The life of an Art Center student can be stressful. Find a group of people who share your passion and understand your stress by joining a club or organization. The Center for the Student Experience sponsors and supports twenty-five different student clubs and organizations. Students had an opportunity to check out all the clubs and organizations at the Club & Organization Fair last Wednesday in the Cafeteria. It is not too late to join even if you missed the fair. Please visit the Center for the Student Experience to find out how to contact any of the clubs or organizations.
Students getting together on Cafe Lawn. Photo: Juan Posada/Art Center College of Design
Here brief descriptions of this term’s registered clubs and organizations:
Art Center Chinese Student Association – theChinese Student Association (CSA) exists to bring together the Chinese student community at Art Center. CSA holds a series of social and peer mentor related events throughout the term that enhance the student experience.
Art Center Christian Fellowship – The purpose of the Art Center Christian Fellowship is twofold: to provide a place on campus for the body of Christians and all interested people to grow in community, share their struggles, pray, worship and discuss biblical ideas; and to engage the greater Art Center community in dialogue about the convergence of art, design and spirituality.
Art Center Indie — Art Center Indie’s aim is to explore the world of Indie film making (past, recent, and current) through regular screenings at various locations in homes or in theaters.
Assa – Korean students at Art Center join together to build relationships, share information and explore their common culture. ASSA helps students strengthen their self-awareness and individuality, and also assists students in making connections.
Nick Locaino led students on a tour of Art Center's lasers.
Did you notice the flyers in the Student Dining Room encouraging students to attend a “laser” demonstration in Room 229A? Our curiosities at the Dotted Line were piqued, so we attended yesterday to see what exactly was going down.
“Some people are disappointed it’s not a gun mounted on a tripod,” said Art Center’s Nick Loicano, a staff member in the Technical Skills Center, when introducing one of the College’s laser-cutting machines. Loicano led the group of 13 students through a two-hour tour of the machines, which included: a walkthrough on setting up a graphic for laser-cutting; laser-cutting a design onto a three-by-three-inch keychain; and, perhaps most importantly, an overview of Art Center’s policies regarding fair and safe usage of the machines.
For additional information on the Technical Skills Center, visit Art Center’s website or the Model Shop and 3D Labs’ Facebook page.
Volunteers Receiving Instruction before working for Arroyo Seco Foundation. Photo Lucia Loiso/Art Center College of Design
Continuing a volunteer initiative launched in celebration of the College’s 80th Anniversary in 2010—and in support of the National Day of Service inspired by the life of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.—Art Center is proud to sponsor its second day of service.
“Art Center Takes Action: A Day of Service in Pasadena” kicked-off at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday, February 18 at the College’s South Campus with a breakfast with College Provost Fred Fehlau and representatives from participating organizations. Volunteers picked up commemorative tee-shirts and mingled with leaders from the community organizations. “Designers, while expressing their own points of view, are also always working in service of others. This day is just an extension of what we as a community do all the time,” Mr. Fehlau told the group at the breakfast.
Moving Mulch for the Pasadena Boys & Girls Club. Photo Lucia Loiso/Art Center College of Design
From there, teams of Art Center volunteers grabbed a boxed lunch and were dispatched to locations around the city to take on such tasks as collecting food, facilities improvement, environmental cleanup, beautification projects and special activities.
Working in the garden of the Pasadena Boys & Girls Club. Photo Lucia Loiso/Art Center College of Design
We were reminded of President Lorne Buchman’s remarks at our first Day of Service, “when the Art Center community comes together to participate in volunteer initiatives such as this, we help elevate Art Center’s reputation not only as a good neighbor, but as a meaningful place to pursue an art and design education.”
Volunteers came from the ranks of students, faculty and staff. All those involved expressed great satisfaction in being able to help the community in some way.
“In reaching out to local organizations—even more than those that participated in the Day of Service—we’ve already begun to build a volunteer network for future collaborations,” said Dean of Students Jeffrey Hoffman.
AIDS Service Center Food Drive. Photo Lucia Loiso/Art Center College of Design
Three Designmatters projects from Safe Agua Peru are among the winners for The Spark: Concept Fall Winter Awards: GiraDora: Safe Agua won the highest ranking SPARK! Award; Balde a Balde: Safe Agua won a Gold Award; and Vitamigos: Safe Agua won a Bronze Award.
GiraDora, Student team: Alex Cabunoc / Ji A You
GiraDora, by students Alex Cabunoc and Ji A You, is a human-powered washer and spin dryer that increases efficiency and improves the experience of hand-washing clothes. For under $40, GiraDora more than doubles productivity, increases health of women and children, and affords the opportunity to begin breaking the poverty cycle. The user sits on top of the drum-like appliance and pumps a pedal with her foot, which agitates, cleans, rinses, then spins-dries clothes. While providing a more comfortable, ergonomic, and efficient way to clean clothes, GiraDora also affords opportunities to generate income.
