Visit Us
Want to visit The Color Lab? Check out our materials collection at the Visual+Materials Resource center, accessible online here and in person at the Fleet Library. And walk by our exhibition space on 30 North Main Street! From the window, you can view a rotating selection of faculty and student exhibitions.
Want your work shown at The Color Lab? Apply for a faculty research grant or our student exhibition open call! View Faculy Fellow presentations and other event recordings here.
Please click here for recent news and event announcements for the 2024-25 academic year.
In 2008, Technician and faculty member William Miller began a modest collection of pigments and research materials related to the study of color with the aim of helping students and faculty better understand the powerful though sometimes confusing behavior of color in art and design.
Over a decade later – and with the support of a motivated, cross-divisional cohort of faculty and staff who are deeply passionate about color – the RISD Color Lab has become an interdisciplinary center for teaching and learning about color in art, design, and culture.
The resources of the Color Lab give members of the RISD community access to pigments, dyes and inks, published research and physical models on color theory, and a multiplatform space to learn, make, and critique from a common, color-centric departure point. The Color Lab will also maintain an active engagement with the color industry in pursuit of knowledge, resources, and research partnership.
Along with RISD’s other academic commons – CoWorks, The Center for Arts and Language, and the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab to name a few – The Color Lab extends the voice of the strategic plan by acting as a “non-departmental, co-located” common space where interdisciplinary inquiry on color can be gathered and organized toward the goal of furthering research activity at RISD.
If you are passionate about the power of color – or merely curious – visit the RISD Color Lab. We can be found in the Visual+Materials Resource Center at the Fleet Library and at our window exhibition space at 30 North Main. We serve color daily ︎
Over a decade later – and with the support of a motivated, cross-divisional cohort of faculty and staff who are deeply passionate about color – the RISD Color Lab has become an interdisciplinary center for teaching and learning about color in art, design, and culture.
The resources of the Color Lab give members of the RISD community access to pigments, dyes and inks, published research and physical models on color theory, and a multiplatform space to learn, make, and critique from a common, color-centric departure point. The Color Lab will also maintain an active engagement with the color industry in pursuit of knowledge, resources, and research partnership.
Along with RISD’s other academic commons – CoWorks, The Center for Arts and Language, and the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab to name a few – The Color Lab extends the voice of the strategic plan by acting as a “non-departmental, co-located” common space where interdisciplinary inquiry on color can be gathered and organized toward the goal of furthering research activity at RISD.
If you are passionate about the power of color – or merely curious – visit the RISD Color Lab. We can be found in the Visual+Materials Resource Center at the Fleet Library and at our window exhibition space at 30 North Main. We serve color daily ︎
Exhibition Calendar
View exhibition photographs here.View event recordings here.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Post-Ocean
by Max Pratt
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March 10-April 30, 2025
In an effort to evaluate the Rhode Island area’s fishery as it currently exists and highlight innovative approaches to the future of our interaction with the ocean, Post-Ocean details coastal New England’s unique approach to sustainable aquaculture and wild fishery management. This archive and body of work aims to build a model for others to follow as we look to create global stability in our food systems and human-ocean interactions. For the March 2025 installation at the RISD Color Lab, we are highlighting the unique approach of this work in its engagement with research through the use of color photography. Leveraging highly accurate color analysis, we create photographic data sets, document the quality of seafood through color, and attempt to instill in the viewer a curiosity and deepened desire to learn about the ocean and its inhabitants. The content of this show is supplementally showcased via a web-based document, allowing viewers to be guided through our vision for the future of food.
Max Pratt (Critic, Industrial Design) is a researcher and designer who focuses on the relationships between waste streams and human impact. In an effort to reduce our impact on the ecology we so often forget we are a part of, they aim to reframe the way we approach the environment around us. Max works to develop and inform sustainable practices in ecology, social equity, human health, mobility, rapid prototyping and manufacturing.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
March 10-April 30, 2025Interacting with Color: A Practical Guide to Josef Albers’s Color Experiments.
