In 2015, Mark Pompelia, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Visual + Material Resource Librarian, accompanied a double-major RISD student (Apparel Design-Industrial Design) on an international exhibition program called Craft the Leather. Based in the Tuscan Leather District of San Miniato, Italy, the program hosted ten schools for a weeklong immersion into the industry of vegetable-tanned leather making, which is both centuries old and full of modern innovation.

On Monday, April 18, 2016 at 4 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Rockefeller Library, Mark will explain how the week served to launch each student on an artistic journey to craft a line of works based on the sites visited, lessons learned, and the inherent qualities of the supplied leathers. Produced over summer 2015 in direct consultation with the Material Librarian, the works were collected in a curated exhibition launched at a February 2016 international exposition in Milan.

Mark Pompelia has been Visual + Material Resource Librarian in the Fleet Library at RISD since 2010. He oversees its non-text collections to include still and moving images in analog and digital formats, including film and video, slides and photographs, half a million picture clippings, 21-million digital images via subscription, and more, in addition to one of the largest material samples collection in the country. He is the administrator for Artstor Shared Shelf and the newly launched Digital Commons @ RISD institutional repository.

Date: Monday, April 18, 2016
Time: 4 p.m.
Location: Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library, 10 Prospect Street, Providence