Engage At Cca News
Mercury News: Scientists team with art designers to restore Año Nuevo Island, a place where animals reign supreme
Posted on Wednesday, January 25, 2012, by Allison Byers
On a tiny, windswept island off the San Mateo County coast, a team of scientists and art designers has engineered a creative solution to give mating seabirds a boost: ceramic "love shacks."
These handcrafted underground nests are one piece of the Año Nuevo Island Restoration Project, a unique collaboration between scientists and artists that hopes to reverse some of the human damage done to the island since the 1800s.
Queer Comic Artists ENGAGE a "New" Writing Genre
Posted on Monday, January 23, 2012, by Jim Norrena
CCA is no stranger to branching out in various genres when it comes to the arts. The college's undergraduate Writing and Literature curriculum is no exception. In spring, the ENGAGE: Queer Comics Project course provided graphic novel enthusiasts the unique opportunity to not only study writing and graphic design but also to do so within a queer perspective!
Read the rest >>>San Francisco Bay Guardian: Looks good off paper
Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2012, by Allison Byers
CAREERS AND EDUCATION: Innovative degree programs for Bay Area changemakers
According to the Princeton Review, that bicep-straining tome of college rankings responsible for many a young adult's breakdown, most of the perennially popular majors (psychology, economics, communications, political science) are still alive and kicking. But plenty of alternative, even radical fields of study are blossoming that meld academic inquiry with tangible work towards change.
American Craft: Real-World Art School
Posted on Monday, November 28, 2011, by Allison Byers
So long, ivory tower. Engage. Collaborate. Partner. These are the watchwords of a new direction in art education.
Read the rest >>>The Atlantic: Designing for Good
Posted on Monday, November 28, 2011, by Allison Byers
A few years ago, Sanjit Sethi, artist, professor, and director of the California College of Art’s Center for Art and Public Life, wrote a paper called "Getting it Wrong: How We Fail and What We Learn." In the paper, written with Nicole Garneau of Columbia College, he discussed the need to talk about failure as much as success. "When students get out into the real world what do they do when they fail? They’re not taught that," he says. "There’s a specific set of procedures that need to be followed. How do students learn what to do when they're in over their heads?"
Read the rest >>>Adam Green Goes Where the Glass Is Greener
Posted on Monday, July 11, 2011, by Simon Hodgson
Adam Green's (Sculpture 2010) current summer job with AmeriCorps, teaching high-risk youth, represents for him a creative coming of age. "I guess you could have considered me a high-risk youth. I was sent to a military academy in Georgia for part of high school." In AmeriCorps' program in Providence, Rhode Island, Green is involved on the administrative side and is also teaching drawing, sculpture, and glassblowing.
The medium of glass was Green's own artistic liberation. "Working with glass takes intense focus. There's a huge learning curve, and a lot of failure. Making a perfect cup is like chasing a dragon. You have this balance between an unreachable goal and a meditative exercise. It's physically intense, and also cathartic. And when it works, it's extremely gratifying."
The quest to create order from chaos is a touchstone in Green's personal fine art practice. His Rocket Grids depict unfurling orthogonal patterns of spaceships, arrayed almost like windows in a skyscraper. Why rockets? "I've always built rockets: from latex, milk, rubber, or wax. As a kid, I was always more interested in science than art. I had a computer at a really young age and loved to take it apart and look at the circuit boards. The grid format is a natural for me in terms of classification, lists, and free association. To me, rockets represent a fantastic metaphor for manhood. NASA in particular is this gigantic phallus-obsessed institution, focused primarily on penetrating the atmosphere. All those failed test flights in the 1950s and 1960s are a huge inspiration for my work. They represented to me an erectile dysfunction in American society. My Rocket Boy costume, this ridiculous red and yellow rocket rig, uses humor to lower viewers' defenses. It's a self-portrait without being too serious."
Read the rest >>>Furniture Students ENGAGE YBCA's Big Ideas
Posted on Tuesday, June 14, 2011, by Sarah Owens
California College of the Arts and San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) paired up this spring when “Production Furniture 1” students, taught and developed by Furniture Program chair Russell Baldon, created new and original furniture designs for YBCA’s grand lobby. The course is a part of ENGAGE at CCA, an interdisciplinary project-based learning initiative at the college that encourages interaction and collaboration between CCA students and community partners.