Feburary Feb 17–Mar 7, 2025Interaction of Color is often presented as an overarching theory of color, but it is actually a method of learning how to better see and understand color—many of the color exercises illustrated in Interaction of Color were devised by Albers’s students: cutting and pasting, looking, pondering, and learning. Fritz Horstman's Interacting with Color: A Practical Guide to Josef Albers's Color Experiments is a teaching tool designed to enable readers to engage in the kinds of tactile creativity and exploration that characterized Albers’s own classroom.
Focusing on eight of the most important lessons in Interaction of Color, this book invites readers to learn by doing, using only simple materials. Core instructions for each exercise are enhanced by additional tips, references to Albers’s original text and illustrations, and stories about how Albers presented the ideas in class. The book and exercises are sufficiently nuanced to challenge and inspire seasoned artists, designers, and educators while also being readily accessible to younger readers and less-experienced practitioners.
Linda Sok
A Vessel for Color
Feburary 4-14, 2025A Vessel for Color explores how creation functions as a reflection of our myriad experiences, emotions and existences. To create is to make a vessel for something we long for, and color is key to its creation.
The “vessels” of the exhibition–the individual pieces–take up various forms of painting, textile, and sculpture. Whether through melancholic palettes, vibrant hues or the absence of color all together, each piece in this exhibit speaks to the power of chromatic expression.
Timothy Veske-McMahon
Fugitive Color: Sensing the Fade![]()
November 25, 2024–January 31, 2025
Virtual Artist Presentation
6:00–7:00PM, January 21, 2025
View the recording.
As a 2023-24 Color Lab Faculty Fellow, Timothy Veske-McMahon (Associate Professor, Jewelry + Metalsmithing) explored fugitive pigments and dyes—colors that fade or transform over time. His work, featuring large-scale automotive air fresheners, evokes a desire for renewal while signaling lingering effects—whether stale, rotten, or mysterious. Through hues that shift and lighten under UV exposure, these pieces highlight the impermanence of histories, identities, and environmental connections as they fade and transform.
Placed within the academic space, the installation invites viewers to reflect on the role of institutions in preserving—or neglecting—cultural memory. It challenges us to reconsider how we engage with and acknowledge our histories, suggesting that fading color, like a dissipating scent, becomes a metaphor for loss, distance, recognition, and the call for renewal.
V1 with PROJECT WHAT DO YOU SEE?
October 15–November 3, 2024
This Fall, v.1, RISD’s student-run literary and arts publication, asked our community to render a glimpse through their window. We wondered: What do you see? And in an ideal world, what would you wish to see?
Prompting observation, reflection, and radical imagination, we pictured windows as portals to inner and outer worlds. As our natural, social, and political ecosystems change in ways we’ve never seen before, we witnessed surprise, intervention, invitation, and new perspectives. From collective imaginings, manifested through drawing and writing, an installation of colorful “windows” grew at the Color Lab.
CEY ADAMS with PROJECT OPEN DOOR
September 26–October 15, 2024
As a keynote speaker during DESIGN WEEK RI, visual artist Cey Adams discussed his artistic career spanning over four decades, from teen graffiti artist in New York City to founding creative director at Def Jam Recordings. He co-founded The Drawing Board, the label’s in-house design firm, that “defined the visual culture of Hip-Hop” and created some of the most iconic album covers and logos including Run-DMC, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, The Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, and Mary J. Blige. Today Adams creates fine art, drawing inspiration from 1960s pop art, vintage sign painting, and comics. His work focuses on themes including pop culture, brand identity, and cultural and community issues. This exhibition features original work produced from 2024 DESIGN WEEK RI workshop with students from RISD’s Project Open Door.
In collaboration with The Department of Teaching + Learning in Art + Design, Center for Community Partnership, and DESIGNxRI.
