San Marino League hosts highly anticipated Art Walk XXVII to benefit Art Center, The Huntington

The San Marino League, a nonprofit organization of women committed to philanthropic work in the community, has been supporting fine arts in the San Gabriel Valley for almost 60 years. The League’s relationship with Art Center dates back to the College’s earliest days in Pasadena and to date the League has donated more than $580,000 to Art Center.

On Friday, April 4 and Saturday, April 5 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. the League will host its biennial fundraiser, Art Walk XXVII, in appreciation of art, architecture and landscape design. A $40 ticket to Art Walk XXVII provides rare entry into four beautiful Pasadena homes and gardens and grants attendees access to amazing private art collections. The featured homes include a classic Mediterranean with Portuguese chimneys, an exquisitely restored Craftsman Japanese Farmhouse, a grandeur of French regency and a stunningly inspired French Provincial.

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Captured on tape: Craigslist in all its humanity

Tape Classified. Though it may sound like a chapter in a book on the Watergate scandal, in this case, those two loaded words are meant to be taken literally as the title and source materials for the first mural installed in the warehouse-sized West Gallery of 870 Raymond, the latest addition to Art Center’s South Campus complex.

Measuring just shy of 70 feet, the installation consists of student-created images made from black drafting tape inspired by ads on Craigslist. The mural’s concept was rooted in the students’ desire to tell many loosely connected stories—each sharing the same narrative DNA from a community. The idea is based on one person’s trash (or Mid-Century Womb Chair) is inevitably another person’s treasure.

Instructor Brian Rea is thrilled with the results. “This one mural tells 80 stories with individual illustrations,” says Rea. “With eight different students, all with different styles, different attitudes; it’s been really interesting to try and systemize that on a wall.”

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View from the Bridge: A renovation designed for creation, innovation and collaboration

The 870 building at sunrise. Photo: Darin Johnstone Architects

The 870 building at sunrise. Photo: ©Lawrence Anderson/Esto

As a teacher, I understand well the difference a space can make in the quality of the educational experience. Space affects learning. It makes a difference in how people teach. It makes a difference in how people create.

Which is why when you embark on creating a new space, you want to get it right. You need to talk to the right people and to ask the right questions if you wish to build that place where students can thrive and where faculty will love teaching. You want the space to elevate the whole.

A lot of careful thought went into making sure the new Fine Art and Illustration building at South Campus, 870 S. Raymond Ave. would engender the highest quality teaching and learning possible. I have no doubt that the building will do exactly that. Move through the new space, and you can feel it. It’s buoyant. It’s alive. You feel open to experience, to learning, to discovery—all thanks to the environment itself.

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Speed making: Art Center students make a clean sweep in Dyson’s rapid prototyping workshops

Before James Dyson first mesmerized TV viewers with his early demonstrations of his sleekly designed and innovatively engineered vacuum cleaner, capable of coaxing the dirt from off any surface, home cleaning devices were many things but sexy wasn’t one of them. But after Dyson’s invention captured the popular imagination (not to mention a landfill’s worth of grit and grime) and became the industry standard for home suction, consumers’ perceptions (and expectations) of vacuums were forever altered, in terms of both performance and prettiness.

Though such paradigm shifting innovations are dependent upon a mysterious combination of luck, timing, research and inspiration. The Dyson company has continued to expand upon its success by upholding its high standards for innovative design and engineering. Cultivating the next generation of design innovators is another vital part of the company’s forward-thinking ethos. To that end, the James Dyson Foundation has been rewarding ground-breaking feats of creative engineering with the James Dyson Award, created in 2002, which offers a $45,000 prize to a design that “solves a problem.”

The foundation has recently started seeding the field by conducting design engineering workshops with K-12 students in Chicago. Last week that strategy graduated to the college level, when a team of Dyson engineers lead Art Center students from three departments — Transportation, Product Design and Graduate Industrial Design — in an exercise testing their teamwork, problem-solving, creativity and craftsmanship.

