Have you ever wondered how to grow a tomato? Are you looking for new ingredients to add spice to your cooking? Would you be willing to share your gardening secrets? Interested in learning more about sustainable growing practices?
Whether you have a green thumb, or are a gardening novice, EcoCouncil and Art Center invites the Art Center community to grab a trowel, put on your gardening gloves and plant with us. Our new campus garden is intended to be a learning, teaching and recreation space for the College community that allows us to experience what it means to live in harmony with our environment. It is a space for experimentation, investigation and exploration of concepts of lifecycle and sustainability.
The garden is the result of careful planning, partnership with Art Center Student Government and facilities, and the support of the College president and senior staff. This collaboration has resulted in a unique and beautiful garden design incorporating low-impact materials.
Become a “founding grower” and begin your garden! We’ll provide the soil, sunshine and water. Individual students, faculty and staff, or student groups can sign up for a planting bed, which can be used to grow organic food plants or ornamentals. Eat what you grow, or share your harvest. Go to the Garden’s Facebook page for more information and to reserve a plot. Spaces will be assigned for the term in the order received.
In today’s episode of Art Center Stories, alumnus Dice Yamaguchi talks about sustainability and remembers help form Art Center’s EcoCouncil student group. Take a look:
Last week, Art Center celebrated the opening of exhibition HYPERBOLIC: Reefs, Rubbish and Reason—on view through August 21 in the Williamson Gallery—with a reception and a pair of presentations in the Ahmanson Auditorium by Jerry Schubel, president and CEO of the Aquarium of the Pacific, and Margaret Wertheim, writer, artist and co-curator—along with her sister Christine Wertheim—of the Hyerpbolic Crochet Coral Reef project.
We spoke with Wertheim following the reception about what’s new in the coral reef, the mysterious Midden Monsters and growing an installation.
Dotted Line: The crochet coral reef project has travelled around the world. What’s the most unique thing about this project as it appears here in the Williamson Gallery? Margaret Wertheim: We decided for this show that we wanted to make the plastic a major feature. Not only did we have a lot more of the plastic than we’ve had before—we’ve been collecting it for four years—but here we also had the space. That big pile of trash in the main room is new. We have shown the trash in a very small form once before, but here it’s a huge new element of the exhibition. Another new feature is the Coral Forest room. That is completely new. No version of that has ever been shown before. In fact, we built that in situ. And finally there’s the mathematics room. We’ve never had a whole room devoted to the math before. So three of the four rooms in this exhibition are completely new.
Dotted Line: Are some of the organisms in this particular installation a mutation of the Midden Monsters?
Werthheim: The Midden Monsters are pieces crocheted out of plastic trash. When they’ve been shown in the past—which is rare—the Midden Monsters have been pinned to the wall surrounding it. What happened in this case was that many of them got incorporated into the big white plastic piece in the Coral Forest room. The Midden Monsters, as a flock, transformed themselves into one giant Midden Monster. This show has a tendency to be very organic and, like living things, it evolves and morphs in response to the room that it’s in. The whole show grows to fit its environment. And since each environment is different, things have a tendency to come into being in new ways in each space.
Dotted Line: You mentioned in your presentation Wednesday night that the installation needs to grow into each space that it shows.
Wertheim: This work is very transmutable. It really is organic in the sense that it doesn’t have a fixed-down form. There are parts of it that do, like the bleached reef, which has pieces that look more literal than the others. That’s what we call our “classical work” and those are now fixed. We basically congealed those over the years into their perfect state. But all the rest of it changes each time we do the show. So every time we do it, it really is different. And the work encourages that because each piece is handmade, and that handmade philosophy extends to the exhibitions as a whole. A way to think of these exhibitions is that each exhibition is a handmade installation.
The Association of Independent Commercial Producers held their annual AICP Awards Show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on June 7. Numerous film schools across the country competed in the Best Student Commercial category, and seven of the 10 national finalists were current Art Center film students. Undergraduate film major Ian Kammer won the highest honor— Best Student Commercial—with his North Face: Hibernation spot.
Art Center is proud to serve as a promotional partner for Dwell on Design, the West Coast’s largest design event.
Established by the editors of Dwell magazine, the three-day event returns to the Los Angeles Convention June 24 through 26. This year, Dwell on Design focuses on conceptual design and international talent, featuring two special exhibits by international design curators designboom, a new awards program recognizing outstanding international design, and a live art performance fresh from the Venice Bienniale show.
Dwell is offering Art Center students, alumni, faculty and staff special deals on tickets–including free exhibition tickets for students. For more information, visit http://dod.dwell.com/tickets.
For more information, including a complete schedule of events, exhibition details, guest speakers and more, check out the Dwell on Design website at dwellondesign.com.
What happens when a Transportation Design student visits Shanghai to study transportation patterns? Alum (and folding electric bike creator) Gabriel Wartofsky tells us in this installment of Art Center Stories.
Retromania. Gothic high-tech. Favela chic. Steampunk. Collective intelligence. Revival cults. Frankenstein mash-ups. Hauntology. The shock of the old: past, present and future in the first decade of the 21st-first century.
Thursday night, Art Center’s “Visionary in Residence” Bruce Sterling plays host to music critic and blogger Simon Reynolds, author of Energy Flash and Bring the Noise. The evening’s goal: to confront the implications of Simon’s latest book, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past.
Cyberpunk vs. Rock Critic: Bruce Sterling and Simon Reynolds
Thursday, June 16, 7:30 p.m.
L.A. Times Media Center
Hillside Campus
In today’s installment of Art Center Stories, Graphic Design alumna Anya Farquhar talks about her time at Art Center and conquering typography. Take a look:
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is hosting an exhibit on innovative and affordable designs to provide safe water, Internet solutions and entrepreneurship opportunities for people living in poverty.
The Design Innovation with the Base of the Pyramid exhibit will showcase solutions developed by the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para Mi Pais, a non-governmental organization based in Santiago, Chile. Six different safe water solutions developed by Designmatters students in partnership with the Innovation Center of Un Techo Para Mi Pais will be on display. These safe water solutions were developed by connecting design students with families living in poverty with limited access to running water and other basic services. In 2010, these solutions were used to help hundreds of Chileans affected by the earthquake.
The garden is the result of careful planning, partnership with Art Center Student Government and facilities, and the support of the College president and senior staff. This collaboration has resulted in a unique and beautiful garden design incorporating low-impact materials.
