Installation image from LACMA’s “Stanley Kubrick” exhibition. Photo: LACMA
There’s art in a museum, and then there is going beyond the “art” to give museum-goers an experience that’s more than the art itself. That’s the goal film and television production designer and Grad Art faculty Patti Podesta (Memento, Bobby, Love and Other Drugs) achieved when designing the Stanley Kubrick exhibition on view through June 30 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, Calif. will feature presentations by Art Center faculty members and an alumnus as part of its upcoming Aquatic Academy. Integrating art and science in order to enhance environmental communication, the Aquatic Academy offers a series of evening classes that foster dialogue on issues related to the ocean and environment.
Professor and Director of Sustainability Initiatives Heidrun Mumper-Drumm will be speaking on Thursday, April 25 from 7 to 9:30 p.m., while Vice President of Designmatters Mariana Amatullo and Alumnus Dan Goods, visual strategist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will speak on Thursday, May 9 from 7 to 9:30 p.m. The series of four evening classes will explore how art, design and science can intersect to create and deliver powerful environmental messages.
Art Center faculty will be speaking at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific.
Jerry Schubel, president and CEO of The Aquarium of the Pacific, says Goods, Mumper-Drumm and Amatullo bring an ideal combined expertise in the areas of engineering, design, visual communications and sustainability.
Master Typographer Paul Soady Writes New Book on Eric Gill
William Humble Ward, 2nd Earl of Dudley, was not a remarkable man. But his name will be remembered forever – at least among type designers and font enthusiasts – because his gravestone was cut by English craftsman and master stone mason Eric Gill (1882-1940), a talented artist and deeply complicated figure. The inscriptional font Gill used for Ward’s headstone became the basis for Monotype’s Perpetua, one of the world’s most widely used book fonts, and is now the subject of a new book.
The book cover is a deeply engraved cardboard replica of the William Humble Ward gravestone.
In the early 1970s, Paul Soady, then a type director at Ogilvy Benson & Mather, bought a “gravestone rough” by Gill in a London book shop. Now an art director, designer and associate adjunct professor at Art Center College of Design, Soady, along with his co-writer Simon Varey, Ph.D., offer a new take with original research devoted mostly to Perpetua. Simon has sadly passed away since they completed the text of the book.
With countless digital fonts available to the current student, Soady feels strongly that a true understanding of the history and significance of artists like Gill is vital to a complete design education. After all, these are people who conceived of and cut by hand some of the most ubiquitous fonts we see today. Through a Samsung Faculty Enrichment Grant, Soady was able to travel to England, pursue his research, and do some gravestone rubbings of his own.
Two Men, One Type Face was a true labor of love for the authors, Soady says, “and from what I can find, the only book written about a single item of Gill’s work.” A limited edition of 250 handmade books is being printed by Traction Press. “Including the halftones,” Soady adds. “Very tricky!”
True to the inspiration for this particular work, the book cover is a deeply engraved cardboard replica of the now-famous William Humble Ward gravestone, so lucky owners may do rubbings all their own. Art Center’s James Lemont Fogg Memorial Library will sponsor a book signing and a copy will be donated to the rare books archive. Collectors can purchase copies from the artist.
The Samsung Faculty Enrichment Fund is an endowed fund that serves as Art Center’s primary faculty enrichment opportunity. Money is made available each year in grants of up to $5,000, awarded according to the merit and relevance of applicant proposals. Application forms are posted on the Faculty Council page on inside.artcenter.edu during the spring term, and proposals are judged by an impartial panel of art, design and humanities professionals who work outside of the Art Center community.
Stars will align on Art Center’s South Campus rooftop on Tuesday, April 23, when poets and artists come together for a special event focused on separate projects exploring Antarctica created by Katharine Coles and Lita Albuquerque. Coles, Utah Poet Laureate Emeritus, and Albuquerque, Art Center Graduate Art faculty member, will be joined by Poetry Foundation President and Red Hen poet John Barr. Hosted by Red Hen Press, an organization committed to publishing works of literary excellence, supporting diversity and promoting literacy in our local schools, the event will also feature a poetry reading by Barr.
Lita Alburquerque installing STELLAR AXIS in 2006.
The Earth Is Not Flat (Red Hen Press, 2013) by Coles was inspired by her trip to Antarctica funded by the National Science Foundation. Filled with poetry that enters the infinite space/time continuum that is the southern bowl of the planet, The Earth Is Not Flat both observes and engages the idea of what the environment of the South Pole means as humans encounter it.
Albuquerque created the artwork, Stellar Axis, on the Ross Ice Shelf at the South Pole from Dec. 14-27, 2006, and she provided Red Hen Press with one of the photos of the installation for the cover of Coles’ poetry collection. Stellar Axis is an ephemeral installation of a star map on ice. Albuquerque and her team placed ninety-nine blue spheres on the ice to correspond with the stars above them, stars not visible at that time of year when it was light all the time.