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We shall not see his like again: Remembering Photography alum Wayne F. Miller

“We began as artist and dealer, but it developed into the most important personal relationship I made in my 16 years in the field,” says Chicago gallery director Paul Berlanga of his friend, Art Center alumnus Wayne Forest Miller (Photography ’41). They met in 2001, at an exhibition of Miller’s work at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Gallery. “After a momentary glance at his work on the walls [the Bronzeville series], I knew the Stephen Daiter Gallery needed to represent this man.” Miller, a Chicago native, was 82 years old at the time, with a long and legendary career behind him — World War II photographer in Edward Steichen’s elite U.S. Navy Combat Photo Unit, member of Magnum Photos, and recipient of two consecutive Guggenheim Fellowships for his landmark project documenting the African American community on Chicago’s South Side in the late 1940s. Miller, who lived in the Bay Area with his wife of 70 years, passed away on May 22, 2013. Berlanga gave a eulogy at the California memorial service last fall, and now shares his memories of the photographer — “Wayne always preferred ‘working photographer’ to artist” — with Dotted Line.

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Chatting with the creator and recipient of the Hoffmitz|Kondrup Excellence in Typography Award

Alex Aristei Like most dedicated Art Center instructors, Professor Gloria Kondrup (MFA ’93 Graphics/Packaging) is always looking for creative ways to encourage, inspire and support her students. In 2013, she and legendary Graphic Design instructor Professor Leah Hoffmitz Milken established the Hoffmitz|Kondrup Excellence in Typography Award. Created as part of their Legacy Circle membership with a gift from the Lowell Milken Family Foundation, the Award is given once each year to an upper-term Graphic Design student who demonstrates excellence in typography across all media.

We brought Kondrup and first-ever Award recipient Quinton Larson together to chat about the award and their love of typography.

Art Center: Gloria, what was the motivation behind creating the Hoffmitz|Kondrup Excellence in Typography Award?

Gloria Kondrup: Leah and I share a love of type and language. As instructors we regularly saw students struggle financially to stay in school. The Award is a way to celebrate typography while providing meaningful financial support to a top Graphic Design student.

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Reflecting on African American History Month’s many shades of meaning to students of art and design

Illustration of Dominican fruit by Medar de la Cruz

“One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

Before coming to Pasadena I rarely thought about how significant the color of my skin was to my everyday life. I was raised in a neighborhood in Miami, Florida where I was part of a majority consisting of residents who were either immigrants, multi-lingual or people of color.

Medar de la Cruz

But when I came to Art Center I realized I no longer fit in as easily. It was here that I was first asked: “Are you black?” This made me realize that race was going to make an impact on my experiences. It’s normal for people to be affected by stereotypes and visual representations. And it’s normal to make assumptions about someone by the color of their skin. So when I was asked this, I responded, “Yes…I mean I’m not white. My parents are Dominican, my ancestors are African, and I was born in America. So technically that makes me African American as well.” I learned that question alone helps me define who I am.

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Tiffany Trenda at Salon Hysterique: If you attend one feminist new media art opening this year, this would be a good bet

Tiffany Trenda performing Urban Devotion, October 30, 2010. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photograph © Tiffany Trenda 2011

New media performance artist and Art Center alum, Tiffany Trenda (Fine Art, ’02) will unveil her video installation, Le Grande Odalisque, at SALON HYSTERIQUE in London next Tuesday, from 6 to 10 p.m. For those of us stranded on this side of the pond, here’s an advance glimpse at the spirit animating Trenda’s work, the soiree and the larger show of like-minded creative provocateurs, which runs through April 19, 2014.

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A young Art Center film student finds her tribe at Sundance 2014

Second term Film student, Laura Holliday (left) poses at Sundance with her high school mentor, Betty Bailey

Second term Film student, Laura Holliday (right) poses at Sundance with her high school mentor, Betty Bailey

I always assumed I had no business attending large prestigious film festivals until I had a movie showing there. So, as an undergraduate film student in only my second term at Art Center, I figured it would be a long time before I ended up at one of them. However, after getting the opportunity to attend the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, I can say confidently that any film student or movie lover has a place there, and can benefit boundlessly from being immersed in a scene ripe with creative energy and opportunities to connect.

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Donor scholarship enables South African student to realize her artistic dreams

Therese Swanepoel's final envisions a electrifying vision of Coachella

Therese Swanepoel’s final envisioned a electrifying vision of Coachella

Therese Swanepoel understands better than most people how a scholarship can change a life. The second-term Environmental Design major was on the brink of dropping out of Art Center due to unexpected financial hardship when she learned that she had been selected as the first recipient of the Joseph and Rebecca Lacko Annual Scholarship.

She was visiting her parents in her home country of South Africa when she got the news via email. “I simply started crying,” Swanepoel recalls. “My family assumed something bad had happened and soon found out that my tears were tears of joy.”

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