Jennifer Steinkamp’s Murmuration
Summer 2014 has yielded a bounty of freshly produced works, events and ideas by Art Center alumni. And look for future editions of this dispatch to be equally flush, given July’s bumper crop of kickstarter campaigns. Read on to learn more…and get in on the fun(ding).
Brandcamp branding copy
Going from high school to Art Center’s highly intense undergraduate degree program can be a challenge for even the most ambitious student. Recent high school graduate Sydney Li is bridging that transition by participating in Brandcamp, Saturday High’s four-week Summer Intensive focusing on Advertising and Graphic Design.
Thanks to scholarship support from the Richard and Jean Coyne Family Foundation, Sydney is able to pursue her classes without financial concern. She agreed to check in with us before, during and after Brandcamp to share her experience. This is our second conversation with her.
Saturday High’s four-week Summer Intensives are known for their, well, intensity. The rigorous, four-week programs immerse students in studio classes and lectures on disciplines like Industrial Design, Entertainment Design, Advertising and Graphic Design, ending with a final exhibition of student work.
Recent high school graduate Sydney Li is one of a handful of students to receive a full scholarship to attend Brandcamp, Saturday High’s Intensive focusing on Advertising and Graphic Design beginning July 7. We asked Sydney to share her experiences before, during and after Brandcamp to get her impressions of the experience.
Here is the first of three conversations with Sydney:
Art Center: Congratulations on Brandcamp and on your scholarship, which was created by through support from the Richard and Jean Coyne Family Foundation. Will this be your first Saturday High experience?
Sydney Li: I’ve taken Saturday High classes in Graphic Design and Advertising, as well as Design 360, which looks at different design majors. Brandcamp will be my first Summer Intensive.
Michael Gottlieb
It is with great sadness that I write to inform you of the passing of our colleague and member of the film faculty, Michael Gottlieb. Michael was in a tragic motorcycle accident late last week, and we are deeply pained by his loss. He was 69 years old.
Writer/Producer/Director/Photographer Michael Gottlieb was raised in New York. The man whom he thought of as a father, Dr. Francisco Marino, was a prominent psychiatrist who mentored Michael through his teen years and beyond. Michael began his professional career working as an assistant on film and photo shoots and found great success as a fashion photographer. This, in turn, led to his becoming a Clio Award-winning commercial director and cinematographer, making many national spots for such clients as Xerox, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s.
Dana L. Walker: measured spaces: diptych 1
Dana L. Walker is an Art Center all-star: a multi-talented player who excels in every position she plays. Walker is the director of Art Center at Night and managing director of Art Center’s suite of public programs (including Art Center for Kids, Saturday High and Summer Institute for Teachers). She is also an Art Center alumna, holding a BFA from the Photography and Imaging program. She also happens to be an occasional Art Center at Night student and an artist in her own right.
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.
Saturday High and Art Center at Night instructor Graham Moore. Photo: Gregory Firlotte
If you’ve been to the vinyl section of Amoeba Music in Hollywood lately, you’ve no doubt noticed a window display featuring cut up and reconfigured album covers by artists like The B-52s, Martin Denny and David Bowie.
That display was created by Saturday High and Art Center at Night instructor Graham Moore, a U.K.-born artist and graphic designer who studied at Wimbledon School of Art and East Ham College of Technology and came to the City of Angels via London.
In addition to Amoeba Music, his other clients have included The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Mazda and JCPenney. His work has been shown at several venues, including Modern Way in Palm Springs, Barnsdall Art Center in Hollywood, and La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Feliz, which included three of his latest works in its annual group show, Laluzapalooza.
Moore’s Inner Circle, featured on the cover of the latest Saturday High catalog, is a prime example of his ongoing “Redux” series, 12”x12” works in which he cuts up vintage album covers (mostly from the ‘60s) and reconfigures them into vibrant, often abstract arrangements.
Cassini’s ringed target: Saturn.
“Right across the Arroyo, we’re making plans for a real close encounter,” says Dave Doody, whose Art Center At Night seminar, “Basics of Interplanetary Flight,” is currently recruiting participants for a class that’s literally out of this world. “My team has been piloting the gangly robot Cassini in wide orbits around Saturn since 2010. But in coming years we’re going to drop in for some up-close-and-personal visits. We’ll plunge the spacecraft between the rings and the planet 22 times before letting go of the spent machine so it can burn up in the gas giant’s atmosphere like a meteor.”
This 2016-2017 segment of Cassini’s 20 year mission has been temporarily dubbed the “Proximal Orbits” by mission planners at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where Doody works as a senior engineer, currently leading the Saturn-bound spacecraft’s flight operations controllers. But after acknowledging that some creative person somewhere could almost certainly conjure a more mission-worthy name, NASA launched the Cassini Name Game, hoping for some better ideas.
“One thing about these orbits will be their huge roller coaster speed,” says Doody. “The camera-laden craft will reach more than 120,000 kilometers an hour as it screams past the innermost ring particles just above the hazy atmosphere. Next, it’ll slow down for three and a quarter days, coasting ‘up’ to the top of its 1.2 million kilometer-high peak, before starting to drop back in again for its next pass. Wild.”
Creative duo Jack-Anthony Collier and Melissa Thomas as featured in their zine Birdscouts.
She’s a copywriter at Deutsch. He’s a copywriter for Mullen. Together, they’ve worked on campaigns for companies like Taco Bell, AT&T, Carls Jr., Kia and JetBlue.
But Art Center Advertising alumni Melissa Thomas (BFA 12) and Jack-Anthony Collier recently put their professional interests aside to tackle one of today’s most pressing issues: the dreaded boom mic mistake. Their solution? CATBOOM.
Okay, on a more serious note, today these creative partners are preparing to channel their creative energy in a different direction. This summer, they’ll be teaching at Art Center’s continuing education program, Art Center at Night, helping students get their advertising portfolios in shape in Advertising Portfolio Workshop.
“We’ll be going through the students’ books, and offering suggestions on how to improve and tighten them up,” says Collier. “We’ll be reviewing their work from an agency’s perspective before they head out into the big wide world.”
And of course, there will be fun.
After years of all-nighters fueled by coffee, critiques, cramming for finals and collaboration, 192 Art Center students will graduate on Saturday. This ceremony includes the very first graduating class for the Graduate Environmental Design and Graduate Transportation Design Programs. In fact, we have a record number, 36, students accepting graduate level degrees on Saturday. Also notable, 25% of this graduating class attended one or more of Art Center’s Public Programs (Art Center at Night or Saturday High).
