Glance | Spring 2014

A publication for the CCA community

CA L I F O R N I A CO L L E G E O F T H E A RT S San Francisco / Oakland Spring 2014

Letter from the President Glance Spring 2014 Volume 22, No. 2 EDITOR

Lindsey Westbrook CONTRIBUTORS Susan Avila Chris Bliss

As I write this, another year of tremendous creative activity at CCA is coming

Kelly Dawson

16th year at CCA—my sixth as president. Unprecedented growth and steady

Allison Byers

to a close. The end of the spring semester also marks the completion of my

Claire Fitzsimmons Barney Haynes

when we look back 20 years from now, our achievements of this past

Simon Hodgson

decade will pale in comparison to the enormous successes and expanded

Barbara Jones

Tanya Siadneva

academic improvements have occurred during those years, but I believe that

(Interaction Design 2014)

Matthew Harrison Tedford

(MA Visual and Critical Studies 2011)

Rachel Walther Clay Walsh

Lindsey Westbrook DESIGN

CCA Sputnik, a student design team FACULTY ADVISOR

visibility that lie ahead for the college.

Higher education is experiencing the most dramatic remake since the end of World War II, when returning vets helped to reshape U.S. colleges and

universities. Changing demographics, the economy, and online and other new

instructional models are just a few of the issues facing higher education today.

The future will not be kind to all colleges, but I’m confident that CCA is well

positioned to thrive in what is likely to become higher education’s new normal.

For us, opportunities abound!

Doug Akagi

My enthusiasm for CCA’s future is fueled by several important factors:

DESIGN AND PRODUCTION MANAGER

1. Entrepreneurs, employers, community organizations, and business leaders

Meghan Ryan

increasingly recognize and value the studio-based pedagogy and broad,

DESIGNERS

have the skills to be leaders in the evolving 21st-century economy.

Suwanna Ruayrinsaowarot Emerald Yang

Glance is a twice-yearly publication of California College of the Arts 1111 Eighth Street

San Francisco CA 94107-2247 415.703.9542

lwestbrook@cca.edu CHANGE OF ADDRESS? Please notify the

collaborative learning that are at the core of a CCA education. Our graduates 2. Our students are deeply committed to sustainable design and art practices,

environmental responsibility, civic engagement, and social justice—values that will advance the new economy, reshape our evolving national character, and, indeed, help secure the future of our planet.

3. CCA is in the right place at the right time. The San Francisco Bay Area is

the global destination for technological, social, and cultural innovation—the

perfect spot for creative young people looking for a forward-thinking college of the arts.

CCA Advancement Office

I continue to be energized and excited by my leadership role at CCA, and

510.594.3784

you for your continued interest and support.

5212 Broadway, Oakland CA 94618 emajor@cca.edu

inspired daily by the creative work of our students, faculty, and staff. Thank Sincerely,

Printed by Quad Graphics, Inc., on 10 percent postconsumer waste paper. Our printer is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council™ (FSC(R)) and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI). Printed with inks that contain a minimum (27.3%) by weight renewable content.

Stephen Beal President

Contents COLLEGE NEWS

FEATURES 02 10 16

Drink, Dine, Design: Packaging That Looks Good Enough to Eat It’s Exhausting! It’s Your Life!

Breaking into Animation Eleven Eleven: Perfect, Bound

ALUMNI STORIES

32 34 35

Awards and Accolades At the Wattis Institute: Capp Street Project Celebrates Its 30th Birthday How I Got Here: Tanya Siadneva (Interaction Design 2014)

36

Bookshelf

37

Tune in to CCA on Instagram

18

Sofía Córdova (MFA 2010)

20

Ako Castuera (Illustration 2000)

22

Sean McFarland (MFA 2004)

38

Spotlight

24

Maximilian Uriarte (Animation 2013)

40

Gifts and Grants

42

Honor Roll of Donors

46

In Memoriam

FACULTY STORIES 26 28 30

Tim Belonax (Graphic Design) Christine Metzger (Critical Studies) David Gissen (Architecture)

PHILANTHROPY

48

Notes from the Studio: Barney Haynes (Interdisciplinary Studies and Fine Arts)

PHOTO CREDITS

All images of student work appear courtesy the students, copyright California College of the Arts, unless otherwise noted. Images of alumni and faculty work appear courtesy the artists unless otherwise noted. Cover, pp. 28, 34, and 38 (3–4): Jim Norrena; inside front cover and p. 39: Alison Yin; p. 18

(top): Carmen Winant; p. 20 (bead) and p. 21 (warrior): Joyce Kim; pp. 26–27: Andria Lo; pp. 28–29 (background): Flavie Liu; pp. 30–31 (background):

Emerald Yang; p. 32 (1): courtesy SFMOMA; p. 32 (2): Ben Blackwell, courtesy SFMOMA; p. 32 (3): David Safian, courtesy SFMOMA; p. 38 (1–2): Hardy Wilson for Nikki Ritcher Photography; p. 38 (5–6): Drew Altizer Photography; p. 41: designs by Lauren LoPrete; p. 46 (top): Alison Padgett; p. 46 (bottom): courtesy the San Francisco Chronicle; p. 47 (top): courtesy Kijeong Jeon; p. 47 (bottom): courtesy Julie Miyasaki; pp. 48–49: Rachel Walther.

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F E AT U R E S

DRINK, DINE, DESIGN.

PACKAGING THAT LOOKS GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT

by Lindsey Westbrook

with invaluable assistance from Graphic Design faculty member Tom Ingalls

From butchers to bakers to Cabernet makers, the San Francisco Bay Area is crammed with artisanal food and drink companies hungry for great design.

For our local graphic designers, this happy fact brings with it a wealth of opportunities to engage in fascinating and highly visible projects in the realms of food packaging, wine labels, restaurant design, and beyond.

S

ometimes—as in the case of Alyssa Warnock (Graphic Design

2001), the designer of all the signage, menus, and packaging for the

La Boulange café chain—the job is to graphically articulate the entire

brand. Sometimes the job is to reinvigorate a faded rose, honoring its history while introducing some contemporary twists, as Robert van Horne

(Graphic Design 2007) did in his redesign of San Francisco’s beloved Tosca.

Even a job as deceptively simple as a wine label actually involves a host of considerations, including—as Tom Ingalls (Graphic Design faculty) and

Michael Vanderbyl (Graphic Design 1968) well know—how the bottle will stand out on the grocery store shelf or the restaurant table.

In the following pages, these designers and others talk about projects that

have been crucial in their careers, in many cases undertaken for people they readily call their “dream clients.”

3

After graduation, Alyssa Warnock (Graphic Design 2001) became a designer for marchFirst and worked

on big accounts such as Apple, Pixar, and Netflix. Eventually tiring of operating within the confines of established brand guidelines, she started networking and taking on her own clients, which led to her first restaurant gig:

designing the logo, signage, and packaging for Mistral in San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

“Because of that design, I got a call out of the blue in

2005 from Pascal Rigo, the Bay Area baking czar, asking

me to do a logo for his company Bay Bread. I went on to work on many of his restaurants: Café du Soleil, Le Petit Robert, Rigolo. When he launched La Boulange, which now has 20 locations around the Bay Area, we worked together to perfect every last detail of every store.

“Pascal is wonderful to work with. He has lots of ideas and is very artistic, but also really trusts me and my

design sensibilities. Ha, he’s the only client who’s ever told me, ‘Make it cuter!’

“The day I found out La Boulange had been acquired

by Starbucks, I almost cried. I thought it was the end

of working with my favorite client. As it turned out, we

generally don’t want their stores ‘messed with’—which

products within the Starbucks stores, retaining a lot of our

By July 2014, Warnock’s work will be prominently

were able to successfully launch our La Boulange–branded existing look and feel. It was a big struggle to pitch this to Starbucks—they have a very strong design team, and

made the outcome that much sweeter.”

featured in every Starbucks store in the United States— and there are more than 10,000 of them!

“Another interesting project for me in the last few years was the redesign of the Lee’s Deli logo. It was trapped

in the 1980s and posed a huge challenge: I couldn’t do

anything too fancy, since they’re a value-driven deli and they weren’t going to change the menu. I think the

outcome was very successful. They got an updated yet

classic design without looking like they’re trying to be something they aren’t.”

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F E AT U R E S

The Bay Area’s enthusiastic locavore and mixology

movements have brought numerous clients to the door

of Tom Ingalls (Graphic Design faculty), for whom wine and spirit packaging is a specialty. Ingalls leads the

Packaging advanced studio in Graphic Design, and he

has taught at CCA since 1980. His firm, Ingalls Design, is composed of himself and CCA alumna Kseniya Makarova (Graphic Design 2010).

Ingalls has had distillers as clients since the 1980s, but the real turning point was in 1998, when the Alameda-based St. George Spirits—one of the first artisanal distillers in

the United States—got in touch about branding and packaging for Hangar One vodka. “They were a great client,”

Ingalls reports. “Smart. Tough. And I’m happy to say that they enjoyed a meteoric rise. They did something very

savvy by marketing directly to bartenders and restaurateurs. Charles Phan of the Slanted Door began offering Hangar One’s four infusions as the only vodkas on his cocktail menu. And the rest is history.”

Clients often come to him with a design brief in their

head, Ingalls says, and a large part of his job is to extract it, storyboard it, and help them articulate on paper who they are and what they’re about. “In the case of Hangar

One, it involved Russian Constructivism, like Alexander Rodchenko, but updated for the 21st century.

“Because of my success with Hangar One, two years ago I landed the job designing for Spirit Works Distillery in

Sebastopol. They were talking to lots of high-profile firms, but in the end they went with Ingalls Design. We’re an

ideal match in so many ways: experience, size, personality, style. We just hit it off.

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“We designed their logo and color scheme, all the branding and

labels, signage for their building, and great collateral, all of which

articulates what they are selling: a handmade product that is crafted in a rich distilling tradition, but with a modern twist. The glass bottles are a custom design, and the labeling is a combination of paper labels and screenprinting directly onto the glass.”

“We’ve also recently been doing lots of work for a wine packager

based in Shanghai,” Makarova chimes in. “There’s a huge emerging middle class in China, and they’re starting to embrace California

wines. We create names, branding, and color schemes. We’ve been amused and fascinated to learn how some things that are very

popular here don’t translate well, for instance names like Rad Dog and Fat Bastard, or imagery that is too elusive or evocative. The more concrete and literal we can make the names—Pine Ridge, Pacific Crest, Highway 29—the better the wine sells in China.

“Our client over there has been incredibly helpful in communicating with us about what’s working and what isn’t, and making guesses as to why. It’s exciting—totally new terrain for us.”

Robert van Horne (Graphic Design 2007) has designed for a wide range of clients, including many restaurants and wineries.

“I didn’t start my design career with this particular focus in mind,

but soon enough I realized I brought more value and had more fun with my restaurant clients. I had worked in food service and hos-

pitality while studying at CCA, which gave me an understanding of how things work in the front and back of the house at restaurants.

So I knew what questions to ask in order to set up the best systems: How often does the menu change? Should the wine list be pre-

scored for easier folding? It’s cheaper to print in bulk, but are you sure you have space to store 10,000 coasters?

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F E AT U R E S

“Wine label design is unique because the landscape you’re

working on is organic, round, and reflective. It’s important to understand how a label design will translate from the computer screen to the bottle, and what print processes

will work best. Fortunately, many printers in the Bay Area are set up to do foil stamping, embossing, custom dies,

and variable-data printing on beautiful, pressure-sensitive paper at a very affordable cost.

“I live in the Mission District of San Francisco, and I’m

especially fond of the work I get to do in my neighbor-

hood. My first neighborhood client was Frances. Then I

helped Delfina with the rebrand of their original restaurant and the new identity for their latest, Locanda, and subsequently got to do all of the branding for West of Pecos across the street on Valencia.

“Also, I must say, you can’t beat the perks in this business! It’s sure easier to get a table at a popular place

when you’re in the industry.” (In the photo at right he

demonstrates this at another San Francisco restaurant he designed for, Mason Pacific.)

Van Horne likes to see clients creatively reuse his designs.

Belcampo Meat Company, for instance, has redeployed

the butcher paper he designed for them as table runners for special dinners, and to cover the windows of stores under construction. “If the same paper looks good

wrapped around a steak, on a table, and hanging as wallpaper, I can be confident I’ve done a good job.”

Van Horne’s recent work on the historic Tosca Cafe in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco generated

more buzz than any project he’s worked on to date. Tosca, which had been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, was

purchased in 2012 by Ken Friedman and April Bloomfield, major New York restaurant celebrities. It was the duo’s

first venture in San Francisco, and they hired van Horne

to do a redesign that would honor the past of this vaunted institution, but in a creative and contemporary way.

“When the locals heard that Tosca was being redone, they practically wept with fear that it would change,

but a lot of what we did was to bring back—excavate,

really—aspects that had been hidden or forgotten. Some

of the changes were major, like reviving the kitchen and the bar program. Some were smaller, like locating Tosca

ashtrays and matchbooks with logos from earlier eras. All of the artwork we created already existed somehow in

the restaurant, but hadn’t been used on any collateral for more than 20 years.

“On my first meeting there with Ken and April, I found, semi-hidden and yellowed with cigarette smoke, some

drink, dine, design

great napkin art done for the previous owner by a patron called ‘Louis of Place Pigalle.’ He’d hand-drawn scenes from various operas; the drawings were fun and light-

hearted, but also kind of lewd in a funny way. It really

was the crown jewel of all the old ephemera we discov-

ered. We took high-res photos, Photoshopped them, and turned them into coaster designs.

“We did something similar with opera sheet music that

we found behind the old bar. We scanned it and made it

into titling fonts for the menus. The uneven, hand-drawn

quality lends itself naturally to the menus, in an authentic manner.”

CCA alumna Jamie Lee (Graphic Design 2009) works

for van Horne (she was a senior designer for the Tosca project) and also freelances. One of her independent clients is Kiva Cannabis Confections.

Lee met Scott Palmer, the CEO of Kiva, through her senior thesis project at CCA. “When Scott first asked me to help develop, brand, and package Kiva, I was conflicted,” she

remembers. “I grew up in Hong Kong, where possession of marijuana is treated like possession of heroin! But, having worked with him on other projects, I was convinced by his commitment to revolutionize the cannabis market with a product that would do good.

“In coming up with the design, Nathan Sharp (my design partner and boyfriend) and I asked Kiva a series of ques-

tions, like, ‘If Kiva was a person, how would you describe their personality?’ We settled on words such as ‘honest,’ ‘transparent,’ ‘friendly,’ ‘clean,’ and ‘fresh.’ This process not only helped us in designing the brand, but also

helped the Kiva team understand themselves better. They

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F E AT U R E S

continue to use this research as a guide in many aspects of their business.