As Albuquerque said, “I am interested in change of scale: how the observer affects the object of observation; space as a void; non-space existing in time… Some brittle stars exist in the Antarctic and Arctic, and some are found even in the deepest parts of the ocean where there is no sunlight. Others have exquisitely developed crystalline lenses, formed from the bone in their skeletons, which focus light inside their bodies and enable them to see. But this is not blackness, it is full of something from long ago with the potential of something yet to be.” [ed. note: Stellar Axis was also featured on the cover of Art Center’s Dot magazine (Spring 2012), which included a feature story on another of Albuquerque’s seminal projects, Spine of the Earth.]
Archetype Press, Art Center’s experimental letterpress workshop overseen by Professor Gloria Kondrup, will be creating limited edition broadsides to commemorate the occasion.
For more information and to purchase tickets, visit the Red Hen Press website.
Art Center tech-heads will have a chance to talk design at the 20th annual SXSW Interactive festival, held March 8 to 12 in Austin, Texas.
The College will host an alumni event March 7 with panelists – including Anne Burdick, Chair of Graduate Media Design Practices, and Maggie Hendrie, Chair of Interaction Design – discussing challenges facing designers in a networked global future.
Additionally, a trio of alumni from the Media Design Practices program will sit on panels: Jayne Vidheecharoen (Shaping the Future of Play Is Serious Work), Carina Ngai (Design for Aging, Your Future-Self) and Jennifer Darmour (The Next Frontier of Interactive: Smart Fashion).
“Spaces In-Between,” an interactive exhibition organized by Media Design Practices faculty member Sean Donahue, will close Sunday.
The exhibition, on display at the Hollywood WUHO project space, is a series of apparatus, temporaries, places, spaces and conversations intended to advance broader participation in community discourse.
“It’s these in-between spaces that my practice aspires to intervene and explore different trajectories,” Donahue told KCET of the project.
Provost Fred Fehlau congratulates Errol Gerson on his 40 years with Art Center
Every year Art Center celebrates employees who have reached significant milestones in their careers.
The College recently celebrated faculty members who reached milestones in 2011.
On Jan. 24, 50 individuals were recognized for having work anniversaries of 10 or more years, with faculty member Errol Gerson, who teaches classes in entrepreneurialism, topping the list at 40 years of service to the College.
The occasion was commemorated with a formal luncheon and presentation of the service awards hosted by the Human Resources Department.
“Art Center students are supported by dedicated staff and faculty who do everything they can, directly in the classroom or indirectly behind the scenes, to help students achieve their goals to become professional artists and designers,” said Nancy Duggan, Executive Director, Human Resources. “It is our pleasure to honor these individuals.”
Today is the last day of the Interaction Design Conference (IxD13) in Toronto, the sixth annual conference organized by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), an international network dedicated to the professional practice of interaction design.
Earlier today, Jason Brush, executive vice president of creative at the Emmy and IDEA award-winning interactive marketing agency POSSIBLE, and the newest faculty member of Art Center’s recently created Interaction Design Department, gave a presentation at the conference titled The Dream of the 90s is Alive.
In the presentation, Brush reminded the audience that the early ’90s — “a time when Mark Zuckerberg was still in grade school, Steve Jobs had yet to return to Apple, and computers still had floppy drives” — was a time in which artists, filmmakers, authors and philosophers made the first technological forays into applications that drive global culture and communication today.
The Batmobile has undergone several on-screen incarnations — from the finned Lincoln Futura designed in 1966 in three weeks to 2012′s tank-like Tumblers that were five months (and reportedly millions of dollars) in the making.
All seven of the Caped Crusader’s rides — including the Batmobile designed by Art Center’s Tim Flattery — are on display through Dec. 14 as part of a free exhibit at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles.
More of Gotham’s finest are also showcased, including costumes and props from the Batman film franchise, as well as art from a traveling DC Comic exhibit featuring work by Jim Lee.
Flattery’s stealth-looking Batmobile, featured in 1995′s “Batman Forever” with Val Kilmer at the wheel, was powered by a 25-gallon propane tank that could shoot a 25-foot flame from the rear exhaust.
IxD Dept. Chair Maggie Hendrie
Apparently, size might not matter — at least when it comes to the future of smartphones.
The tech world was buzzing this week with news that IBM might have found a way to make microchips smaller, cheaper and faster by substituting silicon with carbon nanotubes.
(Developments in the silicon microchip were what allowed big-as-brick cell phones to shrink to pocket-size smartphones and tablets.)
But Maggie Hendrie, Interaction Design Department chair at Art Center, told Marketplace that size isn’t the most important feature for smartphones when looking ahead.
