Tag Archives: Faculty

New Ansel Adams Images Surface

Last year, there was a controversy over a stash of antique negatives bought at a Fresno garage sale thought to be the early work of renowned photographer and Art Center faculty member Ansel Adams. And now, there are new virtually unknown works by Adams, but these have the documentation proving that they are indeed by the famed photographer—information the ones from the summer lack.

Culture Monster reports that the collection of 29 virtually unknown pictures by Adams and his friend and mentor Cedric Wright are on display through Friday at the Chadwick School in Palos Verdes.

From the article: “The 13 pictures by Adams — on display through Friday at the Palos Verdes Library’s Peninsula Center building — come from 1941, when Chadwick, now a private day school but then a boarding school, hired him to produce its fifth-anniversary promotional catalog, and 1942, when Adams returned to shoot a tennis exhibition at the hilltop campus featuring the great Jack Kramer.”

Art Center Honors Doyald Young

This is turning out to be quite a week for Doyald Young.

Tomorrow night he’ll be honored at a special Art Center reception (RSVPs required) with a screening of Doyald Young, Logotype Designer, a new documentary about Young by lynda.com.

Photo by Louise Sandhaus

At Saturday’s commencement ceremony, he will receive Art Center’s Alumnus of the Year Award for his dedicated work as an educator and lifetime of legendary work in typography, logotypes and alphabets. At Saturday’s commencement, he’ll receive an honorary degree from Art Center, where he studied Advertising in the ’50s, and where he has taught lettering and logotype design in the Graphic Design Department for decades.

We caught up with Young this week to talk to him about Art Center, his thoughts on teaching and those things computers can’t do.

Dotted Line: Congratulations on the alumni award and honorary degree.
Doyald Young: Thank you! I’m honored and thankful for such honors. I am an amalgam of the people I’ve known whose ideas have permeated my being. I’m blessed—so many people have kindly befriended me. I often wonder, “How do I repay them?”

I believe that teaching and writing books about what I do is a form of payback. Both of which I continue to do, and will, as long as I am able. A priori, how could I not be deeply touched with the awards I’ve received? I’m humbled that Art Center has allowed me to teach these many years, and blessed that I receive support from my fellow teachers and staff.

Dotted Line: What has Art Center meant to you?
Young: Art Center has been one of the great forces of my life. I learned, most importantly, that our first efforts are just that. They need refinement. A good job is done over and over, and oftentimes is changed again and again when marketing forces or creative directors change their minds. Final art does not emerge full-blown. I make my living making changes.

At Art Center, I learned professionalism, punctuality, and above all, how to continue my skills and burnish my talent. And a mentor of mine, Henry Dreyfuss, taught me the value of a thank-you note.

Dotted Line: You’ve said that you are an educator first, and a designer second.
Young: It’s true. When I was a student in Mort Leach’s class, he noticed fellow students coming to me for help on their projects. They came to me voluntarily, and I found that I enjoyed helping them. Mort later asked me to become his teaching assistant.

Teaching requires patience. I firmly believe that if you have the gift of teaching, you must pass it on. As Woodrow Wilson said, “You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”

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Faculty’s Cookbook Among Best of 2010

More about Art Center faculty member and cookbook writer extraordinaire Krystina Castella—her latest cookbook, A World of Cake, has just been named one of the Best Cookbooks of 2010 by Publisher’s Weekly, who dub it the “best international baking book.”

From the publication: “Pictures of marzipan-covered fruitcakes are gorgeous, and sidebars on such topics as street cakes make this an educational book in addition to a holiday workhorse.”

Congrats, Krystina!

Enjoy these photos taken at Castella’s book signing in the Library on Thursday:

Meet Ronald J. Llanos

Metro’s Exposition Line connecting downtown to Culver City (and eventually Santa Monica) may not be up and running yet, but when it is, it’ll be impossible to miss the work of Illustration alum and Art Center at Night instructor Ronald J. Llanos.

Metro has commissioned the Art Center alum and Art Center at Night instructor to create Ephemeral Views: A Visual Essay for its light rail station being constructed at Western Avenue, and the 24 mosaic panels (each one standing 8’ x 3’) that comprise the work are being created right now.

Much of Llanos work captures the everyday moments of life in the greater Los Angeles area—whether it’s a visual documentation of downtown’s Toy District or an homage to Manet at Hot Dog on a Stick—so it’s not surprising that his Expo Line work inspired by the vibrant characters that make up the city’s street life.

Llanos work has been shown at Wax Poetic, Black Maria Gallery and Ghettogloss and he was the featured artist in Draw the Line, a recent group show at Cactus Gallery in Eagle Rock. We caught up with him to ask him about his favorite artists and teaching at Art Center at Night.

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Celebrating Autumn, Art Center Style

Yesterday Art Center students, faculty and staff celebrated autumn at the ACSG Hillside Harvest. The event featured a barbecue lunch, pie-eating contest, trunk sale, e-waste recycling drive and more.

