Anna Schuleit – Paints, Rumors, and Contemporary Media
The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), in collaboration with the American Academy in Rome, presents two lectures in honor of the 50th anniversary of the European Honors Program (EHP) of RISD established in 1960. The original mission of the EHP, inspired by the American Academy in Rome fellowship program and based on the concept of independent study, was to provide students with the opportunity to live and work in an environment close to the sources of Western culture and to create the broadest possible outlet for their creative energies in the fields of Architecture, Fine Arts, and Design. These objectives have remained remarkably intact in the fifty-year life of the EHP. Its success is confirmed not only by the students’ later career achievements, but even more so by their consensus in saying of the EHP: “It changed my life.”
The second of two lectures in honor of the 50th anniversary of the EHP will be given by Anna Schuleit. Schuleit is a visual artist who studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she attended the European Honors Program in Rome, and received her M.A. from Dartmouth College. Her early, large-scale installations revolved around sites of memory brought back to life: Habeas Corpus (2000) at Northampton State Hospital and Bloom (2003) at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. The latter installation was created to address the persistent absence of flowers in psychiatric hospital settings. For three years she was the artist-in-residence at Westborough State Hospital (2001-04), a long-term psychiatric institution in Massachusetts. Schuleit has been a visiting artist at Smith College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown, Pratt, RISD, Bowdoin, and Boston University, and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard. In 2006 she was named a MacArthur Fellow. She had a solo show of her paintings and works on paper at the Coleman Burke Gallery in New York in 2009. She recently completed a large painting commission for the University Gallery at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a set-design for Ivy Baldwin Dance at the Chocolate Factory Theater.