Photograph by Damon Casarez for the New York Times
From The New York Times to Esquire, from Cannes to the Venice Biennale — Art Center alums have been busy making, making headlines and making their talents known within some of the world’s most prestigious events, platforms and publications. In addition to this primer on their accomplishments, we’re also inviting the Art Center alumni community to nominate candidates for this year’s Art Center Alumni Awards. Read on to learn more.
Built with a team of artists and designers, Art Center Humanities & Sciences faculty Norman Klein and Margo Bistis released The Imaginary 20th Century, a ‘wunder-roman’ online narrative engine where fact and fiction split off and return to each other to tell the story in a unique form.
The Imaginary 20th Century is a tale of seduction, as well as espionage; of archiving and the transitive poetics of excavation. According to legend, in 1901 a woman named Carrie selects four men to seduce her, each with a version of the coming century. Inevitably, the future always spills off course. We navigate through the suitors’ worlds, follow Carrie on her travels and discover what she and her lovers forgot to notice. In 1917, Carrie’s uncle sets up a massive archive of her life. For decades, Uncle Harry had worked for the oligarchs of Los Angeles erasing crimes that might prove embarrassing. Thus, as he often explains, seduction itself is a form of espionage. In 2004, this archive was unearthed in Los Angeles.
Sterling Ruby, MFA 05, Art, courtesy KCET
Art Center’s students, faculty, staff and alumni continue to make news around the world. For those who may have missed a headline or two, we’ve curated this handy highlight reel of our recent media clips.
Chelsea Clinton at SXSW Interactive 2014
The final day of SXSW Interactive has now taken on a different cast; in light of the tragic car crash that claimed two festival-goers’ lives and injured many more. Our deepest condolences go out to the families of those victims.
Even though the festival was technically winding down; passion, engagement and insight revved high throughout the day’s panels and presentations. The conference had successfully lived up to its interactive title. Many themes in the 2014 program were plucked from a virtual suggestion box, including this year’s focus on tech’s role in social change, culminating with Chelsea Clinton’s galvanizing closing keynote address (more on that later). In fact, all of the events we attended on that final day—from presentations by TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie—were informed, either directly or indirectly, by a socially conscious approach to technological innovation.
Philip Ross’s “Mycotecture” series, part of the Williamson Gallery’s “Intimate Science” exhibition.
Bricks. You know, those hard rectangular cubes made of heavy solid stuff like cement, stone, concrete, rock . . . and fungus. Yes, fungus. Clean, lightweight, extremely durable, sustainable, (dead) fungus. There’s a sculpture made of those fungal bricks shaped into a half-arc tunnel – not to mention two fungus-grown chairs – on display in the Williamson Gallery’s current exhibitionIntimate Science (through August 18).
Known for its curatorial connections to the burgeoning ArtScience movement, the Williamson Gallery’s recent projects have extended this theme to include artists who are productively reckless when considering the boundaries between traditional domains. Stitching together performance, installation art, design, citizen science, and maker-ingenuity into a complex fabric of artistic practice, ArtScience artists are challenging older single-channel paradigms.
Originally organized by curator Andrea Grover for Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery and now on a national tour, Intimate Science includes a compelling assemblage of crossover objects and intentions. The exhibition’s stop at the hillside campus has brought works by artists from London, Seattle, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Tokyo to join hometown L.A. participant Machine Project in provoking students, faculty, staff and a stream of inquisitive visitors.
Two recent workshops organized by Machine Project transformed a section of the gallery into an interactive learning lab for unconventional artistic palettes. Attendees examined processes that might inform future hybrid projects by harnessing the behavior of sound vibrations and twisting auditory perceptions, and interfacing with the dynamics of electricity and the natural flow of current in the human body.
At the exhibition’s opening reception on May 30, scientists from Caltech and Jet Propulsion Lab mixed with artists, designers, writers, students, faculty, and the generally curious. Carnegie Mellon’s Astria Suparak remarked on bringing the exhibition to Art Center’s gallery: “We were thrilled to open Intimate Science at the Williamson Gallery — to have the opportunity to bring the gallery’s work to Los Angeles, to be seen by a wider audience and have a larger impact.”
The creative energy around campus is kicking into high gear as the College prepares for its series of Summer graduation events.
Thursday, August 16
If you’re lucky enough to be on the invite list for Graduation Show Preview, you’ll get a sneak peak at the work of the next generation of artists and designers. Held from 6:00 to 9:30 p.m. at Hillside Campus, the preview gives potential employers, alumni, donors and industry professionals an opportunity to preview the Graduation Show and meet our graduating students.
