CCA News
Sanjit Sethi: Community Works
Posted on Monday, April 23, 2012, by Simon Hodgson
What links the children of Oakland's Emery Secondary School with the inmates of San Quentin? Answer: CCA students have worked with both in partner programs organized by CCA's Center for Art and Public Life. The Center, operating out of an unassuming office on Broadway opposite CCA's main Oakland campus, is a dynamic hub connecting the college with organizations across the Bay Area operating in the fields of art, education, business, design, community work, ecology, and beyond. Its ever-widening network is overseen by the Center's director, Sanjit Sethi, whose formidable leadership skills and affable manner have made him much admired and extraordinarily well connected.
In the last four years, Sethi and the Center have focused their activities into three well-defined programs, which immediately benefit hundreds of CCA students every year. ENGAGE at CCA organizes semester-long courses in collaboration with faculty members that occur across disciplines throughout the college and operate in partnership with outside organizations such as Bethany Senior Center Housing or the Temescal Mural Project to solve specific, well-defined issues. The IMPACT Social Entrepreneurship Awards give up to $10,000 to interdisciplinary teams of CCA students to devise, plan, and execute social and humanitarian projects benefiting specific communities, anywhere in the world, over one summer. CCA CONNECTS are structured "externships" in which 40 students every year work at outside organizations such as the design firm Rebar or the architectural group Asian Neighborhood Design.
Read the rest >>>CCA Faculty Brian Conley Delves into the Iraqi Contemporary Art Scene
Posted on Friday, April 13, 2012, by Simon Hodgson
Fine Arts faculty member Brian Conley spent part of his fall 2011 sabbatical in the Middle East assisting in the launch of a new nonprofit organization, Sada (Echo) for Contemporary Iraqi Art. Sada was founded just last year by the Baghdad-born curator and Fulbright fellow Rijin Sahakian, who saw a critical need for support in the creation, presentation, and preservation of contemporary art in Iraq.
Read the rest >>>In Search of Todd Shalom
Posted on Monday, February 6, 2012, by Simon Hodgson
In a New York borough, a group of walkers meanders through the city. They stop and look around. They close their eyes. They listen. They are participants on a walk with artists from Elastic City, a conceptual walk organization founded by CCA alumnus Todd Shalom (MFA Writing 2004). Lauded by the New York Times, the Economist, and even illustrated in the New Yorker (that's how you know you've really arrived!), Elastic City has organized walks from Brooklyn to Brazil.
Shalom's title at Elastic City is producer and director. He designs and leads some walks, and also commissions other artists to create walks. The walks focus less on providing factual information and more on heightening the senses, uncovering the poetry of everyday places, and creating new group rituals in dialogue with public space. Each walk is an artwork. Lucky Walk, by Shalom in collaboration with Juan Betancurth, revealed lucky and unlucky traits within New York architecture. It encouraged participants to engage in rituals to eliminate bad luck and bring forth good luck. Homesickness by the urbanist Einat Manoff examined the group's physical surroundings as a mirror into its collective homesickness, testing possible interventions in space and discussing the theoretical perspectives offered by urban theory and environmental psychology. Other 2011 walks included City Island Hop by Andrea Polli, Love Spells by Emily Tepper, and Total Detroit by Niegel Smith. In this last, participants started out walking in LaGuardia Airport in New York and then took a plane to the Motor City, where they continued the 56-hour performance.
Read the rest >>>Graphic Designer Michael Sun Trades CCA for the NBA
Posted on Thursday, February 2, 2012, by Simon Hodgson
"Zero to hero" is a cliché in sports movies, but how does a sports-obsessed graphic designer make the leap from rookie to professional? Growing up outside Detroit, Michael Sun (Graphic Design 2010) was always a fan but never thought of sports as anything more than a hobby or entertainment. Then after attending the University of Michigan and receiving a teaching degree, he came to the sinking realization that teaching might not be for him. He admits he needed some direction.
"I went to lunch with my dad one day and I was spitballing, trying to think of my next step, but I had no idea what to do. Sports was an obsession, the only thing that held my interest at the time. I didn't know what I wanted. I'd always been interested in sports logos but only doodled them on notes in high school. I didn't even know logos dealt with something called graphic design.
