Category Archives: Fine Art

‘New Eye’ brings a collection of visionary Illustration alumni to L.A. Art Show

As the longest running venue for contemporary, modern, historic and traditional art in the U.S., the L.A. Art Show has connected collectors with established and emerging artists for nearly 20 years. Looking to build on that reputation, the organizers asked Red Truck Gallery owner Noah Antieau to curate a collection of work within the show to break down barriers, buck convention and create a new vocabulary. In turn, Antieau asked Aaron Smith, Art Center alumnus and Associate Chair of Illustration, to assemble a collection of work by Art Center’s Illustration alumni. The result is an Art Center installation entitled New Eye, which will join a selection of innovative galleries to form “Littletopia,” on display January 15-19 at LA Convention Center.

“Littletopia and the L.A. Art Show are a perfect fit for the Illustration Department,” Smith says. “We’re always looking to connect students and recent alumni with galleries and savvy collectors who understand the importance of investing in emerging artists. And the show offers us as a unique platform to offer those collectors a curated view of some of Art Center’s most brilliant Illustration/Fine Art alumni.”

So how is “Littletopia” creating a new vocabulary? Smith notes that, “the innovative, skillful and imaginative work of our alums is rooted in traditional and modern art forms; but our illustration perspective isn’t afraid to break down barriers or buck convention every now and then.”

Illustration alums whose work will be on display, include Erin Burrell, Ryan Cho, David Cook, Ben Sanders, Fleurette West and Julie Yeo, joined by current upper-term Illustration student Jane Lee (see their work in the above slideshow).

The term ‘New Eye,’ is borrowed from the diverse tracks of study available within Art Center’s Illustration program, which encompasses Illustration Design, Entertainment Arts, Motion Illustration and Fine Art Painting — with later forming the basis for the work at L.A. Art Show. “It’s a term that our students and alumni respond well to,” explains Smith, “and it really summarizes the fresh perspective coming out of the Illustration Department.”

In addition to the New Eye exhibit, many other Art Center alums will also have their work on view, including Mark Todd, Esther Pearl Watson, Aron Wisenfeld, Ray Turner and Aaron Smith himself.

Let us know some of your favorite works from the show and who else you bump into from Art Center.

Fall 2013 Graduation Week: So many faces going so many places!

This Saturday, following years of all-nighters, critiques, finals, internships and hopefully some fun, 153 Art Center students will graduate. As that day approaches, we take time to celebrate these creative and talented individuals who are about to take on the world and, as is custom at our Fall Graduation, we also honor alumni who have already paved the way. Here’s the lowdown for the week.

Thursday, December 12: Graduation Show Preview
Industry leaders, employers, corporate partners, donors and alumni get the first look at the Fall term’s graduating artists and designers at the invitation-only Graduation Show Preview. This event, hosted by Alumni Relations to welcome new graduates into the community, gives our graduating students an opportunity to network with potential employers and fellow alumni. The show features student projects from major fields of study at Art Center, including Advertising, Entertainment Design, Environmental Design, Film, Graphic Design, Illustration, Photography and Imaging, Product Design, Transportation Design, Graduate Film and Graduate Industrial Design.

Graduation Show Preview will be held at Hillside Campus from 6 to 9:30 p.m., with a private reception immediately following.

Friday, December 13: MDP Work-In-Progress Show
Media Design Practices is holding a work-in-progress show from 6 to 10 p.m. in the Wind Tunnel Gallery at South Campus (950 South Raymond). The MDP/Lab track will be presenting thesis work in progress from their Ciphertexts & Cryptoblob inquiry and the MDP/Field track with be featuring projects from Kampala, Uganda.

Saturday December 14: Graduation
Join us in the Sculpture Garden at Hillside Campus from 4 to 6 p.m. for our graduation ceremony. At the ceremony, we will honor three of our alumni who will be presented with Alumni Awards. This year, all the awardees received degrees in Product Design. Gordon Bruce will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, Stan Kong will receive the award for Outstanding Achievement and Spencer Nikosey will receive the Young Alumni Innovator Award.

