Campus News |
ART CENTER NEWSWIRE - June 29, 2001
PASADENA, CA, USA | To keep abreast of the exciting and innovative ideas, people and projects at Art Center College of Design, the media and general public can subscribe to Art Center's news digest by sending a blank email to: newswire-on@lists.artcenter.edu. We highlight some of the newsmakers in our Art Center community twice a month. To report news or obtain more information, contact Jan Kingaard, tel. (626) 396-2394, fax (626) 683-9233.
GREAT MINDS
Film Development Seminar
Alumnus Michael Bay shared his insights with the students on pitching a film, the rating system, and working with actors, lighting and sound people. He told the rapt audience about directing the $135 million movie "Pearl Harbor." "It was probably one of the safest movies I have ever done...and that's a miracle for the amount of dangerous stuff we did" referring to the explosions, gunfire, aerobatics, etc. He interviewed over 150 survivors in depth to create the look and feel of the movie. When he was at Art Center, he wanted to be a director of photography, so he approaches things with a photographer's eye. He told the film students, "I made Art Center a full-time job, because film school is only what you make of it. They are not going to anoint you a film maker, you have to do it yourself. You need to try and find out what you are good at and keep honing in on that."Great Teachers
The 154th Art Center graduating class has chosen 12 outstanding instructors for having made an extraordinary contribution to their education. The students in each major selected an honoree in their department: Shou Zhi Wang, Academics; Laura Sweet, Advertising; Dana Duncan, Digital Media; Chris Aykanian, Environmental; Brad Saunders, Film; Fred Fehlau, Foundation; Pauline Stella Sanchez, Fine Art; Clane Graves, Graphic Design; Gary Meyer, Illustration; Robert Engle, Photography; Steve Diskin, Product; and Seung-Jae Min, Transportation. They are being praised as instructors, mentors and friends, generously sharing information, experience, energy, and concern.The digitalDesigners@work
Chris Pullman, Vice President of Design, WGBH/Boston addressed students and faculty and examined how the conventions of typography and the dynamics of word-image relationships change with the introduction of time, motion and sound. Pullman is one of design's most respected practitioners. He has taught in the graduate studies department at Yale for 35 years and has been an Art Director at WGBH since 1973 where he has helped create the broadcast and online identities of public television classics such as Antiques Roadshow, This Old House, Frontline Zoom and NOVA.ADVERTISING
Motion Picture Academy
Rodney Hom wrote and produced the animated film, "The Yellow Umbrella" which won a silver award in the animation category at the 28th Annual Student Academy Awards. Along with illustration student Victor Robert, Hom participated in a week of industry-related activities and social events, culminating with the awards presentation at the Motion Picture Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. They were among 12 U.S. film student honored.Clio
Alumna Betsy Nathane won a bronze Clio with "Blue Book" for Lexus. "Blue Book" also won an award from British Design & Art Direction (D&AD), Communications Arts, and a gold from the International Automotive Advertising Awards. Nathane works for Team one Advertising.CAMPUS
Sinclaire Pavilion
Visitors to www.artcenter.edu/pavilion, can watch the construction of the new student pavilion, complete with Quicktime virtual reality panoramas and audio comments from President Richard Koshalek, architect Craig Hodgetts, and Director of Individual Giving Jay Sanders.ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN
Los Angeles Times
The profile of Chu & Gooding Architects is steadily rising in a city already awash in good architects. The firm has completed a small but notable body of work, including two houses in Santa Monica, a remodel of a Beverly Hills house by modernist master Harwell Harris, and, most publicly, the installation of the R.M. Schindler exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. "Their work shows a responsiveness to materials and a poetic edge," said Patricia Oliver, chair of the Department of Environmental Design at Art Center. Collaboration with artists and other architects is familiar ground to Rick Gooding and Annie Chu. Their willingness to combine the client's vision with their own-to make the client's wishes part of the DNA of the design rather than treat them as an afterthought-allows the architects to create buildings that are accommodating without seeming compromised. This collaborative approach "separates their work either from being purely a stylistic exercise, on one hand, or purely pragmatic, on the other," Oliver said. Annie Chu is an Environmental Design instructor at Art Center.The New York Times
Downtown Los Angeles becomes more design-centric every day. The Southern California Institute of Architecture recently moved from Marina del Rey to East Downtown. Nearby, a remodeled warehouse has become home to Form Zero, a modish design and architecture book store, and to Gallery 1D, an exhibition space showing furniture by students at Art Center. For example, recent graduate, Jonatan Damian's aluminum and Kevlar Elytra chair is available for $600. The show ran for two weeks.Pasadena Star News
At first glance, the furniture on exhibit looked like the kind of stuff that would fit perfectly with the décor of the Jetsons' living room. In this, the 21st century, furniture design has become an art form. Eighteen students and graduates of Art center's Environmental Design Department presented their work at the "Furniture and Lighting Show" in downtown Los Angeles. Those chosen to show their pieces were selected from a group of 100 Art Center students by a panel of judges comprised of instructors and professional furniture manufacturers and designers. The 21 pieces on display included chairs, tables, a bookcase, desk, bench sofa, tables and lights; all have been praised for their clever concepts, versatility, craftsmanship and innovative use of materials. The designers were colorful, yet structured. Compact yet multifunctional. Different, yet strangely familiar. In May, the pieces were on display at both the Ace Gallery and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. Art Center was on of the four art colleges from across the country chosen to exhibit. "Students leave our environmental design program with the very great ability to fluidly and fluently navigate various scales of design, ranging from furniture to the city, including interiors of buildings and the landscape," said Associate Environmental Department Chairman Peter A. Di Sabatino.FILM
