Monthly Archives: January 2011

New Ansel Adams Images Surface

Last year, there was a controversy over a stash of antique negatives bought at a Fresno garage sale thought to be the early work of renowned photographer and Art Center faculty member Ansel Adams. And now, there are new virtually unknown works by Adams, but these have the documentation proving that they are indeed by the famed photographer—information the ones from the summer lack.

Culture Monster reports that the collection of 29 virtually unknown pictures by Adams and his friend and mentor Cedric Wright are on display through Friday at the Chadwick School in Palos Verdes.

From the article: “The 13 pictures by Adams — on display through Friday at the Palos Verdes Library’s Peninsula Center building — come from 1941, when Chadwick, now a private day school but then a boarding school, hired him to produce its fifth-anniversary promotional catalog, and 1942, when Adams returned to shoot a tennis exhibition at the hilltop campus featuring the great Jack Kramer.”

Save the Date: Undergraduate Open House

Interested in attending Art Center for undergraduate studies?

Visit Hillside Campus and find out more about us at Art Center’s Undergraduate Open House on Sunday, Feb. 13.

Tour campus, view student work and meet distinguished faculty and staff from our undergraduate programs. There will also be an admissions and financial aid presentation for participants.

See you there!

Art Center Undergraduate Open House
Sunday, Feb. 13, Noon-4 p.m.

It’s Not Too Late to Register for Art Center at Night

Remember that resolution you made to expand your horizons in 2011?

You’re in luck—it’s not too late to sign up for Art Center at Night. Classes begin January 18.

Art Center at Night (ACN), Art Center’s continuing studies program, offers nearly 200 innovative courses in art and design taught by award-winning instructors who have the knowledge and professional experience to help creative individuals reach their goals.

Whether you want to explore a new passion, prepare a student or professional portfolio, or launch a new career, ACN has a course that’s right for you.

Ready to make your New Year’s resolution a reality? Register today. Also, check out our gallery of student work.

BLUECANVAS Collaboration Party Thursday

Join BLUECANVAS for the launch party for Issue 7 on Jan. 13 in downtown Los Angeles as part of the Downtown L.A. Art Walk. The event is part of the magazine’s  art school collaboration with  Art Center.

The event will celebrate the new issue and feature work from local artists, as well as the Scion Art Car designed by Mark Mothersbaugh, Unit 001.

At the launch, pre-releases of Issue #7 will be available, as well as the BLUECANVAS 2011 calendar, on sale for $3 each. Music will be provided by DJ Rome. There will be live tattooing, painting and digital art as well. Participating artists include:

Julian Escardo
Eric Davison
Tony Hong
David Jien
Linda Kim
Ronald Llanos
Elizabeth McGhee
James Paick
Andrea Pun
Lance Richlin

For more information, check out bluecanvas.com.

BLUECANVAS Issue Launch Party/Art Center Collaboration
Thursday, Jan. 13, 7 p.m.-midnight
Spring Arts Tower
453 S. Spring St. Los Angeles, CA 90013

ENERGY Extended Through Jan. 23

Due to popular demand, ENERGY has extended its run. It will remain on display at the Williamson Gallery through Jan. 23.

ENERGY investigates how natural forces shape not only material things, but affect our emotions and intellect.

Don’t miss the closing reception later this week, Thursday, Jan. 13 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Check out an ENERGY installation by artist (and Grad Art alumna) Rebeca Méndez in the video below:

If you haven’t already seen the exhibit, stop by the Williamson Gallery and check it out. The gallery is open Tuesdays through Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. and Fridays noon to 9 p.m.

Read what others are saying about ENERGY:

Next Big Thing: The Lumi Process

Brand X wrote a great cover story this week on Art Center Product Design students Jesse Genet and Stéphan Angoulvant and their studio Lumi Co. The pair created a new form of printing onto materials, which they call the Lumi Process.

The cutting-edge technology allows the printing of vivid, photo-like images onto natural materials such as denim, wood and leather without the use of chemicals—something never before done in the world of design.

From the article: “Lumi Co.’s first products — a supple leather wallet printed with an image of the Brewery’s neighboring warehouses and a laptop bag featuring a 1960s Richard Avedon print — might not appear to be anything innovative. After all, photography and design have a history of playing off each other. But what makes their technique unique is that the image is ingrained in the fiber, meaning materials like pleather do not have to be used to display a print.”

Also interesting: Lumi Co got its start last year with funds raised on Kickstarter. Genet explains the process in the video below.

Schureman Book Profiled

As you know, Product Design alum and faculty member Frido Beisert has created a beautiful book, To Draw Is to See, of the work of the late Norm Schureman. It’s currently available for purchase online at Blurb, and it’s beautifully done. Beisert has explained that by using the online publisher Blurb (rather than involving a printing company), all proceeds go to Schureman’s two sons.

And even better—Blurb named To Draw Is to See book of the week last week!

