Kristin Chenoweth and Sean Nalaboff on the set of “Hard Sell”

After wrapping a 19-day movie shoot near his hometown in Long Island, alumnus Sean Nalaboff, who graduated in 2012 with a BFA in film, is moving forward with gusto. Mentored by fellow Art Center alumnus, acclaimed photographer-director Matthew Rolston, Nalaboff has attracted a lot of attention to his nascent filmmaking career, even as he toils in a dark edit bay putting the finishing touches on his directorial debut, Hard Sell.

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Lou Danziger (center) with student and former Art Center instructor Roland Young (left) and student and former Advertising Department Chair Mikio Osaki (right).

Lou Danziger is a pillar of West Coast design. He has worked as a designer, art director and consultant since 1949, bringing his talents to a diverse list of institutions, from Microsoft to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Danziger studied at Art Center in the late 1940s and went on to become a legendary instructor at the College as well as at institutions like Chouinard, the California Institute of the Arts and Harvard University. And he recently turned 90 years old.

To celebrate the occasion, earlier this month at the Public Programs gallery at South Campus, Art Center held Danziger@90, an exhibition and appreciation of Danziger’s work and teaching, organized and curated by instructor and former Advertising Department Chair Elena Salij. In addition to Danziger himself, the event attracted more than 150 individuals–with some guests traveling from as far away as Hong Kong–former students of Danziger’s from Harvard, California Institute of the Arts and Art Center.

Past and present leaders and instructors from the Advertising department were at the event, including Chair Gary Goldsmith, former Chair Mikio Osaki and former instructor Roland Young. Other guests included former President David Brown, Provost Fred Fehlau, alumnus and JPL Visual Strategist Daniel Goods and Williamson Gallery director Stephen Nowlin.

The audience to this intimate event were treated to a presentation of Danziger’s work along with his singular philosophy and timeless insight.

We’re pleased to present to you a taste of the event below.

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President Lorne M. Buchman moderating at “The Future of Knowledge” event. Photo: John Dlugolecki

Last week I had the pleasure of moderating an evening panel on “The Future of Knowledge” with the co-authors of Digital_Humanities, a recent publication from MIT Press. Introducing the Art Center Dialogues event in the Ahmanson Auditorium was one of the book’s co-authors: our very own Anne Burdick, Chair of Art Center’s Media Design Practices. In her remarks, she mused that “our bombastic title is actually a serious proposition,” and the presentations and discussion that followed were certainly provocative and opened several important questions about teaching and research in the humanities.

Digital Humanities replaces “the paper” with “the project,” looking to the multi-modal and project-based orientation that is at the heart of creative studio practice. The authors argue that our current ideas about knowledge, interpretation and the cultural record developed in tandem with our long history with print. The digital information age upends old ideas about author, archive, memory and knowledge itself. The book positions designers (and by implication what we teach here at Art Center) as having a major contribution to make as these notions reconfigure along with the technology.

The question of how best to integrate the humanities into Art Center’s curriculum is one I care about very much, and I thank the co-authors—who, in addition to Burdick, included Johanna Drucker, a professor in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies; Peter Lunenfeld, former Art Center instructor and professor at UCLA’s Design Media Arts; Todd Presner, chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities program; and Jeffrey Schnapp, faculty director of metaLAB at Harvard—for a wonderfully engaging evening.

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George Widodo’s witty campaign for Joe’s Pizza.

The best way to understand the essence of Art Center is to pay a visit to Pasadena and get to know some students. The quickest (and cheapest) route, however, is to travel to our recently refreshed “Students” page where you’ll find a mosaic of Polaroid-style snapshots of unfamiliar faces, containing inspiring Q&As about each student’s creative journey.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of deeper dives into the creative lives of those profile subjects, with highlights from the body of work they’ve produced at Art Center. Today’s installment looks at the winding path that lead George Widodo to study Advertising at Art Center.

How/Why did you choose Art Center?
Art Center has a reputation on its own among art schools in California and greater parts of the world for having graduates who simply don’t work at Starbucks. From what I had heard and perceived, this school is a military base camp for the creative minds. Art Center allows me to relentlessly train all the muscles in my right brain.

What was your background prior to Art Center?
Science School + Otis College of Art and Design + Life full of curiosity.

Biggest creative challenge/breakthrough you’ve faced while at Art Center?
Getting ideas, great ones. Ideas are free, anyone can grab them, yet they cannot be controlled, confined, or formulated. It has, is, and will be the challenge of every creative who makes a living with conceptual thinking.

In what ways has Art Center helped you grow as an artist/designer?
Work ethic, lifetime opportunities and the realization of how much power an artist has to influence the world.

Describe your most gratifying collaboration with a faculty member or another student?
Working on a real brief, representing the school to collaborate with Wieden + Kennedy.

How has Art Center changed your worldview and/or creative sensibility?
Everything created and invented is interesting. In visual arts, nothing is new under the umbrella. There are only new ways of seeing things.

How do you hope to change the world through your work?
I commit to make advertising that is intelligent and memorable, which compels you to think and act.

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