Tag Archives: ArtCenter College of Design

Persistence, perseverance and Pixar paved the path to The Dam Keeper’s Oscar nomination

Robert Kondo, co-director of Tonko House’s short The Dam Keeper. Photo: Jennie Warren

In the 2015 Academy Award-nominated animated short The Dam Keeper, a young pig selflessly operates a windmill to keep a poisonous cloud from destroying his town.

Keeping imminent disaster at bay doesn’t seem to be an issue for Illustration alumnus Robert Kondo (BFA 02), who co-directed the film along with Dice Tsutsumi, the first project to emerge from their Berkeley-based animation studio Tonko House.

Take, for example, the story of how Kondo landed his first job. He recalls feeling sick one day during his final term at ArtCenter, walking out of class and heading to the parking lot to recuperate in his car.

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Watch legendary artists create OUTSIDEIN: The Ascendance of Street Art in Visual Culture

ArtCenter’s OUTSIDEIN exhibition, on display at both campuses through January 10, 2016, was inspired in part by the mural Keith Haring painted at the College’s Hillside Campus in 1989, commemorating the World Health Organization’s second annual AIDS Awareness Day. That piece, which took two days to paint, was Haring’s last completed work. Three months later he died of AIDS.

To commemorate Haring’s legacy as well today’s celebration of the 28th anniversary of AIDS Awareness Day, the above video traces the origins of ArtCenter’s longstanding relationship to street art and the insurgent role graffiti-based street murals have played in embedding social and political messages in an emerging, evolving and now mainstream form of creative expression. Combining in-depth artist interviews and time-lapse footage of their creative process, this piece provides a rare glimpse inside the creative process, connecting the dots between the legacy of this subversive art form to its current role as an arbiter of pop culture aesthetics and an access point for popular engagement with the arts.

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Blazing a luminous trajectory: Doug Aitken, Jen Rosenstein, Mark Ryden and Lawrence Carroll

Doug Aitken, Station to Station. Courtesy Regen Projects.

1. Since graduating from ArtCenter nearly 25 years ago, Doug Aitken (BFA 91 Illustration) has blazed a luminous trajectory. From his breakout Electric Earth video installation at the 1999 Whitney Biennial, to the nomadic Station to Station (2013), the Southern California native creates multimedia works at once monumental and ephemeral.

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The overpowering and humbling beauty of UH-OH Frances Stark at the Hammer Museum

Frances Stark, My Best Thing, 2011. Digital video, color, sound. 100:00 min. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Purchase. Image courtesy of Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.

“’UH-OH’ is among the finest solo museum shows this year.” Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2015.

It is not often that an artist has both intrigued and intimidated me as much as Frances Stark (MFA 93). So it was with some trepidation that I set out to the Hammer Museum to see Stark’s mid-career retrospective, UH-OH: Frances Stark, 1991-2015, on view until January 24, 2016. The exhibition brings together more than two decades of Stark’s poetic compositions and autobiographical reflections, featuring 125 works, including the artist’s early carbon drawings, intricate collages, and mixed-media paintings as well as her more recent videos.

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ArtCenter master plan features affordable student housing and elevated quad and cycleway

ArtCenter’s vision for a South Campus student housing village, mobility hub, public gallery and park-like quad. (Image credit: Michael Maltzan Architecture / Tina Chee Landscape Studio)

ArtCenter College of Design has made public its new master plan, charting a 10-year vision for the future of the College’s physical campuses. At a November 12^th reception, nearby residents and business leaders were treated to an early look at the visionary proposal that will provide students with innovative learning and making spaces as well as much-needed housing. The College plans to break ground in 2017, following the City of Pasadena’s review process, to create a thriving art and culture educational urban destination.

Highlights of the plan include an elevated park-like quad that spans the Metro Gold Line tracks, a transportation hub, a cycleway, the transformation of Raymond Avenue into a tree-lined pedestrian-friendly road and a student housing village.

“This is mission-driven growth informed by the College’s conservatory-like approach to education,” said Lorne M. Buchman, president of ArtCenter College of Design. “We’re sharing our vision for rich, intercultural and transdisciplinary dialogue, and our goal is to ensure that institutional development is synonymous with meaningful change in the surrounding community.”

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LACMA exhibition pays tribute to the fruits of alum and Grad Art chair Diana Thater’s ‘Sympathetic Imagination’

Diana Thater in Pripyat, Ukraine, 2010. © Diana Thater, photo by Volodymyr Palylyk

On the eve of her highly anticipated midcareer survey Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination, opening November 22 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, we pay a studio visit to the ArtCenter alum and graduate department chair known for her groundbreaking film-, video-, and installation-based works.