"Fortunately I found CCA, but it was definitely a tough transition. For a while I felt like an outsider. I'd already received a degree, I was a little older, I didn't dress the same way, and I lived far from the city in Sunnyvale. Worst of all, it was discouraging to compare my projects with students who had been designing for longer than I had, or who had a better eye for color or composition."
He realized even in these tough moments, however, that his teachers were on his side. "They knew my work was not the greatest, but they also knew so badly I wanted to succeed and how hard I was trying. My background was academic -- expecting results according to how hard you worked -- so I decided I'd get there if I tried hard enough. And the professors noticed that.
Read the rest >>>Creator Curator: SFMOMA's Joseph Becker on Sets, Space, and Sailing
Posted on Monday, January 30, 2012, by Simon Hodgson
Joseph Becker (BArch 2007) comes from a creative family: In the 1980s, his parents combined their film and education backgrounds to open Southern California's first Gymboree kids' program, and his sister has her own fashion line. His North Hollywood high school actually offered classes in set design, and he further developed what he calls "a taste for space" with classes in architecture and design at UCLA and Art Center College of Design. He arrived at CCA in 2002 to formally begin his undergraduate studies with a plan to become a product designer, but he switched to architecture during his first year. He is now an assistant curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
How would you sum up your CCA experience?
There was a real sense of connection to San Francisco. With the Architecture faculty made up of professors who were also designing independently, I knew I was learning from people who were actually doing things. The studio environment, with late late nights and a palpable energy buzzing around you, was catalytic. You could get everything out of it if you put in the work, and if you were motivated by your own inquisitiveness.
Read the rest >>>Arthur Gonzalez on the Art of Getting One's Hands Dirty
Posted on Thursday, December 15, 2011, by Simon Hodgson
When Ceramics professor Arthur Gonzalez was told about his upcoming retrospective at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado, Boulder, his first reaction was, "Wow, that's exciting!"
Then, his second thought: "Oh boy, am I really old enough for a retrospective?"
The exhibition will take place in 2015. "By the time the show opens, I'll be 60. We're planning it so far out because we have to locate a lot of the work. My pieces are spread across collections in the United States, Taiwan, Japan, Italy, Canada, Belgium, and Australia. It'll be a kind of detective-investigation situation. Each piece has its own history -- its provenance -- and some have changed hands two or three times. And then when I find out who owns an artwork, I have to ask them if they'd be willing to part with it for a while. A retrospective tells a story; you've got to have a beginning, a middle, and an end . . . although hopefully I've got a couple more decades to go before it's really The End!"
Gonzalez grew up in a rural neighborhood outside Sacramento. His mother was a seamstress, and his father was a carpenter. Both came from large families; his mother was one of seven, and his father was one of 23 (!) children born to a Nebraska sharecropper. "Since they both worked, I had to find ways as a child to keep myself occupied. I always loved to draw -- I can't remember a time when I didn't draw. My father was literally a Sunday painter. He would do an oil painting at the kitchen table on the weekends. One day, my mom enrolled herself and my dad in a night class in oil painting. He liked to paint, but only having a third-grade education, he was intimidated by the idea of doing it in a school-type situation. So I went with my mother in his place. I was seven years old. I still have a painting that I made in that class. Also, my uncle worked for the state printing plant and would bring home books that were stitched together, with no images, and they'd be my sketchbooks. I'd go through them like water, filling every corner with drawings and cartoons."
Read the rest >>>The Art of Food
Posted on Wednesday, November 23, 2011, by Simon Hodgson
From painter to pastry chef, ceramicist to wine cellar owner, innovative CCA alumni are shaping creative niches across the world of food and drink.
Twenty people stand around a long butcher-block table. The lights above cast a pale glow on its surface, illuminating the ingredients piled in its recessed trough -- lemons, lettuce, flour, eggplants, bell peppers -- without lighting the faces of the diners. They are here for Hands On, a food-making experience in which they use their hands rather than utensils to create a three-course meal.
"Cooking is very much a form of art," says Lisa Mishima (Graphic Design 2005), who concocted Hands On together with her boss, Randall Stowell of the creative production company Autofuss, and friend Yvonne Mouser (Furniture 2006). "Both cooking and art involve concepting, crafting, and presenting a piece. But there is something about consuming one's creation that feels even more personal, immediate, and honest."
