Woodworker Rosanne Somerson Wanted her Grandfather to See

Side Table 1, 2023, Baltic birch plywood, leather, glass, cherry, beech veneer, copper, 16.75×26.75×26.5.” Image courtesy of Gallery NAGA.

By LIZZIE CONKLIN July 22nd, 2026

As a child, Rosanne Somerson shared a room with her grandfather, who was blind. Known for her career as a woodworker, author, educator, and President Emerita of the Rhode Island School of Design, Somerson first learned to translate visual information into language by narrating the world around her to her grandfather, a former boxer who had received too many punches to the optic nerve at the cost of his sight. 

Somerson would pull him by the hand around their backyard, describing bleached-green dogwood trees and fuchsia cherry blossom petals, or lead him to the movies, where she would cup her hand around his ear to narrate the plot of The Sound of Music. 

“I shudder to think about the people around me in the movie theater.”

 Somerson served as a pair of eyes in her grandfather's hoary head. In retrospect, Somerson attributes this practice of seeing and describing to the beginning of her life as an artist. Her primary medium, wood, relies on multiple senses: it necessitates touch as much as sight, which might please her grandfather if he sat in one of her ornamented seats. 

She crafts earring cabinets attached to mirrors, skinny chairs with tall backs, and tables that align wood grain with the flow of water. In conversation with many contemporary artists who feel compelled to share their environment with their neighbors, Somerson began her career as a photographer. She graduated from high school a year early and crossed the Atlantic to Denmark for a program in creative writing and photography. She intended to stay for a summer. Instead, she planted herself in Scandinavia for a calendar year, living on $4/day while assembling a photography portfolio that got her into art school.

As an undergraduate at RISD, Somerson studied under Tage Frid, a Danish woodworker, educator, and writer whose native tongue clicked with Somerson’s freshly minted Danish-speaking skills. As a boy, Frid had risen to prominence as a woodworker through the apprentice system in Scandinavia. He had sawn boards since he was 13 years old. Occasionally, Somerson helped Frid put his lectures on paper and assemble his articles for Fine Woodworking Magazine. Because of her help with his writing and her knowledge of the field, the publisher of Fine Woodworking asked if Somerson would come on as an Assistant Editor.

Despite these similarities, Somerson took a far different approach to woodworking than her teacher did: Frid produced to make a factory-style living, and Somerson’s work came from an “experimental, exploratory, fine arts perspective… though function and interactivity have always been important to me. I don't hear [Frid’s voice] in my head, [but] I feel him in my foundation.”

Upon graduating, Somerson taught at Harvard Extension School and Boston Architectural Center before joining the RISD faculty in 1985. She held various roles as Associate Provost and Provost between 2005 and 2013, before she became the interim president in 2014. Somerson served as president from 2015 to 2021.

If you read her career backwards, as a reflection on a RISD president's and woodworker’s life, the story makes complete sense; Somerson’s ability to fundraise at RISD might have been influenced by her experience building her own studio and design practice. When connected chronologically, each move looked more like a leap. Somerson did not venture to Denmark so she could eventually help a Danish woodworker write down his lectures, to become a professor, to become a provost, to become the president of RISD. She took on her professional life the same way that she approached the assembly of a chair or a table, and passed this experience down through her teaching practice:

“I used to tell my students that the [largest-scale] creative process they would ever have to tackle was that of their own careers.”

Creative assembly is perhaps what Somerson is known best for, a stalwart trait of RISD training, and the focus of The Art of Critical Making: Rhode Island School of Design on Creative Practice, a book that Somerson co-edited with Mara L. Hermano, which explains the ripples that radiate from artisanship. According to the text, artisanship is the origin of the hand-brain connection. Artisanship is a tool of intellectual inquiry and cognitive growth. Artisanship is a mode of societal critique. Artisanship is the dissemination and curation of information. Artisanship is Somerson’s voice whispering to her grandfather that the Von Trapps are hiding from Rolf in the graveyard at the end of The Sound of Music. Artisanship is showing things to others, so we can see them for ourselves.

Many years later, Somerson creatively assembles her retirement like most approach a full-time job. She is working on commissions that resulted from her show at Gallery NAGA in 2023, serves as an advisory art director for a new children’s museum in Doha, and sits on many juries, including the Spector Craft Prize and the International Frontier Design Prize in Shanghai. Most recently, Somerson had a show at the New Bedford Art Museum of photographs she took of the Northern Lights near the Arctic Circle.