Category Archives: Fine Art

Celebrating the life and work of cubist painter and former Art Center faculty, Mary Vartikian

Instructor Mary Vartikian standing in front of the crit wall with an unidentified female student, circa 1959. Photographer unknown.

Instructor Mary Vartikian standing in front of the crit wall with an unidentified female student, circa 1959. Photographer unknown.

On February 18th, former faculty member Mary Vartikian passed away at the age of 96.  A graduate of Chouinard Art Institute, Mary taught drawing and illustration at Art Center from the 1950s to the late 1980s.  She began in the early days at the Third Street campus, when the College was still under the direction of Tink Adams.  For over thirty years she taught and influenced thousands of students. Professionally Mary worked with costume design at Hollywood Costume and several Hollywood studios.  Her personal work included cubist and collage style paintings.  She lived and worked in a home and studio she shared with her husband, another former faculty member, George Harris, who passed away in 2001.

Mary Vartikian “Diggins” 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. Photography by Alexis Babayan, 2013

Mary Vartikian “Diggins” 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. Photography by Alexis Babayan, 2013

This past Spring,  Vartikian’s niece Suzanne Babayan contacted Art Center on behalf of her aunt’s estate to ask if we would be interested in accessioning any of her collection.  The estate generously donated a number of items to Art Center, including six paintings, sketches and drawings, costume designs, photographs of her and her work, an easel, drawing table, and art supplies.  The Mary Vartikian collection of work and photographs is housed in the College Archives and the paintings will be hung around campus.  We are excited to share some of Mary’s work with the Art Center community.

Mary’s great-niece Alexis Babayan created a Flickr site containing images of Mary and her work.   If you had Mary as an instructor, please share your memories.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maryvartikian

To visit Art Center’s Archives or to donate materials, contact Art Center Archivist Robert Dirig at 626.396.2208 or archives@artcenter.edu

Watch: ‘Trick or Drink,’ a riveting video memoir by new Fine Art chair, Vanalyne Green

 

With today’s announcement of Vanalyne Green‘s appointment as chair of Art Center’s Undergraduate Fine Art program, the College unveiled a pivotal panel in a larger canvas depicting the program’s evolution. Green is an internationally-recognized pioneer in the feminist art movement, whose work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, where the above video is currently housed as part of the museum’s video collection.

“Trick or Drink,” which debuted in 1984, a decade after Green graduated from CalArts’ Feminist Art Program (spearheaded by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro), offers an intimate and provocative look at the different forms addiction takes on as it’s passed among generations of family members. Green adapted the video from a live performance she’d developed from autobiographical material incorporating her experiences growing up in an alcoholic household and her own battles with bulimia. “Truth or Drink” is the rare video work to be as heralded for its artistic achievement as it is for its therapeutic value to patients in hospitals and treatment centers.

This particular work illuminates more than a lifelong social justice bent to Green’s creative sensibility. It also offers a glimpse at how the Fine Art Department’s new Artmatters concentration — an interdisciplinary curriculum launching this fall emphasizing collectivism and collaborative projects in the public sphere — might manifest itself in the real world.

Green, a founding member of the pro-choice, pro-sex agitprop group, No More Nice Girls, expressed her kinship to Art Center’s trans-disciplinary approach to social impact creativity as follows: “This is an especially optimistic moment for education programs such as Art Center because of the unusual flexibility it offers to students to cross disciplines,” Green stated in her application for the position. “My goal is to support young artists to recognize their inherent interests and to strengthen their commitment to work through a program of experimentation and exposure to an international art world.”

Regarding the role she will play at Art Center, Green stated, “For some, making art and administrative leadership within an educational institution are inimical. To the contrary, I find pedagogy and program development to be intrinsic to the project of being an artist: they involve narrative, composition, architecture and art as a form of social energy. This idea of a porous boundary between practices originates in the unorthodox programs I was privileged to experience.”

 

Aquatopia: Rolling in the deep with Grad Art alumna Jennifer West

"Heavy Metal Sharks Calming Jaws Reversal Film" (2011) by Jennifer West. Super 8 print transferred to hi definition video with sound.

“Heavy Metal Sharks Calming Jaws Reversal Film” (2011) by Jennifer West. Super 8 print transferred to hi definition video with sound.

With 90 percent of the earth’s oceans yet to be explored, “the deep” is and has always been a place of mystery, fear, desire—and wild imagination. One Art Center alum who’s creatively plumbed this furtive, fertile territory is Jennifer West ’04 (Graduate Fine Art). Her recent multimedia work, “Heavy Metal Sharks Calming Jaws Reversal Film” (2011) is featured in Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep, a major exhibition that opened this past weekend at the Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, England, continuing through September 22.

Bringing together more than 150 contemporary and historic artworks, Aquatopia explores how “the deep” has been imagined through time and across cultures. Sea monsters, sirens, sperm whales, giant squids, octopi, submarines, drowned sailors and shipwrecks are all portrayed. In a show that includes iconic works by JMW Turner, Odilon Redon, Hokusai, Barbara Hepworth and Oskar Kokoschka, West finds herself in prestigious company.

West is known for her digitized films that are made by hand-manipulating film celluloid, and the description of materials and processes she used to create “Heavy Metal Sharks Calming Jaws Reversal Film” tells a story in itself: “Faded pink super 8 film print — library copy of select scenes from “Jaws” — from Lorain, Ohio public library — treated with black fabric dye enriched with heavy metals: iron and zinc vitamins, celluloid grated with stone, whipped with hair headbanging, impressed with thumb and pink prints devil ears. Super 8 print transferred to hi definition video with sound.” Total running time: 6 minutes, 47 seconds.

