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).
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.
In the March 2013 issue of ARTnews Magazine, arts writer Suzanne Muchnic features the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery on the Art Center Hillside Campus and its nearly two decade-long series of exhibitions. The cover story, “Under the Microscope,” also features other leading contributors to the burgeoning art/science movement, noting that “in museums, schools, and research facilities, scientists and artists are swapping methods.”
Lita Albuquerque's installation "Stellar Suspension" was included in OBSERVE, an Art Center/Caltech-JPL collaboration at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery in 2008.
“Strict old-style boundaries like the ones assumed to exist between art and science are eroding,” said Stephen Nowlin, an Art Center alumnus and founding director of the Williamson Gallery, which opened in 1992. “Traditional dichotomies such as intellect versus emotion, reason versus intuition, and the poetic versus the practical, are becoming less distinct under the influence of unprecedented communication networks and analytical tools that reveal in higher resolution and greater clarity the complex layers of things and ideas.”
Friday, March 8
6-9 pm
Art Center Williamson Gallery and 10 other locations
Enjoy a free evening of art, music and entertainment as Pasadena’s most prominent arts and cultural institutions swing open their doors. Last fall, 14,000 people experienced the excitement of ArtNight.
Begin your journey at Art Center and view the first-ever West Coast exhibition by M/M (Paris), the celebrated Paris-based art and design partnership created by Mathias Augustyniak and Michaël Amzalag in 1992. The exhibition M/MANIFESTATION runs March 8–April 28 at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art Center’s Hillside Campus
Travel on a free shuttle to visit the other 10 institutions participating in ArtNight.
Free Shuttles
Free shuttles, running 6–10 p.m., will loop throughout the evening with stops at each venue. Park at any one venue and ride to the others.
ArtNight is an ongoing partnership among many cultural institutions and the Cultural Affairs Division of the City of Pasadena. The event is sponsored by the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission with support from the Pasadena Department of Transportation Transit Division, Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority and the Pasadena Center Operating Company.
For information on ArtNight, please call the ArtNight Pasadena Hotline at 626.744.7887 or visit artnightpasadena.org. Para más información en español, visite nuestra página del internet: artnightpasadena.org.
For information on accessibility and/or to request written materials in alternative formats, please call the City of Pasadena at 626.744.7062.
– Anna Macaulay
Dana L. Walker, Photography and Imaging alumna and Art Center at Night director. Photo: Ken Merfeld.
Many students who end up studying at Art Center are first introduced to the College through Art Center at Night (ACN)—Art Center’s continuing studies program headquartered at South Campus. And chances are that at some point many of those students also came into contact with Photography and Imaging alumna Dana L. Walker (PHOT 1995). Walker serves as both the director of ACN and the managing director of Public Programs, Art Center’s suite of programs that also includes Art Center for Kids (grades 4–8), Saturday High (grades 9–12) and Summer Institute for Teachers (for K–12 educators).
In addition to her Public Programs duties, Walker is also co-chair of Art Center’s Council on Diversity and Inclusion, which the College created in 2011 as part of its Create Change Strategic Plan. She’s also a board member of the 120 Group, an ethnically diverse, alumni-based organization that promotes educational and career opportunities in art and design for underrepresented minority populations.
We sat down recently with Dana to talk about diversity, her work as an artist and what it’s like to be a student in her own program.
Dotted Line: You’re on the College’s diversity council. How do you define diversity?
Dana Walker: I don’t define it. In fact, one of the things we’ve done on the Council is purposely not define it. Because once you define it, it becomes a quantity rather than a quality. Diversity is not just about race, ethnicity or religion. It’s also economics, geography, gender and more. In fact, diversity includes so much that it’s really about all of us. And that’s what makes it challenging. To become a better artist or designer, you need to understand the world that you live in and the people who live in it. Whether it’s learning about another culture or learning how to work with different people, you can’t design for the world if you don’t understand large parts of it.