“Medical cannabis patients span a wide range of THC

tolerances, and we realized that for edibles, there was no established method to measure dosing. To address this

challenge, we focused on making the THC content obvious on the package, so that patients and their doctors have a clear way to devise a suitable dosage.

“Over time, in response to user and vendor feedback, we

revised the packaging to communicate even more clearly.

For instance we increased the emphasis on the THC

amount, and on ‘Medical Cannabis’ over ‘Chocolate.’ We eliminated the word ‘doses’ because it was confusing.

“We’re now working on a new Kiva product called Terra: a chocolate-covered espresso bean, which also allows for a very precise, controlled dosage.”

CCA alumna Janet Lai (Graphic Design 2009) is a

senior designer for the Berkeley-based chocolate company TCHO. “I’m constantly thinking,” she says, “about the

process of opening a chocolate bar: in what order people

will tear open the flaps, how the smell of the paper affects

the taste of the chocolate (it does!). And, of course, on the scale of the grocery store, how to get TCHO to stand out from all the other chocolates on the shelf.

“I frequently spend time in the ‘lab’ here watching the new flavors being created, since having a deep under-

standing of that has major implications for my designs.”

Design is Play, the firm of Mark Fox and Angie Wang

(both Graphic Design faculty), has received major accolades for its identity and packaging designs for March

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Pantry, a new line of provisions for hearth and home.

“We wanted each piece to feel like a small gift—the

antithesis of a mass-market product,” says Fox. “The

March store on Sacramento Street tells us that designers come in specifically to look at the packaging. For us, that’s a great honor.

“For the paper labels, we chose a ‘laid’ stock that is most

often used for wine labels because of its warmth, tactility,

and associations with fine food. The labels are die-cut and offset printed, and the March Pantry identity is register embossed. It’s a small detail, but the embossing really contributes to the crafted feel.

“The special apothecary jars that hold salt have the design screenprinted directly on them with metallic ink. I did the lettering by hand.”

Michael Vanderbyl (Graphic Design 1968, former Dean of Design, and Graphic Design faculty for more than 30

years) has designed labels for wines that sell for $15 and wines that sell for $1,500. He notes that high-end wine-

maker clients are special because they’ve often made their fortunes in another field, whereas wine is their passion.

This means they’re apt to be producing small, finely crafted batches … and that they’ve got real resources to invest in the packaging.

His first wine label project came about from his work with Teknion, the Toronto-based office furniture manufacturer.

The president had decided to start a small winery near

Niagara Falls and invited Vanderbyl to come up with a name and a brand.

“Full disclosure: We killed a couple of bottles as we

brainstormed,” he recalls, “and the perfect name struck

me: Wildass! Of course we realized it would be difficult

to get it past Canada’s liquor control board. So I made it literal. I drew an illustration of a jackass for the label

and it made it through the review.” That led to all kinds of other winemaker clients, including Checkerboard,

Barbour, Ziata, RdV, Pecota, Stewart, and the cult wines Scarecrow and M. Étain.

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IT’S EXHAUSTING! IT’S YOUR LIFE! BREAKING INTO ANIMATION A CONVERSATION BETWEEN RICK VERTOLLI AND LESLEY PADIEN Illustration by Lily Williams (Animation 2014)

Whether it’s making character sculptures for Toy Story 3 or graphics for Al Gore, creating for the iPhone or for Industrial Light & Magic, CCA’s Animation alumni are finding success. For this story, Glance invited Animation chair Rick Vertolli and faculty member Lesley Padien to talk about finding your passion, maintaining momentum during those first few years after graduation, and why CCA students have an edge when it comes to finding jobs in this competitive field.

Lesley: It’s an exciting time for animation students who

They have a unique workflow that involves creating 2D

in the field. Whether it’s in 2D, CGI, or stop motion, there

frame with an Impressionist-style brushstroke. The result

are just graduating. There’s a lot of different ways to be

are jobs out there. And as technology keeps advancing,

we’re seeing really interesting mergings and blendings of various forms of animation. It’s now possible, and popular, to combine technologies.

It’s not about trends now, but about the project:

What forms of animation can we bring together to create the best possible product? For example, Coraline (2009)

was stop-motion, but it had a CGI aspect when they used 3D printing for the faces and mouths.

Rick: The director John Kahrs gave a lecture at CCA

last semester, and he talked about his award-winning

animated short Paperman (2012). It’s a brilliantly rendered piece that combines 2D and 3D animation. His

inspiration was about the beauty of line. He didn’t want to lose the sensual and expressive lines he was seeing in

hand-drawn animation, then painting over the top of each matches the concept art very closely. It’s like a painting coming to life! A great example of developing methods that go beyond the standard styles.

Lesley: It’s so important to have a range of skills in your animator’s “toolkit.”

Rick: Which is why it’s crucial that our students have access to the college’s craft offerings, the liberal arts offerings, the fine art offerings…

Lesley: Sculpture, jewelry making, ceramics… I went to

Savannah College of Art and Design, and it was the same: I loved my fiber and textiles courses, and I applied what

I learned to texturing my animated characters. CCA even has blacksmithing, which we never had at SCAD!

the initial sketches and drawings, but he wanted to keep

Rick: At CCA, you’re not just learning a particular soft-

mind, he and his team at Disney came up with a method

You’re developing the skills to build a better mousetrap.

the accuracy, the predictability, of 3D. With that goal in where they could have both.

Lesley: LAIKA is a great example of a studio that

cultivates a wide variety of skill sets in-house. Some of

its artists specialize in 2D visual development. Others are amazing stop-motion fabricators or 3D modelers. And then there’s the production management team.

Rick: One of our recent grads is working on an experi-

mental short animation called The Dam Keeper with two Pixar art directors, Dice Tsutsumi and Robert Kondo.

ware package. You’re learning to be a problem solver.

Whereas if you’re coming out of a technical school that just teaches the software, your demo reel won’t be very creative.

This is important in getting your first job, which

will then lead—in five to 10 years, if all goes well—to

realizing your goal of being an assistant director or a story artist. CCA students emerge with a portfolio that reveals

them as versatile, creative, independent thinkers, which is absolutely something employers want to see.

Within the program, we offer a wide variety of

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Jerome Ranft (Sculpture 1991) is a character sculptor for Pixar, where he has worked on some of the most iconic

Jonathan Stagnaro (Illustration 2011) is a concept artist and illustrator specializing in fantasy and science fiction. His current clients include Nickelodeon, Hasbro, Mattel, Burger King,

animated films of the contemporary era, including Brave (2012), Toy Story 3 (2010), Cars (2006), Finding Nemo (2003), Monsters, Inc. (2001), and A Bug’s Life (1998).

Kellogg’s, Cranium, and many more. Recent projects include character art for Mafia Wars and Zombie Nation: Bayou Breakout.

workshops: Acting for Animation, Character Design,

Sound for Animation, Game Art and Design, Drawing

for Animation, Visual Storytelling. The intent is to help

students find their passion, their driving force. This isn’t a field where you can be a moderately interested person. You have to be completely passionate. You have to breathe it,

live it, all the way down to the marrow of your bones, in order to succeed.

Grant Kolton (Animation and Illustration 2012) is a full-time freelance animator. His latest projects include a

Lesley: It’s exhausting! It’s your life!

national TV commercial for Dave Matthews’s album Away From

Rick: When we recognize that passion in one of our

Little Closer.” For the latter he assembled and directed his own

students, we find ourselves spending a lot of time trying

the World and the music video for Cage the Elephant’s “Come A team of animators and artists—almost all of them CCA alumni.

to cultivate it.

Lesley: A couple of my students took Jewelry / Metal Arts

Lesley: And you know what? All 24 of them are really

tion—making puppets and tiny objects to be used in

other schools, and of course attended other schools, and the

electives and are now really into stop-motion fabricaanimations. They could easily sit all day with their

magnifiers on, chiseling and painting and welding tiny little parts. It would drive some people crazy, but they

love it. They have a passion for making teeny things come alive on-screen.

Rick: As a father of three, I’ve tried to raise my children

to find their passion. I remember the day I told my father I was going to go to art school. He looked at me with a

great deal of concern. To discourage me, he said I’d have

to find a way to pay for it myself. But that was actually a huge motivator. It took years and years before he finally

said, “I’m really happy you’ve found a career you enjoy.”

I don’t think my story is all that uncommon. Parents are

just concerned about what their kids will do with a career

excited about, and committed to, teaching. I’ve taught at

faculty here are unique. A lot of us are young—by which I mean still working, not retired. So we’re teaching

because we want to. We’re here for the students. We spend all day at work, then come here and teach until 10 p.m.

Rick: And we’re online with them at all hours. As chair, I look for three qualities in a faculty member. First, they’re

talented in their particular arena. Second, they are a good

instructor. And third, they push the students to succeed. If they don’t have all three, they don’t stay long at CCA.

Lesley: The students are so hungry, I can barely keep up.

They speak highly of their instructors, too. That’s why the program is flourishing, and the level of work coming out of here is so good.

in the arts.

Rick: Four years is such a short time, really. Students

more than 300 years of work experience, cumulatively?

barely begun to scratch the surface.

Hey, did you know our 24 faculty members have

graduate and there’s so much more to learn. They’ve

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Gretchen Grasshoff (Printmaking 2004) is a character animator at Sledgehammer Games. Before that she worked at Mixamo, Rocket Ninja, and Backbone Entertainment.

Rick: Pete Docter came to CCA for a public lecture in spring 2012. He talked to the students about being an Daniel Gonzales (Animation 2010) interned at Pixar as a CCA student and is now an animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios. He contributed to Disney’s Frozen (2013) and is now working on Big Hero 6 (due for release in November 2014).

animator and director at Pixar. Everyone wanted to know, “How do I get in, what do I have to do to get a job at

Pixar?” And Pete said, “Don’t measure your success by

whether you’re working at Pixar. Measure your success by how good of an animator you are.”

To get into Pixar is a rather difficult maneuver.

You have to be really good, and in the right place at the right time. You have to have connections, and you have Lesley: The fourth-year students get so nervous that their work isn’t good enough. They feel like they might not be ready to apply for jobs. But I tell them: Your career is a work in progress. You are just beginning!

Rick: What do you tell them about the first couple of years post-graduation, and getting a foothold in the industry?

Lesley: Even though the San Francisco Bay Area is a huge

hub for animation—especially mobile phones, gaming, stuff like that—it’s tougher to break into the entertainment

business here than in Los Angeles, where there’s just so

much television, feature films, music videos, and on and on.

So I encourage them to go to L.A., live there for at least a

couple of years, work on some smaller projects, and build up their demo reel and their résumé.

Rick: There are a lot more entry-level positions down

there, too. Internships, apprenticeships. Ways to get your foot in the door.

Lesley: Absolutely. There’s certainly lots of jobs up

to be very lucky. You can’t let things like that define you

as a person. Rather, you should be asking yourself, “Am I

passionate about what I’m doing? Am I doing everything I can to improve my skills?”

Lesley: And, “Am I ready to grit my teeth and hang in

there during those tough first few years after graduation, come hell or high water?”

Rick: Yes, it’s a difficult period. Students have to be very dedicated and very passionate to sustain the energy and momentum they’ve built up while in school. We work

with CCA’s Career Development Office to help students

with this transition. I also like to keep the computer labs open to recent alumni still living in the area.

There are a couple of faculty members who have

started a company called Reel Feedback. They help

students by commenting on their demo reels: letting them know what’s missing, and which studios would be a good

fit for their type of work. Then, once the student gets their reel together, Reel Feedback tells them how to connect with HR at companies that are hiring.

Career Development has also brought in Ila

here, but they tend to be more specialized, and more

Abramson, who runs a company called I Spy Recruiting.

you have to be much further along in your career to even

Coasts. Ila gave a talk to the students and critiqued the

advanced—at Lucasfilm, or Pixar, or Dreamworks—and think about competing for those positions.

She specifically recruits animators on the East and West reels of our seniors and recent graduates.

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F E AT U R E S

Lesley: I always suggest starting out working for smaller

Pixar is better than most major studios in this

studios, in production assistant positions. Learn every-

respect because they do share ideas between departments.

set will skyrocket. There’s a lot of these small studios, like

the cafeteria and large common areas where everyone can

thing you can from everyone at the studio, and your skill Titmouse, for instance, which makes series shows for the Cartoon Network. The public doesn’t know them, your

parents don’t know them, but that’s not important. They

are producing shows for a big network. Get an entry-level position there, and pretty soon you can say, “Hey, I am

becoming successful! I’ve worked on five different shows,” or, “I’ve worked this year on a music video and a com-

mercial, and I got a screen credit for a television show.”

Rick: A lot of times, at large studios, people in one

department don’t have an opportunity to work with

people in other departments. An animator won’t get a

chance to talk with the people who are lighting the shots

or designing the characters. And it can be illuminating to

Even the design of their campus enables this: They have mix for conversation and team-building events. Unlike the old-school Disney model, where people worked in

their cubicles and simply passed their work on to the next person in the pipeline.

To their credit, since merging with Pixar, Disney

has been trying to change their way of working. They are moving toward the Pixar idea-sharing model.

Lesley: I actually know tons of animators who highly

respect the work Pixar does but wouldn’t want to work

there. It’s just not their goal or their style to work in a big corporate studio. I say, if you work in animation, success is when your work is seen: on the TV screen, the theater

see that whole process, the entire pipeline.

Kate Klingbeil (Printmaking 2012) works for Parachute Creative Group, an independent company making short-format animations for small businesses to use on Instagram and Facebook.

Steve Purcell (Interdisciplinary Fine Arts 1982) is a cartoonist, animator, director, game designer, Eisner Award recipient, and creator of Sam & Max Freelance Police. He works at Pixar, and was a writer and codirector of the 2012 feature film Brave.

Nate Fredenburg (Printmaking 1993) is a viewpaint artist at Industrial Light & Magic.

Before that he spent a decade at Tippett Studio as an art director. He has worked on many, many feature films, including the Twilight Saga series, Ted (2012), Mirror Mirror (2012), The Immortals (2011), and The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008).

15

Vincent Perea (Illustration 2005) is a senior artist at Disney Mobile and worked on the games Where’s My Water? and The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom. He is also a professional illustrator whose clients have included Game Developer magazine, Kill Screen, Foundation Skateboards, Runner’s World, California Lawyer, and Disney.

Susan Harris (Graphic Design 1998) runs Fluent Studios, a small digital media shop. Her clients include PBS, KQED, Google, MTV, Current TV, 23andMe, BET, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Al Gore. She recently ran a project making 50 animations in six months for Google, and Meegan Barnes (Illustration 1995) was the main illustrator. (Barnes is a freelance illustrator whose clients include MTV, BET, Cargo Cosmetics, Levi’s, and Pottery Barn.)

