Fine Art student Kristy Lovich on board the Metro. Photo by Jennie Warren.
“My practice as a culture worker is hinged on the belief that art making lives in tandem with social action,” says Fine Art student Kristy Lovich, who this weekend will receive Art Center College of Design’s Student Leadership Award.
Each term, Art Center presents the Student Leadership Award to a deserving student from the College. The award is a distinguished honor granted to a graduating student who exemplifies leadership qualities and accomplishments that stand out above their peers.
Students who receive the Student Leadership Award represent the character, the integrity and the skills that Art Center desires for all students to develop during their time at the College. Recipients must have represented student interests by providing outstanding leadership through broad involvement in Art Center campus life.
Politically engaged and dedicated to creating an artistic community based on a culture of mutual support, Lovich provided a vivid model for how art and design can directly confront today’s crucial issues. “As a student at Art Center, I knew that the rigor of my studies would limit my ability to maintain my activism outside of school,” says Lovich. “The solution to this was to bring my desire for social justice directly into the school community.”
She sat on the Diversity and Inclusion Council, founded the Feminist Study Group, and served as ACSG’s Fine Art Department Representative. She acted as a mentor to her fellow students, served as a teaching assistant for two terms, and engaged the community through projects that blurred the boundaries between private practice and the public sphere.
But her true Art Center legacy may lie in a petition she put forward that challenged the College to take a more aggressive role in addressing diversity within its own walls. Her rallying cry galvanized the community and led to the College’s assurance that the issues she raised would be addressed across campus and in the curriculum.
Lovich’s desire for social justice and community building often involved taking her projects outside of Art Center as well. Earlier this year, in explaining her Union Station Project–which turned the daily grind of her long commute into a community-creating, moveable public art studio–Lovich told Dot Magazine that she felt that art, and the place and manner in which it is created, can be used to prod at existing assumptions about public space, power, privilege and history.
“I want to create situations that puncture those assumptions just a little bit,” Lovich said. “To be effective as an activist you don’t need to hold up a sign saying what you think the problem is, because the action itself will expose the problem within the system.”
To learn more about Lovich, visit her website and read “Think You Can’t Change the World with a Fine Art Degree?” in the Winter 2013 issue of Dot Magazine.
