Tag Archives: Moma

It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it: Josh Smith at Art Center’s Graduate Seminar

Josh Smith

Josh Smith

For those unable to attend painter Josh Smith’s Graduate Art Seminar last month, we’ve got your back. Adam Stamp, who is currently pursuing an MFA through Art Center’s Graduate Art program, has provided an insightful and informed essay about Smith’s irreverent body of work and his wide-ranging talk full of valuable takeaways for emerging young artists.

In January, artist Josh Smith visited Art Center to speak at the Graduate Art Seminar lecture series. Smith is one of the 13 artists featured in The Forever Now, a controversial painting show at MoMA, described by many critics with the rhetoric du jour as the first survey of zombieism,[1] with many considering Smith to be the prime example. The artist who made a name for himself with his “name paintings”, a series of works that continue to this day where he uses his name (literally the letter J-O-S-H  S-M-I-T-H) as the subject of his paintings, was described in 2013 by New York Times critic Roberta Smith as “sacrosanct and trashy.” His newest works to make waves depict black palm tree silhouettes in front of Technicolor sky-scapes, á la Edvard Munch.

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Adoration and appreciation abound at memorial for letterform expert Leah Hoffmitz Milken

Laughter, tears and, most of all, love was in abundance last Thursday evening, when more than 200 close friends and family gathered in Art Center’s Wind Tunnel Gallery to remember the extremely perceptive, bigger than life, impressively precise, brutally honest and encouragingly supportive Leah Toby Hoffmitz Milken, who passed away in October after battling a rare form of brain cancer.

President Lorne M. Buchman described Leah’s teaching as “the spine,” the core, the fundamental center for the design practice of her students. “Letterforms are a significant means through which human knowledge is conveyed and made precise, he explained. “Leah gave us the gift of knowing language, of seeing the visual word, in its most precise and exacting form. And from that came a release, a creativity of communication that can only enhance our experience as human beings.”

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View from the Bridge: Grounded in reality and ready for professional liftoff

Students present work to Honda Research and Development executives.

In a Sponsored Project, Graphic Design student Sungmoon Chung, center, presents work to alumnus and Honda R&D Americas Division Director Dave Marek (BS 87 Industrial), far right.

Summertime is traditionally set aside for leisurely activities—poolside lounging, pleasure reading and, at least through June, watching the Stanley Cup Final.

But here at Art Center, our students are as busy as ever. Many students continue their studies through the Summer term, while others, thanks to our dedicated staff in the Office of Career + Professional Development, scatter across the globe working as interns at an impressive array of organizations. It’s amazing, really, when you stop to look at where our students have landed internships:

  • Illustration student Adriana Crespo is at design firm IDEO in San Francisco;
  • Film student Juliana Rowlands is at director Roman Coppola’s production company The Director’s Bureau in Los Angeles;
  • Transportation Design student Harrison Scott Yen is at Chrysler’s Street and Racing Technology division in Michigan;
  • Graphic Design student Siyun Oh is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York;
  • Transportation Design student Yang Fu is at vehicle manufacturer Renault in France;
  • Product Design student Benji Kurada is at Google in Switzerland; and
  • Transportation Design student Sean Peterson is at Suzuki Motor Corporation in Japan.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. These are not your everyday assignments; our students are working with some of today’s most prestigious companies.

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Watch: ‘Trick or Drink,’ a riveting video memoir by new Fine Art chair, Vanalyne Green

 

With today’s announcement of Vanalyne Green‘s appointment as chair of Art Center’s Undergraduate Fine Art program, the College unveiled a pivotal panel in a larger canvas depicting the program’s evolution. Green is an internationally-recognized pioneer in the feminist art movement, whose work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, where the above video is currently housed as part of the museum’s video collection.

“Trick or Drink,” which debuted in 1984, a decade after Green graduated from CalArts’ Feminist Art Program (spearheaded by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro), offers an intimate and provocative look at the different forms addiction takes on as it’s passed among generations of family members. Green adapted the video from a live performance she’d developed from autobiographical material incorporating her experiences growing up in an alcoholic household and her own battles with bulimia. “Truth or Drink” is the rare video work to be as heralded for its artistic achievement as it is for its therapeutic value to patients in hospitals and treatment centers.

This particular work illuminates more than a lifelong social justice bent to Green’s creative sensibility. It also offers a glimpse at how the Fine Art Department’s new Artmatters concentration — an interdisciplinary curriculum launching this fall emphasizing collectivism and collaborative projects in the public sphere — might manifest itself in the real world.

Green, a founding member of the pro-choice, pro-sex agitprop group, No More Nice Girls, expressed her kinship to Art Center’s trans-disciplinary approach to social impact creativity as follows: “This is an especially optimistic moment for education programs such as Art Center because of the unusual flexibility it offers to students to cross disciplines,” Green stated in her application for the position. “My goal is to support young artists to recognize their inherent interests and to strengthen their commitment to work through a program of experimentation and exposure to an international art world.”

Regarding the role she will play at Art Center, Green stated, “For some, making art and administrative leadership within an educational institution are inimical. To the contrary, I find pedagogy and program development to be intrinsic to the project of being an artist: they involve narrative, composition, architecture and art as a form of social energy. This idea of a porous boundary between practices originates in the unorthodox programs I was privileged to experience.”