Jennifer Steinkamp’s Murmuration
Summer 2014 has yielded a bounty of freshly produced works, events and ideas by Art Center alumni. And look for future editions of this dispatch to be equally flush, given July’s bumper crop of kickstarter campaigns. Read on to learn more…and get in on the fun(ding).
Award-winning Illustration alum Ariel Lee.
Ariel Lee earned her BFA in Illustration at Art Center in 2012. That same year, she beat out a field of established professionals as a winner in Design Observer’s 50 Books/50 Covers for her children’s book, Mark & the Jellybean Monster, created as a student in Designmatters’ Uncool: The Anti-Gun Violence Project. The following year, one of Lee’s illustrations was awarded the Society of Illustrators 55 Gold Medal.
Lee, whose graphite and painted works are an evocative mix of delicacy and edge, specializes in publishing and surface design. One of the first freelance jobs she landed after Art Center–her client list includes the Wall Street Journal and the New Republic–was The New York Times. “I had gone to New York right after graduation and I met with the art director just to show her my portfolio,” Lee said.
National Geographic featured Art Center alumna Neeti Kailas’s award-winning device to detect hearing loss being tested on a baby at Vaani Vilas Hospital, Bangalore. Photo: ©Rolex Awards/ Ambroise Tézenas
From National Geographic to The Huffington Post; from stylish sensors for your fingernails to a design to detect deafness in newborns, Art Center’s students, faculty, staff and alumni are media headliners. Click a few of the links below to get a taste of recent coverage about diverse subjects including a mobile home tour through Detroit, origami art on speed, smart growth for future generations of artists and designers, the benefits of naps and much more.
Agustin Garza
For many designers, the most gratifying moment in any project arrives with the unveiling of the visual and conceptual deliverables laid out before a satisfied client. But not Agustin Garza (GRPK, ‘81). The principal and founder of The Garza Group made a pivotal discovery about his own value proposition several years back when it became clear that the real, lasting benefits of his work lie in the meticulous research process he undertook to assess corporate leaders’ mission, vision, values and goals.
For Garza, and ultimately his clients, the journey became the destination. “The irony is that work really is not what you see but how you get there,” says Garza, principal and founder of Garza Group Communications, whose clients include City of Los Angeles, Mexico City, Coca Cola, Luxe Hotels and American Express. “That’s true in most careers. It’s getting to that one solution that is the real job.”
Acton Global
Today, the BBC’s Autos section published the following story about Art Center Grad ID alum, Peter Treadway’s ingenious antidote to urban commuter blues: RocketSkates. Treadway (MS, ’08) began devising these motorized shoe attachments (which resemble a futuristic take on the Roman chariot, with two large red wheels attached to a metal carriage) as part of his thesis project at Art Center. Seven years later, his high concept roller skates have come to fruition, lending new dimensions of fun and functionality to the booming wearable tech space. Read on to learn more.
Fine Art alumni William Kaminski and Evelena Ruether, founders of Control Room gallery in downtown L.A. (Photo by Jennie Warren for Art Center)
A mutual interest in installation art brought photographer Evelena Ruether and painter William Kaminski together as friends and sometime collaborators in Art Center’s Fine Art program. After graduating in 2009, and sharing a desire to maintain the strong community of fellow artists they had bonded with at Art Center, the pair co-founded Control Room, an independent artist-run space that facilitated artist projects and group exhibitions in industrial downtown Los Angeles. Ruether and Kaminski went on to graduate school while pursuing their own work and curating Control Room shows. The space was active for four years, attracting mid-career artists and ushering in a nascent arts district in the area.
The following post, originally featured on InnovatePasadena.org, offers a window into the process and results of the creative partnerships Art Center fosters with the corporate community. These alliances have always been fundamental to the College’s educational philosophy, grounded in an empirical hands-on to empowering students to transform their ideas into professional quality works of creative ingenuity.
The Art Center alumni community has been instrumental in sustaining this tradition. In this case, Eric Ayzenberg (Adv), founder of Pasadena’s Ayzenberg Group, lead that charge, enabling current Advertising students to experience the inner workings of a full-service agency’s approach to a social media campaign.
Harvest is Daniel C. Young’s augmented reality mobile app for selective eaters
As a visual interaction designer with Google Creative Lab, 2012 Graphic Design alum Daniel C. Young can’t talk about the specifics of his confidential work. Rather he describes it in general terms, as “product vision, a kind of subfield within both visual design and interaction design. We design interfaces for a vision of what, for example, Google might do five years from now. It’s somewhere between a real product, real digital product design and science fiction.”
