Products and services by SVA artists and entrepreneurs
CREATIVE LIFE | 18
Getting the most out of your LinkedIn account
BALANCING ACT | 20
Making soap at Even Keel, an all-natural skincare company
PORTFOLIO: Ali Banisadr | 24
Ali Banisadr’s mysterious, mythmaking work
SPOTLIGHT: Chicago | 38
Six SVA alumni who are living and working in the Midwestern city
ART SPACE ODDITY | 46
The Satellite Art Show fights mega-fair conformity
LACMA OBSCURA | 54
Photographer Vera Lutter captures the Los Angeles museum’s recent past
Q+A: Lauren Redniss | 58
The author and illustrator talks about her latest projects, and her favorite weather-related phenomenon
ALUMNI AFFAIRS | 64
For Your Benefit
A Message from the Director SVA Alumni Society Awards Donors
Alumni Notes and Exhibitions
FROM THE ARCHIVES | 78
MFA Social Documentary Film Chair
Maro Chermayeff on the artwork of her father, Ivan Chermayeff
54
“While they don’t capture people, one can see faint evidence of their presence.”
SVA hosts a virtual commencement ceremony. 7
“The work I make is pretty weird, in certain ways.”
58
VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL
Spring/Summer 2020
Volume 28, Number 1
EDITORIAL STAFF
Joyce Rutter Kaye, editorial director
Greg Herbowy, editor
Tricia Tisak, copy editor
Michelle Mackin, editorial assistant
VISUAL ARTS PRESS, LTD
Anthony P. Rhodes, executive creative director
Gail Anderson, creative director
Brian E. Smith, design director
Mark Maltais, art director
COVER
FRONT AND BACK COVER
Ali Banisadr, The Builder, 2019, oil on linen, 66 x 88”. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, London, Salzburg. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges
TO READ THE VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL ONLINE, VISIT: ISSUU.COM/SVAVISUALARTSJOURNAL
On March 16, just a few days before this edition of the Visual Arts Journal was scheduled to go to the press, the School of Visual Arts suspended its on-campus activities and moved its courses online, to help combat the fast-growing coronavirus pandemic. This transition constituted an unprecedented effort on behalf of our students, faculty, staff and administration, and I am thankful for everyone’s contributions and hard work to make it possible.
Every publication is a time capsule, and in the handful of weeks it takes for this magazine to be printed and mailed, the world will surely change. Though I do not know what the future holds, I am certain that the creative work our community does will always have an important place in it.
I hope that this letter finds you and your loved ones safe and well.
president school of visual arts
BY
PHOTO
NIR ARIELI
An alumnus re-imagines the SVA logo
Queens-based artist Patrick Edell creates colorful illustrations, paintings and cartoons inspired by sci-fi and fantasy worlds and the busyness of urban life. For this issue’s MySVA, he imagined the SVA letters as collaborative works of art. Though his focus is on editorial illustration, Edell is represented by the Jacky Winter Group for commercial assignments.
These days, plastic seems almost predestined to end up in waterways, but artists are finding inventive ways to intercept that path, transforming toxic trash into works of art. One such artist, Aurora Robson, has inspired an upcoming exhibition that showcases this alchemy. Next year’s “Reversing Trajectories: Plastic from Pollution to Sculpture,” on view at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, will bring together artists working to counter our disposable consumer culture with creativity.
Robson—the founder of Project Vortex, a nonprofit collective of artists, designers and architects addressing the global problem of plastic pollution through their work—partnered with Francis Di Tommaso, director of SVA Galleries, to select a mix of site-specific and preexisting pieces, all of which use various forms of discarded plastic, such as detergent bottles, nylon stockings and toys. Among the works on view will be Quality of Mercy, one of Robson’s own sculptures, crafted
entirely of water bottles glowing different colors and stretching 16 feet in length, and an interactive walk-through portal made of thousands of CDs, by Texas-based artist Leticia Bajuyo. Other artists exhibiting work include Tom Deininger and Portia Munson.
As the 2020 election approaches and the topics of climate change and environmental issues loom large, this exhibition aims to raise awareness and encourage discourse about the growing problem of plastic waste. “SVA, with its tradition of training artists well aware of the world in which they create, offers a natural venue for ‘Reversing Trajectories,’ which will exhibit artists who not only are masters of their practice, but who are also socially engaged,” Di Tommaso says.