Immediately following the preview, all guests are invited to a reception hosted by Alumni Relations to welcome our graduating students into the alumni family.
Saturday, August 18
Join us at Hillside Campus from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. as we celebrate the accomplishments of our newest graduating class and present the Art Center Student Leadership Award to Product Design student Jenn Kuca.
We will also be presenting the Great Teacher Award to: Product Design instructor Pascual Wawoe (New Teacher); Environmental Design and Humanities and Design Sciences instructors Penny Herscovitch and Dan Gottlieb (Part-Time Faculty); and Illustration and Entertainment Design instructor Will Weston (Full-Time Faculty), who will also deliver the graduating class commencement address.
Can’t join us for the graduation ceremony? Watch our live online webcast.
After the ceremony, Graduation Show opens to the public from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. so everyone can enjoy the work of our newest Art Center graduates.
Let the celebration of our creative community begin!
Phas running shoes, designed by graduating Product Design student Jenn Kuca.
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.
For more information and to read the full announcement of all the CAA 2012 Awards for Distinction, please see http://www.collegeart.org/awards/2012awards
Earlier this year, the Art Center Student Government, together with Student Affairs and the Provost’s Office, together reinstated an annual Great Teacher Award.
The relaunched and revised awards will be presented annually at Summer Term graduation to one full-time, one part-time and one new faculty member, beginning at next week’s ceremony. The recipients are determined through a nomination process open to all enrolled students and a confidential selection committee of students.
The awards are sponsored by the Provost’s Office and Art Center Student Government, and coordinated by Student Affairs. We’re pleased to announce the Great Teacher Award recipients for 2011:
New Teacher:
AFFONSO BEATO
Undergraduate Film Department
Part-Time Faculty:
ERROL GERSON
Humanities and Design Sciences Department
Full-Time Faculty:
HEIDRUN MUMPER-DRUMM
Graphic Design Department
Product Design Department
Humanities & Design Sciences Department
Student Government has requested that Heidrun Mumper-Drumm deliver the Summer 2011 Graduating Class Commencement Address on August 20. The ceremony will begin at 5 p.m. and will be immediately followed by Graduation Show.
Congratulations Affonso, Errol and Heidrun!
Art Center is also taking nominations for the 2011 Art Center Alumni Awards, presented annually at Fall Term Graduation. The Alumni Awards provide Art Center an opportunity to publicly recognize the talent, service and design influence of our alumni.
Nomination categories are: Lifetime Achievement, Outstanding Service and Young Alumni Innovator. Please send all nominations to the Alumni Relations office, alumni@artcenter.edu by Oct. 15.
On Monday, Occidental College professor Dale Wright was on campus as part of the Big Picture lecture series to talk about Buddhism, Buddhist wisdom and creativity.
The most 
entertaining part of the talk, however, was the story of the Zen Master who came looking for the Wild West—and how he found it.
Wright met the Zen Master at a conference in New Mexico. The Master had traveled from Japan in large part because of his love for all things Western—especially Western movies. The first night of the conference, the Master talked Wright into walking into town in search of a “saloon.”
Wright tried to talk him out of it, explaining that things had changed, and that today’s cowboys rode pick-up trucks instead of horses. Not to mention, he doubted that there was a saloon in the small town, anyway.
The Master was not deterred, so he and Wright set out for town on foot—the Zen Master in his robe, wooden sandals and shaved head.
Don’t miss Monday’s Big Picture Lecture Series featuring Penny Florence, who will present the lecture, “Art is Intensely Political: Why You Should Be Interested in Digital Poetry and the Sexed Subject.”
Florence is Chair of Humanities and Design Sciences at Art Center and professor emeritus at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from the University of York, U.K., and has lectured at universities across Europe and the U.S., including Art Center’s Graduate Art program. She has written or edited six interdisciplinary books traversing visual art and theory, film, poetry, painting and feminism, and contributed to 17 others.
Please note: Originally scheduled for July 12, Sandra Ball-Rokeach’s Big Picture lecture on The Seeds of Civic Engagement in Contemporary Urban Communities has been rescheduled for fall.
Big Picture Lecture Series: Penny Florence
Art is Intensely Political: Why You Should Be Interested in Digital Poetry and the Sexed Subject
Monday, July 12, 1 pm
Los Angeles Time Media Center, Hillside Campus