PrattMWP Alumni Newsletter Spring 2021

Spring 2021/Issue Thirteen

ALUMNI NEWS

WE’RE HAVING A PARTY, AND WE WANT YOU THERE!

Join us and your fellow PrattMWP alumni and faculty back on campus for fun, memories, food, and music. We will commemorate the 20th anniversary of PrattMWP College of Art and Design with the opening of the exhibition 20: PrattMWP Celebrating 20 Years.

The weekend will feathure long with mixers, activities, drawing classes, and more. Mark your calendar and plan your much-needed trip back to Utica!

For an invitation, update your Alumni Contact information We will be spotlighting our alumni and the success of PrattMWP on our social media pages leading up to the opening!

Follow us:

Facebook Instagram Meet the alumni participating in the exhibition:

PrattMWP Alumni Anniversary

ALUMNUS PROFILE: ARAY M. TILL - CLASS OF 2006 Aray M. Till is a visual storyteller from New York who received her BFA from Pratt Institute. She went on to work for advertising agencies in New York City and now works in the Saratoga Springs region, splitting her time between design client work and professional development as a coach and faculty member for Seth Godin’s alt MBA/Akimbo courses and workshops.

Aray is currently working on a project that explore sher experiences with synesthesia called Chromatic Voices. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway (for example, hearing) leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway (such as vision). When one sense is activated, another unrelated sense is activated at the same time.

How did you develop a passion for the visual arts?

There’s a level of intersectionality to what I do, and that has been very much intentional.

Coming into college, however long ago that was, I came in with a high level and understanding of photography. At the time, Keith Sandman taught photography and he very much became my mentor.

Looking to the future, I was unsure where I wanted to go with photography, whether I wanted it to be my career or whether I wanted it to just be something I excel at – fine arts versus communications design. I went into communications and art direction so I could take the skills that I have in photography and apply them in a different “language.”

Aray M. Till, Jessica Sheridan, portrait with pantone, from the Chromatic Voices series

I have worked as an art director and focused heavily on print and magazines. I think at the core of it all is visual storytelling, so I consider myself a visual storyteller. I can apply and take different mediums to tell the story. I still do a lot of design work and strategy because I’ve also taken a marketing approach to some of the work.

What makes you a strong artistic director?

I have purposely been very careful to create a career lattice instead of a career ladder. As a leader on a team, I want to be able to do any of the work that I ask anyone on my team to do, but also understand how to have that conversation, or how to provide good feedback and good support. Being able to speak these different “languages,” I can also be the bridge between client and designer, or agency or client.

How did your time and experiences at PrattMWP shape your artistic goals?

My time at PrattMWP was built around exploration and exposure to try different mediums and different approaches, and not necessarily need to perfect any of those mediums or approaches or tools to tell a story. It was also about exposure to worldviews and to people and humanity by understanding that we do things differently. There’s a big component to that exposure and that curiosity, and not keeping yourself in the box. Playing with that curiosity has very much been a part of who I am today as a woman, designer, art director, storyteller, and photographer. I certainly think that being adaptive helps in any field or any way you want to go with your career path, too.

Up until my senior year of high school, I wanted to go to medical school to be a surgeon.

In high school, I took a super rigorous program and dance was my creative outlet. One of the requirements was that I needed to also focus on art, so I took an intensive art exposure class. That was when I realized “Oh, maybe I don’t want to go to med school.” I had been working with a portfolio of sorts, and it was sort of the realization that like my creative outlet could actually be a career, and here I am today. I still have great friendships with people who were part of my experience at PrattMWP. As a matter of fact, I met my husband there. He was a year above me and had transferred early to the Brooklyn campus, but his best friend was still at PrattMWP and I became friends with his best Aray M. Till, Adriano Vazquez, portrait with pantone, from the Chromatic Voices series friend.

Could you tell me more about the Chromatic Voices project?

I have the gift of synesthesia. It’s a neurological condition where there’s a cross wiring of your senses. When I hear people’s voices, I see a color. It was actually a professor at PrattMWP who asked me about it originally and it was a gift that I had not embraced. It’s not something I can turn off, so it has its good moments and bad moments. Chromatic Voices is a project that I’ve been exploring a bit more, bringing all the different parts of me as the designer, me the photographer, me the writer, and me through this gift.

I’ve done a really big exploration, probably close to 150 200 interviews.

Aray M. Till, Cassondra Shauble, portrait with pantone, from the Chromatic Voices series

There’s been an exploration to whether there is a correlation between what I see and personality. It also has a podcast component to it. One of the questions that I ask is, “What color do you see yourself? What color do you think of when you think of yourself?”

What’s really interesting about synesthesia is though you and I can have the same exact condition, the same form of it, we could see different colors from the same person. So there’s a personal component to it, which is really, really, really fascinating.

Artist’s Website

A look inside the studios

Illustration with Beth Post

Sophomore Sculpture with Daniel Buckingham

Light/Color/Design with Carlie Sherry

Freshman Photography with Sarah Smith

Sophomore Photography with Sarah Smith

Sophomore Drawing with Greg Lawler

ALUMNUS PROFILE: ADOLFO GUTIERREZ - CLASS OF 2012 Adolfo Gutierrez is a SalvadoranAmerican multidisciplinary art director and designer who grew up in Maryland and now resides in Brooklyn.

His artwork incorporates lettering and graffiti details that inspired him as a teen to pursue a career in art and design. His past clients have included The Real Cost, Rolling Stone magazine, MTV, Atlantic Records, Men’s Journal magazine, Viper Records, and Zozobra Publishing.

There’s a graphic element to your painting, how did you start incorporating that into your work?