“Reversing Trajectories” will be on view in the fall of 2021 at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th floor. For more information on SVA Galleries exhibitions, visit sva.edu/events. [Maeri Ferguson]
Sillman’s “Shape of Shape”
When the Museum of Modern Art reopened last October after renovations that added more than 40,000 square feet to its campus, one of the first exhibitions on view was “The Shape of Shape,” curated by artist Amy Sillman (BFA 1979 Fine Arts).
Presenting nearly 75 works, all chosen for their emphasis on shapes over other compositional elements, “The Shape of Shape” includes a number of rarely shown pieces in MoMA’s collection. Select installation images are on
view at moma.org while the museum is closed for the COVID-19 crisis.
In an interview with Artforum about “Shape,” Sillman says: “I wanted viewers to love this modern art in all its weird variety, and to know how it might be deeply linked to the feeling of disaster that so many of us have right now.”
Sillman’s latest solo show, “Twice Removed,” is scheduled for late spring at the Gladstone Gallery in Manhattan. [Greg Herbowy]
✶ HEARD AT SVA ✶
“My path isn’t going to be your path. Yours is going to be different. Don’t get comfortable. Learn as much as you can.”
—DAVID HEREDIA (BFA 2000 Animation), animator, author and entrepreneur. From a talk hosted by SVA Alumni Affairs and Development and BFA Animation.
“What is truth’s relationship to fact? I think that’s really a tricky question. … I know what I know— how I prove it is a very different thing.”
—HECTOR RENÉ MEMBRENO-CANALES
(BFA 2014 Photography), educator, photographer and visual artist. From “Truth and Reconciliation,” a panel discussion with artists whose work was on view in the 2019 biennial alumni exhibition, “American Truth.”
Alumnus Christine Sun Kim (MFA 2006 Fine Arts) was invited by the National Association of the Deaf and the National Football League to perform the national anthem (sung by Demi Lovato) and “America the Beautiful” (sung by Yolanda Adams) in American Sign Language at Super Bowl LIV, held on February 2 in Miami. In a New York Times op-ed published the following day, Kim—whose artwork, which explores sound and the experience of being deaf in a world that priori-
tizes hearing, was featured in the fall 2014 Visual Arts Journal—advocated for future signed performances to be more widely broadcast and available.
“I wholeheartedly support the efforts to promote accessibility and equality that have been undertaken by the NFL and the NAD,” she wrote. “I also stand in recognition and support of those who have used the NFL’s platform toward wider goals of social justice. I see my performance as part of that expression.” [GH]
Artist and SVA alumnus Christine Sun Kim performed the national anthem and “America the Beautiful” in American Sign Language at Super Bowl LIV in Miami. Photos: Ben Liebenberg/NFL.
Reflective Waters
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the SVA 2020 commencement exercises— originally scheduled for Thursday, May 14, at Radio City Music Hall—have been postponed. The College will host a virtual ceremony in midMay, which will feature auteur, artist, author and cult icon John Waters as keynote speaker.
Waters has been a singular voice, tastemaker and boundary pusher in pop culture since the 1970s. He has written and directed 16 films, authored nine books and shown his visual art in museums and galleries around the world, including a 2004 retrospective at the New Museum in New York City and last year’s traveling retrospective, “Indecent Exposure.” Through his film work, he has become synonymous with his hometown of Baltimore, which he calls the “Hairdo Capital of the World,” using it as a setting for all of his best-known works, including Cry-Baby, Hairspray, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Polyester, and filling his casts with local performers like Divine and Mink Stole. His books include the best-selling Role Models; Carsick, the audiobook version of which was nominated for a Grammy; and Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder, his most recent, published last spring.
As an actor, Waters has appeared in such television series and films as Ryan Murphy’s Feud and Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. His one-man shows have played to crowds at the Bonnaroo and Coachella festivals and the Sydney Opera House, and his filmography has been recognized with retrospectives at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the British Film Institute. In 2015, he was awarded the rank of Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture.
The 2020 commencement ceremony celebrates the achievements of some 1,280 bachelor’s and master’s degree candidates enrolled in the College’s 31 degree programs. For more information, visit sva.edu/commencement. [MF]
✶ HEARD AT SVA
“Embrace failure. If you can abandon everything you know, you have something glorious to look forward to.”
—MILTON GLASER , designer and acting chairman of the SVA Board of Directors. From “Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines,” a conversation with Glaser, designer Walter Bernard (1961 Graphic Design) and writer Anne Quito (MFA 2014 Design Criticism), hosted by MA Design Research, Writing and Criticism.