Recent alum Micah Rivera (Graphic Design 2013) served as assistant illustrator and production assistant.

screen, the smartphone screen. And yes, you’ll have

have their work seen and make a positive statement with

on a movie for two years and then be unemployed for six

domoic acid, a neurotoxin that adversely affects seals. It

downtime. Even an advanced professional might work

months, looking for their next job. It doesn’t mean that their work isn’t good. It’s just the nature of the field.

animation. We’re creating an animation on the topic of will be something people watch in the visitor center to learn why these seals need rescuing.

Rick: I think what brings students to CCA’s Animation

Rick: For most of the students, it’s their very first team

that an animated film inspired them during their forma-

about working together and relying on other people.

Program—or any animation program, for that matter—is tive years. For me, those first sparks came from seeing

the Disney classics Pinocchio, Peter Pan, and Cinderella.

So, naturally, when I went to school, I wanted to work for Disney. But I’ve found that I can have the same success,

doing work I’m passionate about, in many other contexts.

For instance recently I worked on an informational

kiosk that uses architectural animation to explain how the building works. It illustrates the innovative storm

drain system, the energy-saving HVAC system, the water conservation methods. I also worked on the design and

manufacture of the physical kiosk, ensuring that it is ADA

production experience. They’re learning a new dynamic Lesley: It’s also a professional situation where they’re working for a client.

Rick: Yes, for many it’s the first time they’ve had to pitch their ideas to a client, listen to the client’s feedback, and then alter their concepts to accommodate. That shift in mindset, that realization that they’re not 100 percent

in control of the artistic decisions, is a really important

growth moment in becoming a professional. It is a realworld experience.

compliant. This included developing a Braille navigation system for the visually impaired.

Lesley: We’re definitely excited about the Marine

Mammal Center project we’re doing this semester as an ENGAGE at CCA course, in part because it vividly

demonstrates to students that there are many ways to

Lily Williams (Animation 2014), who created the lead drawing for this story, is graduating this spring and has already completed four internships with Sony Pictures Animation. Read more about Lily and her work at lily-williams.blogspot.com.

16

F E AT U R E S

ELEVEN ELEVEN:

PERFECT, BOUND

by Lindsey Westbrook Eleven Eleven is a graduate Writing course; a journal of prose, poetry, and art; and a force to be reckoned with on the national—even international—literary scene. It’s the reason Candace Hoes (MFA Writing 2014) decided to attend CCA, and she’s taken the Eleven Eleven course every semester she’s been here: “I’ve been the managing editor, webmaster, Ad/Swap coordinator, fiction editing team member, and Koi Pond* coordinator.”

Eleven Eleven is also a network, as faculty editor Hugh Behm-Steinberg explains. “It’s a web of connections and relationships among writers, translators, visual artists, pub-

lishers, and galleries. And us: the faculty and staff and students.”

Roughly 75 percent of the content

is solicited, and the students make

since the writers are physically there. “Litquake brought me out of my shell! I got to speak to authors I really

admired, and ask them to submit work. A lot of them were very agreeable. Several of the pieces I asked for

ended up in the publication. That was really rewarding.”

In fall 2013 Charlie Radka (MFA Writing 2015) was the marketing director, responsible for raising awareness of Eleven Eleven both within CCA and externally. She also

managed social media. “I’m proud

that this semester we made staff and faculty at CCA much more aware of the journal. And I’ve got some

concrete goals for next semester in terms of external marketing.”

all the final decisions about what

Eleven Eleven alternates between

beginning of the semester, we or-

(produced over the spring semester)

is selected for inclusion. “At the

ganize a prose staff and a poetry staff,” says Behm-Steinberg.

“The students draw up lists of

writers they want to solicit, then approach them to contribute. At the same time, they’re reading

through the pool of 300 to 500

recent unsolicited submissions— the ‘slush pile’—and culling the gems from that.

“They also generate content themselves; everyone is

responsible for writing a book review, or conducting and editing an interview. There’s budgeting with the printer,

design, layout, proofreading. The students do everything, from soup to nuts.”

Eleven Eleven always participates in Litquake, the massive annual Bay Area literary event. That’s when the students make a lot of face-to-face solicitations, Hoes explains,

a printed issue of 1,500 copies

and an online issue (produced over

the fall semester). Locally, its peers

include 580 Split, produced by Mills

College, and Fourteen Hills, produced

by San Francisco State University.

But it is also part of a national

conversation with journals such as

Fence, Denver Quarterly, Paris Review, Drunken Boat, and Octopus. “Many of them have budgets way bigger than

we do,” observes Behm-Steinberg, “but we’re publishing work that’s at the same very high level.” Each issue in-

cludes a lot of art, and the students routinely collaborate with local galleries to discover and secure the rights to

reproduce pieces by artists from the Bay Area and beyond.

“When we take Eleven Eleven to the Association of

Writing Programs (AWP), which is where a lot of people first encounter it,” says Hoes, “they just love paging

through it. You can tell.” AWP is the biggest book fair

17

of independent publishers in the world, and the largest

issue 15 include Andrew S. Nicholson (2006), LaTasha

gathering of creative writers in the United States. Roughly

N. Nevada Diggs (2008), Hazel White (2005), Jønathan

annually. “We always have a table,” says Behm-Steinberg,

alumna Linda Michel-Cassidy (MFA 2006). Alumni in

20,000 poets, fiction writers, and essayists converge there “and our students staff it. We sell lots of copies, and we make lots of contacts and connections.”

Andrew Bonfils (MFA Writing 2015) says his claim to fame in issue 16 involved spotting a true gem in the

slush pile. “A writer named W. Todd Kaneko sent in these amazing poems that use professional wrestling as a way

Lyons (2005), and Ted Rees (2010) as well as fine art issue 16 include Dan Encarnacion (2002), Nana K.

Twumasi (2007), Steffi Drewes (2006), and undergrad alumna Chelsea Martin (Individualized Major 2008).

To purchase a printed copy of Eleven Eleven, or to read the online issues, visit elevenelevenjournal.com.

to talk about his relationship with his father. Wrestling

actually has nothing to do with what he’s saying; it’s just a framing device. It’s brilliantly done.”

Issue 16 also features, translated for the very first time

into English, startling and strange poems written between 1907 and 1920 by the famous Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky.

Pieces first published in the journal have gone on to

appear in Best of the Web and Pushcart Prize anthologies as well as books that later won the Pulitzer Prize,

the Governor General’s Award (Canada’s highest literary award), the Lambda Literary Award, and the Pen/ Faulkner Award.

Many of the students from the course go on to intern

with 826 Valencia, which is part of McSweeney’s, Dave Eggers’s publishing empire. A number of them have

started their own publications. Jeff Von Ward (MFA

* Koi Pond is the biweekly “issue within the issue,” where staff

collaborates with Autumn Darbrow (MFA Writing 2013)

of Eleven Eleven. All the “elevens,” FYI, are a play on CCA’s

Writing 2012) publishes Samizdat Literary Journal and

to produce Writing Without Walls. Kevin Whiteley (MFA Writing 2009) publishes Criminal Class Review.

And as the body of alumni from the MFA Program in

Writing gains critical mass, the journal is increasingly

committed to showcasing their work. Alumni featured in

highlight their favorite work from the collective online issues San Francisco campus address, 1111 Eighth Street.

18

A L U M N I S TO R I E S

SOFÍA CÓRDOVA Beyond What the Eye Can See

by Rachel Walther Meet ChuCha Santamaria: dancing siren, disco singer, and larger-than-life alter ego of CCA alumna Sofía Córdova (MFA 2010). Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Córdova has developed an artistic practice spanning video and installation, sculpture and photography, but it is her music and performances as ChuCha Santamaria that have attracted the most attention.

In 2011, she and her husband, the musician and artist Matthew Kirkland, released their debut album, ChuCha Santamaria Y Usted. (It was the central piece in an installation/performance cycle.) Reviewers were dazzled. “Fantastic, vital …

imminently catchy,” wrote East Bay Express critic Ellen Cushing. “Singer/word-

smith Sofía Córdova sings in inglés, español, y Vocoder, carefully unfolding her melodies with stately restraint,” enthused PopMatters reviewer Josh Langhoff.

DISCO SIREN “ChuCha Santamaria isn’t me,” says Córdova, “but rather an alter ego, because I

want her to be universal.” While ChuCha’s persona draws on decades of American depictions of Latin cultures, the music touches on ideas about belonging, migration, and the Caribbean diaspora.

For the upcoming album and the performance she’s currently working on,

Córdova transforms ChuCha into a traveling oracle and vagabond. The character gives her a platform to comment on the shifting landscape of culture after an

unidentified catastrophic event, all the while seducing her listeners with sugar-

cane-sweet rhythms. In the video sections of the performance, ChuCha appears as a shadowy figure behind the screen. The first chapter is colorful, campy, and satirical—a nod to Latin performers such as Carmen Miranda and XuXa. The

second chapter is darker, with ChuCha receding into shadow. “People like Carmen Miranda occupy this position of burlesquing ‘the other,’” says Córdova. “There’s a sad humor in it, which is an important tool when talking about terrible things.”

THE BIOLOGY OF A PERFORMER For such a committed performer, Córdova’s college journey began at an

unexpected starting point: as a biology undergrad. In 2001 she enrolled at Bard

College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, otherwise known as the Early College. “It’s for kids who are frustrated with high school and want to start college early. I studied marine biology, and began taking photographs as

part of my research.” It was the photography that hooked her. And after living

for a few years in New York, studying in the photography program at St. John’s University in Queens and the International Center of Photography, Córdova

decided it was time for a change. Time to head West. “I was attracted to CCA’s

Graduate Program in Fine Arts because it was so interdisciplinary. It seemed more attuned to the real art world for a photographer to be in critiques with sculptors and painters. And the competition in New York can at times be damaging to a

young artist’s practice. The saturation can be such that you have to change a lot about your work.”

19

EXPERIMENTING AT CCA

A RENEWED FOCUS

Córdova began her MFA studying photography, but after

Finding a way to support her own artistic practice, post-

Photography felt—literally—too static to develop the

was making a living out of four different jobs.” But one

her first year, she says, “I hit a wall and felt really stuck. ideas I was working through.” In her second year she

began to collaborate with her husband in creating more

dynamic works—sequenced photographs and small videos

set to music—that better articulated her interest in themes such as identity and the pain of not belonging.

CCA, took a few years. “After graduation,” she says, “I of them was an internship at the photography gallery Pier 24. When the director heard that photographer

Richard Misrach was seeking a studio assistant, he recommended Córdova for the position. She’s now working for Misrach full time.

Two faculty members made a particular mark. “I shot my

“I was really lucky. I’d always admired Richard’s work,

for his encouragement, I might not have felt like I could

process, as well. I knew that working for him would be

first videos in a course led by Larry Sultan. If it weren’t

accomplish the work I’ve done. I’m forever grateful that I got to work with Larry the last year he taught.

and after a talk he gave at CCA I fell in love with his

an ideal job, as he is such a considerate art maker and someone I could learn a lot from.”

“I am also indebted to visiting artist Julio Cesar Morales,

Alongside her development of ChuCha’s voice, Córdova

a coherent whole. Perhaps because he deals with similar

Infinite Encyclopedia. It’s “an intentionally futile attempt to

one of the first people to recognize the ChuCha work as issues in his own work, he understood where I was

coming from in a way that the mostly white art world doesn’t always access on the first read.”

Even after finding her feet as ChuCha, Córdova has

found it challenging to locate appropriate venues, partly

because the work combines installation with performance, and the category-crossing can sometimes be difficult for museum and gallery curators to accommodate. Córdova

and Kirkland have found success at alternative mixed-use

spaces, music venues like the South by Southwest festival in Austin, where they performed in 2012, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

has returned to photography in a series of works entitled record everything,” she says, “even things as ‘useless’ as

the backs of people’s heads, as a sort of anti-portraiture.”

Collecting this photographic data and examining the

patterns that emerge lends itself to what she describes as

a kind of universal knowledge. “Encyclopedias are gener-

ally the province of aristocratic white men. This project is being written by a woman of color in hopes that it offers a challenge to what we consider concrete and perfect knowledge.”

20

A L U M N I S TO R I E S

AKO CASTUERA

Giant Robots, Mangled Corpses, and Magical Dogs

by Matthew Harrison Tedford (MA Visual and Critical Studies 2011) Before helping to bring to life Dethklok, the metal band in Metalocalypse, or the postapocalyptic Land of Ooo in Adventure Time (both Cartoon Network shows), there was a time when Ako Castuera (Illustration 2000) was, surprisingly, not fond at all of drawing.

She’d attended an arts high school and loved it, but always thought drawing class was too much like boot camp. It took a CCA Illustration course led by

Barron Storey to make her fall in love with the medium. “Barron was super magnetic, and so devoted to drawing and illustration. I fell under the spell and discovered I loved to draw.

“Also it was the 1990s,” she adds, “and I felt very socially activated and

wanted to do something that could reach people.” She found some of her

greatest sources of inspiration in her classmates. “The friends I made at CCA were always very active, always drawing, never without their sketchbooks.”

THERE’S A GIANT ROBOT AT THE DOOR It was through this group of friends and roommates—she was one of seven CCA students living in an apartment above Art’s Crab Shak on Broadway—that Castuera

connected with Giant Robot, the popular Asian American zine-turned-storefront. Giant Robot founder Eric

Nakamura visited the apartment one day, after he’d been urged to check out the work of roommate David Choe

(now famous for his mural work and comics).

It was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.

She and her friends became involved in, as she puts it,

“the loose yet tight-knit weird web” that is Giant Robot.

Castuera started showing her work at the gallery, first in group shows, then in solo exhibitions.

21

METALOCALYPSE She got involved in animation through a series of coincidences. Soon after graduating from CCA, she moved back to Los Angeles, where she lived next to a couple

who worked in animation. She drew a birthday card for

one of them, and it just so happened that, a year later, he became the lead character designer for Metalocalypse, an adult cartoon about a world-famous death-metal band.

After the show’s first season, he needed another character designer on the team, and remembered Castuera’s highly impressive birthday card.

She got the job. Castuera would watch animatics (which

she describes as like a very rough comic) scene by scene, make lists of every character and any special poses that

were required, then draw the poses. Given the cartoon’s death-metal theme, she says, “I spent a lot of time drawing mangled bodies.”

ADVENTURE TIME During this time she was going to independent comics

functions, mostly to support her partner, Rob Sato. (Sato had recently won the Xeric Award, which allowed him to self-publish his graphic novel Burying Sandwiches.)

