Andrew Lyndon is the director of CCA's Fine Arts division, which is a community of 13 programs devoted to making art and craft in the context of critical inquiry, materials exploration, and professional practice.
While there are distinctive gestures that clearly differentiate each program, shared behaviors also exist, such as “learning through making” or “seeing as inquiry," which define us as fine artists and members of community.
Innovative Curriculum
This kind of learning is inspirational; one of the greatest pleasures of teaching within CCA’s critique-based culture is observing how often a student’s increasing craft or technical skill parallels a rise in the ability to conduct critical inquiry.
That’s fundamentally important in a rapidly changing global society that increasingly values innovators -- makers comfortable with visual complexity and nuance as well as with productive inquiry and experimentation.
These future makers will be relied upon to create compelling objects and images, and for cogent and rigorous observations about community or culture at large.
CCA’s History of Making
CCA's century-old history of inquiry-based learning through making provides us with a vibrant foundation from which our students can learn their "home" professional practices, while at the same time engage in cross-disciplinary adventures and inquiries.
Contemporary art practice requires both these habits: a thorough, concentrated knowledge and dexterity within a discipline, and agile critical thinking capable of ranging across maker and thinker boundaries.
The CCA fine artist of the future will create imagery and objects that reflect and lead an increasingly diverse and complex conversation, one which includes revered and ancient crafts as well as new technology and social practice.
Professional Background in the Fine Arts
I´m thrilled to be a part of guiding this diverse community of fine-art makers, in part because my own path as an artist and video maker/animator has taken me through many of the disciplines found in the fine arts programs at CCA.
I spent 15 years in New York and Oakland painting, making sculptures, prints, and photographs, and exhibiting as a studio artist. In 2001, while working at Pixar Animation Studios, I was introduced to the breadth, beauty, and deep narrative contained in animation, so I started creating films and animation, thereby adding storytelling, movement, choreography, and comedy to the color, line, and composition of my work.
Animation’s multidisciplinarity provides me with a guide to overseeing the Fine Arts division, because it synthesizes wide-ranging hand and conceptual skills: drawing, painting, digital software, acting and directing, hand- and technology-created art, familiarity with cinema, and observation of physical and emotional behavior.
Familiarity with these skills and terms allows me to enter the dialogues among fine arts students, faculty, and staff surrounding the intricate and varied terrain of making art that matters.