Site Specific
The Visual Arts Press, the in-house creative studio at SVA, launched the latest version of the College’s website in December. The redesign, three years in the making, is graphically bolder, easier to use, better-organized and more mobile-friendly. If you haven’t seen it yet, take some time to check out the new sva.edu.
Art Ed Addition
CThis fall, SVA will launch its latest graduate degree program: the College’s Art Education Department, chaired by Dr. Catherine Rosamond and currently offering a Master of Arts in Teaching degree, will now offer a Master of Arts in the discipline as well. The new MA program is designed for students who have completed an undergraduate degree in studio art; like the MAT option, it can be completed either as a full-time, one-year intensive or a two-year, part-time program.
Both graduate programs include coursework in art education, special education and general education, with some notable distinctions. While the 36-credit MAT program allows its students to become New York State–certified art teachers, the 34-credit MA program will prepare its students for a more flexible artist-educator path in museum and community contexts. The MA program includes new courses in technology in art education, the artist as educator and museum studies, and there is a required art-education internship, in
lieu of the student-teaching requirement of the MAT program.
“We have come to learn that art education extends well beyond traditional classroom teaching and, in our case, within New York State’s public schools,” says SVA Provost Dr. Christopher Cyphers. “Graduates of the MA program will be equipped to teach at an independent school and lead art education programs at, for example, museums and other cultural institutions, many of which are connected to, or a part of, a community-based organization. We believe this new MA program will appeal to a broad group of prospective students interested in art education, but who do not wish to pursue the path toward state certification and public school teaching.”
For more information on the MA and MAT Art Education programs at SVA, visit sva.edu. [MF]
SVA Shows 2020
Featuring graduating students’ work. Through September
Various locations
Full schedule at sva.edu/svashows
Summer Residency Programs
Open Studios
Featuring work created by participants of SVA Summer Residency Programs. Thursday, August 6 133/141 West 21st Street
Art & Activism: Storytelling for the Climate Crisis
Presentations on using visual arts to raise climate-crisis awareness. In partnership with Solar One and Materials for the Arts.
Presented in conjunction with United Nations Climate Week NYC Monday, September 21
SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street
After School Special
Screenings and talks with SVA alumni working in animation, film and television. Week of September 21 SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street
The Masters Series: Lynsey Addario
SVA honors the acclaimed photojournalist with its annual Masters Series award and exhibition. November 14 – December 20
SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street
ABOVE MAT Art Education students and Chair Catherine Rosamund (right) on a guided tour of the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Photo: Ambar Del Moral (MAT 2019 Art Education).
WHAT’S IN STORE
The latest from SVA entrepreneurs: books, movies, products and more
TiGeorges Kafé
925 NE Second Avenue, Miami coffeehaitian.com l lakayproduct.com
Though it’s been 40 years since Georges Laguerre (BFA 1980 BFA Film and Video) graduated from SVA, he has never forgotten the most import-
ant quality instilled in him as a student: ingenuity. It’s something he has applied to a 30-year-plus career in the food industry, carving out his own path with a beloved and
critically acclaimed chicken place in Los Angeles, which he ran for 13 years, a coffee shop in his home country of Haiti and now a second coffee shop in Miami, opened just over two years ago. “Have respect for whatever job you do,” he says from behind the counter of TiGeorges Kafé, located in the Little Haiti Cultural Center of Miami. Laguerre (affectionately called TiGeorges, meaning
“little George,” by those who know him best) grew up immersed in the coffee business in Haiti before moving to New York City at 12 and eventually finding his way to SVA for college. After completing his senior thesis film, for which he traveled back to Haiti with classmates to capture the colorful tradition of Carnival, Laguerre made the cross-country trek to Los Angeles, a trip that changed his life and inspired his celebrated 2016 memoir/ cookbook, No Man Is an Island (Rare Bird Books). It was there that he reconnected with his passion for food, particularly recipes taught to him by his grandmother. In addition to rich, aromatic Haitian coffee, the Miami shop specializes in snacks like pain patate (a small dense cake made from sweet potato and ginger) and full lunch plates of chicken fricassee and tender goat. It even offers a line of products: peanut butter tinged with Scotch bonnet peppers, jars of hot pickles and bags of Haitian “blue” coffee beans, all of it sourced by Laguerre himself (and sold in nearby grocery stores and online).
