Archive for December, 2009
Friday, December 4th, 2009
AshokaTech is following 12 Art Center students who travelled to Chile for the Safe Agua Chile collaboration with Un Techo Para Chile. Last week, we learned that storing water in multiple containers increases the possibility of water contamination, since containers are not always stored properly and often pick up dirt and germs. The conditions in the campamentos make it difficult to preserve water quality. Art Center students Erica and Elizabeth are working towards eliminating these contamination risks by designing easy and responsible solutions.
“Families in campamentos have tap water delivered but they store it for a long time in containers that are not kept clean. They do use chlorine for cleaning and purifying water, but the main problem is that they are not measuring safe chlorination. Thus, Erica and Elizabeth’s solution proposal is to enhance strong chlorine measuring education and to encourage the use of a low-cost water filter.”
Read more about Erica and Elizabeth’s study, and view their presentation, at AshokaTech.
Tags: Chile, Safe Agua Chile, Student Work
Posted in Designmatters | Comments Off
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
An
interesting post today at
The Huffington Post’s new
L.A. section by Michael Govan, director of the
LACMA, about the distinct style of art that has come out of Los Angeles.
Govan writes: “Art history can be broken into distinctions of time, but also of place. One can discern differences of style and influence, for instance, between 17th Century French painting and that of Italy. So too have distinctions in American art become apparent in the twentieth century when looking at the artists of New York and those of California.”
The article also mentions Art Center alumnus and sculptor Jorge Pardo and his recent pre-Columbian art installation at LACMA.
Read more: The History of Art, Through the Lens of Los Angeles
Tags: Alumni, Alumni Work, Jorge Pardo, LACMA, Los Angeles
Posted in General Interest | Comments Off
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
Guess what? Art Center’s Admissions Office is on
Facebook. Even better: they have more than 700 fans! Check them out on
Facebook today—it’s a great way to find out what it going on in Admissions!
Tags: Facebook
Posted in Admissions, General Interest | Comments Off
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
This spring the Kansas City Art Institute will introduce a Chinese language and culture course into its curriculum. The course will provide an introduction to Chinese characters, and students will focus on daily conversational skills, including speaking, listening, reading and writing standard Mandarin Chinese. The course also incorporates relevant topics related to Chinese arts and culture from the past to the present.
Art Center Illustration alumna Valda Hsu, born and raised in Taiwan, will teach the course. Hsu came to the U.S. in 1983 to attend Art Center. Prior to her journey, she received advanced training in traditional Chinese brush painting with landscape master Yu Wei.She teaches Chinese brush painting for adults at KCAI, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Confucius Institute at the University of Kansas, where she is also special programs instructor for Chinese language and culture.
Hsu said her frequent visits to China and Taiwan have inspired her to teach Chinese to visual artists “in order to promote the understanding of its culture and its timeless, authentic art form through the language.”
Tags: Alumni, Alumni Work
Posted in General Interest | Comments Off
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
Eight Art Center students participating in a transdisciplinary class through
Designmatters were recently commissioned by the Organization of American States (OAS) to create a new identity for its upcoming 100th anniversary. Students were asked to promote greater awareness and reinvigorate enthusiasm for the OAS to the millennium generation. After much deliberation and research, a new identity and core message, “On Common Ground,” was created. This identity espouses the organization’s goals of democracy, human rights, security and development, while engaging a younger audience.
Tomorrow, Dec. 3, the students will present to OAS leadership the campaign, which includes a Public Service Announcement for television, a new visual identity for the OAS Centennial events, a new website to help connect young people from across the hemisphere, and advertisements targeting the millennium generation. The event will take place at the South Campus Main Gallery at 10 am. Stop by and check it out!
Tags: OAS, PSA, Student Work
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Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
On the Desigmatters blog, Graduate Industrial Design student Radhika Bhalla shares her experience at the International Development Design Summit in Ghana last July. The summit brought together people from around the globe to build appropriate technologies and develop the creative capacity of communities in the developing world. More than 90 attendees and organizers representing 21 countries from around the world participated.
Bhalla part of a group assigned to design and build child-friendly latrines.
She writes: “When all of us first got together, we had absolutely no idea how this was going to work. We had not one participant from the year before, and we started on a blank page. Little did we know that the IDDS vision of ‘prototypes, not papers’ would not be our biggest challenge, but how to get the prototype on a pick-up truck would be the hardest thing to do!”
Read the rest of her inspiring story on the Desigmatters blog.
Tags: IDDS, Radhika Bhalla, Student Work
Posted in Designmatters, GradID | Comments Off