BLUE
In celebration of the new academic year, Fleet Library’s Graham Visual + Material Resources Center invites you to explore RISD Blue through a selection of similarly hued samples from the Materials Collection.August 21–September 16, 2024
Eric Anderson
What is a Color Lab? Sites and Practices of Design Research![]()
Color Lab Faculty Fellow
8 April - May 9
Watch the Artist Talk here
Starting with the question What is a Color Lab?, Color Lab Faculty Fellowship recipient Eric Anderson proposes an interdisciplinary historical study of facilities and techniques for exploring color in design. The RISD Color Lab occupies a lineage of institutional spaces in which scientists, designers, makers, and theorists have carried out technical experiments, creative work, and scholarly research aimed at producing knowledge about color. Through this project, Anderson situates the Color Lab historically to consider the possibilities and limits of color research for design.
Wintersession - Ceramic Sculpture
Testing Grounds
Student Exhibition
March 3 - April 1, 2024
Testing Grounds showcases work from the 2024 Wintersession course "Ceramic Sculpture" taught by artist and faculty member Chenlu Hou. Experimentation with different combinations of clay bodies, glazes, underglazes and glazing techniques underscored the importance of form and color as conveyors of meaning. Recruiting clay bodies in terracotta and stoneware, students pushed and played with different colors and embraced the shifts and accidents that occur through the firing processes - aiming for one result, and ultimately accepting the whims of the kiln.
Participating artists: Emily Chao, Amy Chen, Anika Gupta, Chenlu Hou and Tiffany Tang, Mindy Leung, Yilin Li, Linda Sok
Felipe Shibuya
Invisibilia
Faculty Exhibition
December 13, 2023 – February 23, 2024
Watch the Zoom presentation Recording
In nature, every color has a meaning, from flowers that convey messages to their pollinators, to frogs that display their venomous potential with vibrant colors, and the color of the sky that signals climate changes. However, humans are capable of seeing only a small portion of the light spectrum, leaving many messages from nature unread. For example, many species, such as birds and insects, can perceive the UV spectrum. Furthermore, there's an entire palette of colors that are only evident when certain conditions allow organisms to display them, as is the case with bacteria. When bacteria multiply, they synthesize pigments, establishing a visual connection with other species, including humans.
In "Invisibilia," Shibuya (Experimental & Foundation Studies) offers the audience the chance to see, through photographs, 16 species of bacteria that have grown to the point of showing their natural colors. His intention as an artist and ecologist is to show humans that when they are able to see other species, especially through their colors, the perception to understand how humans are part of an entire ecosystem is broadened. This understanding allows for the creation of opportunities to preserve nature and ensure a sustainable future.
Megan Callahan
Color Scraps
Color Lab Faculty Fellow Exhibition
October 25 - December 6, 2023
Watch the Artist Zoom presentation recording
As part of an ongoing project supported by the faculty fellowship, Callahan explores how color can be a guide in approaching the accumulation, organization and composition of scrap materials and waste-based making.
Fleet Library
color | surface | textureA selection of samples from the Material Resource Center
August 3 - October 13, 2023
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The Fleet Library Visual + Material Resource Center is home to over 35,000 material samples. It is a hands-on interdisciplinary collection for the exploration of materials used in architecture and construction, fine arts and design, apparel and interior furnishings, landscaping, product design, and printing. Categories include biocomposites, minerals, metals, ceramics, polymers, and textiles. 
Browse the collection by composition, property, material ecology, and other parameters online at Material Order SEARCH.
Fleet Library
Swarovski Trend Books
June 12 - July 30, 2023
These unique volumes of textile flags featuring Swarovski crystals were gifted in 2017 from a local jewelry supplier to Fleet Library’s Visual and Material Resource Center.
Twenty-four volumes dating from 2004 to 2017, they are a visual feast of color and texture created by individual artisans.
Complete volumes may be viewed in the VMRC, Fleet Library room 204, on the 2nd floor of the Roger Mandle Center for Living and Learning, 15 Westminster Street.