From the Blurb blog: “Every once in a while, a book comes along that reminds us how very powerful the act of honoring one’s story by making a book can be. To Draw Is to See is such a book.”

They interview Beisert on Schureman, creativity and how to tell your own story.

Beisert on Norm: “Norm was all about being creative and helping others, and we very much hope that this book will help inspire the artists and designers of the future to start creating. I often tell my students that the difference between a creative and a non-creative person is that the creative one creates. It is that simple. By doing we expose ourselves to learning and by learning we improve automatically.”

It’s a great interview—take a look. Read more: Book of the Week: To Draw Is to See

A Rising (Sixth Magnitude) Star

Open issue 49 of CMYK Magazine (due on newsstands this month) and you’ll find the work of recent John Marshall High School graduate and Saturday High student Richard Kam.

A logo and poster Richard created for the nonprofit The World at Night was selected for inclusion in the magazine by Connie Hwang of San Francisco’s Connie Hwang Design. The logo and poster were part of a rebranding assignment in Zohrab “Z” Gevorkian’s Graphic Design Saturday High course last spring. Gevorkian was so impressed by Richard’s work that he encouraged him to submit his work to CMYK, a magazine that features work by emerging college art students.

The World at Night, poster by Kam

“I felt Richard’s work was at a place that was deserving to be competitive,” explains Gevorkian. “Yes, he was a high school student, but it is a college course. He was hesitant at first, but Richard ended up submitting his work, and he was selected. He really broke the mold.”

We recently caught up with Kam to chat about the honor.

Dotted Line: Tell us a little about the work that CMYK selected.
Richard Kam: They’re printing a logo and a poster I designed for The World a Night (TWAN), an offshoot of Astronomers Without Borders. TWAN is a photography group whose slogan is “One people, one sky,” and its members, who come from all around the world, upload and share beautiful nighttime and space photography. They also organize an annual exhibition. Their basic philosophy is that regardless of which country you’re from, the night sky is for all of us to share.

Dotted Line: Why did you choose TWAN?
Kam: I really like astronomy and space exploration. It’s a whole new frontier and it’s so vast. And I really like what TWAN is doing, so I wanted to bring some new light to them.

Dotted Line: Is TWAN aware of your redesign?
Kam: A few weeks before CMYK contacted me, I gathered together all my files, and I wrote TWAN a really long email. I started with, “If you’re really busy right now, please don’t read this. Open it at a later time. And please forward this to somebody who’s in a position to read this.” The rest of the letter was the creative brief I wrote for the project in class. I ended by asking them to just look at a fan’s work and see what they think.

Continue reading →

Not Another Year in Review

The following post was written by Vice President and Director of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo for the Designmatters blog.

As I sit down to write the final blog entry of the year, I am making a conscious decision to resist compiling another trite “year in review” about what we have been up to with Designmatters at Art Center. The truth is that the collective milestones we hit this year are many in number, vast in scope, and often pretty extraordinarily consequential in impact. When I run through a mental log of individual student journeys, staff, faculty and alumni accomplishments, presentations, publications, exhibitions, and project outcomes implemented with our partner organizations, I am quickly overwhelmed and humbled by the sheer power and complexity of it all.

William Ismael, Education for All, detail of poster for UNESCO, 2008

What dwells on, as I look forward to the year to come, are two key and interrelated concepts that were ubiquitous throughout the year, and in turn inform everything we are about: optimism and relevance. As I attempt to anticipate what new opportunities we might embrace, and what challenges we might fence off, these come up again and again.

Optimism–which is an idea so deeply entrenched in the definition of design itself–I always like to refer to Herbert Simon’s profoundly significant framing of design in The Sciences of the Artificial: “devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” And relevance–which is a concept so influential when you are striving to drive educational projects that are imbued with both at once a pedagogical and social impact mission.

I was taken by an insightful editorial in a recent issue of The Economist about globalization, titled “The Redistribution of Hope,” that canvassed some of the major forces at work in the world today. It captures how “optimism is on the move—with important consequences for the hopeful and the hopeless” and goes on to expose how much more vital it is turning out to be in emerging economies where it challenges the status quo, rather than in our more cushioned “first world” societies. The piece includes a testimonial by Nandan Nilekani who now heads India’s government technology committee and was the inspiring chairman of Infosys. He comments on the greatest achievement of his company being not that of producing technology but “redefining the boundaries of the possible.”

Here’s to us all having the strength and courage to pursue that impetus of shattering boundaries in 2011.

Certainly for us with Designmatters at the college the stakes are high: we are entering into the tenth year of this College-wide program, we are embarking into the first full year of granting our undergraduate students the option to pursue a course of study for the Designmatters Concentration in Art and Design for Social Impact, and we will welcome the 1st and early cohort of students for the new Media Design Matters Track MA by fall. So here’s also to optimism, full-on!

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