Author Archives: Anna Macaulay

Goodbye Dotted Line, hello ArtCenter News!

After a brief hiatus, we are restarting this blog with a new emphasis on connecting and celebrating our ever-expanding two campus community. ArtCenter News is where we will exalt our student successes, laud our faculty accomplishments and discover our staff talents. While anyone can read and follow this blog, and we encourage all to do so, it is primarily a place for the ArtCenter community to come together. It is a forum for us to revel in what makes ArtCenter unique, acquaint ourselves with each other and our programs and offerings, and discuss issues we face. We may be spread out physically between two campuses and many buildings, but we are a community and ArtCenter News is a place for us to convene electronically. Everything that relates to what is happening at the College is relevant. We will post stories about students, faculty, staff and events, as well as important issues that affect how we learn, how we teach and how we work.

We invite—and encourage—all members of the ArtCenter community to submit ideas, tips and first-person tales. Please send your news, thoughts and stories to anna.macaulay@artcenter.edu.

All posts on ArtCenter News can also be read on our college intranet, Inside ArtCenter. Stories that are relevant to both internal and external audiences will continue to be told in Dot magazine online, which resides on our main website, artcenter.edu. There you will also find a gathering place for posts about both ArtCenter and the larger art and design world, which are curated at ArtCenter Now. The ArtCenter story is also told through our compelling alumni video series, Change Makers, which lives on our YouTube channel, along with other video assets.

In addition to reading our stories, we encourage everyone to share in the conversation through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And you can catch a slice of ArtCenter life by following our Snapchat feed.

The overpowering and humbling beauty of UH-OH Frances Stark at the Hammer Museum

Frances Stark, My Best Thing, 2011. Digital video, color, sound. 100:00 min. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Purchase. Image courtesy of Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.

“’UH-OH’ is among the finest solo museum shows this year.” Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2015.

It is not often that an artist has both intrigued and intimidated me as much as Frances Stark (MFA 93). So it was with some trepidation that I set out to the Hammer Museum to see Stark’s mid-career retrospective, UH-OH: Frances Stark, 1991-2015, on view until January 24, 2016. The exhibition brings together more than two decades of Stark’s poetic compositions and autobiographical reflections, featuring 125 works, including the artist’s early carbon drawings, intricate collages, and mixed-media paintings as well as her more recent videos.

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Tales from the art side: ArtCenter launches Untold Stories to share alumni Q&As

Jon Jon Augustavo (MFA 13 Grad Film)
This short is not only something I’m proud of—the tone, the look and the story are all representative of my voice as a filmmaker and it is probably the last time I was able to create something that’s not weighed down by expectation or inundated by other voices. This is something that is truly me. More recently I’m waking up and developing a few independent feature films. Films go much slower than commercials and music videos and the projects start out seeming so far away, like a pipe dream. But in the blink of an eye everything starts to happen and it’s all on top of you.

We have created a virtual sharing space, Untold Stories: Q&As with ArtCenter Alumni, for alumni to talk about their past, present and future projects as well as the ideas and challenges that shape their careers, lives and work.

ArtCenter alumni are some of the most accomplished art and design professionals in the world. We hail their prominent successes in our various digital and print publications, including Dotted Line, Dot magazine, the Viewbook and social media channels.

We are proud to share these triumphant moments. But fame—or even outsize accomplishment—is not the only evidence of success. We believe that inspiration, innovation and authenticity are the true hallmarks of a creative and fulfilling life. So, as we celebrate our 85th anniversary we are embarking on an effort to understand meaningful achievement in all its variations and to share the many untold stories of ArtCenter alumni.

In many ways the site is an anthology of alumni work and will be used as a source for content on all of our communications channels where we will continue to share the ArtCenter story with the world. Alumni have been invited to explore and engage with Untold Stories by answering questions and submitting images to this highly visual and highly personal space. This is the place where designers and artists share their thoughts as well as their work. Here is a small sample of posts already inhabiting the space. We invite you to visit Untold Stories to peruse the rest and keep checking back for new entries.

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Reach out and Art Someone

Still from film workshop video

What started as a passion project for Alvin Oei, has morphed into an official and active ArtCenter student club that brings the disciplines of art and design to underserved kids in the community. This past summer, some sixteen Environmental Design, Film, Graphic Design, Illustration, Interaction Design and Product Design students participated in Art Reach volunteering in two separate local Boys & Girls club locations, offering a number of twice weekly workshops.

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You go, grads: Let the Summer Graduation festivities begin!

