Simon J. Blattner, chair of the Board of Trustees of California College of the Arts (CCA), has announced the appointment of six new trustees: Louis Belden, Tim Brown, Diane Christensen, Byron Kuth, Tim Mott and Alan Stein.

"I'm delighted to welcome our new trustees. They bring a wealth of experience and a high level of commitment and passion to the college," commented Blattner. "I look forward to working with them in the future as we continue to build on CCA's reputation as one of the strongest art and design schools in the country."

Louis Belden is president of Belden and Associates, a San Francisco investment counsel firm. He has been an active community member for many years. He currently serves on the boards of the World Affairs Council of Northern California, Edgewood Center for Families and Children and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Tim Brown is CEO and president of IDEO, the nation's largest innovation and design firm. Based in Palo Alto, IDEO has eight locations around the world and more than 350 employees. The firm works on projects in a variety of industries, including computers, furniture, medical, sporting goods, telecommunications, toys and transportation. Prior to his appointment as CEO and president in 2000, Brown was director of IDEO in Europe. He is very committed to design education and has lectured at MIT Sloan School, Stanford University, Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Royal College of Art.

Diane Christensen is CEO of Manzanita Management Corp., an asset management firm. She is also president and board chair of The Christensen Fund, a private, independent foundation dedicated to assisting organizations in the visual arts, conservation science and education. She currently is chair of the board of Verde Valley School in Arizona and serves on the boards of Midland School, the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Wildlife Conservation Society/New York Zoological Society. She is also a member of Stanford's Humanities and Sciences Council and the California Academy of Sciences Council.

Byron Kuth is owner of Kuth/Ranieri Architects, a San Francisco firm specializing in residential, mixed use and commercial projects. The firm has received numerous awards, including ID Magazine's Design Distinction Award—Environments in 1999, 2000 and 2001 and the Architectural League of New York Young Architects Forum "Emerging Voices" award in 2002. Kuth serves on the boards of the LEF Foundation for Art in the Environment and SFMOMA's Architecture and Design Forum. He has been a faculty member at CCA and was visiting faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1999.

Tim Mott is chairman of All Covered, a provider of computer and network services. A cofounder of Electronic Arts, he held a variety of executive positions there from 1982 to 1990. Electronic Arts is now the world's leading interactive entertainment software company, and Mott remains a member of the company's board of directors. Mott also cofounded and was CEO of Macromedia, the leading multimedia software tools company, and he cofounded and was chairman of Audible, the leading Internet spoken word audio company. Currently, in addition to his work with All Covered, Mott manages his investment company, Ironwood Capital. Mott also serves as a trustee of the Dia Art Foundation and the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.

Alan Stein is a managing director of JMP Group. An investment banker for more than 45 years, he has held positions at Weston Presidio Capital, Montgomery Securities and Goldman Sachs and Company. He cofounded and is currently chairman of the board of BRIDGE Housing Corporation, the largest nonprofit development company in California. BRIDGE creates and manages a range of affordable, high-quality housing for working families and seniors. A dedicated arts community volunteer, Stein is chairman emeritus of American Conservatory Theater and has served on the board of SFMOMA.

The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts presents "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art" (B2V), an exhibition that explores a revealing and animated selection of recent art created on the western edge of North America, stretching from Baja California, Mexico, to the United States and Canada. Unlike regional biennials, B2V is a tightly focused survey of representational artworks that respond to and engage with the West Coast's physical and social landscapes.

Organized collaboratively by the CCA Wattis Institute, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Seattle Art Museum and Vancouver Art Gallery, B2V features 33 artists—both established and emerging—and includes several new pieces commissioned especially for the exhibition. B2V is on view from September 23 through December 11, 2004 (note: these dates have been updated) in the Logan Galleries on the San Francisco campus of California College of the Arts; an opening reception will take place on Thursday, September 23, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public.

Though Los Angeles and, more recently, Vancouver have become internationally recognized art centers, the West Coast of North America has never before been the subject of a major survey exhibition.

"This 2,200-mile-long coastal region is both a coherent cultural corridor and a continental hub of innovative art and design. As such, it is overdue for recognition as North America's most vital region of contemporary art making. This art doesn't look to Europe or art history for validation; instead, it draws its inspiration from changes in the cultural landscape that are happening first, and accelerating more rapidly, all along the West Coast," says Wattis director Ralph Rugoff, one of the five West Coast curators who organized the exhibition.

B2V focuses on recently made work (produced within the last two to four years) in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, drawing, video, text pieces, web-based works and performance. Artists in the exhibition include Michael Brophy, Delia Brown, Brian Calvin, Russell Crotty, Roman de Salvo, Trisha Donnelly, Stan Douglas, Sam Durant, Thomas Eggerer, Kota Ezawa, Harrell Fletcher & Miranda July, Evan Holloway, Chris Johanson, Brian Jungen, Tim Lee, Ken Lum, Liz Magor, Matt McCormick, Roy McMakin, Mark Mumford, Shannon Oksanen & Scott Livingstone, Michele O'Marah, Marcos Ramí­rez ERRE, Glenn Rudolph, Steven Shearer, Catherine Sullivan, Larry Sultan, Ron Terada, Althea Thauberger, Torolab and Yvonne Venegas.

The artists in the exhibition are interested in popular forms and genres, from landscape and portraiture to vernacular signage and music videos.Their work thoughtfully reinterprets myths and reexamines histories related to West Coast cultures as diverse as the First Nations of British Columbia and the contemporary youth tribes of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The exhibition invokes patterns of immigration in the region as well as utopian visions of the "good life" and the unique topography of West Coast cities—part urban, part suburban and part wilderness. The art in B2V not only embodies a range of West Coast sensibilities, it also offers revealing portraits of the people and places on the western rim of North America and presents evidence of creative collaborations and shared aesthetic concerns among artists living and working in the region.

"Perhaps because of their relative youth as well as their geographical distance from national capitals and traditional centers of high culture, West Coast cities have nurtured ideas related to the reinvention of both self and society, and this tendency inflects the art being made here," says Rugoff.

B2V took shape through an extensive research process; the curators conducted literally hundreds of studio visits with artists in Tijuana, San Diego, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. The B2V curatorial team consists of Ralph Rugoff, Director, and Matthew Higgs, Curator, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts; Toby Kamps, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Lisa Corrin, Deputy Director for Art, Seattle Art Museum; and Daina Augaitis, Chief Curator/Associate Director, Vancouver Art Gallery.

B2V is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, which features the artists and their works and includes essays on the themes of art and life on the West Coast of North America by novelist Douglas Coupland, novelist and NEST magazine editor Matthew Stadler and others.

Lawrence R. Rinder has been appointed to the newly created position of dean of graduate studies, effective August 15, 2004. Rinder is currently Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In his new position at CCA, Rinder will oversee the college's graduate division, which includes programs in architecture, curatorial practice, design, fine arts, visual criticism, and writing. CCA currently enrolls 189 graduate students.