Tag Archives: exhibition

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.

Continue reading →

OUTSIDEIN exhibition assembles a pantheon of street artists to create mural-sized works illustrating public art’s expanding sphere of influence

RISK’s OUTSIDEIN installation on the north face of ArtCenter’s Wind Tunnel building at 950 South Raymond Avenue. Photo by Chuck Spangler

“Street art has exploded as an anti-authoritarian form of art making and an important global movement happening in the visual arts today,” said OUTSIDEIN curator and author G. James Daichendt in a recent TEDx speech, “The Streets As Canvas.” “Even if you’ve never stepped foot into a museum or gallery, you’ve been impacted by street art since it lives in the corners of our communities.”

In recognition of this phenomenon, ArtCenter College of Design has organized OUTSIDEIN, an expansive indoor and outdoor exhibition opening, with a public reception on October 8, 2015, and continuing through January 10, 2016, at multiple venues in Pasadena. Initiated by ArtCenter’s Illustration Department Chair Ann Field, the exhibition’s curatorial team also includes Daichendt and Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery Director Stephen Nowlin.

“Like many artistic insurgencies, street art has had to navigate around the pitfalls of its own commercial success to remain possessed of raw and vital meanings,” said Nowlin. “That tension, along with the breadth of street art’s current influence in contemporary design and visual culture, is what we set out to explore in OUTSIDEIN.”

Featured in the show are artists Olivia Bevilacqua, David Flores, CHASE, Robbie Conal, Cryptik, Jeanne Detallante, Shepard Fairey, James Jean, Geoff McFetridge, RISK, Kenny Scharf and Jeff Soto, who is an ArtCenter alumnus.

Continue reading →

Art Center friends of 30 years unite for exhibition at Hurley HQ to raise scholarship funds

Julian Smith, Hayden Smith, Chris Lundy and Mark Smith worked together as the “Sarasota Brotherhood” to gather and ship the paintings for the exhibition.

It’s no surprise that lifelong friendships are often forged out of the rigor and intensity of an Art Center education. Take Mark Smith (BFA 88 Graphic) and Chris Lundy (BFA 89 Illustration), who met at Art Center in 1985. What’s followed has been 30 years of artistic collaborations, a shared love of music, film and writing and surf days on the beach. When Chris was diagnosed this past September with glioblastoma multiforme, a cancerous tumor of the brain, the two friends met the challenge side by side. Inspired by each other and their shared Art Center experience, they decided to create a scholarship in Chris’s name.

On Saturday, July 18, an exhibition spearheaded by Mark will showcase Chris’s extraordinary paintings, with proceeds going to support the Chris Lundy Creative Scholarship. The fund will provide financial assistance to talented Art Center students. Mark offered to talk to us about the exhibition, which will take place at the headquarters of Hurley in Costa Mesa, and his friendship with Chris. Here’s our conversation:

Continue reading →

The Williamson Gallery’s latest show, With Hidden Noise, features the work of eight sound artists

Installation view, With Hidden Noise
Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design
Photo: Chuck Spangler

Sound is a fugitive object. We live in a muted cosmic universe – the big silence – where aural comprehension is confined to only certain molecule-rich atmospheres of planets supporting species of living things with an evolved ability to hear. We’re just damned lucky to be one of them—and even luckier to know of our own good fortune.

Without volume or mass (at least not the kind that succumbs to gravity) sound on Earth is weightless, fleeting and ephemeral—certainly not the solid we think of when contemplating the form of a physical thing. And yet sound is described in just those tangible terms, as having color, weight, body or texture. It isn’t that the material world just happens to offer us a robust set of analogies; it’s also because sound is, to our comprehension, very much like an object—a transient form of object, one that moves through time. Its shape, it might be said, is something we sense fourth-dimensionally.

Continue reading →

Dispatches from the future of design thinking: MDP’s Faculty Work-in-Progress show

MDP Faculty Work-in-Progress Show. Video by Nick Meehan from MediaDesignPractices on Vimeo.

“Being part of a community that provides support and critique is important,” said Media Design Practices (MDP) Chair Anne Burdick as she kicked off the department’s first ever Faculty Work-in-Progress show on a recent Thursday evening in Art Center’s Wind Tunnel gallery space. “It’s really a super amazing gift.”

As the MFA program’s twelve faculty members’ presentations unfolded over the next two hours, it quickly became clear that Burdick was not overstating the rewards of her department’s commitment to open dialogue. The event, which Burdick hopes will become a regular piece of programming, was organized around the following theme: a piece of something bigger. Faculty responded to that imperative with a series short presentations of unfinished projects they’re cultivating in their private creative practices.

Continue reading →

Artworld luminaries hail Stockholm debut of Sculpture After Sculpture, curated by Grad Art’s Jack Bankowsky

Screen Shot 2014-10-24 at 1.21.52 PM

By all accounts, Sculpture After Sculpture, an omnibus exhibition curated by Art Center faculty member, Jack Bankowsky, is a major event, capturing nothing short of a pivotal moment in the evolution of modern sculpture. The show opened last week at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet to great fanfare, including this piece in Artforum. For those who can’t make it to Sweden, the following catalog excerpt offers a glimpse at the compelling story this audacious show tells about sculpture’s relatively recent past and possibly its not-so-distant future.

Continue reading →

Science and Art collide in the REALSPACE exhibition at Art Center’s Williamson Gallery

$Dan Goods andDavid Delgado Refraction, 2014 Theater light, water, custom electronics 19 x 25 ft., dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artists.$

Dan Goods and David Delgado; Refraction, 2014; Theater light, water, custom electronics; Courtesy of the artists.