TiGeorges Kafé is the kind of neighborhood joint that attracts friendly, familiar regulars and curious newcomers drawn in by the warm atmosphere and walls covered in a rotating selection of local art. His customers might come for a coffee or tea and end up staying for a meal or even a stimulating conversation. And Laguerre has never forgotten the skills he picked up during his time at SVA, to be original and stay true to himself—whether he’s behind a camera, or the clay pot in which he roasts coffee beans. [Maeri Ferguson]
The Striving Artist
Podcast, available on Apple, Spotify and Anchor strivingartist.com
Lettering artists and entrepreneurs Lauren Hom (BFA 2013 Advertising) and Stefan Kunz have teamed up for The Striving Artist, a podcast about the realities of making a living as a modern-day artist. Topics covered to date include creative burnout, audience-building and how to price work.
The Official Charles Fazzino Gift Shop
Housewares, games, luggage, prints and apparel, $5 and up fazzinogiftshop.com
Christine Sun Kim x Lingua Franca x Whitney Shop
Embroidered sweatshirts and cashmere sweaters
$160 – $400 shop.whitney.org
Christine Sun Kim (MFA 2006 Fine Arts) designed a series of sweaters for the Whitney Museum’s fourth collaboration with New York City–based clothing brand Lingua Franca. The collection, which features embroidered versions of Kim’s
handwriting and drawings of signs in American Sign Language, continues the artist’s exploration of how people communicate across languages. Kim’s charcoal drawings on “deaf rage,” through which she highlights the everyday frustrations faced by deaf individuals, were included in the Whitney’s most recent Biennial.
erhaps best known for his long tenure as the official artist of the Super Bowl, for which he creates posters and other commemorative merchandise, self-described “3D pop artist” Charles Fazzino (BFA 1977 Media Arts) also maintains an e-commerce site. Fans can buy a variety of items—including 1,000-piece puzzle kits ($14.99 – $16.99) and Charles Fazzino Monopoly World Edition board games ($599 – $899)—all featuring his detail-packed work.
Writer’s Block Game
Pencil set with stand, $48 | store.moma.org
icah Lynn (MFA 2019 Products of Design) created the latest item in the ongoing collaboration between MFA Products of Design and The Museum of Modern Art’s MoMA Design Store: a pencil kit that doubles as a game, for those idle times when you’re waiting for inspiration to strike.
WHAT’S IN STORE
Shop Shimizu
Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films, 1954 – 1975
Eight-disc Blu-Ray set
$179.96 criterion.com
Vintage Classics’ Japanese Classics Series
Penguin Random House Paperbacks
£9.99 – £10.99 each
The Cat Man of Aleppo
Irene Latham and Karim Shamsi-Basha; illustrated by Yuko Shimizu
Penguin Random House Hardcover/e-book, $17.99/$10.99
In-demand illustrator Yuko Shimizu (MFA 2003 Illustration as Visual Essay; faculty, BFA Illustration) has been a part of three notable projects in recent months.
Last fall, the Criterion Collection, a home video compa-
ny, released a deluxe boxed set of 15 Godzilla movies and a host of extra features, including interviews, audio commentaries, essays and original art. In addition to contributing an illustration to the hardcover companion book, Shimizu created the art for the set’s case. Her work on the project won a 2020 Society of Illustrators gold medal.
In the UK, publisher Vintage Classics has produced a paperback series of five classic Japanese novels, all with covers by Shimizu. The set includes Natsuo Kirino’s Out, Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor and Junichiro
Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters Finally, this spring, Penguin Random House published The Cat Man of Aleppo, a Shimizu-illustrated children’s book based on the real-life Mohammad Alaa Aljaleel, who ran a cat sanctuary in Syria amid the country’s ongoing civil war. [Greg Herbowy]
The popular punk-rock band, led by singer Gerard Way (BFA 1999 Cartooning), has reunited for an international tour. Dates are currently scheduled through mid-October, with many shows already sold out.
Everyday Witch Oracle
40-card oracle deck and guidebook, $23.99 | llewelyn.com
Writer Deborah Blake and illustrator Elisabeth Alba (MFA 2008 Illustration as Visual Essay), the team behind 2016’s Everyday Witch Tarot kit, have teamed up again for this companion set, aimed at witches—and interested readers—of all skill levels.
