Category Archives: Events

Check out these new student videos from our stellar Myspace occupiers

Roman Vargas, Photography and Imaging – second round from Art Center College of Design on Myspace.

Shortly after the Spring 2014 term passed its halfway point, our participating students (Myspacers?) produced a new set of videos tracking their progress on the path toward creative completion.

Starting a project is never easy. And finishing it is, arguably, even harder. But let’s not underestimate the challenges involved in persisting through the obstacle course of roadblocks artists often face once they’re deep enough into a project that starting over isn’t an option, and the finish line isn’t yet in sight.

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Explore the art of border crossing with Morgan Fisher: scholar, sculptor, filmmaker and conceptual artist

Morgan Fisher’s New Alien Pendant Pair Paintings

Conceptual artist and filmmaker, Morgan Fisher, will discuss his vast and eclectic body of work at Art Center College of Design on Tuesday, March 25 at 7:30 p.m. at the Los Angeles Times Media Center.

At first glance, it’s hard to connect the dots comprising the details of Morgan Fisher’s early biography. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1942. He studied the history of 19th and 20th century art at Harvard University. Then he studied film production in Los Angeles, first at USC and then at UCLA.

His creative path started to coalesce, however, once he landed in L.A. and committed himself to filmmaking. He began making independent films in 1968 while complementing his own avant-garde filmmaking, working as a teacher at Art Center and in various capacities on Hollywood productions, including as Roger Corman’s editor. Fisher’s films have been shown at festivals such as Pesaro, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Berlin, and New York; and at museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou.

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Of one minute wonders and sustainable paper planes: February’s Art Center alumni notes

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s design for for his museum complex in Odawara, Japan

From art installations inspired by NASA’S space oddities to a self-styled museum in Japan: Art Center alums have been busy in February. Read on for more details about last month’s alumni accomplishments, including Designmatters’ new alumni engagement efforts.

News

Dan Goods GRPK 02 was featured in a story on Yahoo News about his work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Yahoo

Satyendra Pakhalé PROD 94 discussed his design process and curiosity in a One Minute Wonder video. One Minute Wonder

Hiroshi Sugimoto PHOT 74 has announced plans to design and build a new museum for his work, the Odawara Art Foundation, which will be located in Odawara Japan. Wall Street Journal Blog

Jennie Warren PHOT 05 collaborated with Welsh singer Cate Le Bon and illustrator Erin Althea and on a series of promotional images for Cate’s upcoming tour. Erin Althea’s Blog

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SXSW Interactive 2014 wrap-up: Chelsea Clinton, Neil Young and Toms.com

Chelsea Clinton at SXSW Interactive 2014

The final day of SXSW Interactive has now taken on a different cast; in light of the tragic car crash that claimed two festival-goers’ lives and injured many more. Our deepest condolences go out to the families of those victims.

Even though the festival was technically winding down; passion, engagement and insight revved high throughout the day’s panels and presentations. The conference had successfully lived up to its interactive title. Many themes in the 2014 program were plucked from a virtual suggestion box, including this year’s focus on tech’s role in social change, culminating with Chelsea Clinton’s galvanizing closing keynote address (more on that later). In fact, all of the events we attended on that final day—from presentations by TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie—were informed, either directly or indirectly, by a socially conscious approach to technological innovation.

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Art Center @ SXSW 2014: Choice program and party picks for artists, designers and innovators

Lady Gaga announced, earlier this week, that she’d make her SXSW debut, headlining the music festival on March 13. But the biggest surprise was not that the mother of all little monsters would join the hordes of outliers, outcasts, oddballs and out there futurists making the pilgrimage to the annual Austin cultural convergence. It’s that she waited this long to get there. “[I'll be performing] as part of the Born This Way Foundation night on the Doritos stage,” she said via video. “I believe being an individual and speaking your mind is one of the boldest things you can do. I will be celebrating that Thursday night. We are for the bold. This is a very special show…only people who prove their boldness are able to get in.”

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Art Center roundtable featuring Charles Ray examines the state of contemporary sculpture

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What does Charles Ray’s faintly lumpish, touched-all-over Tractor (2004) have in common with Jeff Koons’ glistening, meticulously machined Balloon Dog (1994–2000)? And what does either of these celebrated icons have to do with Katharina Fritsch’s fluorescent yellow, human-scaled apparition Madonnenfigur (Madonna Figure) (1987)?