She’s snorkeled with wild dolphins, regularly watches the Nat Geo channel and lives with four rescue cats. So it seems only natural that Graduate Art Chair Diana Thater (MFA 90) would use her empathy for animals as the foundation for a remarkable series of video and film installations dissecting the knotty dynamic between humankind and wildlife.

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Every day is Veterans Day for students in Designmatters’ The Healing Trauma Project

Army medics treat a victim of a bombing in Tikrit, Iraq in 2006. Photo: Christopher Stoltz

In this photo by veteran and current ArtCenter student Christopher Stoltz, Army medics treat a victim of a bombing in Tikrit, Iraq in 2006.

“When guest speakers come into the class, they can spot me in the crowd and instantly tell I’m a veteran,” says ArtCenter student and former mass communication specialist for the U.S. Navy Christopher Stoltz of meeting with experts during this term’s Designmatters course The Healing Trauma Project. “I think they can tell by my cargo shorts,” he adds laughing. “The non-uniform uniform.”

All jokes about conformity aside, one of the main reasons Stoltz signed up for the Graphic Design-hosted transdisciplinary studio is that it dealt with a serious issue—helping veterans learn about a method for treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)—and he wanted to represent an actual veteran’s viewpoint.

“I think a lot of people assume the military experience is what you see in movies like American Sniper, very extreme war stories” says Stoltz, who grew up in Mount Airy, NC and served in the Navy for 14 years in a number of photography-related roles, including being an aerial photographer aboard the U.S.S. Harry Truman, and covering stories in Iraq from a soldier’s point of view for the Navy’s Stars and Stripes news agency. “Not every military job involves carrying a rifle. Some veterans worked desk jobs. I carried cameras the whole time I served. I also carried a rifle, but telling stories and capturing moments was my first priority.”

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7 inspiring and delightful nuggets of ArtCenter wisdom from the 2015 Core77 conference

Alumna Jessie Kawata speaks at the Core77 conference.

Core77’s second annual conference came to town last week and set up shop in downtown Los Angeles at Vibiana, the former cathedral now event space, which Core77 called “an architectural gem” and touted as a venue that once hosted a concert by Snoop Dogg (“If it’s good enough for Snoop, it’s good enough for us.”).

It was also good enough for seven members of the ArtCenter community who appeared on stage at the conference, whose theme was Designing Here/Now, and who delighted and inspired the packed audience with “thought-provoking ideas and projects that are years ahead of schedule.”

Appearing on stage were: alumni Nadine Schelbert, Matthew Manos, Jessie Kawata, and Javier Verdura, the latter appearing in conversation with Transportation Design faculty Eric Noble; Advertising and Graphic Design faculty Nicole Jacek; and former faculty Ravi Sawhney.

For your own inspiration and delight, we’ve assembled seven of our favorite ArtCentric quotes from the stage:

“Water has its own will. When you design with it you have to develop an understanding for that will. You can never truly control it, but you can entice it to behave a certain way.”

Nadine Schelbert (BS 02 Environmental Design)
Director of Design, WET

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Food for Thought: GradID alums Anuja Joshi and Geetika Agrawal design a local solution to global wanderlust

Food for Thought founders Geetika Agrawal and Anuja Joshi

Impresario is not often listed among the careers available to industrial designers. Then again, neither is chef, host or community organizer. But combine all those roles under the umbrella of entrepreneurial problem solving and you have the makings for a successful startup deeply rooted in ArtCenter’s Graduate Industrial Design (GradId) curriculum.

Food for Thought, the brainchild of Anuja Joshi (MS 09 GradID) and Geetika Agrawal (MS 04 GradID), is a digital portal curating events around the globe hosted by local cooks offering a menu of their favorite recipes. The result: a local solution to lonely planet ennui in the form of dinner parties satisfying a universal desire for community, good food and the wonder of discovery unique to exotic travel—minus the cost of airfare and lodging.

Not surprisingly, Food for Thought, has found some serious traction with wanderlusty foodies and adventurous flocking to events worldwide. Case in point: At the most recent gathering in Lisbon, Portugal, Manuel Nascimiento whipped up some of his favorite African-inflected dishes from his childhood for a sold out crowd.

Joshi and Agrawal’s traveling dinner party may not make it Pasadena for quite some time. So we tracked them down to answer a few questions about the origins of their intimate gatherings and their unorthodox approach to industrial design.

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In the zone at Yosemite: A photography class hits the road

El Capitan on left. Oliver at the Eureka Valley Sand Dunes on right.

Ansel Adams famously taught at ArtCenter in the 1940’s and invented Zone Theory with Fred Archer while at the school. Peter Suszynski is still teaching their timeless concept, and offering students the unique opportunity to visit and photograph Yosemite National Park – a favorite haunt of Adams and the ideal place to put his theory to the test. The assignment for the class is to create six unique but cohesive images. It is a difficult project but Pete’s guidance and the Zone Theory system make it possible. Continue reading →