Balde a Balde, by students Kimberly Chow and Carlos Vides provides running water from any bucket, maximizing cleanliness while optimizing water use. Nearly half of the world lives without access to running water. Balde a Balde (Spanish for “Bucket to Bucket”) is a portable faucet that provides running water from any container, bringing the health benefits and experience of using a tap to families living without running water. The user attaches Balde a Balde to any container with a universal clip, then begins a continuous flow of water with just a few squeezes of the siphon pump. Users can easily control the exact amount of water they need, with a simple click of the on/off spout or a twist of the valve to regulate flow. Balde a Balde harnesses gravity to bring the dignity of running water to the 3 billion people living without taps.
Balde a Balde, Student team: Kimberly Chow / Carlos Vides
Vitamigos, by students Thomas Kong and Cora Neil, combines water purification and nutrition in a tasty beverage. Kids want it, mom’s love it! For the 1 in 6 people living without access to potable water, purification methods are costly, time-consuming, and often inconsistent. Kids often end up drinking sugary-sodas in place of clean water. Vitamigos combines water purification and nutrition in a tasty beverage, creating a new, fun, playful, and interactive experience for moms and kids living without access to potable water. It is a more convenient and economical alternative to boiling water and healthier than the sugary drinks purchased from the local bodegas. The ultimate goal of Vitamigos is to help reduce the illness and medical costs associated with waterborne disease.
More about all the Safe Agua Peru projects can be found on the Designmatters website here.
Congratulations also to alumnus Dan Ashcraft for his Bronze Award winning project, Aria.
According to its website, “Spark is first and foremost a community of designers and creative people, bound together by the idea that Design can make significant, positive changes in the world and help make it better. The way we promote this Good Design is through the annual organization of international design competitions, exhibitions, blogs and workshops.”
Jacki Apple, an Art Center College of Design faculty member of over 28 years, as well as a practicing visual, performance and media artist, critic and writer since the early 70s, has been awarded the 2011 Distinguished Teacher of Art Award from the College Art Association. This award is presented to an artist of distinction who has developed a philosophy or technique of instruction based on her experience as an artist; has encouraged her students to develop their own individual abilities; and/or has made contributions to the body of knowledge understood as embracing technical, material, aesthetic and perceptual issues.
From the official announcement:
For the past twenty-eight years, Jacki Apple has provided students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, with a dynamic, inspiring, and evolving model of the possibilities and rewards of an interdisciplinary practice. An artist, writer, and producer, she has produced work in multiple modes—performance, installation, drawing, book art, photography, film, radio, text, and audio—and presciently engages the opportunities afforded by new technologies. Praised by students and colleagues alike for her intelligence, generosity, enthusiasm, and critical discernment, Apple adeptly bridges various disciplines using a wide scope of knowledge about contemporary culture and technology and a depth of understanding about the history and practice of the visual and performing arts. A gifted communicator, Apple is exceptionally effective in encouraging students to think for themselves.
CAA will formally recognize the recipients at a special awards ceremony during the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, on Thursday afternoon, February 23, 2012, 12:30–2:00 PM, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Led by Barbara Nesin, president of the CAA Board of Directors, the awards ceremony will take place in West Hall Meeting Room 502AB, Level 2; it is free and open to the public. The Los Angeles Convention Center is located downtown, at 1201 South Figueroa Street adjacent to the Staples Center.
"Red Tails" Executive Producer and Art Center Trustee Charles Floyd Johnson.
One of Art Center’s newer Trustees, Charles Floyd Johnson has a long-standing and successful career as a producer in the entertainment industry. He first started becoming familiar with the College during August of last year, became a Trustee earlier this year, and is looking forward to assisting Art Center in a number of different capacities, from outreach to fundraising.
“I came out for a graduation and was so impressed with Art Center, its students, and its plans for the future, that I said this is the place for me,” said Johnson, who points to being particularly impressed by the College’s Strategic Plan. “It felt to me like a very forward-thinking agenda, in terms of both making the school more user-friendly for the students and also making Art Center more dominant. Art Center already has a wonderful reputation in so many of its areas, but the College is interested in becoming even stronger.”
Johnson is currently serving as executive producer of the CBS television drama NCIS, which celebrates its 200th episode on February 7. He is also one of the producers of Red Tails, the Lucasfilm feature about the Tuskegee Airmen, America’s first all African-American aerial unit who both helped bring down the Nazi war machine during World War II and challenged racial stereotypes back home. Defying the odds, the film starring an all African-American cast — including Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Nate Parker and David Oleyowo — debuted last weekend in second place by bringing in nearly $19 million at the box office.
