CCA News

Alumnus Hank Willis Thomas and Photography Professor Chris Johnson Receive 2007 Media Arts Fellowship from Renew Media

Posted on Thursday, August 9, 2007, by Hannah Eldredge

CCA alumnus Hank Willis Thomas (MFA 2003, MA Visual and Critical Studies 2004) and CCA Photography professor Chris Johnson have won the 2007 Media Arts fellowship from Renew Media, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Thomas and Johnson received the $35,000 award for Question Bridge: Black Male, a documentary film that explores critically divisive issues within the African American male community. The project was initially conceived and produced by Johnson in San Diego in 1996. Recently, Thomas and Johnson teamed up to enhance it, using videotaped question-and-answer sessions.

Interior Design Student Wins Prestigious Donghia Foundation Interior Design Scholarship

Posted on Tuesday, July 31, 2007, by Hannah Eldredge

The Angelo Donghia Foundation of New York has announced that Kali Lewis, a senior Interior Design student at CCA, is one of only 11 students nationwide selected to receive the prestigious Donghia Foundation Interior Design Scholarship.

The scholarship will cover senior-year tuition, board, and maintenance as well as books and other materials.

Lewis was nominated by CCA faculty and was required to submit both a residential and a nonresidential project that she had already completed. About her designs and her style Lewis observes, "Mobility and manipulation of space and objects are always things I end up playing with. A person's activities and mood shift daily, and design should be able to complement and adapt to those needs."

The Donghia Foundation, established by the internationally recognized interior designer Angelo Donghia, provides support for the advancement of education in the interior design field. Its senior scholarship program awards prizes to exceptional seniors in accredited, undergraduate interior design programs. A jury of professionals in the field, educators, and magazine editors selects the winner of each merit-based scholarship.

For more information about CCA's Interior Design programs, see Interior Design.

Simpson Award Winners Announced

Posted on Monday, April 16, 2007, by Hannah Eldredge

Graduate students Patricia Esquivias, Reggie Stump, and Gabrielle Teschner were recently selected as winners of the Simpson Award, presented by CCA trustee Barclay Simpson and his wife, Sharon Hanley Simpson. CCA's centennial marks the 20th year this scholarship has been awarded to honor the work of exceptional graduate students.

The Simpson Awards Exhibition is on view April 23–28, 2007, in the Oliver Art Center on the Oakland campus of California College of the Arts. There is a reception April 23, 5:30–7:30 p.m.

Architecture Program and Dwell Collaborate to Renovate Offices for McSweeney's

Posted on Tuesday, March 20, 2007, by Hannah Eldredge

For the last two semesters, students of the CCA Design Build course have been working on the redesign of the office space of literary journal McSweeney's, located at 849 Valencia Street in San Francisco.

The project, taught in collaboration with Dwell Magazine, is a unique opportunity for advanced architecture students to gain hands-on experience and allows students to see a project from beginning to end.

Interior Design Student Awarded Scholarship from the International Interior Design Association

Posted on Tuesday, March 6, 2007, by Hannah Eldredge

Interior Design student Kerry Bogus (2008) was recently awarded the Honor Awards Scholarship by the Northern California Chapter of the International Interior Design Association (IIDA-NC). Bogus won for her design of the Love Chair, which was designed with sustainability in mind. The chair was created in professor Brian Kane's furniture production course.

When asked about the design and materials of the chair, Bogus replied, "All of the materials are either recyclable or biodegradable and are easily disassembled. The main material of the chair is a single sheet of cork that rolls up and ships easily. I wanted to design a soft buoyant seating option that focused on sustainability."

Bogus was awarded a $6,000 scholarship and was honored on February 15, 2007, at the IIDA-NC Honor Awards Celebration at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco.

For more information about CCA's Interior Design Program, see Interior Design.

Recent Industrial Design Alumnus Wins Dyson's Eye for Why Design Competition

Posted on Tuesday, February 27, 2007, by Hannah Eldredge

Matthew Gale, who graduated from the Industrial Design Program in 2006, is the winner of the third annual Eye for Why student design competition, sponsored by Dyson and the Industrial Designers Society of America.

Gale won for his design of the Excubo jacket, which helps commuters comfortably sleep on various forms of public transportation. The jacket is designed with a system of cords and polystyrene foam padding that, when tightened, cause the jacket to transform into a sleeping cocoon. The collar becomes a sleeping mask, the lapels become pillows, the sides tighten around the torso to support upright posture, and the cuffs unwrap to become mittens. The Excubo (Latin for "I sleep outside") provides effective support for the body to sleep while traveling on planes, buses, subways, and other forms of transportation.

Gale was awarded $5,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to New York, where he was honored at a reception hosted by James Dyson, founder of Dyson. Gale is also now eligible to compete for the James Dyson Award, an international competition between the winners from all the national Dyson award programs, which are held in 13 countries.

Gale designed the Excubo as part of the Industrial Design 6 course, instructed by Bill Wurz and Joanne Oliver. The course is one of the final Industrial Design courses to fulfill the undergraduate program and is tied to the final presentation and Senior Show, which is open to the design community.

For more information on the CCA Industrial Design Program, see Industrial Design. For more information on Dyson, visit Dyson.