Henry Spuria
Interfacing with Color
May 25 - June 5, 2023
This fifth-year double-major graduate project (Graphic Design, Industrial Design) investigates the distinctive way we interface with designed objects; a flashing amber light signifies a warning, an RGB blue implicates the web, and a green app icon represents technical information. These design decisions imbue a psychological and behavioral framework onto everyday objects and interfaces we surround ourselves with. But what would happen if we, as designers, enabled users to assume the role and generate their colors, shapes, typography, or other design assets? This project aims to allow users to understand generative design through different variables and tools within the exhibition space. It also features a reading corner that presents research, analysis, and frameworks around user interaction and experience design so that we might better understand the politics, analytics, and parameters implicit in every designed object. Color is such a vital tool in the expression of designed things and assets, it’s also a historically politically embroiled medium of design and art-making; by presenting color as a variable, both in print and digital form, users can unlock a perspective on how to interface with color and technology.The technology we interface with daily is diffuse and counter-intuitive. What would it look like to return to familiar, tactile, and tangible interfaces to evoke results? In this world, where a dial controls a color value, a button controls the blur, and slider pages through imagery, designed objects are meant to be interacted with, hacked, and broken. In this world, textual information is meant to be processed, re-configured, and recombined. These elements, which straddle the physical and digital, culminate in an experience founded in the innate nature of design; whether the design is textual, colorful, informational, or expressive, it is all meant to be made and remixed.
Ella Knight
An Architect’s Toolkit for Color TheoryMay 18 - 24, 2023
This graduate project (M-ARCH 23) investigates the discipline's relationship and valuation of the use of color to bring awareness to both implicit and explicit cultural biases within the architectural practice. It’s important to address that many of these notions have come from the student’s experiences living in the US, working with American Architects, and attending three different American schools of architecture. From her limited experience on the professional side, Knight has observed how paint colors and material finishes are put at the very end of the process and left to interior designers. In the actual design process, architects are all taught to start with modeling white boxes, taking after modernist pedagogy and giving preference to minimalist aesthetics. In American architectural education, color theory is not a required aspect of design curriculum. These Eurocentric biases towards color were coined “chromophobia” by David Batchelor in his book of the same name. The erasure of color from Greco-Roman architecture is an early example of chromophobia. Hellenistic architecture was vibrantly painted, but when studied centuries later European scholars disregarded the evidence of color; the Greeks were considered genius while bright colors were associated with the aesthetics of “savage nations,” (Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors). The false whiteness of antiquity then became idolized in Neo-Classical Architecture, further associating white with purity and supremacy, only to be later reinforced by modernists.
Mode Yellow 5
presents
Toxic Interlocutory
April 15 - May 15, 2023
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MODE YELLOW 5 harnesses spacial interfaces to readjust the Overton Window on some of this era’s most pressing complexities. The RISD Spring 2023 installations dive into questions of earth systems. More specifically, we prod our viewers to look closer and interrogate the process and forms of labor that are involved in modern curations of nature. We hope that we can reveal some often overlooked realities of the cosmetic infrastructure and inspire people to examen the role that artists and designers play in facilitating the invisible toxicities that have become the air we breath.
Creative Direction: Kiki Nyagah. Advising: Charlie Cannon, Lafayette Cruise. Team: Chris Webber | Production Lead , Kuem Hee Rhee | Production, Sandrupty Das| Origami, Julio Berrora | Immersions, Cody Young | Horticulture & Landscape, Lena Luo | Glass , Ben Riley | Terrariums, Ariel Aravot | Glass, Femi Shonuga-Fleming | Soundscapes, Lydia Chodosh| Typography
Hope Leeson
Colors of the Land
March 1 – April 7, 2023Watch the Artist Zoom presentation recording
An installation by Hope Leeson (botanist and part-time faculty for Liberal Arts Science and Landscape Design and Architecture), funded by a Color Lab Faculty Fellowship. The body of work represents a year-long investigation into natural dye colors given by plants indigenous to South Kingstown, Rhode Island. The color palette is an expression of the land’s changing seasons, the terroir, and presents the visual dialect of the land to viewers.
