of Design
Providence, RI
02903

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