Soon after graduating and completing an additional Art Center Honors Term, Young landed his new job with remarkable speed. This self-described simplicity evangelist found his calling. “Let’s just say it this way: I feel like I’m impacting the actual direction of where everyday computing might happen and how to make technology less annoying and more kind of delightful and fun and playful.”
Saeri Dobson designed these wallets to support Bangladeshi girls and women rescued from brothels.
The following letter pays tribute to Art Center alum Saeri Dobson’s tireless and selfless work on behalf of Bangladeshi girls who have been rescued from brothels. Dobson (MFA 00 NEWM), whose ethically-minded creative practice is embedded right in her company name: By SaeRi: Design + Humanity.
“I founded By SaeRi, Inc. to tell the stories of amazing human lives through my design,” says Dobson, who produces several lines of handmade bags and wallets ranging from bright and funky to chic and understated. She donates 10% of her profits to Speak Up for the Poor, a non-profit supporting displaced Bangladeshi girls and women. “Each By SaeRi bag is one of a kind, designed and made entirely in the USA. I handpick all the materials and oversee the production process.”
This letter, by the founder of Speak Up for the Poor, offers a snapshot of social impact design in action, exemplifying the vast potential for designers to change the world by bringing their social conscience to bear on their creative practice. We salute Saeri’s commitment to her cause, not to mention the elegant leather craftsmanship she brought to the entirely covetable Project Hope line of tote bags.
I am writing to express my organization’s support for the work of By SaeRi, Inc., a business which has generously supported our work for several years. Speak Up for the Poor, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, serves girls in poverty in Bangladesh. We remove girls from brothels and fund a home for rescued girls; we run a large education program keeping girls-at-risk in school and out of child marriage and other forms of abuse and exploitation; and we do legal casework and advocacy for girls in poverty who have been abused.
Speak Up relies on the generous support of individuals and businesses. By SaeRi, Inc. has been a faithful financial supporter of our work for several years, giving generously since 2011 to help fund several of our projects in Bangladesh.
Starting in 2011, By SaeRi became a funder of our work at the Alingon Home, a place for girls removed from brothels. In Bangladesh many young girls who are born to mothers working in brothels are themselves destined for forced prostitution as minors, and By SaeRi’s generosity helped fund our important work to remove and rehabilitate girls at the Alingon Home.
Similarly, By SaeRi’s generous financial support towards our Girls Education Program in 2012 and 2013 helped Speak Up build four Learning Centers in impoverished villages in southwestern Bangladesh, school rooms where hundreds of girls in our program receive academic support and mentoring to rise out of poverty and avoid the pitfalls of poverty. Several of Saeri Cho’s students have also contributed generously to our general fund, further catalyzing our efforts to serve girls in poverty in Bangladesh.
Speak Up is thankful to By SaeRi, and in particular, to the founder Ms. Saeri Cho Dobson for her hard work and generosity in supporting our work. We enthusiastically support their continued business expansion. We encourage you to extend every courtesy possible to enable By SaeRi to grow in its important mission as a socially responsible business.
Please contact me with any questions.
Sincerely, Troy Anderson
Founder and International Director, Speak Up
Still from “Robocop”
To be embraced by the notoriously finicky French is a badge of distinction for any artist. Just ask Jerry Lewis. Or Mickey Rourke. Or Charles Bukowski. Or for that matter, Sebastian Leda (00 Film), who won his second award at Cannes Lions this past May for a commercial entitled “Robocop.”
What separates Leda from the legions of directors and producers who have exited the festival with statuettes in hand is that Leda and his longtime creative collaborator, Francisco D’Amorim, are the only winners to have received prizes for spots targeted at the Hispanic market. Both “Robocop,” which took home this year’s Silver Lion award, and “Crying,” which garnered the Gold Lion at the 2010 festival, represent the kind of high production value commercials tailored to Latino audiences defining all the work produced by Dos Ex Maquina, the company Leda formed with D’Amorim shortly after graduating from Art Center.
Cannes Film Festival voters are far from alone in recognizing the value and vast reach built into Leda and D’Amorim’s business plan. The duo has been thriving both critically and commercially ever since they made the fortuitous (or prescient) decision to distinguish themselves from LA’s mob of young, hungry directors by catering to an under-served and rapidly growing viewership.
In the Q&A below, Leda gamely agreed share a few ingredients in the special sauce that’s given him a competitive advantage in the world’s most competitive (and lucrative) industry.