See the calendar event listing beneath each scheduled lecture for additional information. For a quick-view list, see Design and Craft Lecture Series.

The Design and Craft Lecture Series is funded by the Wornick Endowment Fund. For questions, please call 415.703.9563 or email Program Manager Design Kerry Gould at kgould@cca.edu.

View past Design and Craft Lecture Series:
Spring 2009
Fall 2008

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Jim Sherraden

Wednesday, September 9, 7–9 p.m.
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
See calendar event listing.

If you’re at all a fan of graphic design or music, you’ll recognize the unmistakable look of Nashville’s Hatch Show Print. Founded in 1879, it is among America’s oldest letterpress design shops and has evolved into a tourist attraction, museum, and historical archive as well. Jim Sherraden is its manager, chief designer, and archivist. In addition to managing all the new jobs ordered each week (Hatch designs and produces more than 600 projects annually), he has been systematically hand printing the shop’s massive archive of woodblocks into unique monoprints for collectors and museum shows worldwide.

A Smithsonian-organized exhibition of Hatch posters is touring through 2012. Recent Hatch Show Print posters have featured B. B. King, Neil Young, Coldplay, Anthropologie, the New York Times, Wired magazine, and Taylor Guitars. Sherraden’s CCA presentation will begin with the very first poster printed at Hatch, then speed through more than 100 years of hand-set graphic design.

Paul Discoe

Wednesday, September 16, 7–9 p.m.
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
See calendar event listing.

Paul Discoe is a designer and Zen Buddhist priest. He apprenticed in Japan with traditional temple builders and has designed and built many Zen temples, residential projects, grand estates, and modular structures. He helped transform a rustic hot-springs resort into Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. His team at Joinery Structures recently created a modular cardboard zendo for Burning Man. Currently he is working on a new Zen temple complex for Sonoma Mountain Zen Center. Discoe focuses on sustainable design and building practices.

His commitment to the environment (and deep respect for wood as a material) inspired him to open an urban lumber mill that salvages and recycles trees cut down in Oakland to make low-cost, prefabricated housing systems and furniture. His lecture will include not only an overview of his past work, but also an in-depth discussion of the wood types available in this area, their uses, how to cut and dry them, when to machine them, and how to deal with imperfections.

Anne Wilson

Wednesday, October 7, 7–9 p.m.
Nahl Hall, Oakland campus
See calendar event listing.

Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based artist whose sculptures, drawings, Internet projects, and DVD stop-motion animations explore themes of time, loss, and social ritual. She uses found materials that are familiar and rich with cultural meaning, including table linens, bedsheets, human hair, lace, thread, and wire. Using pixelation and projection, dematerialization and reanimation, she works in a conceptual space, a liminal zone between drawing and object making, where social and political ideas overlap the material processes of handwork and industry. Her finished pieces remain liminal, in whatever new medium they enter.

Wilson holds an MFA from CCA and has exhibited in the United States, England, and Japan. Her work was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. She chairs the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Michael Cooper

Wednesday, October 21, 7–9 p.m.
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
See calendar event listing.

Michael Cooper says that he’s been “fooling around” with wood and metalworking since he was a kid and hasn’t grown up much since then. After graduating from San Jose State University and UC Berkeley with “some sort of degrees” in the 1960s, he “faked his way” as a college art teacher, teaching sculpture, 3D design, furniture design, and drawing before being purged from the system. He has somehow won numerous awards and has been encouraged to leave the United States many times to make things elsewhere. He bends wood well and often joins wood with odd bits and pieces of other materials. He has exhibited his work around Sonoma County, where he currently resides, and recently sold “something big for a lot of money.” That sculpture, Gunrunner, appeared on the back cover of Woodwork magazine in December 2007. He is also the 2009–10 Wornick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Wood Arts at CCA.

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray

Wednesday, November 11, 7–9 p.m.
Nahl Hall, Oakland campus
See calendar event listing.

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray is deeply interested in the polemics and possibilities of traditional craft in contemporary practice. She will discuss her recent residency at Kohler Co. and the two bodies of work she created there: one more domestic and utilitarian, the other more abstract and sculptural. The various modes of production available at the foundry presented new challenges and opportunities, opening up her studio practice, inspiring her to take a deep look at the divergent paths of tradition and innovation, and reaffirming her commitment to metalsmithing.

Mimlitsch-Gray is chair of the art department and professor of metal at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.