Community Building
The idea for a project-based furniture course in collaboration with YBCA stemmed from a conversation between Baldon and YBCA graphic designer crystal am-nelson. They had started a conversation at a previous YBCA event about the lack of unique, dynamic furniture in the grand lobby space. The project was born soon thereafter.
“We started with a basic problem in that we needed new furniture for our lobby,” said nelson. “And I felt that whatever we chose had to be very representative of who we truly are, which is not easy to find at a furniture store. That’s when I thought about continuing to work with local design students by co-creating a process where their work could be transformed into a real-life situation while they were still in school.
“I also was interested in experimenting with the museum as a laboratory for emerging artists and educational institutions,” nelson revealed. “It was wonderful to witness their development and excitement for the project throughout the various stages.”
Read the rest >>>California College of the Arts Earns Placement in Princeton Review's Guide to Greenest Colleges in the United States
Posted on Thursday, April 21, 2011, by Jim Norrena
California College of the Arts is one of the most environmentally responsible colleges in the United States and Canada, according to The Princeton Review, an education service that helps students select and apply to colleges. CCA's inclusion in The Princeton Review’s Guide to 311 Green Colleges: 2011 Edition reinforces the college's reputation as an exemplary institution of higher education committed to sustainability.
Read the rest >>>Sentenced: CCA Writers Take on San Quentin
Posted on Tuesday, April 5, 2011, by Simon Hodgson
On March 4, 2011, ten CCA writing students followed in the footsteps of Johnny Cash into the oldest correctional facility in California: San Quentin State Prison. We were there to attend a creative writing class, an invitation arranged by MFA Program in Writing faculty member Anne Marino. Last year, Marino participated in a literary contest pitting a handful of Bay Area professional writers against a group of inmate writers. After experiencing the inmates' responses and the quality of their work, she organized a new graduate-level course as part of the ongoing ENGAGE at CCA initiative: "Slammer: Writing In and About Prison," in which students would read works about incarceration and explore the roots, themes, and social and psychological significance of prison literature. Which is how Paul Blumer, Lauren Camacho, Max Cherney, Kyler Hood, Luisa Leija, Julian Quisquater, Rae Thomas, Rachael Volk, Jeff Von Ward, and I came to pass through the razor-wire gates of San Quentin on this blustery Friday evening.
Before driving out to the bleak, wind-swept promontory in Marin County, we'd all familiarized ourselves with San Quentin's guest handbook. The guidance notes issued by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) were intimidatingly direct. For instance: "Wear shoes you can run in." No visitors are allowed to wear green (the color of the guards' uniforms), orange (the jumpsuits worn by recently arrived inmates), or blue. Inmates wear dark-blue denim pants and shirts the color of Tar Heel blue, both stenciled with "CDCR PRISONER" in large yellow print.
Read the rest >>>Enter the Outsider: CCA's Kota Ezawa Scores with Smithsonian and New York
Posted on Monday, April 4, 2011, by Simon Hodgson
For Kota Ezawa, it's crunch time. The German-Japanese artist and Film Program faculty member has barely recovered from the tumult and applause surrounding the acquisition of one of his digitally animated works by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC. Now, he's plunged into a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito and is presenting a public piece in the most iconic city in film history: New York. From March 31 to May 15, Madison Square Park is hosting Ezawa's City of Nature project, in which he distills images of nature -- a waterfall, a mountain, a marlin -- from movies and shows them as animations on four LCD screens. The commission is officially a part of Mad. Sq. Art, a program of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Ezawa sourced more than 40 movies for the project. "I was really interested in scenes where nature drives the story," he says. "Shots without human presence. No people. No buildings." Eagle-eyed viewers will detect some familiar films -- Brokeback Mountain, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, The Old Man and the Sea -- as well as a few that are less recognizable, for example a jungle shot from Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, or a waterfall from the 1960s German Western Winnetou.
Read the rest >>>