Graduating students with friends and family following Spring 2015 commencement. Photo: John Dlugolecki

“Sun is shining. Weather is sweet. Make you wanna move your dancing feet.” Bob Marley

This Saturday, following a sometimes exhaustive, always intensive, memorably vigorous and astonishingly creative commitment to making and learning, 91 ArtCenter students will receive their diplomas. This will be the second graduation ceremony to be held at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, a thankfully climate-controlled venue conveniently located between Hillside and South campuses.

As the day approaches, let’s celebrate these creative and talented individuals who are about to take on the world. Here’s the lowdown for the week:

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Art Center’s Bob Kato traces the evolution of The Drawing Club, LA’s bastion of communal creativity

Alum and faculty member Bob Kato’s new book explores The Drawing Club’s role as a hotbed of communal creative expression

You may not have heard of The Drawing Club, but for anyone who is serious about the art and craft of character drawing, this enduring Los Angeles institution is both a hands-on weekly workshop and a creative community hub.

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Looking to fire up your Fourth of July? Check out these blast-tacular movie explosions!

Wherever you decide to celebrate the anniversary of our nation’s independence—in a small town watching a patriotic parade or an urban center sampling designer cocktails on a hotel rooftop—we know you are really just passing time until dark, waiting for the fireworks start.

To whet your appetite in anticipation of the pyrotechnic exhibition of your choice, we offer up some dynamite detonation displays from the silver screen.

No 4^th of July celebration should go by without a viewing of the spectacular demolition of Paris in Michael Bay’s (BFA 88 Film) Armageddon.

An oldie but goodie, it is always worth watching the final scene of David Lean’s classic, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

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The female gaze: Shestock photography agency focuses on women behind and in front of the camera

The stock photo agency Shestock is the brainchild of Photography alumna Karen Beard (pictured), who aims to change how women and girls are portrayed.

“Girls today are inundated daily with imagery that is overtly or covertly sexist,” says Photography alumna Karen Beard. “They have not developed the skills to question the visual language that surrounds them. I wanted to do something about that as a mother, and I realized that I could.”

In 2012 Beard founded Shestock, a stock photography agency that offers compelling and visceral female-centric images created exclusively by professional women photographers. Early on in her career, Beard was drawn to the freedom that stock photography made possible. “Stock allowed me this open free space to create, to make mistakes, to evolve as a photographer—it gave me an outlet for that and a place to put the images. If they sold, that was great. If people passed, that was fine too.”

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Illuminating Lumi: charting a startup’s path from Shark Tank to Y Combinator to VC funding

Jesse Genet with Inkodye display

When 16-year old Jesse Genet began printing tee shirts in her parents’ basement, the enterprising teen could have scarcely fathomed a future in which her bright idea would morph into Lumi, a company with $2.5 million in sales, which appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank, earned a coveted spot in Silicon Valley’s hottest startup incubator Y Combinator (think Airbnb, reddit, Dropbox) and has just closed on a seed venture round of financing.

Jesse and Lumi business partner Stephan Ango met as Product Design students at Art Center. Before starting college, however, Jesse was a natural-born entrepreneur who sought out a better way to print photography on textiles. A ton of research led her to a reference about a dye process that intrigued her and eventually led her to the man who owned the rights to the dye and the last inventory of the substance. She first contacted him while still in high school. “He didn’t take me seriously at first,” Jesse recalls. “After all I was just a high school kid. It wasn’t until Stephan and I joined forces and we made several trips to Northern California to meet with him that he finally began to negotiate with us seriously.” Continue reading →

Civic improvements: Spring 2015 Graduation claims a new location and starting time

Photo credit: Pasadena Convention & Visitors Bureau, Jamie Pham

In February 1932, during the lowest ebb of the Great Depression, the new Pasadena Civic auditorium was dedicated “to the citizens of Pasadena, whose efforts and sacrifices have made the erection of this beautiful and useful building possible.” In the decades since its dedication, the Civic has seen millions of patrons from several generations of Southern Californians pass through its doors. As a home for ballet, symphony, popular music, musical comedy and television programs, the Civic has hosted a wide variety of special events.

On Saturday, April 18, 2014, the 2,997-seat auditorium will serve as the new venue for Art Center’s graduation ceremonies. The Spring 2015 graduating class will be the first Art Center cohort in a long time who will not face off against the elements—rain, sun, wind or cold—as they prepare to collect their diplomas. The gathering is at long last moving to a climate-controlled indoor home with permanent walls and floors. It is also conveniently centrally located between Art Center’s Hillside and South campuses.

As the day approaches, let’s celebrate these creative and talented individuals who are about to take on the world. Here’s the lowdown for the week:

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