Alice Taranto

Alice Taranto is a New York-based multidisciplinary graphic artist whose practice includes publishing, lighting design, and curatorial event planning. She is a recent graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design with an undergraduate focus in Graphic Design. Alice is 25% of Henry Blank. Artist Statement: I author tailored experiences exploring the social and shared dimensions of art and design. All roads in my work lead to peer-to-peer collaboration and specific community engagement. I feel compelled to work with and curate people intimately in a manner that is distinct from the prototypical “public art” model of monuments and dedication plaques. My works may resonate on many levels: with me as the artist-leader, with the collective team with whom I make the project possible, and with the designated audience, who become involved often at the latest stage, that of release or distribution. Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist asks, “Collaboration is the answer, but what is the question?” Through a process of questioning and attempted articulation of my working method, I have come to understand that collaboration answers the following: How can a work of art live and live on? As an artist, I initiate an experience or relationship, rather than primarily making physical things. In this way the work remains very much alive in the memories of its makers, participants, and witnesses as the work has been shared in real time. My work essentially explores the human experience, as it is about people and life. My most absorbing and invested projects of recent years were made in response to the context in which they lived—namely, that of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). These projects have ranged from co-curating the fifty-plus student Graphic Design Senior Show and catalogue; to the Dinner Party Club, a monthly series of RISD-funded participatory eating events I hosted at rotating campus locations throughout my four undergraduate years; to YTB Zine, the biannual, multi-format, cross-art school publication I co-founded with my twin sister. In my practice I have questioned how I am culturally like or unlike the people with whom I work, how our values relate or differ, and how this affects the outcome of our working engagement. In this reflective manner I aim to connect individuals on the premise that we learn more about ourselves and can improve the world by collaborating with others rather than existing in a vacuum.