“It’s a story that has resonance with a lot of people,” said Johnson of the film which he and fellow Red Tails producer George Lucas had been trying to get off the ground for 23 years. “These young men were not encouraged to fly for their country. They were not expected to succeed. But they triumphed over adversity. These were men who fought racism at home and fascism abroad. They did it successfully and they were heroes, not victims.”
Photography + Imaging student Jessee Torres’s work is included in the 25th Annual Hearts & Flowers Exhibition currently on view at The Folk Tree in Pasadena. Torres specializes in wet plate collodion prints, the prevalent photographic method used through the end of the 19th Century.
Collodion Print (c) Jessee Torres
The collodion process requires the photographic material to be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed within the span of about fifteen minutes, necessitating a portable darkroom for use in the field. In the following video, she describes her progression from digital to collodion photography. Torres credits Art Center faculty Stephen Berkman, Ken Merfeld and Steve LaVoie as influencing her work.
Torres will be at The Folk Tree this weekend photographing portraits using the wet plate collodion process. Participants who reserve a time will receive a varnished tintype/ferrotype, an 8×10 archival print a digital image, all for the reasonable price of $75. To sign up, call Gail Mishkin at 626.793.4828 or call The Folk Tree at 626.795.8733.
The Pasadena Star-News recently spoke with Torres about her participation in the exhibition. For excerpts from the article, read more after the break.
Alumnus Jonathan Jarvis GMD '09 speaking to the Fall 2011 graduates. Photo: John Dlugolecki.
At last month’s Fall 2011 graduation ceremony, Graduate Media Design alumnus Jonathan Jarvis GMD ’09 received Art Center’s prestigious Young Alumni Innovator Award for his innovative professional and creative work.
While at Art Center, Jarvis made a splash with The Crisis of Credit Visualized, a video he created which entertainingly explained the nuts and bolts behind the economic crisis of 2008 using easy-to-understand language and engaging imagery. The video became an Internet sensation and has been viewed millions of times since Jarvis first placed it online.
Just one week after graduating, Jarvis was hired by Google’s Creative Lab unit as one of the original Google Five. Currently a designer for the company, he has worked on several high profile projects for the search giant, including Androidify, the YouTube Symphony and a Google-powered love story that ran during the Super Bowl.
In addition to receiving the Young Alumni Innovator Award, Jarvis also delivered the evening’s commencement address to the Fall 2011 graduates, during which he elaborated both on The Crisis of Credit Visualized and what he took away from his Art Center experience. Here are highlights from his speech:
On lessons learned at Art Center:
“As you think about the road ahead, you’ll no doubt feel many things. I remember when I graduated from the Master’s program here a little less than three years ago, I was sitting where all of you are today, thinking about that road. I’ve been asked to tell you my story today, and how circumstances allowed me a brief glimpse of that road before I was ready to walk it. At least I thought that I wasn’t ready to walk it. But my time at Art Center had done something to me, something that made me ready. I can’t tell you exactly how it happened, or precisely when it occurred, but it did. I’m sure of it. The challenges you faced here, both personal and academic, and the ideas that you saturated in, have had a deep impact on you, deeper than you realize right now. You may not see it now, but it might manifest in an unconscious manner, like a muscle memory you’ve forgotten you developed. Something inside of you has changed, and you’ve grown more than you’ve recognized.”
On what inspired The Crisis of Credit Visualized:
“I had some studio space down at South Campus that I called the bunker because it had no windows and really thick concrete walls. I was sitting in the bunker, listening to NPR and I heard that Lehman Brothers, one of the biggest banks in the country, had just gone bankrupt. I also heard the term “subprime mortgage” for the 500th time, and I still didn’t know what that meant. So instead of working on my master’s thesis, I thought that it was the perfect time to learn what a subprime mortgage was. And I quickly discovered that to learn what a subprime mortgage was, you need to learn what a prime mortgage is. And to learn what that is, you need to understand defaulting and bankruptcy and so on. And while I was learning about all of this, a strange thing happened to me. I became fascinated.”
On the power of design:
“I started reading and watching everything available about the credit crisis. And surprisingly, for something that was so relevant, there was no basic introduction for someone who wasn’t versed in finance. Then I had this realization that, as a designer, I had the ability to turn around and explain everything I just learned to someone who, just like myself a few weeks ago, didn’t know anything about finance. And this was an amazing feeling. It was the first time that I personally realized the power of design. And it was also my first realization that what I had been learning in school was actually applicable to the world at large.”