In reviewing a previous show of the artist’s work, Wendy Vogel noted on Artforum.com, “Like her experimental predecessors, West forgoes narrative cohesion in favor of creating jumpy cuts and abstract visual collages — splicing, rolling, and drenching the celluloid using materials from Mylar tape to pickle juice, whiskey to candle smoke.” Writing on West’s work in Frieze, Joanna Kleinberg observed how “the intermingling of materiality, feeling and identity creates a wild blend of synaesthetic experience wherein the substances of life literally and figuratively colour the film.”

Born in Topanga, Calif., West lives and works in Los Angeles. Before earning her MFA at Art Center, she received a BFA from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. She has had solo exhibitions in museums and galleries in Europe, Asia and the U.S., and has done commissioned projects for exhibitions at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, the Aspen Art Museum and the Tate Modern. West also creates “zines” — DIY photo booklets of production stills of the making of her films — in conjunction with her exhibitions.

Curated by Alex Farquharson, Aquatopia is a collaboration with Tate St Ives in Cornwall, where it will be on view from October 2013 to January 2014.

“Like” Jennifer’s film on Facebook!

A Transman Speaks Out on LGBTQ Allyship, DOMA, and Eating a Cookie

Tyler Bennet's self-portraits track his transgender transformation

Tyler Bennet’s self-portraits track his transgender transformation

Tyler is a student at Art Center in the Fine Art Program. Last week OutNetwork, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Student Club along with the Center for the Student Experience and Tyler led an Awareness and Ally Day at both campuses; encouraging staff, students and faculty to wear red and outwardly honor their commitment to a diverse and inclusive Art Center. Tyler’s work centers on large-scale photographs of his gender transition and daily life as a transgender man (transman.). Tyler is the current President of the Art Center Student Union, Vice President of the Art Center Service Club and the Director of Student Concerns on Student Government.

When I came to Art Center a few years ago I never could have imagined that I would be making 12’ photos of vulnerable parts of my life/body, sitting in countless committee meetings or walking down the hallway pinky promising students to take a nap. In my first few terms I observed the extreme work mentality, negation of personal narrative and absence of critical theory dialogue happening in and out the classroom; and ultimately how detrimental this vacuum can be to a creative. I started standing up for a supportive educational model — one where doing things outside of school and a commitment to self-care is viewed as integral to success in the studio. When I started taking testosterone as part of my gender transition I became even more aware of the need to bring these things into the present educational dialogue, also remarking on the exploitation and exoticism of minority populations in design work; including that of gender non-conforming people.

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Getty “Overdrive” Exhibition Designed in Collaboration With Environmental Design Students

getty-overdrive

The exhibition “Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990,” organized by the Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum and on view through July 21, 2013, is the first major examination of the innovation and influence of Los Angeles architectural history. As Los Angeles in the second half of the 20th century grew rapidly into an industrial and creative capital, its architecture transformed the city’s landscape.

Designing the installation of “Overdrive” was a collaborative project between Art Center and the Getty. To develop the spatial and graphic design of the exhibition, the museum’s curatorial and design teams worked closely with a Transdisciplinary Studio class of 20 Art Center students in Environmental Design and Graphic Design, led by Art Center Environmental Design faculty member and alumnus Rob Ball, with the additional participation of Environmental Design instructor Dewi Schoenbeck.

Related:

Environmental Design Students Take Top Prize in 2013 LAIAC Competition

 

 

Art and Science Intersect at “Intimate Science” Exhibition Opening at Williamson Gallery

Intimate Science, an exhibition showcasing contemporary artists conducting projects in scientific and technological domains, opens at Art Center College of Design’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery on Friday, May 31. An opening reception, free to the public, will take place Thursday, May 30, from 7 to 9 p.m.

The Williamson Gallery, says Stephen Nowlin, founding director of the Gallery, has helped define this “briskly emerging international cultural movement.” He explains, “Science enjoys a popular patina of certainty, while behind art there is in fact cerebral order, structure and intent. The true kinship of art and science is to be found…when each discipline is allowed to encourage and ignite each other.”

Curated by Andrea Grover and organized by the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Intimate Science explores the shift from artists aiding science to artists “doing” science, and how this impacts the way scientific knowledge is acquired, used and shared. The exhibition continues through Aug. 18 at Art Center’s Hillside Campus in Pasadena.

Philip Ross's Mycotecture Series at the Williamson Gallery exhibit Intimate Science is an experiment in growing architectural structures and furniture from the fungus Ganoderma Lucidum, also known as Reishi or Ling Chi.

Philip Ross’s Mycotecture series in the Williamson Gallery exhibition Intimate Science is an experiment in growing architectural structures and furniture from the fungus Ganoderma Lucidum, also known as Reishi or Ling Chi.

 

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Faculty Patti Podesta Went to Great Lengths to Create a “Kubrickian Perception” at LACMA

Installation image from LACMA's "Stanley Kubrick" exhibition. Photo: LACMA

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).

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Red Hen Press Event Features Art Center Faculty Member Lita Albuquerque

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 Albuquerque in Antarctica

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.

ARTnews Recognizes Williamson Gallery as Shaping Art/Science Movement

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.”

OBSERVE at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery

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.”

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Art Center Participates in ArtNight Pasadena This Friday


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