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Realism and abstraction, domestic bliss and ambivalence coexist in student’s award-winning paintings

Art Center faculty recently selected Vanya Horwath to be the first recipient of the Franklyn Liegel Award. Named for a beloved Art Center faculty member, this honor includes $1,000 cash and the use of one of two private studios in the new 870 building to which the Fine Art department will be moving in January. Horwath’s exuberant paintings of women in domestic interiors use abstraction, patterning and gradient brushstrokes to break down the surface and the image in a language that glances back to painters such as Vuillard and Leger, while using the brushstroke as a discrete element in a way similar to that used by programs such as Photoshop. Read on as Horwath shares her response to the award and the ideas informing the work that earned her the honor.

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Art for artists’ sake: Sharon Lockhart collaborates across time with dance composer Noa Eshkol

Artforum called Sharon Lockhart’s meditation on the visionary work of Israeli dance composer and textile artist Noa Eshkol (1924–2007) an “intimate conversation of ideas simulated across the gulf of history.” The New York Times hailed the five-channel film installation as a “subtle but virtuosic move.” And the Los Angeles Times described it as “a sensitive portrait of a formidable artist.”

If you didn’t get a chance to experience the Art Center alumna’s acclaimed exhibition in person at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2012 or at The Jewish Museum in New York earlier this year, the catalog presents an opportunity to delve deeply into the two artists’ unusual “collaboration.” Edited by LACMA’s Stephanie Barron and Britt Salvesen, Sharon Lockhart | Noa Eshkol (Prestel Publishing) features an in-depth interview with Lockhart; photographs of the installation and of Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation spherical models; a selection of Eshkol’s wall carpets, scores and drawings; as well as several essays.

It’s not the first time Lockhart, who completed her MFA in Fine Art/Painting in 1993, has trained her lens on the work — and sometimes literally the labors — of others. In this case, Lockhart says, she was drawn to Eshkol’s “radical” practice and the “labor of love” that Eshkol’s devoted students, many of them aging, enact in preserving and performing her rigorous compositions.

This story originally appeared in Art Center’s Fall 2013 Dot magazine, where you’ll find more images from Lockhart’s installation as well as profiles of other notable alumni at work.

Creative Footnotes: Kristy Lovich traces the inspiration for her new gallery show to her childhood bedroom

This creative manifesto is part of a series of first-person pieces by Fine Art students reflecting on the ideas informing their work. Each post will feature the artist whose work is currently rotating through the Undergraduate Fine Art Student Gallery, at the Hillside Campus. This week, student Kristy Lovich explores the sources of inspiration behind her intimate and evocative installation entitled, “Don’t go runnin off, there’s lots of shit to carry!”

We are building a house that remembers.
Don’t go runnin’ off, there’s lots of shit to carry!

This Place: and we have so much to do; so many things to look at.

When I was a kid, my mom would ask me to clean my room, the room I shared with my sisters. And because we were always making things, because I was always building something and taking something apart, the room was always a mess. Always in each corner was the evidence of the simultaneous destruction and construction of the small worlds I occupied: the theater, the miniature, the fantastic, the hidden, the movie, the book, the magic. Collections piled onto collections. And alongside these precious worlds were also the objects of this world: the dirty laundry, the trash, the long abandoned can of soda, lollipop stuck to its own paper, a forgotten homework assignment. On that dreaded Saturday morning, when she had finally tired of negotiating the path carved into the sea of things in our room, my mother would tell us that we were not to emerge until it was clean. Until everything was in its place.

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Creative footnotes: Student artist, Joanna Bassi on her current show, ‘Hallowed Degeneration’

This is the first in a new series of first-person pieces by Fine Art students reflecting on the ideas informing their work. Each post will feature the artist whose work is currently rotating through the Undergraduate Fine Art Student Gallery, at the Hillside Campus. This week, student Joanna Bassi unveils the sources of inspiration behind her striking collection of sculptures made from charcoal, beeswax and ash, entitled, “Hallowed Degeneration.”