Industrial Design Winteression Class
Advanced Computer-Aided Design
January 26 – February 15, 2023
Students from the Industrial Design course, Advanced Computer Aided Design course led by Andy Law (Associate Professor, ID), were asked to create a color palette or use the one shared by Law: Palettes Book One (pdf, 380 pages) or Palettes Book Two (pdf, 380 pages), to reference music videos.
The work was produced in the open-source 3D software Blender referencing Blender’s vast and accessible learning community of YouTube videos. All the images used the AI tool Intel Open Image Denoise that reduced final image rendering time by 75%, using less carbon.
The exhibition features the work of RISD Industrial, Graphic and Architecture and Brown University Computer Science students: Joyce Ho, Xavier Lee, Helen Peng, Zack Cheng, Mandy Liu, Santiago Alvarado, Connie Cheng, Sara Choi, Sarah Frix, Claire Guo, Joy Ham, Angela Lobel, Charles Wang, Echo Yao, Andy Zheng, Rita Zhu. and Jupiter Shi. Teaching Assistant Ty Ko designed and installed the exhibition.
Jiemin Park
The Colors of Stress
January 6–25, 2023
An installation of work by Jiemin Park (GLASS, 2022), the exhibition is inspired by the materiality of glass itself and the results created by the material in response to the choices and actions of the artist. Stabilized glass does not show any colors but stressed glass reveals various colors. With the level of stress directly resulting in color intensity, the artist presents the irony that the most beautiful and vivid colors are actual markers of extreme stress and explores the idea that beauty could be an expression of suffering.
Rachel Berwick
A Near and a Far: Rubies, Cobalts, Opals, and Crystal
Artist Zoom presentation: 6:30pm EDT, September 27, 2022.
Color Lab Faculty Fellow Exhibition
September 1-October 10, 2022
An exhibition of Berwick's (Professor, Glass) ongoing research of structural color in crystal and hummingbird feathers. Conducted with the support of a RISD Color Lab Research Fellowship and work within RISD Glass, The Nature Lab, and RISD Prints.
Sara Jordenö
Ektachrome: collocations & counter-reactions
Color Lab Faculty Fellow Exhibition
May 17-June 3, 2022
Presentation May 17th at 6:30pm
RISD Color Lab is proud to present EKTACHROME – collocations & counter-reactions, a video installation by Sara Jordenö. As part of their Color Lab Faculty Fellowship, Sara Jordenö (Assistant Professor in Film/Video/Animation) investigates the material properties of the color reversal 16 mm film stock Ektachrome. Documentation of family life becomes a site of trauma as a Rhode Island law demand the filmmaker succumb to a humiliating criminal investigation to gain parental rights of their own daughter. When efforts to legislate a ban on any mentioning of LGBTQIA subjects or history gains traction among parents in the local schools, the filmmaker and their children explore techniques to deteriorate the film strip. EKTACHROME asks questions about memory, archive and the emblematic and binary representation of family, while simultaneously exposing the instabilities and reversals of LGBTQIA+ and reproductive rights in the United States. The project is on view 24/7 in the Picture Window Gallery on 30 Main Street, Providence, from May 17 – June 3, 2022. Everyone is welcome to a virtual opening/artist talk at 6.30 pm on May 17, 2022.
Daniel Lefcourt
Query: Evidence of Color Research
Color Lab Faculty Fellow ExhibitionApril 4-29, 2022
Query is a set of large-format digital prints which accumulate long-term color research into digitally rendered scientific displays. The displays, which create a “laboratory” of real objects and digitally fabricated images, undermine the concept of scientific authority using humor and deception. For Lefcourt, presenting evidence of research isn’t only a requirement for recipients of academic funding; it is an opportunity to play with the very idea of ‘evidence.’
