Ms. Somerson is hardly the first RISD president to make a big show of the school’s creativity, for who could resist such easy pickings? Mr. Maeda used the house’s built-in library shelves to exhibit his personal curios, each tagged with a thought bubble containing a message in Korean. (The project was by Jiwon Choi, then a furniture design student, working with Lane Myer from the sculpture faculty.) Now the shelves hold books by RISD alumni, including Roz Chast and Shepard Fairey.
For Roger Mandle, who was president of the school from 1993 to 2008, living in the house is “not like assuming a throne,” he said. “It’s really taking charge of a community property that’s owned by everybody at RISD.”
He and his wife, Gayle, an artist, put notable marks on the place, renovating a group of rooms in the basement and lodging graduate students there. They also insisted that everyone who attended their social functions sign the walls in the antechamber next to the powder room. That included the governor of Rhode Island.
The dense graffiti was obliterated in the Maeda administration, but Ms. Somerson has paid it homage. A photography composite of the original wall by Peter Goldberg, an alumnus, hangs in the little room.
A number of the new pieces were donated, others lent. Dale Broholm, a senior critic in the furniture department, worked for half his usual rate when he built a mahogany dining table, whose top is inlaid with words arranged by Jan Fairbairn of the graphic design faculty. Ms. Somerson said that the mahogany came from RISD’s rare wood collection. This helped make the final cost “comparable to commercial tables from a not-high-end source.”
The budget for the new décor, she added, was “unbelievably frugal for a house of this size and beauty,” because she needed resources for other projects.
“There’s a lot we’re trying to accomplish,” she said. “One of my big initiatives is to keep the rate of tuition increase low.”
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