Initially, the guests are nervous, even clumsy. Flour falls to the floor. Slowly, the experimental chefs grow more confident. There are giggles around the room, then nods of approval as the dishes take shape. The menu features Caesar salad, handmade pasta with pesto sauce, and tiramisu. Some diners shape vegetables into utensils and use those instead of spoons or spatulas. Maybe there will be a meal at the end of this.
Read the rest >>>A Tale of Two Graphic Designers: Martin Venezky and Jon Sueda
Posted on Thursday, October 13, 2011, by Simon Hodgson
Today, professors Martin Venezky and Jon Sueda seem like two sides of the same coin. In the Graphic Design courses they co-teach at CCA, they listen to their students before speaking, argue with each other fruitfully and comfortably, then almost always agree on what the student should do next. In addition to their academic work, each has forged a successful professional career. Venezky is one of the most influential designers of his generation. His projects include work for SFMOMA, Reebok, the Sundance Film Festival, and the two-volume, 600-page, award-winning publication for the International Center of Photography's The Mexican Suitcase, documenting recently unearthed Spanish Civil War photographs by Robert Capa and others. Sueda just finished a major international commission, designing the graphic identity for the 12th Istanbul Biennial. He is also curating an exhibition at the International Biennial of Graphic Design in the Czech Republic in 2012. While the rapport and respect between these two designers is solid and obvious today, it's not a relationship that developed overnight. This is the story of a mentorship spanning two continents, four states, and 15 years.
Back in 1996, the 25-year-old Sueda enrolled in CCA's undergraduate Graphic Design Program. A tennis-playing Hawaiian with a BFA from UC Davis and a background in painting and printmaking, he signed up for a class with Venezky. "Jon was extraordinarily shy and basically terrified," says Venezky. "He was also really, really good. He hated the critiques, but when I made suggestions, he followed through and went much further, and I was really impressed with that. His development was amazing to watch." Says Sueda, "I didn't know what graphic design was, and I wasn't sure what I was getting into. At UC Davis, we never really had critiques. So I wasn't prepared, and I found it hard. I didn't even know I needed a computer. I went through the first semester doing everything at Kinko's."
Read the rest >>>Extra Ordinary: Kate Pocrass's Mundane Journeys
Posted on Thursday, September 29, 2011, by Simon Hodgson
For an artist who has made her name celebrating the everyday, the career of Kate Pocrass (MFA 2001) is anything but ordinary. Pocrass's well-considered salute to normalcy began at CCA, when she launched Mundane Journeys, a community art project based around a telephone hotline. Art fans calling the line would hear a series of instructions directing them to a specific address in the city where they might find intriguing graffiti, a charming storefront window, or an upholstered tree stump.
"The hotline started in 2001, the year I graduated from CCA. It was in reaction to a show one of my advisors, Ted Purves, did at Southern Exposure called Sites and Expeditions. I changed the telephone message every Monday, figuring at first that it would end when the gallery show ended. I ended up continuing it for eight years, from 2001 to 2009."
Mundane Journeys led directly to a residency at the Hammer Museum. Allison Agsten, who curates the Hammer's residencies, saw a Mundane Journeys poster created for the Orange County Museum of Art's 2006 California Biennial and gave Pocrass a call.
Read the rest >>>Myron Michael: Verses Between Bars
Posted on Monday, September 12, 2011, by Simon Hodgson
“Wouldn’t it be amazing to learn the craft of writing from Kim Addonizio at a dive bar? Or from devorah major at the Church of John Coltrane? Or from Paul Hoover at the Crucible!”
These are the enthusiastic musings of Myron Michael (MFA Writing 2006), a poet, teacher, recording artist, and proprietor of the micro label Rondeau Records. “I’m envisioning an annual festival of free neighborhood writing workshops taught by performers, poets, and thespians. It would cover everything from semantic poetry to phonetic poetry—poetry and dance, poetry and photography. Slam, sonnets, spoken word, songwriting, rondeaus, rap. It’s all poetry.”
Based in Oakland, Michael is also the founder of the poetry publication project Move or Die and curator of the monthly reading series HELIOTROPE. In August he will join other ambitious emerging poets and novelists at the week-long Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has already attended the annual conference twice, the first time as a student, the second as a work-study scholar. This year he returns as the resident emcee. The conference is an immersion experience, offering the chance to hone his craft not only in manuscript building, but also in organizational skills, as he pursues his goal of one day directing a writing conference or festival.
“Writing builds bridges.”
Read the rest >>>