Pop quiz:
What do the following design concepts have in common: a streamlined re-design of in-flight meal preparation and service that reduces air-travel waste; a bicycle for tourists that collects environmental data as cyclists explore the city; and a human-powered washing machine and spin dryer for families living on $4 to $10 per day?
a. They were all designed by Art Center students.
b. They reflect the growing awareness of sustainability within art and design.
c. They are the winning concepts of the 2012 Denhart Family Sustainability Scholarship Prize.
d. All of the above
Too easy? The answer (d) shouldn’t surprise anyone who is familiar with the cutting-edge role Art Center students are playing in environmentally and socially responsible art and design. This year’s Denhart Prize winners, chosen from a highly competitive pool of undergraduates from Fine Art, Film, Photography, Illustration, and Industrial and Environmental Design, represent some of the year’s top design ideas in sustainability at Art Center.
Art Center artists show how their majors—and the scholarships that support them—can be powerful investments in creating community.
Control Room
Graduating from Art Center, Fine Art alumni Evelena Ruether FINE 09 and William Kaminski FINE 09 didn’t want to lose track of the many remarkable artists they had met here.
“So often, once you leave school everyone disperses to pursue their individual careers,” Ruether explains. “We wanted to stay in touch with the community we’d created at Art Center. At the same time, we felt that many of our peers were doing work that was as good, or better, than what we were seeing in commercial galleries, and we wanted to create a place for them to exhibit their work.”
In this way was born Control Room, an artist-run gallery occupying part of their live-work space on Seventh Street in downtown Los Angeles near the L.A. River. In its first years, the gallery offered a sense of community and networking opportunities for Fine Art graduates during the important early post-college years.
Artist Julienne Johnson in her North Hollywood studio. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“Her work impressed me with its own combination of raw confidence and formal strategy,” said art critic Peter Frank of artist Julienne Johnson. “She knows how to put together a painting, even as she puts herself right in the middle of its fabrication.”
Frank edited Johnson’s first art book Ashes for Beauty, which documents the artist’s collection of the same name, which was the subject of two solo exhibitions at Santa Monica’s TAG Gallery in 2010 and 2011.
Johnson has taken several courses at Art Center at Night over the past few years and she credits the College’s continuing studies program with dramatically changing her work as well as her approach.
“I learned that the making of art is of great value to the world,” said Johnson. “I already knew how immensely important it was to me, but it was through Art Center that I felt empowered to proclaim it boldly.”
Fine Art Chair Laurence Dreiband (L) and instructor Ramone Muñoz. Photo: Chuck Spangler
After more than four decades of service to Art Center, Laurence Dreiband, chair of the College’s undergraduate Fine Art Department will be retiring at the end of this month.
Dreiband leaves the College with an impressive roster of accomplishments: a robust program with increasing enrollment and plans for future growth; an impressive list of distinguished faculty and alumni; plans for Artmatters, a new area of emphases in public art and social engagement; and, most significantly, a dedication to the importance of the fine arts in the life of the College and of the culture at large.
To mark the occasion, Art Center alumnus, instructor and former chair of Foundation Studies Ramone Muñoz recently sat down with Dreiband to discuss the outgoing chair’s legacy, their beginnings at the College’s Third Street campus, and what the future holds.
Simon Johnston with his work "Investigation" at the "PAGES" exhibition opening. Photo: Chuck Spangler
Students recently packed an overflowing Los Angeles Times auditorium for 3×3*: Type Guys, an event that featured three presentations and a lively Q&A with three individuals that have crafted the way we see, understand and interact with typography.
Previously we shared highlights Kyle Cooper‘s and Jeremy Mende‘s presentations. Today we focus on Art Center’s own Simon Johnston.
Johnston was educated at Bath Academy of Art in England and the Kunstgewerbeschule, Basel, Switzerland. In England he founded the design practice 8vo, as well as the influential typographic journal Octavo. Since relocating to Los Angeles in 1989, he has run his own design office, Simon Johnston Design, with a particular emphasis on typography, especially book and catalog work for museums and galleries.
Johnston has taught typography and design at Art Center for 20 years. He is currently faculty director of the print area of emphasis in the Graphic Design department. In addition to his teaching and design practice, he works on his own art and photography projects.
At the event, Johnston touched on a variety of topics, including the importance of typography, working with some of his idols and the minefield of registered trademarks.
Here are just a few of the highlights:
On typography:
There’s an old joke: It’s the scene of an accident, a crowd is gathered around an injured person, and from the back of the crowd a voice is heard, “Let me through! I’m a typographer!” Typography may not be a matter of life and death, but as visible language, it is the key means through which we communicate as a society, and as such it’s the spine that runs through the body of graphic design practice.
