Edythe Wright, adjunct professor of sculpture interviews of the following alumni for their thoughts on the Rhode Island School of Design Scultpture program, and asks for advice to current students>
Andy Ness, MFA Sculpture – 2006, current fellow, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA
Sarah Young, second year in MFA in Sculpture at Hunter College, New York Noah Fischer, BFA Sculpture – 1999, sculptor, New York City
Bowie Zunino, MFA Sculpture – 2009, co-founder, the Wassaic Project, Wassaic, New York Lauren Was, co-sculptor in collaborative team Ghost of a Dream, Wassaic, New York Howie Sneider, BFA Sculpture – 2002, co-founder of the Steelyard, Providence, RI
“The ability to construct symbolic objects attains its greatest triumph in money. For money represents abstraction at its purest form; it makes comprehensible the most abstract concept …thus money is the adequate expression of the relationship of man to the world which can only be grasped in single and concrete instances yet only really conceived when the singular becomes the embodiment of living mental process which interweaves all singularities and in this fashion creates reality.”
-Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money
Coin Return is an artistic exploration of that uniquely human abstraction that we call money, or currency. This project was realized with a class of Rhode Island School of Design students as assistants. We created a “gezamptkunstwerk” (total work of art) made up of many objects, sounds, ideas, and media, culminating in a performative assembly line, and series of objects. Collaborators worked alongside Brooklyn-based artist Noah Fischer, who played the role of capitalist inventor in an Thomas Edisonesque laboratory. Collaborators became worker- elves in this money-making production. This was a human-powered “anti-mint”, which un-produced currency- transformed into unique numismatic objects.