Architecture Faculty Receive National Recognition

Posted on Tuesday, February 13, 2007, by Hannah Eldredge

AIA Fellowship Program

Three architecture faculty members—Peter Anderson, Charles Dilworth, and Paulett Taggart—have recently been elected into the Fellowship program in the American Institute of Architects (AIA). The Fellowship program recognizes architects who have made a significant contribution to architecture and society and who have achieved a standard of excellence in the profession. This is the highest honor the AIA gives nationally, and only 76 out of 80,000 members received the award this year.

Animal Subjects Course Wins Award from the Humane Society

Posted on Tuesday, December 12, 2006, by Hannah Eldredge

Animal Subjects, an interdisciplinary course designed to examine a wide range of stories, theories, and images of animals in history, is the 2006 winner of the Animals and Society Course Award from the Humane Society of the United States and the Center for Respect of Life and Environment.

This award is granted each year to three college undergraduate and graduate courses worldwide. The award includes a $1,500 prize, which will be used to expand CCA's library with resources relating to animal subjects.

Animal Subjects is part of the Critical Studies Program under the category of Methods of Knowledge, which are interdisciplinary humanities seminars required of all CCA undergraduate students in their third or fourth year. These courses are designed to teach critical thinking and to show students historical and cultural contexts.

Kari Weil, chair of Critical Studies and associate professor of Writing and Literature, teaches the course. By teaching Animal Subjects, she hopes for students to "sometime in their work try to make the empathic leap of envisioning a nonhuman perspective." The course evolved from her work on horse-human relations in 19th-century France, but has grown both in response to her research and student interest. Weil tries to integrate students' areas of study into the course. Last year the class took a field trip to the Oakland Zoo, where they learned about zoo design and conservation, which incorporated architecture and design.

Weil has been teaching at CCA for six years, and this is the fourth time she has taught the Animal Subjects course. She is near completion of the book The Equine Other in Nineteenth-Century France, a study that looks at the discourses around and representations of riding and breeding horses. Parts of the book are already published as articles. She also has a forthcoming essay called "Animal Death and the Struggle for Ethics" in a special issue of Configurations, a journal dedicated to animal and agricultural studies.

To learn more about the Critical Studies Program, see Critical Studies.

Fashion Design Student Wins Award at the 2006 Arts of Fashion Symposium

Posted on Friday, November 3, 2006, by Hannah Eldredge

Senior Fashion Design student Leanne Wierzba was recently awarded a three-month internship with Anne Valérie Hash in Paris. The internship was one of six grand prizes from the 2006 Arts of Fashion Symposium, where internationally renowned fashion experts from cities such as Paris, Brussels, Vienna, and London judged aspiring fashion designers.

The event was hosted by the University of North Texas, School of Visual Arts, and over 100 students from 43 U.S. colleges and universities participated.

The symposium began with a four-day series of master class workshops, which included seminars, debates, and lectures on various topics in the fashion industry, including copyright law, blogging, international scholarship, and business.

The event concluded with a runway-style fashion show featuring the designs of 40 candidates competing for the six grand prizes.

Students were asked to create fashion illustrations depicting the way to express the mind and the body. Of all the submitted illustrations, about 50 finalists were chosen to present their designs at the event. Wierzba presented a complete outfit, with a cutout bustier, skirt, and ankle boots, which was intended to express the feminine archetype in art and fashion and the Freudian slip. The outfit was made from ivory satin, with pleated portions in charcoal grey chiffon.

Wierzba describes her style as very personal: "It is about my experiences, concrete and otherwise. It comes out of history, memory, and the realm of dreams. I am driven by concepts that relate mostly to psychology and social behavior."

The three-month internship in Paris will most likely begin in May, at the end of the spring semester.

For more information on the Arts of Fashion Foundation, visit Arts of Fashion. For more information about CCA's Fashion Design Program, see Fashion Design.

Media Arts Students Participate in Yahoo!'s Annual University Design Expo

Posted on Wednesday, November 1, 2006, by Hannah Eldredge

Five CCA Media Arts students participated in Yahoo!'s University Design Expo, an annual event that explores how humans interact with technology and showcases student projects illustrating future uses for technology services and devices.

Yahoo!'s User Experience & Design (UED) group and Yahoo! Research hosted the annual event on July 31 at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale.

CCA and four other interdisciplinary graduate design programs were invited to participate: New York University, Interactive Telecommunications Program; Royal College of Art (London), Interaction Design Program; UCLA, Design and Media Arts Program; ESDI (Rio de Janeiro), Graphic Design Program.

Yahoo! provided CCA with $10,000 to create and present five projects. Professors Barney Haynes, Todd Blair, Allison Sant, and Anthony Burke led the students and encouraged out-of-the-box thinking in creating their interfaces.

Media Arts students Erin Elliott, Kate Richards, North Pitney, Rhonda Holberton, and Lucas Ketelle created projects for the expo. Projects ranged from Richards's living grass interactive project, in which users could run their hand over grass to trigger a video showing the world from a bug's perspective, to Elliott and Pitney's lollipop project, which consisted of lollipops with sensors that, when licked, controlled the movement of robotic babies.

"The mouth is underused in interactive art and design. This is a good example of a fun way to show you how you can use your mouth to control computers and machines," said Elliott.

The expo was launched 17 years ago by Joy Mountford, who was looking for a way to promote new ways of thinking about computers and design among engineers. She began the expo while at Apple Computer, but has recently moved to Yahoo! and has kept the expo going. She estimates 1,800 students have participated over the years.

CCA has received an invitation to participate in the event next year as well.

For more information about the CCA Media Arts Program, see Media Arts.