On going viral:
“In my sixth and final term and I wanted to make a short film about the credit crisis in a very simple way. So I said to myself that I would work really hard for one week, crank the video out, it would be out of my system, and I would move on. About four weeks later, it was starting to shape up, but it was still far from what I felt was ready. I had already sunk almost half of the semester into making this film and I had to do something quick, so I threw together a website. I put the film on it, and I called it The Crisis of Credit. I sent it to my professors, some friends and a few blogs. Surprisingly they watched it. And they started watching it a lot. And then more people watched it, and started to share it. Before I knew it, it had been viewed millions of times. And I couldn’t believe it. The response was far bigger than anything I had ever imagined. Back when ‘viral’ was still a cool word, my film was going viral. And it was all because I had made something I just wanted to watch myself when I started this process.”
On glimpsing life after school:
“I suddenly started getting lots of email and my phone would ring with unidentified numbers. I was getting a lot of attention, and I loved it at first. And then everybody wanted to know what my agenda was. They wanted to know my design philosophy. What did I plan to do next? Everyone started making demands on my time. I was forced to talk to the world outside of school and to find myself as a designer before I felt ready to define myself to anybody. Even myself. I couldn’t handle it. But somehow, I did. That muscle memory kicked in. I somehow responded to all the emails. I somehow answered all the questions. And somehow said what I wanted to do without sounding completely stupid.”
A research sketch by Jarvis for his "Crisis of Credit Visualized" video.
On the next move:
“The next thing I knew I was at the finish line. It was graduation day and I thought, wait a second, what’s going on? Wasn’t everything supposed to be sorted out by now? Wasn’t I supposed to have a job? Wasn’t the next move supposed to be clear? I just managed to get through this crazy situation and I thought that meant that I was ready. But I was sitting there, and I certainly didn’t feel ready. I spent most of graduation day wondering when do you feel ready? And it was about a week later and I was on the phone with a man named Andy [Berndt] from Google. He’d seen the video and he was telling me about a new group that he was putting together in New York to find new ways to use Google and YouTube and Chrome. I told him it sounded fascinating, but that I wasn’t sure that I was ready. And then I immediately thought to myself, what are you doing? You just told a prospective employer that you don’t feel ready for the job! And then he said to me, ‘Nobody ever feels ready. But if the spaceship lands in your backyard and the door opens, you get in.’ So I got in.”
On not being ready:
“Over the past three years I’ve been on a team that’s found ways to use YouTube to let people anywhere in the world audition to play with the London Symphony Orchestra, that’s used only Google Search to tell a love story during the Super Bowl, and that’s visually redesigned all of Google. I’m on a team that every day asks me to do things that I don’t feel ready to do. And all of you will be asked to do the same. Because you are going to go on to do things that have never been done before. On your road ahead, you will build new types of products that have never been built before. You will work in industries that did not even exist when you started here. One of you may even go on to create an entirely new industry. And you’re never going to be ready for that.”
Art Center Alumni Awards, which provide the College an opportunity to publicly recognize the talent, service and design influence of our alumni, were also bestowed uponLou DanzigerADVT ’48 for a lifetime of professional and creative achievement andWendy McNaughton FINE ’99 for realized humanitarian design impact. See all the award winners and the Fall 2011 graduation ceremony in it’s entirety here.
Grad Art Faculty Member Seeks Bodies to be Part of Performance Art Event This Sunday
Grad Art core faculty Lita Albuquerque is creating a large scale performance for the Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival and is looking for students, faculty and alumni from the Art Center community to sign up to participate this coming Sunday, January 22nd at noon at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Outlook in Culver City.
As described on the Pacific Standard Time website, Spine of the Earth 2012 is taking place this Sunday and is a recreation of Albuquerque’s 1980 Spine of the Earth, where the artist created a land based work at the bed of the El Mirage Dry Lake. The piece created a giant “geometric pattern over six-hundred feet in diameter” and turned the Earth into a artist’s canvas. In Albuquerque’s recreation twenty two years later, she won’t be painting the earth but will be making a “performative sculpture” that requires at least five hundred people.
As part of the open call to artists, designers and the general public, Albuquerque is looking for students, faculty and alumni from the Art Center community to participate in the performance. Sign up is easy at spineoftheearth2012.com. According to the site, participants will be involved in a very simple walking based movement (choreographed by LA-based choreographers WIFE) and will receive a signed, limited-edition artifact of the performance.
Kyle Fitzpatrick, who blogged about the upcoming event, wrote that he received the following details after signing up to participate:
The event is this Sunday between 12PM and 2PM. If you are participating, you need to be on site no later than 8AM.
This actually will not be in the desert (phew), but in Baldwin Hills Scene Overlook in Culver City, between Jefferson and La Cienega.
All participants will be involved in a very simple walking-based movement that will take place outdoors
What will you be wearing? A red jump suit! You should wear dark clothing and “comfortable walking shoes” in neutral colors to go underneath, though. You’ll also be keeping your red jumpsuit, which Lita will be signing as a thank you for participating.
Don’t bring your kids: all participants must be 16 and over.
Bring food money, as they will have food trucks there for eating. You’ll also be getting free coconut water!
