At RISD, Silk Road Ensemble members and RISD faculty and students investigated the integration of music with a wide variety of visual art forms	© DAVID O'CONNOR

Silk Road Project Residency at RISD

The Silk Road Project was affiliated with Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) from 2005 through 2010. Exploring the intersections of performing and visual arts, this partnership gave rise to a variety of innovative courses, studio projects, workshops and unique opportunities for RISD students and faculty. The collaboration established a multifaceted investigation of ways in which artistic disciplines can interact and enrich one another, while bringing diverse cultural offerings to the RISD and greater Rhode Island communities.

An op ed by Laura Freid and Jessie Shefrin looks back on this successful partnership.

Affiliation Highlights

Year 1: 2005 - 2006 Workshops engaged Silk Road Ensemble musicians with faculty and students from the Illustration; Film, Animation and Video; and Digital Media departments to explore intersections of artistic disciplines. Silk Road Ensemble musicians and storyteller Ben Haggarty improvised with students to create musical and visual works in response to the RISD Museum of Art’s 16th-century bronze Shiva Nataraja statue. Film, animation and video students experimented with live video of Silk Road Ensemble musicians performing and responding to video cues. The Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma performed for the RISD community prior to a U.S. concert tour.

Year 2: 2006 - 2007 Silk Road Ensemble percussionists Sandeep Das, Joseph Gramley, Shane Shanahan and Mark Suter collaborated on new pieces, including Saidi Swing, gave work-in-progress performances that showcased the Ensemble’s method of developing new musical ideas, and led percussion workshops with students. Students collaborated with Silk Road Ensemble musicians on Silk Road mapping projects; Silk Road Ensemble artist Kevork Mourad developed a performance piece, Sound of the Brush, with RISD calligraphy professor Ming Ren; and a Silk Road family day at the RISD Museum of Art included multidisciplinary activities for children. For studio projects, RISD students designed and constructed models for a Silk Road Ensemble traveling exhibition.

Year 3: 2007 - 2008 The Silk Road Ensemble shared musical works in progress, Indigo and Blue and White, both of which provided the inspiration for semester-long courses at RISD: Silk Road Ceramics and Pojagi, a traditional Korean patchwork technique. Students showcased blue-and-white porcelain and indigo-dyed Pojagi projects. The Silk Road Ensemble performed an original score to accompany the animated feature film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, at the Avon Cinema.

Year 4: 2008 - 2009 Silk Road Ensemble members worked throughout a semester with students and faculty on multimedia projects throughout a “Folktales in the Digital Age” class, resulting in a collaborative public performance. Ensemble storyteller Ben Haggarty conducted a storytelling workshop for the RISD community.

Year 5: 2009 - 2010 The Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma gave a music workshop at RISD for Rhode Island middle- and high school students. RISD students attended an open rehearsal prior to the Ensemble’s concert tour and got a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the multimedia piece Layla and Majnun with Ensemble musicians and set designer Henrik Soderstrom, a RISD alum.