The painter Willem de Kooning once said that the idea of space “is given to the artist to change if he can.” And of the real, Robert Rauschenberg opined that a painting “is more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world.” Space in painting is measured on a scale that begins with deep illusion depicting what appears beyond the window of the canvas, and moves successively forward to tangible real tactility in front of the canvas.

Where an artist chooses to work on that illusion-to-reality scale can have meaning in and of itself. And the modern history of those choices can be viewed as a kind of archeology of existential change. The exhibition REALSPACE, opening October 4 at Art Center College of Design’s Williamson Gallery, is meant to reflect on how science intersects with that history. Poeticized by artists and studied by scientists throughout human history, the intractable reality of the natural world is examined by contemporary art and artifacts included in REALSPACE.

REALSPACE will be installed in the Williamson Gallery October 4, 2014 through January 18, 2015. The public is invited to an opening reception on Friday, October 3, from 7 to 10pm. Artists in the exhibition include Adam W. Brown and Robert Root-Bernstein, James Griffith, Dan Goods, David Delgado, Santiago Lombeyda, Rebeca Méndez and Jennifer Steinkamp. Artifacts and writings by James Ferguson (1710-1776), William Herschel (1738-1822), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), on loan from The Huntington Library, are also featured in the exhibition that combines works from contemporary art and science. At its opening, the exhibition will be accompanied by a 20-page free booklet and, eventually, a 40-page catalog.

Continue reading →

Inside ‘In Particular:’ Sarah Magladry’s installation in the Fine Art Gallery

This creative manifesto is part of a series of first-person pieces by Fine Art students reflecting on the ideas informing their work. Each post will feature the artist whose work is currently rotating through the Undergraduate Fine Art Student Gallery, at the Hillside Campus. This week Sarah Magladry explores the inspiration behind her exhibit, “In Particular.”

“Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again, or, more likely, to be corrected.” – Richard Feynman

Dissection is a crucial element in my practice. The minute details ignite the story. It’s a process of deduction, examination and reappropriation. I am never finished searching for what I am attracted to in an image and am typically drawn to the unexpected, the failed or the perverse. It is these details I relish that make the final viewing. There is an embracing of aberrations: a celebration of them. A self-reflective nature that allows the inadvertent to take on more than perhaps what the piece originally intended to do. The fragmentation of each piece allows them to converse with one another. Each element feeds upon the next, creating a carousel of information more thorough and more complex with the progression of each concept.

Products become just as much a narrative of the image-maker as the image itself.

And the narrative is as the quote suggests… we are in constant entropy. And yet it is this degree of disorder and uncertainty that allows for metamorphosis.

Aquatopia: Rolling in the deep with Grad Art alumna Jennifer West

“Heavy Metal Sharks Calming Jaws Reversal Film” (2011) by Jennifer West. Super 8 print transferred to hi definition video with sound.

With 90 percent of the earth’s oceans yet to be explored, “the deep” is and has always been a place of mystery, fear, desire—and wild imagination. One Art Center alum who’s creatively plumbed this furtive, fertile territory is Jennifer West ’04 (Graduate Fine Art). Her recent multimedia work, “Heavy Metal Sharks Calming Jaws Reversal Film” (2011) is featured in Aquatopia: The Imaginary of the Ocean Deep, a major exhibition that opened this past weekend at the Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, England, continuing through September 22.

Bringing together more than 150 contemporary and historic artworks, Aquatopia explores how “the deep” has been imagined through time and across cultures. Sea monsters, sirens, sperm whales, giant squids, octopi, submarines, drowned sailors and shipwrecks are all portrayed. In a show that includes iconic works by JMW Turner, Odilon Redon, Hokusai, Barbara Hepworth and Oskar Kokoschka, West finds herself in prestigious company.

West is known for her digitized films that are made by hand-manipulating film celluloid, and the description of materials and processes she used to create “Heavy Metal Sharks Calming Jaws Reversal Film” tells a story in itself: “Faded pink super 8 film print — library copy of select scenes from “Jaws” — from Lorain, Ohio public library — treated with black fabric dye enriched with heavy metals: iron and zinc vitamins, celluloid grated with stone, whipped with hair headbanging, impressed with thumb and pink prints devil ears. Super 8 print transferred to hi definition video with sound.” Total running time: 6 minutes, 47 seconds.

In reviewing a previous show of the artist’s work, Wendy Vogel noted on Artforum.com, “Like her experimental predecessors, West forgoes narrative cohesion in favor of creating jumpy cuts and abstract visual collages — splicing, rolling, and drenching the celluloid using materials from Mylar tape to pickle juice, whiskey to candle smoke.” Writing on West’s work in Frieze, Joanna Kleinberg observed how “the intermingling of materiality, feeling and identity creates a wild blend of synaesthetic experience wherein the substances of life literally and figuratively colour the film.”

Born in Topanga, Calif., West lives and works in Los Angeles. Before earning her MFA at Art Center, she received a BFA from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. She has had solo exhibitions in museums and galleries in Europe, Asia and the U.S., and has done commissioned projects for exhibitions at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, the Aspen Art Museum and the Tate Modern. West also creates “zines” — DIY photo booklets of production stills of the making of her films — in conjunction with her exhibitions.

Curated by Alex Farquharson, Aquatopia is a collaboration with Tate St Ives in Cornwall, where it will be on view from October 2013 to January 2014.

“Like” Jennifer’s film on Facebook!