Originally, I went to school for design. I ended up designing because I painted when I was younger. I was very into graffiti. The whole lettering practice caused my high school teacher to suggest that I go into graphic design, but I still enjoyed painting. I did a little bit of painting while at PrattMWP, but I stopped in college in my junior year. I got back into painting in 2015 when I ended up doing a t-shirt for Rolling Stone. The creative director asked if I could bring in a sketchbook to see if I could illustrate. I was always doodling even if I wasn’t painting. So I brought in the sketchbook and some prints, because I was really into printmaking in college. He started looking through everything and asked, “What’s this stuff?” It was more of the illustrative work that determined the style.

Adolfo Gutierrez Recemos por los que vienen, vinieron, van a venir y los que no llegaron. (Let’s pray for those coming, came, are coming and those who didn’t make it.), 2020 acrylic, sand, acrylic medium, pumice gel, house paint on canvas, 18 in. x 24 in.

Adolfo Gutierrez Promesas de una vivienda libre. (Promise of a free home.), 2020 acrylic, sand and acrylic medium on canvas, 14 in. x 11 in.

A lot of your work has themes of home, what does that mean to you and what kinds of stories do you like to tell?

I like to talk about what it means to be Latin American, especially within the context of being in this country, whether someone was born here or came as an immigrant like my parents, and understanding their experience. I wound up doing an illustration discussing the “American Dream” and it became a focal point for my paintings, thinking back on what it meant for me, my parents and neighbors, and everyone who came before me in my community, of either being here or having to go back due to deportation. When I start painting or drawing, I think of some of the stories I was told through research or reading or through others reaching out to tell their stories. Instead of going straight to the sketchbook, I tend to write some of the stories people tell me and dissect certain aspects of it later on and use it for the titles of paintings. I tend to start backwards in a way. I start by coming up with the title and then creating the story of the work itself. It doesn’t happen all the time, but for the bigger projects, the bigger paintings, it tends to happen a lot more. When it comes to colors, a lot of them tend to be very bright and bold and I’m going back to my experiences of going to El Salvador, where my parents are from, and just looking around and at the homes and the vibrance found there. The work is about immigration, and so it’s about creating a home, and finding a new home, as well as about the homes that many of them have left behind.

When I start working on things that are about my personal narrative as a child of immigrants, or another narrative that has to do with the children of immigrants, I tend to tone down the colors a lot more as a way to show how we are removed from that. We’re still aware of our culture, but we didn’t grow up in it.

I grew up in Maryland, where there are a lot of brick homes and it’s very different, color-wise from El Salvador. Going inside my parents’ house, they had green walls, maybe not as bright as the homes back there, but it still has a vibrancy. In a way, my parents tried to incorporate those colors in our home. It’s a reminder of where they came from.

I have started to add texture to my work and it’s a way to go back into the concept of the home, reflective of the stucco and materials that were used to make the homes. I’ve been fortunate enough to have an apartment where I can have a painting studio. I’ve been trying to incorporate how colors deteriorate over time. It’s very much a work in process, but I’ve been exploring that idea and have been thinking about how to incorporate more of that.

The last time I went to El Salvador was in 2019, and I was very much looking at everything and feeling the textures on the walls and noticing how the paint was starting to erode and how the materials play with one another.

I’ve been trying to work in series now, still focusing on the larger encompassing story of what it means to come to America, and be Latin American here.

Because of the pandemic, I’ve been thinking more about the aspect of communication. We’re experiencing the same aspect of what it is to be detached from someone and figure out a way to keep in touch. Telling the stories that are told through the phone.

Adolfo Gutierrez, Un abrazo por todos los que no te pude dar.

(A hug for all of those I couldn’t give you.), 2021 acrylic on paper, 22 in. x 30 in.

What is part of your painting process?

When I paint, I’m thinking like a designer through the way I place colors to try to make sure that colors don’t clash with one another and that they have a vibrancy going on. Working with perspective, it becomes a kind of camouflage. The way I block colors off like camouflage represents that these stories I’m trying to tell are out there, but many times a lot of us aren’t open to the idea of discussing certain things like trauma. It’s not hiding what’s there, but it’s making someone sit down with it and see what’s there. I’m giving them the titles so they can find out what the emotion or what that story is, so it’s a bit of the reverse from what Rothko was doing.

What do the symbols you use in your paintings mean?

There are certain things that I try to include in most of my paintings such as three spirals that, in a way, have become almost autobiographical and part of the story. The three loops are a representation of a wall at the border, but they’re also a representation of the three borders that my parents had to cross: El Salvador, Guatemala and then the U.S. It’s also a symbol for my two younger sisters and myself as the offspring of immigrants.

Adolfo Gutierrez, Hay esperanza en el otro lado.

(There’s hope on the other side.), 2020 acrylic on canvas, 14 in. x11 in.

What shaped your time at PrattMWP? Because it’s such a small campus, the friendships last a lot longer. At PrattMWP, it was so much easier to hang out when other people were doing sculptural work or ceramics or painting that you got to experience a lot more of those different aspects. I almost transferred to sculpture sophomore year because everyone nurtured our ideas and made sure that our ideas were heard. For us as students, it was monumental, because you would never think about working with things like bronze, for example. I enjoyed being able to go off campus to help our learning and understanding and then finish a project on campus. There was the excitement of being able to figure the process out. There is also a museum there! I remember going a lot to the Museum of Art because there was one piece that I really enjoyed that helped a lot to form my current work. It was Mondrian’s Tree (Horizontal Tree).

Piet Mondrian, Dutch (1872-1944) Tree (Horizontal Tree), 1912 Oil on canvas, 29 1/2 x 44 in.

Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, Museum Purchase, 52.37

Artist’s Website

Update your Alumni information here Join the Alumni Group on LinkedIn here