Inspired by the scene, she created a comic on a lark.

A good friend at the Cartoon Network handed it to

Pendleton Ward, who was looking for a storyboarder

for Adventure Time, his new (and now wildly popular)

Cartoon Network show about a boy and his magical dog.

Ward hired her, and soon she’d been promoted to story-

board artist. Adventure Time is outline-based rather than script-based, meaning that the story is initially totally stripped down, just the bare essentials. As Castuera

structured scenes and wrote dialogue, she distilled each story to its core.

“When working on storyboards I would often hear voices

… specifically the voices of my former CCA professors! I’d hear Vincent Perez saying, ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid,’ and Richard Gayton asking, ‘Can you do this watercolor in five strokes? Plan ahead.’”

And now a new chapter in Castuera’s career has begun.

She’s left TV animating (though there is a chance she’ll

return as the voice of Finn’s giantess friend, Canyon) to

focus on her own personal work, in particular ceramics.

She has been processing her own clay from soil she

collects on her hikes in the hills around Los Angeles, and getting her hands (literally) dirty in a way that always felt missing from her work for television.

Come see her latest creations in SuperAwesome! Art and

Giant Robot at the Oakland Museum of California, open through July 27, 2014. This retrospective of works by

15 artists associated with Giant Robot includes pieces by

Castuera; her now-husband, Rob Sato (Illustration 1999); David Choe; and Deth P. Sun (Painting/Drawing 2002).

22

A L U M N I S TO R I E S

SEAN McFARLAND An Artist Who Found His Calling

by Matthew Harrison Tedford (MA Visual and Critical Studies 2011) Photographer Sean McFarland (MFA 2004) wasn’t one of those kids who spent his youth in a darkroom, nor was he enrolled in art schools from an early age. “I actually didn’t start making art until I was 21,” he recalls.

“And then, within six years, I’d graduated from CCA with my MFA.” Good thing he didn’t miss his calling. Since then he’s shown at the Berkeley Art

Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and he has won numerous prestigious art prizes.

McFarland is best known for his landscape Polaroid photographs, but he works across a spectrum of light-sensitive materials: cyanotypes, gelatin silver prints, and archival pigment prints. All of his photographs deal with artifice in some way. By employing collage, double exposure, and light effects, he creates

images that blur fantasy and reality, often without ever quite letting on which parts are the “deception” and which are “authentic.” But rest assured: You’re never seeing what was actually there in front of the camera.

WHO’S AFRAID OF LARRY SULTAN? McFarland clearly remembers the day he visited

CCA as a prospective student. “I was scheduled to

meet with Larry Sultan, and I was scared to death.

But after the introduction, the rest came easy. I

thought to myself, yes, this is exactly where I need to be. This is amazing.”

His accelerated artistic maturation depended on

his mentors and colleagues. “My knowledge of con-

temporary art was limited,” he says about his first

semester at CCA. But with the support of his teachers, and the community to which CCA connected

him, he grew immensely. “It felt like I got both an undergraduate and a graduate education in those two years of the MFA.”

McFarland also notes that it helped having such a

great class of peers. His classmates included John Chiara, James Chronister, Greg Halpern, and

Mitzi Pederson, all of whom now show at museums and galleries across the country.

OUT ON HIS OWN The September after he graduated, McFarland got his first solo show at Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, which got him his first print review

in Artforum. Later that year, he had another solo

show at White Columns, New York’s oldest alterna-

23

give you the time and the space to make whatever you

want.” In 2010 he was awarded a residency at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, and in 2011 he received one at

Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California.

In summer 2013, McFarland was one of the inaugural

artists at a new residency in Gualala, California, called Project 387. “I had a ton of space to work. We’d have

dinner with the family that owns the land. I got so much work done in two weeks!”

ENTRY INTO TEACHING These days, when McFarland isn’t making his own work, he’s passing along his skills to others. He got his start

teaching Intro to Black-and-White Photography at CCA. He credits his former CCA teacher Susan Ciriclio, who tive art space. The director at White Columns, Matthew

is also a CCA alum (Photography 1971), for much of his

for Contemporary Arts and former co-chair of CCA’s MFA

McFarland is now enjoying his fourth year of teaching

Higgs, was a former director of the CCA Wattis Institute program; he had taken a liking to McFarland’s work

while they were both at CCA. Higgs was also the one who introduced him to Jack Hanley.

development as an educator.

at the San Francisco Art Institute, at the undergrad and graduate levels. He still teaches beginning black and

white, but he’s also been creating his own courses, which

“Stuff just started happening. I was working hard, but

are inspired in part by what he absorbed while working

there was definitely someone watching over me.”

for Jim Goldberg and Larry Sultan.

An important step in McFarland’s professional devel-

And, every summer, McFarland returns to CCA to teach

former professors. After graduating, he spent a few years

Project 387 was one of his own former CCA Pre-College

studios. “That experience was totally invaluable. I gained

northern California woods as professional peers speaks to

opment was his continued association with some of his

in the Pre-College Program. One of the other artists at

working with Jim Goldberg and Larry Sultan in their

students. That they would cross paths again in the

not only technical skills, but also skills in how to work as

what McFarland sees as one of CCA’s greatest assets: the

a professional in the field.”

creation of community.

Adept at navigating the nitty-gritty, he decided he was

“CCA really helped me become a part of the arts commu-

point I told myself that I wasn’t going to work for other

couldn’t have had a better grad school experience.”

sufficiently prepared to venture out on his own. “At some people anymore.”

Growing recognition of his work made this transition

possible. In 2009 he won the Baum Award for Emerging

American Photographers, which includes a $10,000 cash grant and a three-month exhibition at SF Camerawork.

That year he also won the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, which likewise came with a $10,000 cash

award. In 2011 he was awarded a $25,000 Eureka Fellowship and had three works acquired by SFMOMA.

CONTINUING ARTISTIC EDUCATION Residencies have played an important role in the development of McFarland’s career. “Having a residency is

the most special thing that can happen to an artist. It’s a

tremendous validation when someone says they like what you’re making, you have good ideas, and they want to

nity in San Francisco. It was an invaluable two years. I

24

A L U M N I S TO R I E S

MAXIMILIAN URIARTE Iraq Veteran Draws from Experience

by Allison Byers After his honorable discharge in 2010, Uriarte enrolled at CCA. “I was certainly outside my

comfort zone at first! I think anyone who was in my classes can attest that I had some growing

pains. Adjusting to civilian life is hard for every veteran, and I am no exception.”

Uriarte had spent his childhood learning to

draw from books by Andrew Loomis, Burne

Hogarth, and other master illustrator-authors.

At CCA, his Animation courses gave him a solid

Maximilian Uriarte (Animation 2013) didn’t join the Marines at age 19 for the usual reasons. “I knew I wanted to be an artist, and I felt an intense need to experience the world in order to give my work legitimacy. I wanted to find the most difficult thing I could imagine. It might sound strange, but I really did join for the sake of my art.”

We learned how to pick apart a film, shot by

He deployed to Iraq twice between 2007 and 2009. During his

Uriarte’s current big project is The White

second tour, his battalion commander noticed his penchant for creative work and asked him to serve as a combat artist and photographer. Uriarte traveled all over the country, taking photos and sketching the Marines’ daily lives.

technical foundation for making art beyond

illustration, instilling skills in squash, stretch, arc, and so on. “Probably my favorite course

was Visual Storytelling, led by Mark Andrews.

shot. I realized I had a real passion for it.”

Donkey, a graphic novel based on the main characters of Terminal Lance. He initially

resisted the idea of funding the project via

Kickstarter, but his CCA classmates urged him

“Most of the work I did was classified documentary photo-

to do it, and he ended up raising more than

be allowed to capture anything I wanted, photographically or

Following that massive accomplishment, Uriarte

journalism. On rare occasions, I would embed with a unit and otherwise. Those times were the most fun.

$160,000 after asking for only $20,000!

feels obliged to focus his full attention on his

“One night in 2009, I Googled my way through building a

art. “It is a full-time job now, and I’m happy

would become Terminal Lance. I printed out fliers and placed

kicking around in my head, too. My next goal,

100 hits a day, then 1,000, then 10,000, and now 100,000.”

start my own animation studio here in the Bay

Before Terminal Lance, the landscape for military comic strips

here on out!”

website and posted some of the first comics in the project that

to be doing what I love. I have other projects

them around the base. I remember watching the website get

assuming The White Donkey is a success, is to

was pretty barren, he says. “There wasn’t anything accurately representing the Corps as I knew it. Marines were raunchy, angry, often unhappy. That’s what I wanted to capture.”

A “terminal lance” is a negative thing in the Marine Corps, he explains, referring to someone who ends their career at the

(low) rank of Lance Corporal. “Because of the title, people were uneasy at first with Terminal Lance,” says Uriarte. “But once they saw that it was not only bringing to light some serious

issues in the military, but also genuinely funny, they began to love it. And I do my best to remain unbiased and apolitical.”

Area. I hope I’ll stay busy with my art from

25

MORE ALUMNI STORIES

Visit cca.edu/news and search for the full versions of these stories about CCA alumni and their latest projects:

Mike Holmes (Jewelry / Metal Arts

Sarah Hotchkiss (MFA 2011) is the

Kelly Rodriguez (Architecture

cisco metal arts and jewelry gallery

tor at Southern Exposure, the highly

ARCADE, a Seattle-based nonprofit

1984) is a co-owner of the San FranVelvet da Vinci, which celebrates its 24th anniversary this year.

communications and outreach direc-

respected San Francisco nonprofit art organization and gallery. She’s also an artist, curator, and writer.

2013) is the executive director of that promotes dialogue between

architecture, design, culture, science, and the arts.

Zach Gibson (MFA Design 2011)

Arielle Coupe (Printmaking 2013)

Aimee Le Duc (MA Visual Criticism

Design 2005) are designers at Google.

Emerging Artist Residency at Kala

Francisco–based curator, writer, and

and Jefferson Cheng (Graphic

Every day, millions of people see their logos, icons, infographics, posters, and other work.

was awarded the 2013 Hamaguchi

Art Institute in Berkeley. She creates prints, hybrid collages, animations, and flipbooks.

2003, MFA Writing 2004) is a San

arts administrator, as well as gallery manager at the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Mary Meyer (Painting 2001) owns

John Chiara (MFA 2004) takes

Grady Gordon (Illustration 2008)

a storefront shop in Brooklyn and a

hand-built camera that he transports

types. His portraits of demons,

and operates Mary Meyer Clothing, wholesale business.

massive photographs using a huge, on its own trailer.

works almost exclusively in monogoblins, and warriors are visceral

and urgent.

26

F A C U LTY S T O R I E S

Inside Facebook’s Analog Research Lab with

TIM BELONAX

by Claire Fitzsimmons

Along the walk to the cafeteria, a poster reads: “Eventually everything connects.” Another, “If it works, it’s obsolete.” In the atrium, “Hack the graph,” and in the corridor, “Empathy. Have some!” This sounds like it could very well be CCA’s campus, but it’s actually Facebook’s. Each poster is stamped at the bottom with the words: “Poster brought to you by your friends at the Facebook Analog Research Laboratory.”

Facebook designer and CCA Graphic Design faculty member Tim

Belonax calls the Analog Research Laboratory—known simply as

the Analog Lab—“a playground for a print designer. There are very

few places around the Bay Area where a lover of handmade graphic design would encounter such amazing facilities.” Wired magazine

has called it “Facebook’s secret propaganda arm.” The Huffington Post dubs it “a slogan factory where techies get tactile.”

INTRO TO FACEBOOK

Belonax originally joined Facebook’s communications design team

in 2011 to work on F8, the company’s annual developer conference.

In his off time he frequently found himself venturing into the Analog Lab. “It started out as a hobby, but you know how such things go.

I realized that the fruits of what happens in here end up getting reinvested into so much of my work.”

The lab had humble beginnings. Two Facebook communication

designers—Ben Barry, whose background was in screenprinting, and Everett Katigbak, who came from a letterpress practice—built it by hand in a warehouse at Facebook’s old campus in Palo Alto, using scavenged materials.

By the time the company was planning its new Menlo Park campus in 2012, the Analog Lab had proven its value to such an extent

that it was built into the new site plan. Begun mostly as a personal diversion, it had turned into an active driver of company culture.

“We established its worth through doing things, making things.

We’d put posters out, and people would get interested and want to come make their own. We started seeing it activate new aspects of what Facebook does and how the company imagines itself.”

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PRINT ’N’ PRESS Today the lab has an amazing array of facilities for screenprinting, letterpress, and sign painting. What in the “old” days of 2011 was a casual offering of demos led by Barry and

Belonax has become a rigorous schedule of instruction, thanks to the newest members

of the Analog Lab team: Drew Bennett, Jez

Burrows, Blaise DiPersia, and Hannah Fletcher.

Employees from across Facebook come in for a few hours to work on a message they want

to propagate and are taught how to print and disseminate the information.

The lab also now has its own curator, Drew Bennett, who coordinates Facebook’s

artist-in-residence program. CCA affiliates who have completed the residency include Chris

Duncan (Painting/Drawing 2003), Barbara

Holmes (Furniture faculty), and Jay Nelson (Painting/Drawing 2004).

AGENCY PROVOCATEUR The lab’s role, if it could be said to have an

official one, is to insert into the physical realm ideas that reflect and respond to Facebook’s

culture—a culture that Belonax says is already very open to new ideas, experimentation,

and critique. “There’s just something really interesting that happens when you see a message on a poster.”

Consider, for instance, the recent launch of

Internet.org, a global partnership instigated

by Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg that gathers technology leaders, nonprofits, local

reiterate that Facebook’s mission is essentially about humans, not machines.

One of the first posters produced by the lab

asked, provocatively, “Is this a technology company?” This deliberately disingenuous

question ruffled some feathers. The slogan came from the weekly companywide Q&A with

Zuckerberg. “Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone, and nowhere in there is the word

‘technology.’ But Facebook cannot exist without technology. So there you are.”

The Analog Lab is independent of Facebook’s

marketing and publicity offices and strives to keep it that way. “We’ve definitely put some

things out there that, for one reason or another, the company doesn’t want to, or isn’t ready to, address from a more official PR perspective.”

ON THE SEEPAGE OF IDEAS Which doesn’t necessarily mean that the topics the posters propose don’t make it out into the

world, directly attributed to Facebook. Take the idea that “The journey is 1% finished.” That

idea originated in 2010, the first night Belonax visited the Facebook campus as a guest artist, accompanied by CCA alumna Emily Craig (Graphic Design 2009).

