Rosanne Somerson


Rosanne Somerson is an American-born woodworker, furniture designer/maker, educator, and current President of Rhode Island School of Design. An artist connected with the early years of the Studio Furniture, her work and career have been influential to the field.

Education and early career

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she began her undergraduate degree at Rhode Island School of Design in photography, but switched her focus, and received her B.F.A. degree in Industrial Design in 1976. During this time of transition, she took a semester off of her studies at RISD to attend full-time furniture making workshops at Peter's Valley Craftsmen. After graduation, Somerson worked as a correspondent for Fine Woodworking magazine. She also assisted for photography with her former professor and mentor Tage Frid's three-part book series "Tage Frid Teaches Woodworking" published by Taunton Press.

Academic career

She taught woodworking with the Harvard Extension School from 1977 to 1978, and at the Boston Architectural Center in 1981. Somerson joined the Rhode Island School of Design faculty in 1985. Starting in 1985, Somerson ran the M.F.A. Graduate Program in Furniture Design and she co-founded the creation of the Furniture Design department in 1995. She served as RISD's interim associate provost for Academic Affairs from 2005 to 2007, as interim provost from 2011 to 2012, as provost from 2012 to 2013 and as interim president from 2014 to 2015. The RISD Board of Trustees appointed her the college's 17th president on February 18, 2015.
After being appointed president of the university in February 2015, Somerson appointed Pradeep Sharma to be Provost. Somerson's first speaking engagements as president came in the spring at the National Art Education Association Annual Convention and at South By Southwest EDU in 2015, where she discussed the impact of critical making. In April, 44 technicians at the college went on strike, but the three-day job action concluded with the ratification of their contract. In May, the work of Apparel Design seniors was showcased in New York City for the first time at RISD Backstudio. Somerson's first semester as president concluded with filmmaker John Waters delivering the college's commencement address. His remarks went viral and have been turned into a book.
In the fall of 2015, Somerson spoke at the Nantucket Project, the Drucker Forum in Vienna and Art Basel Miami Beach.Rosanne Somerson#cite note-11| The three-year renovation of RISD's Illustration Studies Building was completedRosanne Somerson#cite note-12| and an opening ceremony was held as part of the college's annual parent and alumni weekend.Rosanne Somerson#cite note-13| Somerson was inaugurated as the seventeenth president of RISD in October 2015.
In July 2020, after the outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent closure of the RISD campus, Somerson began negotiations with the RISD faculty union over the avoidance of possible layoffs by suggesting cost-cutting measures. The part-time faculty union, the National Education Association rejected the initial proposal.

Artistic practice

Somerson has maintained a full-time professional studio practice, Rosanne Somerson Furniture, since 1979 designing and building furniture for exhibition and by commission. Her current studio is located in Fall River, Massachusetts within Smokestack Studios. Somerson is known primarily for one-of-a-kind and custom work, but is also a partner in DEZCO, LLC, a small-scale production furniture company which focuses on environmentally-responsible and design-conscious production furniture.
Somerson, along with Wendy Maruyama, Kristina Madsen, and Gail Fredell, was one of the first women to break into the field of Studio Furniture: a field that mixes art, craft, sculpture, and furniture design. In these early years, the women in this field responded to the hyper-technical work of their male counterparts by building furniture with complex joinery and technically advanced bent wood laminations. This was done to "prove themselves" and "gain acceptance" into this male-dominated field. In the mid-80's, Somerson began to define her aesthetic style and to put personal expression into her work. Her focus became functional and timeless pieces using long-standing furniture making traditions to ensure decades of use. She started to create smaller works that valued function as well as emotional content; pieces that demanded an intimate relationship with the viewer. Through the use of subtle color, upholstery, and graphic elements, her work stood out in the field that was quickly turning towards the era's trends of bright-colors and abstraction.
As her work and career progressed, Somerson's work narrowed focus on the emotional experience of furniture. Her 1992 piece titled "Botanical Reading Couch" invites viewers to lie back in the piece and recollect a familiar couch from home or from their childhood. This work in particular is less a self-expression as an artist but instead a concern for the emotional and physical needs of the user. The intimate and interactive nature of furniture as a medium allowed her to evoke memories and emotions from the viewer. In a 1991 artist statement, Somerson writes "My hope is to help the viewer find her or her own place of emotive satisfaction, coaxed and guided by the furniture;s utility in both its obvious and more subtle functions."
Somerson's work has been included in the following museum collections: Smithsonian American Art Museum; Renwick Collection, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Brockton Art Museum, Fuller Memorial ; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Yale University Art Gallery; RISD Museum, at Rhode Island School of Design; Huntsville Museum of Art, in Huntsville, Alabama; and Smith College Museum of Art.

Awards and distinctions