Category Archives: Illustration

Chinese immersion: Alum’s award-winning agency behind high-adrenaline campaign

An immersive experience that’s part of a campaign in China created for Under Armour by David Schwarz and Hush Studios. (Photo courtesy of Hush Studios)

An immersive experience that’s part of a campaign in China created for Under Armour by David Schwarz and Hush Studios. (Photo courtesy of Hush Studios)

In the United States, if you want to push yourself physically there’s a competitive infrastructure in place, from t-ball to the pros, to help you achieve your goals. That’s not so much the case in China, says David Schwarz (Graduate Media Design ’04), creative partner at Hush, the New York-based design agency: “The minute percentage of the population that are seen as having athletic ability are whisked away at a young age and put on an Olympic track.”

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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.

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

Art Center invades Myspace homepage

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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View from the Bridge: Art Center’s incoming class, the LEAP Symposium and bringing the Bard to Lida Street

President Lorne M. Buchman

President Lorne M. Buchman

Being surrounded each and every day by thought-provoking ideas and inspiring individuals is perhaps the greatest benefit of working at Art Center. As President, I’m in a unique position to see so much of the remarkable work created here.

A clear side effect—and thankfully, it’s a good one—is that at the end of the day I have a lot on my mind. Which is why I’d like to start sharing with you here, on occasion, my thoughts on what I’m seeing, hearing and experiencing around campus and in the larger community.

First things first: The Fall 2013 term is well underway. Before we reach that busy midterm crunch, I’d like to tell you a few things about our latest incoming class. After receiving the highest number of applicants across all disciplines in our 83-year history, Art Center this fall welcomed 361 undergraduates and 68 graduate students, our largest incoming class ever. The increase reflects the strength and growth of our academic programs, as well as the planned expansion envisioned in Create Change, Art Center’s 2011–2016 strategic plan.

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Alum Neil Shigley makes the invisible visible

 

Illustration alum, Neil Shigley with block prints including, at left, Michael 67 (Pastor Shelby).

Illustration alum Neil Shigley with block prints including, at left, Michael 67 (Pastor Shelby).

For the portrait artist, block printing is a particularly labor-intensive form. For San Diego-based Neil Shigley, it’s a labor of love.

The Art Center Illustration alum, who documents his adopted city’s homeless in search of “the most honest portrayal that I can get,” is among 48 artists whose work is included in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, a juried exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery on view through Feb. 23, 2014.

“They are people who are, to most of us, invisible. They are the homeless,” says Shigley’s artist statement. “I have focused my art on capturing the incredible character that life on the streets has given these individuals, many of whom are from my neighborhood near downtown San Diego. As a human being I can’t help but feel compassion . . . and by presenting them in this large format perhaps it will bring them into focus. Making them visible.”

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Station to Station and Mirror place Doug Aitken at the epicenter of underground art

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All great art (and even some of the mediocre stuff) can be transporting. Conceptual artist Doug Aitken (ILLU ’91) took that idea into the realm of the literal with his latest project, Station to Station, a traveling public art project for which he has commandeered a cross-country train and turned it into “a moving, kinetic light sculpture, which will broadcast unique content and experiences to a global audience.” The traveling exhibit, which kicked off on September 6, brings together groundbreaking artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers and chefs for a series of pop-up festivals taking place at train stations along the two costs and at stops in between. And with Levis sponsoring the whole enterprise, don’t expect this to be a typical beer-in-plastic-cups underground art scene affair. Aitken managed to recruit a lineup of iconic creators, including Cat Power, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Jackson Browne, Patti Smith, Beck, Urs Fischer, Alice Waters, Ed Ruscha and Rick Moody among others.

If you miss that train, don’t fret. Just book a trip to the Emerald City and be sure to stop by the Seattle Art Museum to see Mirror, a new permanent installation by Aitken that wraps itself around the downtown museum’s northwestern façade. Unveiled in March, the monumental LED display features a horizontal band of projected images that dissolve into narrow columns of light running up and down the building. To create the images, Aitken shot a vast archive of video footage of the Pacific Northwest that can be choreographed—for Mirror’s public unveiling, the work was synchronized to music by minimalist composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley—and that can also respond to the installation’s changing urban environment, so that ephemeral factors like weather and traffic all help Mirror decide what to reflect.

For more on Aitken and the Mirror exhibit, check out the Dot magazine story here.

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

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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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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

Nurture the right brain, feed the left

Scott Griffiths

Scott Griffiths

Art Center alum (’79) Scott Griffiths, who launched 18|8 Fine Men’s Salons in 2002, has a track record of creating breakthrough brands. He recently began franchising 18|8, sharing the opportunity for driven entrepreneurs. Griffiths is a recognized marketing and branding trendsetter who has created and built industry-leading companies across several sectors, including within the salon segment.

Though I’m currently functioning in the business world as the owner and developer of 18/8 Fine Men’s salons with company-owned stores and a franchise business (18/8 is expanding nationally with target goal of 1,600 salons), I was trained first as an artist and designer at the Art Center College of Design.

Because of that experience, I see and think in pictures. I paint in my mind. The process of painting — working in layers, textures…adding and taking away — is conducive to entrepreneurship and building my businesses. (I have led or been on the leadership team for 20 start ups and early stage companies). My training from Art Center helps me think more like Mickey Mouse conducting in “Fantasia“ than like Gordon Gecko in “Wall Street.” After more than three decades, I’m still an artist at heart.

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2013 Great Teacher Award-winner, Richard Keyes, delivers graduation address. Student-drawn allegory included.

 

Illustration by Katia Grifols

Illustration by Katia Grifols

Richard Keyes didn’t stay long the first time he took the stage at Art Center’s 2013 Summer commencement ceremony to accept the Great Teacher Award. That’s likely because he knew he’d return shortly in his other capacity, as the event’s keynote speaker. Keyes, who is both an alum (Graphic Design ’87) and beloved faculty member has made a habit of multitasking throughout his career at Art Center, where he straddles five departments — Graduate Industrial Design, Entertainment Design, Photography, Integrated Studies and Art Center at Night. For insight into why he received the highest honor awarded by Art Center students, look no further than the speech itself (posted in its entirety below), which culminates in a moving fable, accompanied by a slideshow of images hand-drawn by student, Katia Grifols, who has been Keyes’ T.A. for three terms.   

You have reason to expect a celebrity sending you off into the world today, but you are getting a teacher. Conversely, when I came to Art Center 30 years ago I occasionally expected teachers and got celebrities, so I hope I can redress the balance somewhat. But not before I state how much I have learned from you, quite probably the most impressive student body in the creative world.

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