As Facebook continues to develop, the lab

remains correspondingly mutable. “Two weeks ago,” says Belonax, “it looked quite different than it does now. The formalization here is

more in terms of production, not so much about the physical space.”

communities, and experts to bring the Internet

The lab is about the culture of Facebook, but

doesn’t have it. There was a big external PR

And, like the company within which it is

to the two-thirds of the world’s population that push, of course, but “there was also an internal push to discuss the ethics of connectivity. And the Analog Lab was uniquely positioned to

get Facebook employees thinking about it.”

Zuckerberg’s famous essay “Is Connectivity a Human Right?” started as a poster.

IS THIS A TECHNOLOGY COMPANY? Other posters continue along the thread:

“People over pixels” and “Users, people” (strikethrough intentional). Both aim to

it’s about the unplanned aspects of its culture. situated, the lab is only just beginning to figure itself out. Fans of all things handmade will be happy to know that the history of the Analog Research Lab is only 1% finished.

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F A C U LTY S T O R I E S

CHRISTINE METZGER: THIS AIN’T CSI

by Lindsey Westbrook

Critical Studies faculty member Christine Metzger is a crafty scientist. She’s “crafty” in the CCA sense of the word, but she’s also “canny” and “astute,” having spearheaded, along with Stuart Kendall, chair of Critical Studies, a very long but very happily concluded campaign for a National Science Foundation grant.

The grant of $200,000 was not only more than they’d

money to buy full collections of major fossil groups, for

instance. And to hire additional science faculty members.”

CCA will run a sponsored studio in the spring, out of the Graduate Program in Design. The students will create,

among other things, carts that can be used to take some of the new equipment into classrooms and out into the field.

There will be a weather station for each campus, and water quality testing kits.

requested, but also one of the largest NSF awards ever

“Ideally, my long-term dream vision is to have a

Exploring Science in the Studio, an innovative project

something very similar to the existing Hybrid Lab and

than just a general education requirement. The aspiration

space to create, explore, and investigate. A lot of the

design students to develop an understanding of their

says, ‘I was thinking about X,’ and I can say, ‘Hey, we

made to an art college. Over three years, it will support

dedicated classroom-laboratory-exploration space,

dedicated to the idea that science at CCA should be more

the shops, where students will have the materials and the

is to integrate science into the arts, enabling art and

magic that happens in the classroom is when a student

native fields from a science-based perspective.

have a sample of X right here.’”

“This NSF grant is highly unusual, and a very big deal,”

ARTISTS MAKE THE KEENEST SCIENCE STUDENTS

says Metzger. “It’s very exciting that they saw promise in

Metzger is CCA’s first tenure-track assistant professor

other science granting organizations. We’ve put together

the keenest science students I’ve ever had,” she reports.

our program. It establishes our legitimacy with them and a big equipment budget: instruments, materials, microscopes, binoculars. Wonderful science stuff. But I am looking at this as seed money—the start of ongoing,

permanent science programs at CCA. I’d love to have

of earth and environmental science. “CCA students are “They are passionate about what they do and want to

incorporate what they learn in science class into their art

practices. Unlike students at a typical big university, they are 100 percent engaged. No one is forcing them to come

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to CCA, and, in fact, they (or their financial aid) are

Intro to Knitwear Design, since she was already a “mad

should squeeze maximum value out of the experience.

weeks, and it kicked my butt, let me tell you.

paying a dear sum to be here. So they understand that they

knitter.” “We met for six hours every Monday for 15

“They’ll say things like, ‘In my Textiles class we were

“TV shows like CSI make you think that to solve a science

water contamination. Could we discuss tanning leather

money at it. But science doesn’t work that way; it takes

talking about dyeing fabric, and now we’re talking about in India, or manufacturing cotton in Egypt?’ That clearly demonstrates that we’re giving them the tools to make those connections.”

CCA places high value on an interdisciplinary curriculum, and Metzger is actively helping to formulate new ways

to implement this at the institutional level. Spring 2014

problem, all you need to do is press buttons and throw time, and you can’t skip steps. Just like art takes time,

and you can’t skip steps. The difference between science and art is that artists work in a very intensely physical way, and it’s exhausting. I came out of that Textiles

course with so much more respect for the CCA students and what they do.”

will be the first instance of a new model in which five

distinct courses offered by five different programs will

happen in a “cluster,” meeting in adjacent spaces in the same timeslot, so that they can share resources such as guest speakers. Metzger’s science class will be looking

at climate data and records of past climate change. The

other instructors are Donald Fortescue from Furniture, Kim Anno from Painting/Drawing, Lynda Grose from Fashion Design, and Nathan Lynch from Ceramics.

BAD SCIENCE AT THE MOVIES Metzger’s Bad Science at the Movies course has become a perennial favorite. “We’ll watch Jurassic Park, for

instance, and then talk about different types of fossilization and whether they’re accurately represented. I bring

in amber, because amber plays into how they get the DNA in the movie. Then, since they’re artists and designers,

we talk about amber being used in jewelry. I show them

a very simple test for determining whether amber is fake or not. It’s the sort of demonstration that makes science seem real, and exciting.

“I also bring in dinosaur bones. No matter how jaded a

19-year-old you are, there is nothing better than handling a real dinosaur bone!”

Metzger’s PhD is in geology—ancient climate change, to be specific—but her research is interdisciplinary. “In

Metzger’s former thesis supervisor is a professor at the

tional, siloed academic jobs weren’t going to be available

field. “He has very narrow views about what scientists

graduate school, I saw the writing on the wall that tradi-

much longer. Nor was I going to be happy in that kind of job. I wanted a job that was super dynamic, and where I could work with a lot of different, interesting people.”

CSI ISN’T REAL “I’d never even taken an art history course before I came

here four years ago. So, in my second year here, I decided to take an intro-level studio course, just to see firsthand what the students were going through.” She picked

University of Oregon and the best-known person in his should do, and be, in academia. I saw him recently, and he said, ‘You know, Christine, a lot of what you did in

graduate school made no sense to me. All that crafting.

But now it seems you’re in the perfect job. I can’t believe that job exists for you.’ It was amazing to hear that from him. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

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F A C U LTY S T O R I E S

from Médoc to Manhattan:

DAVID GISSEN’S ADVENTURES IN ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

by Simon Hodgson Whereas most folks look at Paris and see the Eiffel Tower and the river Seine, the architectural historian David Gissen sees many different Parises, sequenced and layered, pockmarked and potholed by history. Currently the interim director of CCA’s Architecture Division, Gissen has an eye for the vestigial histories of cities and their landscapes— the parts that are buried, forgotten, or unseen. The decay of 1970s Manhattan, the underwater landscape of London’s River Thames, and the revolutionary landscapes of the Paris Commune have all come under his idiosyncratic scrutiny.

PARIS HILL TON In summer 2014, the Canadian Centre for Architecture

in Montreal will host a solo exhibition of Gissen’s work related to what he calls the Mound of Vendôme. The

mound was a pile of earth built in 1871 in Paris by the

Communard revolutionaries. Its purpose was to cushion the impact of the demolition of the massive Vendôme

Column, an imperial obelisk built to celebrate the military victories of Napoleon. The Communards detested this monument to empire and war.

Soon enough, the Commune was suppressed, and the

obelisk was replaced by the French government. Gissen’s project is a bold petition to the Department of Heritage

and Architecture for the City of Paris to reconstruct the

earthen urban pile as a way of breathing new life into a fleeting moment of radical expression.

“There’s something amazing about the mound’s story,”

Gissen says. “How monuments change. How buildings are destroyed and reconstructed. How history goes in circles.

It’s one of many examples of how urban nature can

become a tool of radicalism, and how people remake and appropriate landscapes for political functions.”

AN OLFACTORY ARCHIVIST With a magpie’s eye and an innate way with words, Gissen is rarely far from relating his next example.

“I love stories,” he says. “Buildings are places for

countryside designed by his friend, the Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, which features an underground cham-

ber. Although its subterranean passive cooling serves a straightforward “green” function, Gissen’s interest was

piqued by something else: the chamber’s olfactory terroir, redolent of the region’s distinctively fragrant soil.

Most architects talk about space—about volumes defined

by the structures that enclose them. Hardly any talk about smells. Then again, Gissen isn’t your typical architect. In October 2013, Gissen and fellow faculty member Irene

Cheng curated An Olfactory Archive: 1738–1969, an exhibition examining how scents can resurrect historical

spaces and regions. The perfumes ranged from an 18th-

century library to a rural landscape in medieval Holland.

OENOPHILIA Gissen likes to look for a twist in things. On his sabbatical from CCA in 2010, he began what he jokingly referred to as “a wine routine.” “I write about landscapes,” he

says, “so it makes complete sense that I’d be interested

in wine. But I realized I’d never really understood wine.

In 2010, I happened to taste a wine by Marcel Lapierre,

a French winemaker who’d died a few months before. He was a real radical, deeply committed to preserving the landscape of Beaujolais, and angry at how commercial

agriculture flattens and homogenizes the life within the vineyards, and the taste of the wine the land produces.

stories. I look at buildings and landscapes as intellectual

“I tried one of his Morgon wines, and it tasted like

As an illustration, he talks about a house in the French

which I had always associated with class and prestige,

histories—enormous repositories of ideas and knowledge.”

nothing I’d encountered before. And I realized that wine,

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was actually part of a political and historical landscape.

You can read and taste and understand that the person

who made this wine had ideas about what it should be.”

Inspired by his new hobby, Gissen drew a subway-style map of French wine landscapes that cuts through the

labyrinth of the country’s traditional regional appellations. He was approached by a London publisher who

wanted to sell it as a poster, which Food & Wine magazine then named one their top five gifts for 2012. It has been reviewed in numerous newspapers and wine magazines, is a required learning tool for classes at the Culinary

Institute of America, and has been exhibited at Paris’s city hall and the Sorbonne.

PUBLISHING HAUS Subnature, Gissen’s 2009 book, is an investigation of

exhaust, gas, dust, debris, weeds, soot, even pigeons—

elements that make up a large part of the urban landscape but are often ignored by architects and city planners.

“I got a call from Princeton Architectural Press,” he says, explaining the book’s origins, “asking me to write about urban sustainability and environmentalism. I said, ‘You

don’t need another book on that. Let’s look at the urban environment, but take a different angle, focusing on

wastelands, war, industry, and the residue of environmental degradation.’”

The book became something of a sensation among

architecture students in the United States and Europe.

“Everyone is trying to think of a way forward in our

problematical and compromised environment. Let’s face it: We’re not going to live in a world that looks like a

Poussin painting. So how can we think about learning to

live with the very difficult types of environments that surround us? How do you integrate ‘subnature’ into cities?”

The book was particularly resonant, Gissen explains, in

a field that’s currently in thrall to all things sustainable.

“Sustainability is the new high modernism. Yes, skylines

of buildings with green roofs and windmills are comfort-

ing, but this myopic focus on sustainability has created a real flattening effect. It limits us to one idea of environment, one idea of nature.”

In his just-published new book, Manhattan Atmospheres, Gissen explores “natural environments” created inside New York buildings between the 1960s and the early

1980s. It was a period in the city’s history notorious for

crime, urban disintegration, and the breakdown of public spaces such as parks. And yet, at the very same moment, from the atriums of corporate megaliths to apartment

buildings built above freeways, architects were reinventing the great outdoors … indoors.

GISSEN 2.0 What’s next for this energetic architectural historian?

“All I’ve ever built so far,” he says, slightly ruefully, “are

museum installations. When you go to architecture school, you get infected with this compulsion to build things. No

matter where your career takes you, you’re hounded by it.”

This will hopefully soon be remedied, as Paris’s City Hall is now seriously looking at guiding the permit process

so that the Mound of Vendôme will be realized one day.

There may also be a film made about it.

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COLLEGE NEWS

Awards & Accolades Three members of the CCA community won SFMOMA’s 2012 SECA

Art Award. This year the exhibition was co-curated by CCA alumna Tanya Zimbardo (Curatorial Practice 2005), who is the assistant curator of media arts at SFMOMA.

Because SFMOMA is temporarily closed for expansion, the museum

commissioned the winners to create new work for presentation outside the traditional gallery context:

Alumna Zarouhie Abdalian [1] (MFA 2010) created a public sound

installation at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland. Occasional Music (2013) consisted of brass bells programmed to ring at a different

1

time each day from rooftops in and around the plaza.

BE BOLD For What You Stand For, BE CAREFUL For What You Fall For (2013) by Textiles faculty member Josh Faught [2] consisted of

three hand-woven, fiber-based sculptures that specifically responded to the architecture and history of the Neptune Society Columbarium in San Francisco.

Jonn Herschend [3], former CCA faculty member and visiting artist, investigated SFMOMA’s temporary closure and relocation through a

behind-the-scenes film titled Stories from the Evacuation (2013). It features interviews with 10 museum staff, including Dominic Willsdon, who is a curator of education and public programs at SFMOMA and a member of CCA’s Curatorial Practice faculty.

3

2

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Adam Dole [4] (MBA in Design Strategy 2010) has been spending an exciting year in Washington DC as part of the second cohort of

Presidential Innovation Fellows; he was one of 43 selected out of more than 2,000 applicants. This program pairs top innovators from the

private sector, nonprofits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate during focused “tours of duty” to develop solutions that can save lives, conserve taxpayer money, and fuel job creation.

The fellows have a unique opportunity to make an impact on a truly massive scale.

4

Dole is working on a project called MyData Initiatives at the Department of Health and Human Services. Under the direction of White

House CTO Todd Park, he spends his days studying the intersection of technology and our health care system.

Two CCA students won 2013 Spark Awards. Spark is an annual juried competition intended to call attention to designs that are “changing

the game and in some way helping humanity or the environment we live in.” Yulin Ye [5] (Industrial Design 2015) won a silver award

for Tidvatten, a kitchen timer and elegant minimalist sculpture. The top, bottom, and sides are all screens. Patima Pataramekin [6] (Industrial Design 2013) won a bronze award for her Craft Brew

Carriage, a far classier way than the standard cardboard carrier for home brewers to tote their bottles.

Graphic Design faculty member Jennifer Morla [7] had her Public

Bikes poster, conceived as a bike basket filled with flowers, selected for inclusion in the Communication Arts Design Annual 54 (September/

October 2013); it is the 35th issue in which Morla’s work has been featured. The poster was also acquired by SFMOMA.

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6

1

CO L L E G E N E W S

AT THE WATTIS INSTITUTE: CAPP STREET PROJECT CELEBRATES ITS 30TH BIRTHDAY On February 18, 2014, the renowned artist residency Capp Street Project

celebrated its 30th anniversary with a birthday bash at the CCA Wattis Institute.