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‘Insights’ highlights: 108 high-intensity doses of creative inspiration in 130 characters or less

Alum Lynne Aldrich leads a tour of her sculpture exhibit in the Williamson Gallery

While Car Classic dominated last weekend’s headlines, with its lineup of head-turning, high-revving art-imitates-life works of automotive aesthetics and ingenuity. Sunday’s auto design showcase wasn’t even the only audacious display of Art Center’s creative assets on view last weekend. On Saturday, the College hosted a curated selection of seminars and workshops known as Art Center Insights. The invitation-only event offers donors and trustees an opportunity to experience what it’s like to be Art Center student for an afternoon (minus the mountain of pressure to complete competing creative projects).

After a lunch in the student dining room with President Lorne M. Buchman, participants chose from the following Session 1 presentations: 3D Printing: A Revolution in 3D, Environmental Design: The Safe Aqua Project and Interaction Design: Evolving User Experience. Then came the second and final round of workshops: Transportation Design/Sustainability: Nature, The Mobility Innovator, Photography: Portraiture Unplugged and Fine Art: Lynn Aldrich: Un/Common Objects.

Because Insights reaches only a small slice of the population who might benefit from it; we embedded reporters in each of the workshops and live-tweeted the entire event. Taken together, these concise dispatches offer a cohesive (if not comprehensive) narrative of what it was like to experience Insights and the inspiring ideas and tools exchanged over the course of all six workshops.

Some people dream of being king for a day. But Insights makes a good case for the rewards that go along with being a student, for a day or a lifetime. Hopefully the chronicle below will conjure some of that mind-expanding thrill vicariously.

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Myspace takeover 2.0: New videos track students’ creative progress and problems

Art Center invades Myspace homepage

Update: Our quartet of students leading our Myspace occupation has produced a new batch of posts — three videos and one written narrative. Visit our Myspace profile for the latest news on how these artists and designers are devising solutions to the roadblocks and detours they encounter en route to their destination: creating something of lasting value that didn’t exist before.

Space. Whether it comes in the form of a blank canvas, an empty sound stage, a blinking cursor on a computer screen or a room of one’s own — space itself has always been fundamental to the act of creation. Art Center has long provided that space for its community of compulsively creative forward-thinking doers and makers, united by a desire to disrupt the status quo with explosive feats of imagination and artistry.

At its most basic level, it’s an invitation to create, explore and invent. And put simply, artists need their space. This was the operative principle behind the supernova success of Myspace, the 1.0 generation social network that became a hub where music lovers connected to their favorite bands. Ten years later, Myspace has reinvented itself, beginning with its June 2013 relaunch, as a social network “purpose-built to empower an infinitely expanding creative community.” The new Myspace has been designed around 21st Century creators’ needs to “connect, make, discover, collaborate, promote and expand.”

And what better place to seed that artistic ecosystem than the hothouse of creativity that is Art Center? So, for the next week, Art Center’s unique approach to bringing audacious ideas to fruition will receive unprecedented exposure as it stages an occupation of the MySpace homepage, which has a massive global reach of 35 million users.

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augh.: Streetwear with a conscience by Art Center students

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting

- e.e. cummings

Aye Hasegawa models pieces from the Fall/Winter collection, entitled The Wanderer
Photography by Simia Rassouli

It is simple: You are who you are. If you cannot explain yourself to a child, then you do not understand yourself, which means that you have constantly complicated your life and confused yourself because you have listened to what others have told you instead of listening to your own inner self. You know that the right thoughts and the right words are simple: They are raw and elegant. You use common words to say uncommon things. Those words have force. Your presence is forceful. Life is very simple, but it is YOUR choice to live it simply or to complicate it.

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Art Center in the News, July 2013

Alumnus Jim Root, art director at Cramer-Kasselt, was featured in the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel.

From fuel efficiency standards changing the look of your car to top ranked film schools, from Gibson Guitartown to backyard beehive designs – here’s where you can catch up on any Art Center news you may have missed with our latest media roundup.

The Hollywood Reporter, “The Hollywood Reporter Unveils the Top 25 Film Schools of 2013” July 31, 2013: Art Center moves up from #23 to #15 in annual film school ranking.

The New York Times, “Carlab Mixes Natural Gas and Gasoline for More Efficient Vehicle” July 9, 2013: Transportation Design instructor Eric Noble featured throughout the Wheels blog about rethinking the size of the natural gas tank.

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