Enjoy this slideshow of photos of the fun:

Now Showing: Art Center Alumni, Faculty and Students

Danger, Set Free, by Rob and Christian Clayton (2008)

A few current exhibits featuring work of Art Center students, alumni and faculty:

Clayton Brothers: Inside Out, a new major exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, presents paintings and mixed-media installations created collaboratively by Illustration alums Rob and Christian Clayton. The exhibit will be on view through January 2, 2011. Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
Graduate Art faculty member Taft Green’s new show, Settings, opens at Praterstrasse48 Berlin on Sept. 30. Praterstrasse48
Graduate Art faculty member Skip Arnold, Graduate Art alums Jennifer Moon and Jeff Ostergren, and Fine Art alumnus Jorge Pardo are in a group show opening Sept. 25 and curated by Grad Art faculty member Jan Tumlir, Jerry/Jury Rigged, at the Glendale College Art Gallery. Glendale College Art Gallery
Fine Art alum Devin Strother currently has a solo show at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica. Richard Heller Gallery
The Blab! Show features work by Illustration alums Marc Burckhardt, Owen Smith and Lou Beach. Through Oct. 2 at Copro Gallery in Santa Monica. The Blab! Show
Grad Art alumna Emilie Halpern’s latest show, Eclipse, on display at Pepin Moore through Oct. 23. Pepin Moore
Painting faculty member Kent Williams has a solo show at Evoke in New Mexico through Sept. 30. Evoke Contemporary
Alumna Korin Faught has an opening September 25 at Corey Helford Gallery. Corey Helford Gallery
MDP student An Xiao Mina participating in a poetry reading this Saturday at the Pacific Asia Museum. Southern California Haiku Study Group Anthology

What did we miss? If you know of any student, alumni or faculty shows, let us know.

Ansel Adams Negatives: The Real Deal?

Could it be? A Fresno man thinks that a stash of antique negatives bought at a garage sale are the early work of famed photographer and Art Center faculty member Ansel Adams.

Check out this very interesting L.A. Times article about the negatives and the debate surrounding them—some think they are legit; Adams’ family says otherwise.

One theory is that scorch marks on the negatives are proof that they survived a 1937 fire in Adams’ studio. Adams reportedly tossed stacks of negatives into a bathtub to save them from the flames.

Reporter Mike Boehm writes: “Alt theorized that Adams brought the Norsigian negatives to Southern California in the early 1940s as examples for his students at what’s now the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. ‘It would not be unreasonable for him to show the fire-damaged plates and regale his students with what was surely a great story,’ Alt wrote. He added, ‘In almost all of the photographs, the compositions are virtually flawless,’ indicating ‘a photographer of singular vision and talent’.”

What do you think? Are these the real deal, or just wishful thinking?

Art Center Visioning Update from President Buchman

Dear Art Center Community:

I am writing to update you on Art Center’s planning process and to outline the next steps to completion. As many of you know, we designed the entire process to consist of two major phases of work: the visioning phase and the strategic planning phase. The midpoint and fulcrum of the process took form by way of a retreat of the Board of Trustees (on June 23 and 24) in which the Trustees heard the work completed by the visioning task force committees to date, focused their priorities and set the course for the final strategic phase to be concluded by the end of the calendar year.

Art Center students, alumni, faculty and staff convened for visioning brainstorming sessions in January.

The Board, I believe, was energized by what they heard and were compelled by the fact that hundreds of participants representing a cross-section of the community were involved at various points in the deliberations. They were engaged during the retreat in a thoughtful and rewarding dialogue that included the chairs of the visioning task force committees as well as representatives from the Chairs’ Council, Faculty Council, Art Center Student Government (ACSG) and senior staff. The effort was inclusive and courageous.

The work of the retreat coalesced the findings of the task force committees into a cogent statement of educational purpose, a statement serving at once as a tribute to the heritage of the College as well as to a dynamic vision for the future.

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Spotlight on Esther Pearl Watson and Mark Todd

"Whatcha Mean, What's a Zine?" by Mark Todd and esther Pearl Watson

At home in their shared Sierra Madre, Calif., artist studio, Esther Pearl Watson ILLU ‘95 and Mark Todd ILLU ’93 look every bit the part of one of those tightly knit couples whose lives intertwine both personally and professionally. They finish each other’s sentences. They share a cell phone, a car, and, up until recently, an email account. They have completed eight books together, and their paintings are (at least sometimes) shown in the same exhibitions (currently the Sandra Lee Gallery in San Francisco). Since 2003, they have co-taught in Art Center’s Illustration Department. For them, collaboration is a way of life, having spent most of their respective careers working side by side on projects, pushing the boundaries of illustration —whether through books for children, teens and adults, zines or illustrations. Success has followed: their work on the cover of American Illustration and clients like McSweeney’s, Business Week and Country Music Television.

“We’re a support system for each other,” said Todd. Added Watson, “We trust each other’s advice and rely on each other’s strengths. I’m the cheerleader with lots of ideas, and I trust Mark when it comes to art directing or refining the design or layout. We rely on this cross pollination of ideas.” Continue reading →

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