The evening included drinks, dancing, and the battering of numerous unique piñatas, which were fabricated by traditional piñata makers and designed by Capp Street alumni and other local artists, including Abraham Cruzvillegas,

Jeremy Deller, Kota Ezawa (Film faculty), Jonn Herschend, Chris Johanson,

Tony Labat, Tim Lee, Byron Peters (MFA 2013), Stephanie Syjuco (Sculpture faculty), Cassie Thornton (MFA 2012), and Shirley Tse.

Erica “Wanna Hang Out?” Johnson

(Printmaking 2003) played an all-vinyl set

of soul 45s, big-hair girl groups, proto-punk garage, and guilty-pleasure ’80s pop.

The collective Will Brown

The collective Will Brown, which is made up of David Kasprzak (MA Curatorial

Practice 2011), Lindsey White (MFA 2007), and Jordan Stein, contributed Baunshaus: Artist Ann Hamilton and Capp Street Project founder Ann Hatch

a newly commissioned, fully functional Bauhaus bounce house.

Renowned pastry chef Leah Rosenberg

(MFA 2008) created 30 custom birthday cakes.

Read more about Capp Street Project at

wattis.org/capp.

To hear about upcoming Wattis events and exhibitions, sign up for the mailing list at Leah Rosenberg

cca.edu/subscribe.

Wattis Institute Director Anthony Huberman with assistant curator (and birthday party coordinator) Jesi Khadivi (MA Curatorial Practice 2013)

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How I Got Here:

TANYA SIADNEVA (Interaction Design 2014)

This is a short story of how a curious girl from a flat

animations, built a computer game, and made jewelry

design in hilly San Francisco.

Working in restaurants taught me about different cuisines

Eastern European country ended up studying interaction I grew up in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in the Soviet and post-Soviet era. During those years, everyone had

to be a thrifty and inventive consumer. Versatility and

while working as a waitress, hostess, and bartender.

and cultures—Japanese, Peruvian, Italian—not to mention communication skills that my academic language studies hadn’t covered.

longevity were primary criteria for any major purchase.

In 2011, a friend was finishing her master’s degree in

lives were prolonged through repair and repurposing.

that a new Interaction Design Program was starting. Once

Hard-to-come-by items had to be improvised, and their Growing up in that context was my first exposure to problem solving through design.

Most young people in Eastern Europe attend art and craft studios, gymnastics, a nature club, some musical instru-

ment classes, and possibly a chess club. I did all of those

but the last. Growing up this way made me curious about always trying something new …

… including learning English! After finishing high school,

I applied to and was accepted at Minsk Linguistics University with a major in education. Each time I discovered yet

another common thread among the languages I was learning, I was fascinated. I taught English in a kindergarten

and worked as a tutor. One winter I traveled to Italy as a teacher and interpreter with a group of children from

Belarusian orphanages. I came to understand so much

about human motivations and needs. In my free time I at-

tended film festivals and developed my own photographs.

Eight years ago I visited San Francisco and decided to

stay. I began taking graphic design classes at City College, which led to other creative pursuits. I created my first

Architecture at CCA and spoke highly of the college. I saw I learned more, I realized that the discipline was exciting, important, relevant—a way to bring together everything

I’d ever been interested in: communicating, making con-

nections, tackling problems creatively. I was thrilled to be accepted as part of the first cohort.

I’ve fallen in love with my studies. Through design I can

bring moments of joy to people’s everyday lives, often in very subtle ways. My favorite projects at CCA have been about connecting people—both strangers and friends— using everything from public space to sensorial experi-

ences. During an internship at Adobe last year I worked

on a data visualization library for their Marketing Cloud, and last summer I interned at the design and strategy

firm Cooper, working with a client who was developing a service for doctors using Google Glass technology.

I am looking forward to a career of applying my new

skills and diverse life experiences to solving some of the world’s most challenging design problems!

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COLLEGE NEWS

BOOKSHELF A select few of the many books written, designed, illustrated, and published by CCA faculty and alumni in the past year.

Get the full scoop on these and more at cca.edu/news/bookshelf.

If you are a CCA affiliate and have published (or designed, illustrated, et cetera) a book in the last 12 months, we’d love to hear about it!

Send details to lwestbrook@cca.edu.

Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design New Riders, 2013 Paperback, 216 pages, $34.99

This book by Facebook director of product design Maria Giudice (Design faculty) and Christopher Ireland (Design faculty) explores the intersection of creative talent and business expertise. It’s a playbook designed to unlock creativity in a traditional executive, or teach a creative professional how to become an effective business leader.

CARJACKED Concrete Press, 2013 Hardcover, 100 pages, $122.86

This limited-edition book provides visual and critical documentation of a project developed in 2012 by COLL.EO (the artist Colleen Flaherty and Visual Studies faculty member Matteo Bittanti). It is a counter-appropriation of the BMW Art Car initiative, developed within the virtual spaces of the popular Forza Motorsport video game.

Stay Up With Me Ecco/HarperCollins, 2013 Hardcover, 224 pages, $22.99

These stories by Tom Barbash (MFA in Writing faculty) explore characters reacting to the chaos and consequences of their everyday lives, from fractured relationships to the loss of a loved one. Selected as a best book of the year by Amazon, NPR, and the San Francisco Chronicle!

Minnows: A Shattered Novel Journal of Experimental Fiction Press, 2013 Paperback, 320 pages, $17

This work of experimental fiction

by Jønathan Lyons (MFA Writing 2005) is about a child and his younger brother, and how the world comes crashing down around them.

Lyons’s writing process involved cutting up blocks and columns of text and hanging them on walls around his basement.

How to Hang a Picture: And Other Essential Lessons for the Stylish Home St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013 Hardcover, 160 pages, $19.99

Scrape the Willow Until It Sings

CCA alumna Suzanne LaGasa (Graphic Design 2005) coauthored this user-friendly guidebook that details everything you need to know about hanging, framing, decorating, and displaying art. Avoid mishaps related to crumbling plaster, ruined antique lath, and mismatched pictures hung too close together!

Heyday, 2013 Paperback, 288 pages, $35

4-Headed Woman

Deborah Valoma’s (Textiles Program chair) book about the preeminent California Native basket maker Julia Parker (CCA Honorary Doctorate 2006) combines oral histories collected though a decade of conversation, beautiful photographs, and a sensitive discussion of the historical and philosophical implications of Parker’s craft from a non-Native perspective.

Tia Chucha, 2013 Paperback, 80 pages, $14.95

These poems by Writing faculty member Opal Palmer Adisa present a journey into and through womanhood. With bravery and humor, Adisa discusses the breads of the world, domestic imagery, menses, and college restroom graffiti as a site of meaningful student communications.

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TUNE IN TO CCA ON

Stay connected with the greater CCA community by joining us on Instagram!

Whether you’re an alum, a student, faculty, staff, or a friend of the college, share your photos by using our hashtag #CCArts. And don’t forget to follow us at @CACollegeofArts. (You don’t want to miss #ThrowbackThursday!)

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P H I LA N T H R O P Y

SPOTLIGHT 1

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3

4

5

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September 10, 2013

Wattis Institute Opening: City of Disappearances, Curator’s Forum Preview 1. Wattis Institute Director Anthony Huberman and CCA trustee Patty Fitzpatrick 2. Xiaoyu Weng and Susy Wadsworth

October 15, 2013

15th Annual Ronald and Anita Wornick Award Exhibition

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3. CCA trustee Ronald Wornick, award recipients Asa Hillis and Hannah Quinn, and Anita Wornick

4. CCA trustee F. Noel Perry; W. Daniel Hillis, parent of Wornick Award recipient Asa Hillis; and Ronald Wornick November 4, 2013

Curator’s Forum evening at the Workshop Residence with Susanne Ghez, adjunct curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Hosted by Ann Hatch, CCA trustee and founder of the Workshop Residence

5. CCA President Stephen Beal, Ann Hatch, Wattis Institute Director Anthony Huberman, and Suzanne Ghez

6. Lauren Ford, Sabrina Buell, and Kelly Huang

8

November 19, 2013

Fall Scholarship Dinner at the Perry Family Event Center

7. Dorothy Saxe (center) with George B. Saxe Scholarship recipients Laura Kingsley (left) and Sasha Coelho (right)

8. Susan Shawl (left) and Hannie Lederer (right) with Benjamin Wasserman, recipient of the Louis Shawl Trustee Emeritus and Louis Shawl Graphic Design Scholarships 9. Pamela Gerfen (left) and Tom Gerfen (right) with Anushe Babar, recipient of the RMW/ Matthew R. Mills Endowed Scholarship

10. Patrick Coyne (left) and Jean Coyne (right)

9

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with featured student speaker Ganesha Balunsat, past recipient of the Richard & Jean Coyne Family Foundation Graphic Design Scholarship

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p h i la n t h r o p y

Gifts and Grants We extend heartfelt thanks to every donor who made a gift from February 1, 2013, through February 28, 2014. Following are highlights of gifts received during this period.

Student Scholarships CCA’s spring 2014 gala, Blueprints, Blue Jeans

& Bluegrass, celebrated the life and work of the distinguished architecture and design leader Art Gensler and raised a total of $756,000,

with net proceeds going to student scholarships.

CCA thanks honoree Art Gensler and gala co-chairs Brenda and George Jewett

(Architecture 1996) for their vision and

leadership. (Gala donors will be covered more fully in the fall 2014 issue of Glance.)

CCA successfully completed its Fitzpatrick

Leo and Florence Helzel gave $100,000 to

their endowed scholarship in honor of David Kirshman. CCA received a renewed grant of $75,000 from the S. Livingston Mather

Charitable Trust for the Victor Carrasco

Memorial Scholarship, which supports gradu-

ate students in Architecture. The Richard and Jean Coyne Family Foundation continued

its long-standing support for the Coyne Family Illustration Scholarship with a gift of $20,000.

Sponsored Studios and Academic Programs

Foundation challenge grant of $300,000 for

The National Science Foundation awarded

the catalyst of this one-to-one challenge, CCA

Science in the Studio project. Leslie and Mac

international student scholarships. Thanks to secured eight new gifts totaling $322,380,

realizing a total of $622,380 for international students. The capstone matching pledge of

$50,000 was made by the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.

Two thoughtful and generous bequests were given for endowed scholarships. The Steele

Family gave $300,000 from the estate of CCA

alumna Roberta Steele (BFA 1970), who passed away in 2009. CCA received $100,000 from Paulette Long from the estate of her late

husband, Shepard Pollack, who served on the CCA Board of Trustees for more than 15 years.

Robin Wright made a gift of $25,000 to help

launch the creation and sale of a special artists’ multiples project to raise funds for a scholar-

ship named the Rite Editions Gift in Memory of Steven Leiber. More than 20 sets of multiples

have been sold, generating a total of $167,520 for this new endowed scholarship.

a $200,000 grant to support CCA’s Exploring McQuown gave $150,000 to launch a new

design and technology industry partnership program. An anonymous donor provided

renewed funding of $150,000 for the IMPACT Social Entrepreneurship Award. Citrix gave $50,000 to sponsor a studio in the MBA in

Design Strategy program. Levi Strauss & Co.

designated $10,000 to sponsor the 2013 Annual Fashion Show and an additional $25,000 for

awards recognizing exceptional Fashion Design students. The FOR-SITE Foundation awarded grants totaling $20,000 to support courses

taught by CCA faculty members Kota Ezawa,

Ranu Mukherjee, and David Burns. The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation gave $15,000 to support a visiting curator from Sweden

who worked with Curatorial Practice graduate students in spring 2014. Adobe Systems gave

$15,000 to collaborate with Interaction Design students to develop a model for an online

interactive tool for instructors, students, and external reviewers.

41

PUBLIC PROGRAMS Grants for the Arts awarded CCA a $56,750

BUY CCA MERCHANDISE AND SUPPORT SCHOLARSHIPS!

grant in support of public programs in

Brand-new designs on sweatshirts, T-shirts, tote

Netherlands gave $12,300 for Seeing Orange:

more have been added to our CCA “Designer’s

San Francisco. The Consulate General of the

Dutch Design at CCA. The Larry Sultan Visiting Artist program was sustained by renewed gifts of $10,000 each from the Pilara Foundation and Randi and Bob Fisher. Jack and Susy

Wadsworth sponsored the 2013 Honorary

Doctorate Luncheon with a gift of $15,600.

THE FUND FOR CCA The Fund for CCA supports core academic and co-curricular programs at the college. Many generous gifts were given for this purpose,

including: $20,000 each from Johanna and

Tom Baruch, Kay Kimpton Walker and Sandy Walker, Judy and Bill Timken, and Carlie

Wilmans; $15,000 each from the Gensler

Family Foundation and Miranda Leonard; $14,500 from Nancy and Steven Oliver;

$12,000 from Anita and Ronald Wornick;

and $10,000 each from Kimberly and Simon Blattner, Tecoah Bruce (Painting/Drawing 1974, MAEd 1979) and Thomas Bruce,

C. Diane Christensen and Jean M. Pierret,

Nancy and Pat Forster, Ann Hatch and Paul Discoe, Hellman Foundation, Nancy Howes

(Jewelry / Metal Arts 2005) and Tim Howes, Brenda Jewett and George F. Jewett III

(Architecture 1996), Byron Kuth and Liz

Ranieri, Joyce B. Linker, Lorna Meyer Calas

and Dennis Calas, MF Foundation/Tim

Mott, F. Noel Perry, Rotasa Foundation,

Gene Savin and Susan Enzle, Sharon and

Barclay Simpson, Marion Stroud-Swingle,

Tarbell Family Foundation, Jack and Susy Wadsworth, and Mary and Harold Zlot.

bags, water bottles, trucker hats, mugs, and

Collection” at CafePress.com/cca_store. Show off your CCA pride, or buy a great gift for a

family member or friend! All profits benefit CCA’s scholarship fund.

42

P H I LA N T H R O P Y

Honor Roll of Donors New gifts and pledges from the following donors were recorded between January 1 and December 31, 2013. Alumni are identified by their actual or expected year of graduation, when the date is known.

