This summer, 12 RISD students put their creative skills to work at nonprofits and government organizations across the globe as participants of the Maharam Fellowship. Launched in 2012, the annual fellowship offers stipends of up to $5,000 funded by the textile company Maharam.
The fellowship is managed by RISD Career Center Director Kevin Jankowski, who is also a mentor to the fellows. Maharam also provides “encouragement that these fellowships are about community, sustainability, the environment, climate change (and) civic engagement,” according to Jankowski.
June Ahleman, a RISD senior, worked for Evanston ASPA, an Illinois-based nonprofit which aims to support Evanston’s Asian American community and increase AAPI representation in the arts.
Ahleman spent her summer researching and developing educational resources to support the TEAACH Act, which made Illinois the first state to require Asian American history be taught in public schools.
“I’ve never been able to invest so much time in community-based cultural programming work,” Ahleman said.
Elsa Fishman, who graduated from RISD this spring, spent her summer working with Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles-based organization designed to support gang-affiliated or recently incarcerated individuals. While running sculpting classes, she relied on the background she gained in RISD’s first-year Experimental and Foundation Studies program.
The foundation “taught me a lot about taking a step back through the artistic process and thinking about why we’re doing the things we’re doing,” Fishman said. “It was helpful to rely on that more basic background of the ESS program that we had at RISD.”
In her first year of teaching art, Fishman taught 18 to 25 year olds, as well as high school students.
“I learned so much about myself,” Fishman said, noting how “really, really small moments can really, really be a big breakthrough for somebody.”
“Art can be somewhere that you get to mess around,” Fishman said, “and that can lead to people feeling comfortable enough to share their stories with you.”
Other students, like Salma Hassaan, an MFA candidate in Digital Media, worked abroad through the fellowship. Hassaan spent her summer in Egypt with VeryNile, an organization working to incentivise fishermen to remove plastic from the Nile River.
She created prototypes of weaved pouches and bags made from the upcycled plastic fishermen had removed from the river after realizing that women in the community wanted to be more involved in the initiative.
This allowed the locals to kickstart a “circular economy,” she said, that could generate income for their otherwise isolated community.
Now in its 15th year, the Maharam fellowship has inspired RISD students to look beyond their studios. “There’s a lot of hope in this fellowship,” Jankowski said. “You can cause change and you can make a difference.”
Millie Barter is a senior staff writer covering RISD.