Abiola Makinde, Ariela Kanarek, Brian Qi, Carina Lee, Carl Soonawalla, Elisabeth Tai, Garner Gardner, Hannah Skye Dunnigan, Jenny Du, Jessica Young, Kason Wang, Leon Lau, Louis Hand, Lucy Blake, Manini Banerjee, Silas Gibbins, Stephanie Park,
Tian Tian, Timothy Li
Color Citation
Work from the Students Andy Law, Industrial DesignJanuary 25-February 21, 2022
"Color Citation" is a collection of digital artworks from the advanced CAD students of Andy Law, associate professor of Industrial Design. The work in "Color Citation" was inspired by the color and form palettes of diverse and decentered sources such as Alex Bernasconi, Alex Goad, Anni Albers, Ayako Takase, Bridget Riley, Carmen Herrera, Christopher John Rogers, Ettore Sottsass, George Sowden, Guo Zhiheng, Helen Frankenthaler, Ibrahim Kamara, James Turrell, Kari Bienert, Keith Sonnier, Kerby Jean-Raymond, Ma Yansong, Martine Bedin, Mary Corse, Nathalie du Pasquier, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, Solange Knowles, Yinka Ilori and Yosuke Yamada.
(Image by Timothy Li)
Chaeeun An
Color Breathing
Student Exhibition
January 6-21, 2022
“Color Breathing” was a series of interactive posters by Chaeeun An (BFA GD 2023) that visualize the relationship of complementary colors for meditation.
Geruihan Xu, Beth Johnston, Yiling Wang,
Bella Bergam, Tianyi Xie, Ann Dinh,
Megan Chao, Zitong Hui
Transparent Matter
Student Exhibition
March 26 - May 10, 2021
"Transparent Matter" was an interdisiplinary course being co-taught in 2021 by Sheri Wills (FAV) and Jocelyne Prince (Glass) and supported by the Academic Enrichment Fund. Each week, a new loop of gesture videos that were made as part of the course's exploration of the idea of performative matter screened against Color Lab windows.
Craig Taylor
TESTS:Variants
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Color Lab Faculty Fellow Exhibition
March 2 - April 30, 2021
Color Lab Faculty Fellow Craig Taylor (Associate Professor of Painting) used his grant to experiment with the interaction of color in his ongoing series of Busts/Portraits/Formats. As a strategy, seriality is deployed to demonstrate how color can create content that is often connected to an emotive or evocative state. In TESTS:Variants, Taylor presented a new series of chromatic sculptures cast from a single mold. Each sculpture functioned as a site for the exploration of color systems. During the production of the sculptures, a short single-channel video depicting the bust as a source was found and created.
Exhibition: unoriginal palette: color citation by clearer means
An Installation by Andy Law (Industrial Design)
March 5 – 30, 2020
RISD associate professor of Industrial Design Andy Law has copied many people to bring you unoriginal pieces installed in the Color Lab in an attempt to convince you that this is how we all create.
Archived past events on
Digital Commons @ RISD https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/colorlab/
Artist Zoom presentation: 6:30pm EDT, November 15, 2023.
The Color Lab Collection
Our library of resources is contantly growing. View our collection and request items here through the Visual+Materials Resource Center at the Fleet Library. Please visit regularly to see what’s new.
Color Served Daily
The RISD Color Lab is a multiplatform space where faculty and students can engage with the one aspect of art and design that draws us all together : COLOR
︎ ︎
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The RISD Color Lab is a multiplatform space where faculty and students can engage with the one aspect of art and design that draws us all together : COLOR
︎ ︎
Visit the Color Lab
Our exhibition space is viewable from the street at 30 North Main. Our physical materials collection may be requested through the Visual + Material Resource Center at Fleet Library.
colorlab@risd.edu
Our exhibition space is viewable from the street at 30 North Main. Our physical materials collection may be requested through the Visual + Material Resource Center at Fleet Library.
colorlab@risd.edu