RISD Museum 2022–2025 

The RISD Museum Guild is a group of undergraduate students who develop self-directed programs that engage communities within and beyond the Providence area. We want to inspire critical dialogue around the collection, purpose, and future of art museums.

 In Spring 2025, the guild hosted Ballroom Bash, an event that disrupted the museum's expected movement patterns.  Collaborating with RIC Ballroom Dance, RISD Mango Street, and RISD Black Artists and Designers, the guild facilitated cha-cha and ballroom dance workshops that offered participants a shared sense of community.

 In Fall 2024, the guild tackled the question “how do we build relationships and embodied experiences in the museum?” with Dinner Party.  In this program, the guild asked audiences to identify artworks they would choose as their appetizer, entree, and dessert and facilitated conversations based on their response. 

RISD Center for Arts & Language  2023 – Present

volume 1. is RISD’s biggest student publishing platform. Its namesake — “it's always volume 1.” — signals its ambition to be infinitely flexible in form, content, and concept.  For example, in Venturing into the Virtual Unknown TOGETHER we featured works experimenting with the web as a medium.

The publication features work of all genres such as arts criticism, campus journalism, creative non-fiction, and poetry. volume.1 creates space for voices across diverse disciplines, cultures, and perspectives. 


READ HERE
Circling Home: A Roundtable (2025 essay)
Quickies & Questionings (2024 interview & investigative journalism)
Colliding Scopes (2023 blog)

Reframing Representation

Center for Integrative Technologies 2025 

When looking at artwork, “Do we see the real world, or do we just see a representation of it?” This is a question Magritte often poses in his consistent representations of windows. The exhibition “Reframing Representation” asks the artist this question, prompting an introspective look at how we express our own illusory perceptions of the world through unique representations and reconfigurations of the window.

The Asian Food Aisle

RISD Museum 2024 

Click here for the full story

The digital publication from the 2024 Mellon Internship features museum interpretation tools, including video, illustrations, and literary essays. It began as an independent research project on Asian Decorative Arts, using a playful approach to critique museum taxonomies and institutional histories. The project aims to reinvent provenance and adopt imaginative approaches to labeling and interpretation.


  

RISD Research 2022–2023

Worlding Englishes is a repository of the different varieties of English spoken around the world. Envisioned as a living archive of these World Englishes, the digital project intends to complicate ideas of linguistic standardization, nativity, and “appropriateness”, among other ethnoracial traces of British colonialism.

Housed digitally, the archive will contain meta-commentaries and reflections from individual contributors on their experiences with these linguistic registers, along with an evolving body of digital and physical thinking art objects and experiences. 

The project is funded by the Rhode Island School of Design through the SPUR Fund.

Come Again?

RISD Museum Digital Initiatives 2024

The Audio Guide for RISD Museum’s Contemporary Galleries offers a welcoming introduction and a “Ways of Looking” guided experience. Designed for a diverse audience, it includes interviews with members of the museum’s extended community, humanizing the museum’s institutional voice. The audio piece encourages audiences to relook at art and rethink their perspectives.

This is a collaborative project between the Audio Production Intern and myself as the Digital Storytelling Intern under  RISD Museum Digital Initiatives. 

Kairos: A Timeless Myth

 2024

Credits
MUSIC by Arete Xu
BOOK & LYRICS by Arete Xu & Waverly Huang
DESIGN by Grace Liu
EDITED by Arete Xu
IMAGES & ARTWORKS  by Arete Xu


This self-published playscript artist book contains notes, photographs, and artworks that document Kairos’s performance process, featuring graphic design elements that support the show’s concept. Kairos reinterprets the Trojan War myth cycle through themes of non-linear time and entropy. The heroes of Greek mythology are filled with the same existential howl we have within us today, sifting through different versions of themselves across time to find who they are.