Individual Donors $10,000+

$5,000–$9,999

Earle F. Holt (MFA Advertising 1949)

Kimberly and Simon Blattner

Dr. Thomas and Janice Boyce

Timothy and Anne Kahn

Johanna and Tom Baruch

Tecoah Bruce (Painting/Drawing 1974, MAEd 1979) and Thomas Bruce

C. Diane Christensen and Jean M. Pierret

Richard and Jean Coyne Family Foundation

Una Baker

Rena Bransten

Lauren and Jamie Ford

Jeffrey Fraenkel and Frish R. Brandt (Printmaking 1979)

Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein

Hellman Foundation

Randi and Bob Fisher

Robert Mailer Anderson and Nicola Miner

Nancy and Pat Forster

Mac and Leslie McQuown

Ann Hatch and Paul Discoe

Byron R. Meyer

The Ferguson-Scott Family

Mark Jensen

Patricia Fitzpatrick

Nion McEvoy

Gensler Family Foundation

The Anthony and Celeste Meier Family

Leo and Florence Helzel

Mrs. Sarajane Miller-Wheeler and

Timothy Howes and

Dr. Calvin B. Wheeler

Dick and Carol Hyman

Ms. Susan Landor Keegin

Brian Kotzin and Kathryn Comick Chong-Moon Lee

David and Nena Marsh

Sheri S. McKenzie and Mark S. Bernstein

George H. Mead III (Painting/Drawing 1976, MFA 1978) Lisa Mertens and John Ward

John L. Milner (Interdisciplinary Fine Arts 1972) Barbara and Stephen Morris

John and Barbara Osterweis Werner and Eveline Schnorf

George Luis Sedano and Eric Fiske Büldan Seka

Nancy Howes (Jewelry / Metal Arts 2005)

Edna Reichmuth* Trust (Art Education 1939)

George F. Jewett III (Architecture 1996)

Jessica A. Silverman (MA Curatorial Practice 2007)

Mr. Sandy Walker

Susan Swig

Laurellee Westaway

and Elizabeth Ranieri

Anonymous

Peter Wiley and Valerie Barth

Brenda Jewett and

C. Ross Sappenfield and Laura Brugger

Ms. Kay Kimpton Walker and

Ruth and Alan Stein

Byron D. Kuth, FAIA LEED AP

Dr. Thomas J. White

Jennifer Stein

Kenneth W. Swenson (Graphic Design 1953) and Cherie Swenson

Suzanne Westaway Vincent R. Worms

Miranda Leonard Joyce Linker

Mary Jo and Arthur Shartsis

Mari Wright (Textiles 1965)

The S. Livingston Mather* Charitable Trust

$1,000–$4,999

Xiaoming Zhang, International Advisory

Ms. Ann Morhauser (Glass 1979)

Neil and Gene Barth

George and Lorri Zimmer

Lorna Meyer Calas and Dennis Calas

Susan Avila and Stephen Gong

Nancy and Steven Oliver

Mr. Robert Bechtle (Interdisciplinary Design 1954,

Mary and Andy Pilara

Alexandra Bowes and Stephen Williamson

Rotasa Foundation

Michael Bull (MFA 1963) and Priscilla Bull

Dorothy Saxe and George Saxe*

Lissa Cooley

Christine Bliss and David Nitz

The Steele Family

Rose Anne Critchfield (Painting/Drawing 2005)

Eric and Maria Clothier

Judy and Bill Timken

Jay Dandy and Melissa Weber

F. Noel Perry

MFA 1958) and

Ms. Whitney Chadwick

Shepard Pollack* and Paulette Long

Bill and Gerry Brinton

Gene Savin and Susan Enzle

Brandon and Carol Clark

Barclay and Sharon Simpson

Melanie Corn and Julian Johnson

Marion Stroud-Swingle

and Steve Cohn

The Toby Fund

Andrew G. Fisher (Jewelry / Metal Arts 1978)

Ms. Carlie Wilmans

Mark Freund and Trice Koopman

Robin Wright and Ian Reeves

Kenneth A. Goss, in memory of

Anonymous (2)

Mara Hancock (Individualized Major 1986)

Jack and Susy Wadsworth Ronald and Anita Wornick Mary and Harold Zlot

and Jeffry Weisman

Malin Giddings

Armando Rocha (Environmental Studies 1980)

Tracy and Maie Herrick

Director, Poly International

Anonymous (3)

$500–$999

Robert Avery (Advertising 1962) and and Amanda Avery

Philip and Sally Chapman Don Crewell

Dennis Crowe

Leroy Dutro (Art Education 1941)

Burton P. Edwards (Painting/Drawing 2003) Mona El Khafif Britta Erickson

Mr. George A. Gonzalez (Graphic Design 1973) I Min and Tjinta Hao

Doris Harris (Interior Architecture 1983)

Kurt Kiefer (MFA 1992) and Mary L. Williamson

43 Bruce and Michelle Klafter

Norman Stein (Graphic Design & Painting 1970) and

Helen Frierson

Julie P. Lee

Grace and Megan Blue Stermer

Sharon Gadberry

John and Melba Lew

Anonymous

Sandra Greenberg Kosinski (Ceramics 1974) Ardelle K. Levy Sally Lewis

David Meckel

Helen Stein

John Williams and Audrey Lyndon

Alan W. Myers

$50–$249

The Ras Family

Opal P. Adisa

John Newberger Barbara H. Rhoades (MFA 1987) Sarah L. Robayo Sheridan

(MA Curatorial Practice 2008)

Robert Tong (Art Education 1953) and Helen Tong

Chia Hong Tsai and Ping Jen Tsai Ku

Andrea S. Wilder (Interdisciplinary Design 1974)

Jay Xu, PhD, Director, Asian Art Museum Ruby E. Young (Art Education 1952) Anonymous

Juvenal Acosta

Gregory Andreas & Judith Rosenberg Peter and Ann Appert

Joseph Arena (Interdisciplinary Fine Arts 1956) and Tonni Arena

Terri K. Bailard (Environmental Studies 1973)

Alexander Bicket and Susan Mosites Bicket Nina Chiappa (Photography 1976)

Linda A. Cicero (Photography 1980) and Robert Kennedy

Nancy Clark and Bill Broach

Stanely Cohen (Art Education 1949, MFA 1952) and Naomi Cohen

Allan Crane (Painting 1978)

James M. Fowler (Ceramics 1969) and Sui Hen Fung Fowler

Elizabeth T. Geran (Interior Architecture 1971) David Gissen and Rachel Schreiber

Jack Howard (Art Education 1958, MFA 1959) and Joyce Howard

Karen Jacobs Bradley (Individualized Major 1988) and Mark Bradley

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Judd David D. Kennedy (1974)

David Kolonay (Architecture 1990) and Melissa O’Connor

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Leiber

Bob Levenson (Interdisciplinary Fine Arts 1974) and Diane Levenson

Jacqueline Little (MFA 1992) and Henry Turmon

Ashley Lomery and Kevin Lisewski Merideth H. Marschak

Christina Meyer (Drawing 1994)

Janet M. Monaghan (Environmental Studies 1973) and Brian J. McKeever

Sally and Robert Nicholson

(parents of Bobby Nicholson)

Sun Qian

Barbara A. Sattler (Interdisciplinary Fine Arts 1971) Luc and Veronique Schlumberger

Dan Shafer (MFA 2005) and Alicia Shafer

Christina M. Gearin (Architecture 2000) and Andrew Mayo (Architecture)

Norval L. Gill (Art Education 1937)

Jane Duff Gleason, AIA, LEED AP Jose and Victoria Gonzalez Gertrude H. Goodale (1949)

Deborah Griffin (MFA 1992) and Gregory Griffin

Dr. Edward A. Aiken (Interdisciplinary Fine Arts 1972)

Samuel and Peggy Gutterman

Richard Alongi

William A. Hamilton (MA Art Education 1975)

Mia S. Alexander (Drawing 1979) William R. Alschuler

Robin L. Anderson (Sculpture 1973, MFA 1975) Judith D. Andresen (Art Education 1960)

Andrew Hall (Graphic Design 1966)

JoAnne Hammer (Graphic Design 1982) and Carl Hammer

Ms. Mikae Hara (MFA 1986)

Susan Bard and Mike Olson

Robert Harding (Art Education 1957) and

Marianne and Thomas Bartholomew-Couts

John and Sandra Haskin

Jennie Barrett Gisslow (Individualized Major 1983) Jacob Belsky (Advertising 1965)

$250–$499

Michael Furlong and Myra Paci

Mary Bender (Painting 1984) and Stephen Hoyt

Mary C. Bendix (Painting 1975) Don Berk (Ceramics 1975) and

Nina DeLynn Berk (Ceramics 1974)

William Bivins, Jr., and Lynn Fuller Jay Bixler and Deborah Orel-Bixler Steven and Lili Blalock Lucia Bogatay, AIA

Barbara J. Breashears (Interdisciplinary Design 1983) Stanlee Brimberg

Francis P. Brooks (Interior Architecture 1982) Kenneth L. Bryant (MFA 1976) James Butler

Leland Byrd (Art Education 1973)

Marcella Harding

Mary Hawkins and Jose Esteban

Gerald Hoepfner (Painting 1967) and Marcia Hall

Dulcie Horwitz (Architecture 1997) John and Anne Humphries

Chi Wah Hung and Mei Chi Mak John and Annette Janowiak

Jack S. Johannes, AIA (Interdisciplinary Fine Arts 1947) Andrea K. Johnson (BA 1979) Barbara P. Jones

Van and Maryann Jones

Elizabeth Shari Kadar (Sculpture 1989) Martin Kasofsky

Richard and Audrey Kauffman May T. Kawamoto (Painting 1969, MA Art Education 1985)

Mary C. Cancelmo

Cassandra Kegler Kaldor (MFA 2005)

Blanche C. Clark (Painting 1949)

Tari L. Kerss (MFA 1991)

Theodore Cohen (Art Education 1952)

Katherine Koelsch Kriken and John L. Kriken

The Cutler Family

George and Lauren Landress

Linda DeBruyn-Nelson (Interdisciplinary Fine Arts 1973)

Sui Leung and Pauline Law

Andrew Dhuey and Bridget Clarke

William and Catherine Leach

Steve Diller

Judith and Robert Leedy

Lori Chan Luna (Environmental Studies 1973)

Christopher W. Kent

Rosemary Clark (Ceramics 1967)

Norman Kondy

Carolyn Cunial-Salazar (Interior Architecture 1987)

Kiersten L. Lammerding (Graphic Design 1994)

Gail R. Davies

Janis Lavine (Ceramics 1975)

Gail DeSpain (Interior Architecture 1986)

Marc A. Le Sueur

Barbara J. Dickie

Patrick Lee

Gordon C. Dipple (Art Education 1952)

David Lemon (Interdisciplinary Design 1979) and

Ron and Becky Dreasher

M. C. Leo

Brian Dyck (Art Education 1971) and Iwalani Dyck

The Loewy Family

Mr. David G. Edlefsen (Textiles 1978)

Timothy Long

Karren Lutz Elsbernd (Interior Design 1965)

Vivian MacKenzie

Jesse and Vera Feldman

Nancy R. Marzi (Interdisciplinary Fine Arts 1954)

Shannon N. Foucault

Katherine S. McCabe

Bob Franco (Art Education 1963) and Judy Franco

Leonard R. McKinley (Graphic Design 1970)

Dean Draper (Ceramics 1951)

Mona Lemon

Mark M. Dutka (Interior Architecture 1992)

James Leritz

Jerry Ebanks

Sophia Loh and Thomas Li

Richard G. Elliott

Ian C. MacColl

Joseph and Judy Erm

Janice Marcin (Painting & Interdisciplinary Design 1984)

Luke and Kimberly Felker

Deborah E. McAfee (Film 1975)

Lola Fraknoi (MFA 1984)

Margreta McKeown

Jan Freeman Long (Painting 1996) and Jeff Long

Mary W. Mead (Ceramics 1978)

44

P H I LA N T H R O P Y

Rachelle A. Meneses (Interior Design 2008)

Doris Rodriquez (Art Education 1950)

Constance Treadwell

Cecily Merrill (Painting 1966, Art Education 1967) and

Eleanor Salazar

John C. Twomey

Mary G. Mercer

Frank M. Friedlaender

Bonnie G. Meyer

Richard Meyer (Advertising 1958) and Joan Meyer

Jamie Millican (Environmental Studies 1981) Lucia Maria Minervini (Painting 1979)

Dennis Moran (Art Education 1961) and Mary Moran Marjorie K. Murray (Advertising 1949)

Ellen B. Nachtrieb

Miyako Overturf (Interior Design 1961) Arnulfo and Maria Teresa Pacis Jeff Padilla (Photography 1983)

Sushil C. Pal (Graphic Design 1978)

Wendy J. Paull-David (Jewelry / Metal Arts 1972) Charmaine M. Pearson TTEE (MFA 1991) Dr. and Mrs. Tom Piatt

John and Margaret Pillsbury

Rosalie Price (Art Education 1961) and John Price

J. Przybysz

Jessica Russell

Mara Saltz (Graphic Design 1975) Timothy J. Schmitt

Susan Schneider (Graphic Design 1988) Judith Serin and Herbert Yee

Harry Reom (Advertising 1950) and Carol Reom

Pamela Rhodes

Mary Rita Vasquez (Ceramics 1988)

Graham Walker and Agnes Murray (MFA 1980)

Loesje Shema (Interior Architecture 1982)

David and Barbara Volckmann

Elsa Waller (Textiles 1968) and Julian A. Waller

Daniel and Jane Shureb

Robert Wallis (Architecture 1997) and

Peter Silen, Ph.D.

Christine Walter

Matt Silady

Peter A. Smith

Timothy Smith

Benjie Wallis (Textiles 1996)

Frederick Wasser (Art Education 1960) and Linda Wasser

Susan Solinsky Duryea and Paul Duryea

Susan Sampsell Weller (Art Education 1970)

Mr. & Mrs. Bill Steel (Interior Design 1968)

Lawrence and Mary Ann Wight

Julia Sommer (1989)

Stephanie Summersgill (Architecture 2005) and Chris Summersgill

Kenneth Tanzer

Heidi Reifenstein (Graphic Design 2009)

Daniel and Lynne Van Engel

Ms. Susan W. Sheldon (Painting 1968)

Sallie Shawl

Michael Reardon and Jill Lawrence

Laurie Reid (MFA 1996) and Charlie Casey

Kathryn Van Dyke (Painting 1990) and R. D. Grant

Janice L. Viekman (Textiles 1976)

Randy Tabb

Andrea Reed

Lina Urbain and Bertrand Racine

Adrienne A. Sharp (Drawing 1975)

Michael Quinn

Sharon O’Brien Rayner (Art Education 1965)

Brenda Tucker

Hajime and Hong Tada Martin and Elizabeth Terplan

George and Katherine Thomason Joel and Patricia Tomei Leslie Townsend

Timothy R. Wells (Interior Architecture 1986) Sharon Wilcox (MFA 1965) Carolyn Wong

Isabelle Wyatt (Interior Architecture 1984) Neysa Young

Stefanie Young (Illustration 1995) and Peter Young Raafat Zaini and Hebah Al-Amasi Leonardo Zylberberg Anonymous (9)

Dominick Tracy

Organizational Donors $10,000+

$5,000–$9,999

Perkins + Will

Capital Group Companies

American Craft Council

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP

Adobe Systems Incorporated Charitable Foundation

Citrix

Cotton Inc.

