Tag Archives: 870 Raymond

Carol Johnson’s WWII illustrations on view at Art Center’s Hutto-Patterson Exhibition Hall

Drawing-FireThe following Pasadena Now article adds a concise bit of context to Art Center’s new show of work by illustrator Carol Johnson. The exhibit opens today in the College’s newest gallery space, the Hutto-Patterson Exhibition Hall, located within South Campus’ Illustration and Fine Art hub at 870 South Raymond Avenue. This show offers a rare glimpse at both Johnson’s uniquely evocative illustrated narrative about WWII and, ultimately, our evolving relationship with war and how its atrocities and triumphs are conveyed and covered. And for those who have yet to visit Art Center’s newest building, this ongoing exhibition also represents the perfect opportunity to pay a visit to the meticulously renovated former US Post Office warehouse. 

Art Center College of Design presents Drawing Fire, an exhibition curated by alumnus Brody Albert, bringing attention to the work of his grandfather, illustrator Carol Johnson. As a World War II correspondent, Johnson helped translate the immediate experience of war into raw observational sketches for nationally syndicated newspapers, conveying a first hand experience of the war into the households of thousands of Americans.

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Close encounters of the Mac Pro kind

Mac Pros at 870

Like a fleet of alien spacecraft, over 50 new Mac Pros have landed at 870, melded with the network and firmly attached to new Wacom Cintiq touchscreen monitors. To the delight of Illustration and Fine Art students, these strange new digital organisms have taken root and are ready to start turning out some serious teraflops (1 Trillion floating-point operations per second)!

The new Mac Pro has been eagerly anticipated since its announcement last year at The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC); and it represents the next wave in desktop computing, boasting dual GPUs, PCIe flash storage, high-performance Thunderbolt 2 peripheral connectivity, new-generation Xeon processors, ultrafast memory, and support for up to three (count ‘em, 3) 4K monitors (That’s… ehem… over 24 million pixels at up to 60 frames per second = over 1 Billion pixels per second).

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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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