Anticipating the Moderna Museet survey (October 2014–January 2015) that will bring together the sculptural work of Katharina Fritsch, Jeff Koons, and Charles Ray, the exhibition’s curator and Art Center adjunct faculty member Jack Bankowsky will present a distinguished panel at Art Center’s Pasadena campus to discuss the show-in-progress and the critical issues it raises.

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Ray Eames at Art Center: An alum remembers the Modernist pioneer’s commitment to inspiring the next generation of designers

Ray Eames and I first met in Chicago while judging the 1980 Society of Typographic Arts 100 Show. I was the Communication Department Chairman at the time and President of the Art Center Alumni Association. We would often meet for lunch near her studio offices on Washington Boulevard in Venice during the 80s, and she attended several alumni functions at Art Center during those years.

Visiting her studio was always special. Everything was still in place, as it had been when Charles was still alive. Ray had been assembling and archiving, with assistance, the Eames design history, and delegating the items being sorted and donated to the library of congress. There were work tables full of documents and models. And at one time she considered donating the facility to Art Center for student research facilities to be shared with UCLA, as I recall. Art Center’s leadership at the time declined the offer.

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San Marino League hosts highly anticipated Art Walk XXVII to benefit Art Center, The Huntington

The San Marino League, a nonprofit organization of women committed to philanthropic work in the community, has been supporting fine arts in the San Gabriel Valley for almost 60 years. The League’s relationship with Art Center dates back to the College’s earliest days in Pasadena and to date the League has donated more than $580,000 to Art Center.

On Friday, April 4 and Saturday, April 5 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. the League will host its biennial fundraiser, Art Walk XXVII, in appreciation of art, architecture and landscape design. A $40 ticket to Art Walk XXVII provides rare entry into four beautiful Pasadena homes and gardens and grants attendees access to amazing private art collections. The featured homes include a classic Mediterranean with Portuguese chimneys, an exquisitely restored Craftsman Japanese Farmhouse, a grandeur of French regency and a stunningly inspired French Provincial.

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Captured on tape: Craigslist in all its humanity

Tape Classified. Though it may sound like a chapter in a book on the Watergate scandal, in this case, those two loaded words are meant to be taken literally as the title and source materials for the first mural installed in the warehouse-sized West Gallery of 870 Raymond, the latest addition to Art Center’s South Campus complex.

Measuring just shy of 70 feet, the installation consists of student-created images made from black drafting tape inspired by ads on Craigslist. The mural’s concept was rooted in the students’ desire to tell many loosely connected stories—each sharing the same narrative DNA from a community. The idea is based on one person’s trash (or Mid-Century Womb Chair) is inevitably another person’s treasure.

Instructor Brian Rea is thrilled with the results. “This one mural tells 80 stories with individual illustrations,” says Rea. “With eight different students, all with different styles, different attitudes; it’s been really interesting to try and systemize that on a wall.”

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Speed making: Art Center students make a clean sweep in Dyson’s rapid prototyping workshops

Before James Dyson first mesmerized TV viewers with his early demonstrations of his sleekly designed and innovatively engineered vacuum cleaner, capable of coaxing the dirt from off any surface, home cleaning devices were many things but sexy wasn’t one of them. But after Dyson’s invention captured the popular imagination (not to mention a landfill’s worth of grit and grime) and became the industry standard for home suction, consumers’ perceptions (and expectations) of vacuums were forever altered, in terms of both performance and prettiness.

Though such paradigm shifting innovations are dependent upon a mysterious combination of luck, timing, research and inspiration. The Dyson company has continued to expand upon its success by upholding its high standards for innovative design and engineering. Cultivating the next generation of design innovators is another vital part of the company’s forward-thinking ethos. To that end, the James Dyson Foundation has been rewarding ground-breaking feats of creative engineering with the James Dyson Award, created in 2002, which offers a $45,000 prize to a design that “solves a problem.”

The foundation has recently started seeding the field by conducting design engineering workshops with K-12 students in Chicago. Last week that strategy graduated to the college level, when a team of Dyson engineers lead Art Center students from three departments — Transportation, Product Design and Graduate Industrial Design — in an exercise testing their teamwork, problem-solving, creativity and craftsmanship.

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