Emirates Foundation

FOR-SITE Foundation

The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Grants for the Arts/

San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund

Walter & Elise Haas Fund Intel Corporation

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences The Black Dog Private Foundation diPietro Todd Salons + Academy Fong & Chan Architects

Monotype Imaging Inc.

BraytonHughes Design Studios

Patina Gallery

San Francisco Arts Commission University of the Arts London

Koret Foundation

American Institute of Architects,

Abercrombie & Fitch

San Francisco Chapter

LEF Foundation

ArtsLink Residencies

MF Foundation/Tim Mott

Bay Area Video Coalition

Levi Strauss & Co.

National Endowment for the Arts National Science Foundation

The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation Panta Rhea Foundation

The W.L.S. Spencer Foundation Tarbell Family Foundation

Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation

Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. The W.L.S. Spencer Foundation Anonymous (2)

Society of North American Goldsmiths

$500–$999

Celia Berta Gellert Foundation

$1,000–$4,999

Lam Research Corporation

SmithGroupJJR

The Carl Gellert and

Kadist Art Foundation

Vehbi Koç Foundation

San Jose Museum of Art

Bonhams & Butterfields

Cary Bernstein Architect Stephen Gong,

Center for Asian American Media

Harley Ellis Devereaux

Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects Levy Design Partners

Stanley Saitowitz | Natoma Architects Inc. Kenneth Foster, Executive Director, YBCA

Astro Studios

$250–$499

Gallery Wendi Norris

ARCH Drafting & Art Supply

Hosfelt Gallery

International Interior Design Association Jensen Architects

John Marx / Form4 Architecture Kava Massih Architects

Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture Blasen Landscape Architecture Donald MacDonald Architects Johanna Spilman, Inc.

TANNERHECHT Architecture

McCall Design Group

$50–$249

Netherlands Cultural Services

Oakland Art Association

Nan Hai Arts Center Oliver & Company

cafepress.com

45

Gifts in Kind Anthony Meier Fine Arts

Diana Cohen

Katherine N. Arnemann

Peggy Fleming

Donald R. Anderson Arter

Artforum International Jason Baron

Bjarke Ingels Group Andrea W. Cassidy Cerruti Cellars

Shirley Juster

Liza J. Dodd (Ceramics 1985)

Ms. GyĂśngy Laky and

Mr. Thomas C. Layton

Shademaker Productions, Inc. Thomas Wojak (MFA 1992) and Misty Leigh Youmans

Mutahar Glasgow

Christen Leong

Ann Hatch

Muscardini Cellars

Ronald and Anita Wornick

Dorothy Saxe and George Saxe*

Anonymous (2)

Koko F. Flowers (Graphic Design 1970)

Michael Lopez* (MFA 1963) and

Dorothy Saxe and George Saxe*

Kenneth A. Goss, in memory

Richard M. Lowenthal, M.D.

Grace Street Catering Laura Hazlett

Pamela Joyner and

(Painting & Printmaking 1996)

Magnolia Photo Booth Co.

John Wong

Ann Rhode

Yoga Tree SF

Camille Seaman

Alfred Giuffrida

Founders Legacy Society Mia S. Alexander (Drawing 1979) Cal Anderson

(Interdisciplinary Design 1946)

Carole A. Austin (Textiles 1978)

Kimberly and Simon Blattner Audrey Brown

(Interdisciplinary Fine Arts 1976)

Claudia L. Bubeck (Painting 1979) Robert J. and Nancy R. Cole

Mary L. Correia (Illustration 1967) Doug Cover

Gladys M. Eaton

Mrs. Phoebe Fisher-Wolters

and Thomas E. Flowers of Armando Rocha

Ann Jones

Marian D. Keeler (Architecture 1990) Jim Kidder

Diane M. Kinnane

Gerald M. Ober (Commercial Art 1956)

and

Eve Steccati-Tanovitz (Graphic Design 1969) and Ron Tanovitz (Graphic Design 1969)

Margi Sullivan (Interior Design 1973) and Bill Van Dyk

Diane Oles (Interior Architecture 1984)

Kenneth W. Swenson (Graphic Design

Shepard Pollack* and

Kern Toy (Graphic Design 1985)

Edna Reichmuth*

Dr. Thomas J. White

Nancy and Steven Oliver

Roxanne Kupfer

(Interdisciplinary Fine Arts 1974)

Dr. Thomas L. Nelson and Dr. Wylda H. Nelson

(Environmental Studies 1980)

Robert P. Levenson

Jeannette Lopez

1953)

and Cherie Swenson

Paulette Long

Sheila L. Wells (Art Education 1955)

(Art Education 1939)

Anonymous (6)

Gifts in Memory:

Gifts in Honor: Honoree

Donor

Honoree

Donor

Katherine Dey

George Luis Sedano and Eric Fiske

Michael P. Cooley

Lissa Cooley

Nancy Boas

Vanessa Gorman Ann Hatch

George F. Jewett III (Architecture 1996) Emily Keegin and Ben Sterling David Kirshman Alan Marcus

The McCullock Family Steven Oliver

Bruce Qvale and Jeff Qvale Hannah Raffeld Tara Rech

Charity Romano Noki Seekao

Susan Sobeloff

Danielle D. Smith

(Painting/Drawing 2013)

Jeannine Szamreta

Kayoko Wakamatsu

Suzanne Westaway

George Luis Sedano and Eric Fiske

John Cardinali

(Individualized Major 1976)

John C. Twomey

Marion B. Stroud-Swingle

Michael P. Cronan (Painting)

Helen Frierson

Ms. Susan Landor Keegin

Joseph W. Girard

Rachel B. Stern (Sculpture 1972)

Anonymous

Leo and Florence Helzel

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Leiber

Sally and Philip Chapman J. Przybysz

Sally and Philip Chapman

George Luis Sedano and Eric Fiske George Luis Sedano and Eric Fiske George Luis Sedano and Eric Fiske George Luis Sedano and Eric Fiske George Luis Sedano and Eric Fiske Earnestine B. Turner

George Luis Sedano and Eric Fiske George Luis Sedano and Eric Fiske

(Sculpture 1970, MFA 1971)

Trude Guermonprez Betty Hine

Lindan Hynes

Peter J. L’Abbe (Furniture 2012) Steven Leiber

Frederick H. Meyer

Margaret Montgomery Shepard Pollack Robert M. Ralls

Armando A. Rocha

(Environmental Studies 1980)

David M. Schoenfeld Roberta A. Steele (BFA 1970)

Nancy and Steven Oliver Mari Wright (Textiles 1965) Barbara J. Dickie Helen Frierson

Sally and Philip Chapman

Ronald and Anita Wornick

Robin Wright and Ian Reeves

Norval L. Gill (Art Education 1937) Sally and Philip Chapman Helen Frierson

Timothy J. Schmitt Kenneth A. Goss

Mr. and Mrs. Paul Leiber The Steele Family

Dugald Stermer

Grace and Megan Blue Stermer

Glenn A. Wessels

Norval L. Gill (Art Education 1937)

Ron Twomey

Sally and Philip Chapman

* Deceased

46

IN MEMORIAM

In Memoriam Richard McLean passed away on January 3, 2014. He was born in 1934 and received his BFA in

Painting from CCA in 1958. He taught for many years at San Francisco State University.

McLean fell under the sway of Richard Diebenkorn’s

abstract painting while he was a student here, but then

moved away from abstraction and eventually embraced photorealism—specifically pictures of horses and their milieu: owners, trainers, stables, and equipage—as his primary mode. He was well known by the late 1960s

and is frequently mentioned together with the Bay Area

photorealists Robert Bechtle and Ralph Goings. His work

is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American

Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Yale University Art

Gallery; and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. McLean said in a 2012 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle: “The horse appears historically in art going

back to the caves. And it struck me in the ’60s that there

Richard McLean, Kahlua Lark, 1980, a gift from the artist permanently on display in Macky Hall on CCA’s Oakland campus

were no instances of the horse—this noblest of animals—

being painted by serious painters, whom I consider myself

among.” He sought to purge his paintings of the sentiment

that had beleaguered animal pictures in the 18th and 19th centuries. “I wanted to cool things down and make the

horse just an object among other objects. I always regard these as still life paintings.”

Helen Breger passed away at her home in

Berkeley on October 22, 2013, at age 95. She earned her

MFA from CCA in 1970 and taught here for 33 years, from 1955 until her retirement in 1988.

Breger was also a freelance artist for the San Francisco

Chronicle from 1954 to 1960. According to the Chronicle: “Along with the Chronicle’s fashion editor, who wrote

under the pen name Ninon, and the photographer Arthur Frisch, Ms. Breger went twice a year to the now-defunct

I. Magnin and Joseph Magnin stores to see models twirling in the latest styles. Ms. Breger sketched, and Frisch took photos for the inside pages.”

Breger frequently sketched author portraits for the

Chronicle’s book section, too. Her drawings accompanied book reviews, interviews with authors and poets, and news of literary events.

Breger wrote the book Lines: A Sketched Life in 2008, and

she illustrated Sketches Poetical with the poet Jack Foley

in 2011. Her work is in public and private collections

around the world, from San Francisco to Jerusalem. In

2012 her daughter, the filmmaker Michelle Shelfer, made a one-hour documentary called Vienna in the Heavenlies about Breger’s flight from Vienna to Trinidad during World War II.

47

For decades he headed Wallace Jonason Environmental Design, with offices in San Francisco, New York, and

Manila, working on projects ranging from corporate, film, and product designs to assignments in design psychology and community service projects.

He was very active in professional organizations—in 1980 he was the national president of the American Society of Interior Designers—and he participated enthusiastically on faculty committees and panels. He edited and wrote

numerous articles for design and educational publications.

Jonason was known to leave the window of his Macky Hall office open so that squirrels could get in. The

Wally Jonason passed away on September 29, 2013, at age 87. He was on CCA’s faculty from 1968 to

squirrels would scamper to his desk, climb his necktie,

and retrieve the almonds that he had stashed in his shirt pocket for them to find.

1999 (when he was named professor emeritus). He was

In an interview circa 1980, he said of his CCA students:

—the first of its kind in the country—and the Architec-

if nothing else. And I am fascinated by their ‘happy acci-

key in the formation of the Interior Architecture Program ture Program. He served as an advisor to innumerable

students, plus many presidents, trustees, faculty, and staff.

“I learn more from them than I will ever confess. Patience, dent’ methods of problem solving. Freedom to fail is one of the big things you pay for in education.”

Miyasaki studied painting with Richard Diebenkorn and printmaking with Leon Goldin and Nathan Oliveira. He

earned a BFA and a BAEd from CCA in 1957, and an MFA in 1958; he also taught at the college for seven years, from 1958 to 1964.

He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship

for 1963 and traveled to Europe; while there he worked

at the vaunted Atelier 17 in Paris. He taught printmaking

and drawing at UC Berkeley for decades and was named a professor emeritus there in 1994.

Over the course of his career, Miyasaki had numerous

national and international exhibitions and was awarded

George Miyasaki, a painter, printmaker, and

teacher, passed away on October 21, 2013, at age 78. He was born in Hawaii in 1935 and came to California in

1953 to enroll at CCA. He intended to pursue a commer-

cial art degree, but was persuaded by Manuel Neri, Bruce

McGaw, and other friends to switch his major to fine arts.

a Ford Foundation grant and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. His work is in the collections of

the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, San

Francisco; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the

Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; the Walker

Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

alumni

Gerome Castagnetto March 27, 2013 Art Education 1949 Salinas, California

Francesca (Frenchie) DeLorenzo March 24, 2014 Photography 2006 San Diego, California

Thomas Myers February 3, 2014 1951 Milwaukie, Oregon

John Sowaal January 10, 2013 MFA 1958 Grover Beach, California

Georgia Deaver March 22, 2013 1984 El Granada, California

Roy (Bo) McCord January 24, 2014 Education 1951 Fairfield, California

Samuel Richardson 2013 Art Education 1956, MFA 1960 Oakland, California

Kiyoji Toyofuku January 15, 2014 Applied Arts 1954 Berkeley, California

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N OT E S F RO M T H E S T U D I O

NOTES FROM THE STUDIO: BARNEY HAYNES INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES AND FINE ARTS FACULTY 1983-PRESENT; MFA 1988 photography by Rachel Walther

49

I’ve lived and worked in my West Oakland studio for 15

There are past projects all over the place, and also extra

have great skylights and windows. There’s roof access for

materials. I’m constantly buying things that seem like

years. I’m on the top floor of a three-story building and when I’m doing something involving water or solar.

The hardwood floors are nice but not too nice, so I don’t have to be overly careful while dragging heavy objects

around or working with conductive paint or ferrofluid.

There is also a freight elevator and a loading dock, which facilitate the deployment of large-scale projects for exhibitions.

My work is at the crossroads of art and technology, so

if a project involves, say, robotics, 3D printing, hacking downloaded files, and drilling and grinding aluminum

components, all the tools are immediately at hand. This

allows for a rapid iterative process that is unencumbered

by spatial issues. Almost everything is on wheels so that I can constantly reconfigure the space and move the workstations around.

I collect a lot of things. My accumulation of stuff is a

bit like a reference library. The organizational system

may not be apparent to most people, and to be honest, I sometimes get a little lost in it myself! But in the chaos, creative juxtapositions happen. Things get repurposed: Maybe part of an old project will become a piece of furniture, or vice versa.

stuff I’ve acquired while out on excursions to procure

they might be handy down the road. Many of them I’ve never used—to put it in film terms, my shooting ratio

is incredibly low—but they’re still inspirational in some way. Parts of robotic arms, for instance, that are fun to pick up and look at and get inspired by.

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This issue of Glance magazine was designed by CCA students s u wa nn a r u ay ri n s aowa rot (Graphic Design 2015) and e m e ral d ya n g (Graphic Design and Illustration 2015). Suwanna is originally from Bangkok. Her interests include print and interactive design.

She loves being in the city, traveling, and keeping herself busy.

Emerald comes from Shenzhen, China. She likes to daydream and enjoys the process of creative problem solving.

The image on the cover shows a class taking place in the Lightweight School Prototype 3.0, conceived and constructed by students in Peter Anderson’s fall 2013 Architecture course, Creative Project Management. The Prototype is a lightweight, easy-tofabricate design for institutional use in tropical climates. Here it is pictured in the not-so-tropical climate of the Nave on CCA’s San Francisco campus.

The Prototype will be reinstalled at CCA’s Cross Section exhibition at the Bay Area Maker Faire, May 17–18, 2014. All are invited to come see this and many other exciting CCA student projects!