The 2001 AICP Show
Art Center film students swept this year's Association of Independent Commercial Producers' competition. Tony Garcia and Armando Sanchez were honored for "Gotcha" a 30-second commercial produced and directed by the students in Eric Sherman's Professional Film Production course. Tony Garcia was the award-winning director, director of photography, art director, copywriter and editor on "The Crush", another 30-second spot from Sherman's class. Student Director Robert Hanson, Director of Photography Reuben Steinberg, Producer Nick Hill and Editor Rebecca Jamesonndistinguished themselves with "Get A Room," in the Film Workshop Coursentaught by Michael Ahnemann.CINE
Graduate Sebastian Leda won a Golden Eagle Award for his short film "Dating in LA." The Biannual film and video competition recognizes and supports excellence in the design and development of film, video and related media production across America.FINE ART
Graduation Speaker
Tim Coultas has been chosen by the 154th graduating class as Student Speaker for the August 18 Commencement.Skirball Cultural Center + Museum
Steve Nowlin, Vice President/Director, Williamson gallery and Creative Director of Art Center Online, was a co-panelist with media-artist and fellow Art Center alumna Jennifer Steinkamp, in the seminar, "Arts Media: Using New Technology."GRAPHICS/PACKAGING
Adobe Design Achievement Awards
Student Hugo Freitas has been selected as a first place Most Creative winner in the Print category for his Memory Identity Book created in the Advanced Graphics Class taught by Clane Graves. Freitas will receive his award in August at Paramount Studios.ILLUSTRATION
Pasadena Star-News
Victor Robert was the director/illustrator in the animated film, "The Yellow Umbrella" which won a silver award at the 28th Annual Student Academy Awards. Along with advertising student Rodney Hom, Robert participated in a week of industry-related activities and social events, culminating with the awards presentation at the Motion Picture Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. They were among 12 U.S. film student honored.San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Whittier Daily News, Pasadena Star-News
Alumnus Eric Merrell has a heady background in both art and the intricacies of how art works in a commercial sense. He is building a portfolio which highlights his portraiture skills and is developing ideas for book illustrations as well as his landscape painting. While studying illustration at Art Center, he developed a love for painting. Two instructors who particularly helped him were Mike Hussar and Mike Hernandez. Merrill now paints in a studio in the Altadena foothills and is one of 60 exhibiting artists in the Chinatown Art festival at the Hong gallery.Press Telegram
The California automobile craze was running full speed in 1926, the year the Brown Derby opened in Los Angeles as an eye-catching beacon for travelers. Who could resist the chapeau-style café or any of the dozens of other oddly shaped buildings that some saw as the apex of California craziness. To get a good look at the 1,000 or so eccentric structures, advertising signs and statues that remain, take an armchair tour via Jim Heimann's new book, "California Crazy & Beyond." He's the same guy who brought us "California Crazy" two decades ago, along with half a dozen other historical guides to such things as match book covers, menus and Hollywood nightlife. "There is a rabid interest in this stuff from all quarters," says Heimann, a historian, designer, and instructor at Art Center.LIBRARY
St. Francis Tapestry
Monique Lehman arrived in Pasadena 20 years ago, but only after a storybook odyssey, which began even before she left her native Poland in 1978. She is an accomplished woman, fluent in five languages, with a rare talent. She is a tapestry artist; and, she works in the library at Art Center. Her tapestries are creative, monumental and painterly. She has just completed a major commission for a hospital in Illinois. Meticulous and intense and intense training prepared her for undertaking projects of monumental proportions such as the historically significant 30' x 8' tapestry for the City Hall of Bay City, Michigan; the 35' x 5' "Pasadena Landmarks," at Pasadena City College; and the 8' x 4' "Deep Space One" in the Kennedy Space Center Museum, Florida.PHOTOGRAPHY
Michael Dawson Gallery
"Photography at Art Center College, 1940-1950" features work by students enrolled in the photography program at the college not long after the college became the first art school in the United states to establish a full-time curriculum in photography. The photographs on display are primarily experimental nude portraits involving photomontage, solarization, and advanced lighting techniques done under the direction of painter and designer Edward Kiminiski. Photographers included in the exhibition are Clarence Massey, Ira Dowd, Jr., Ray La Marca, Chuck Brenkus, Bob Wallacec, and Emily Owens among others. Kiminiski pushed students to explore movement and form by exploring their compositions in charcoal drawings on paper and then interpreting their sketches using photography. The exhibit runs through July 21 in Los Angeles.PRODUCT DESIGN
Business Week
fuseproject of San Francisco, CA was awarded three IDEA/2001 design awards and a ranking in the top ten design firms by Business Week. Hewlett Packard and Philou were clients, partners and collaborators for these awards. "I founded fuseproject as a creative space where we fuse the notion of brand strategy with the design of products and experiences," explains founding principal and Art Center graduate, Yves Behar. The industrial design and brand development firm employs design as a tool for creating a story around a company.TRANSPORTATION
Automotive News
General motors bolstered its design staff by hiring Bryan Nesbitt, the 32-year-old designer of the Chrysler PT Cruiser, to be the brand character chief designer for Chevrolet. At GM, the Art Center graduate will be the lead designer for Chevrolet's concept vehicles and help set design direction for the division. Nesbitt will work out of GM's design studios in Warren, Michigan.