DiResta Makewear
Jeans, vests and coats for makers
$180 – $295 jimmydiresta.com
As an artist, designer and all-around maker with over 1.5 million YouTube subscribers, Jimmy DiResta (BFA 1990 Media Arts) found that he needed a more functional pair of jeans—so he made them. Presenting DiResta Makewear,
a clothing line durably designed for those who make, with plenty of pockets for tools and canvas patches to add a strong extra layer. Order the Welders Jean, Chore Coat and Chore Vest online.
WHAT’S IN STORE
in honor of their father’s dedication to the trade.
KCustom, fine and fashion jewelry
$25 – $1,350 shamiofficial.com
elly Shami (BFA 2013 Design) learned about jewelry design while working at her father’s jewelry store in New York City’s Diamond District and remained interested in it when she started working full-time in the music industry after graduating from SVA. In 2017, she and her twin brother, Mark, launched their own jewelry brand, Shami,
Shami’s line of hoop earrings, custom nameplates, link bracelets, and more is designed with her generation in mind; thanks to her music-world connections, her pieces have been worn by celebrities like Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Halsey and Dua Lipa in music videos and for performances. [Michelle Mackin]
Dykes, Camera, Action!
The pioneering women in queer cinema are celebrated in this documentary by Caroline Berler (MFA 2017 Social Documentary Film). DVD, $25 and up
Beware of Dog
Nadia Bedzhanova (MPS 2012 Live Action Short Film) directed and wrote and Thomas Knight (BFA 2014 Film and Video) edited this film, which follows three young adults coping with mental-health and identity issues. bewareofdogmovie.com
Betty
Based on and featuring the same cast as her 2018 film, Skate Kitchen, this series by Crystal Moselle (BFA 2002 Film and Video) tells the stories of a crew of young women skateboarders in New York City. HBO
Western Stars
Thom Zimny (BFA 1990 Film and Video) directed this Bruce Springsteen concert film, featuring songs from Springsteen’s album of the same name. All major streaming services; Blu-ray, $34.99
Watch List
Screen time with SVA alumni and faculty
The Lighthouse
Jarin Blaschke (BFA 2000 Film and Video) received an Academy Award nomination for his cinematography work on Robert Eggers’ art-house thriller. All major streaming services; DVD/Blu-ray, $12.96/$17.99
The Pharmacist
MFA Social Documentary Film faculty member Ann Collins (MFA 2018 Art Writing) edited this four-part documentary, which covers a bereaved father’s efforts to combat the opioid crisis. Netflix
Bill Plympton Library
Shout! Factory has acquired the seven feature films and more than 50 shorts by animator Bill Plympton (1969 Cartooning), and they’re now available on several streaming platforms. All major streaming services
Radioactive
This biopic of Nobel Prize–winning scientist Marie Curie, based on the book by Lauren Redniss (MFA 2000 Illustration as Visual Essay), premiered in theaters this spring. Check local listings (See page 58.)
Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children
MFA Social Documentary Film Chair Maro Chermayeff co-produced this doc series about the abductions and murders of some 30 African American children in Atlanta in the late ’70s and early ’80s. HBO
Be Water
Bao Nguyen (MFA 2011 Social Documentary Film) directed this documentary about movie legend Bruce Lee’s early years and struggles in the entertainment industry. ESPN
WHAT’S IN STORE
ART/ART CRITICISM
Eric Rhein: Lifelines
Eric Rhein (MFA 2000 Fine Arts; BFA 1984 Fine Arts) Institute 193 Hardcover, $40
Newflesh
Edited by Efrem ZelonyMindell (BFA 2011 Photography) Gnomic Book Paperback, $38
Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s
The Tale of Steven Rebecca Sugar (BFA 2009 Animation); illustrated by Elle Michalka and Angie Wang
Abrams Books Hardcover/e-book $14.99/$10.79
Stoker & Wells: Order of the Golden Dawn
Steven Peros; illustrated by Barry Orkin (BFA 1989 Illustration)
Our Gal Pictures
Paperback/e-book
$19.99/$12.99
DESIGN/DESIGN HISTORY
Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines
Walter Bernard (1961 Graphic Design) and Milton Glaser (acting chairman, SVA Board of Directors; faculty, MFA Design), with Anne Quito (MFA 2014 Design Criticism) Columbia University Press Hardcover/e-book $34.95/$33.99
The Illustrator: 100 Best from Around the World
Steven Heller (co-chair, MFA Design) and Julius Wiedemann Taschen Hardcover, $125
NONFICTION
The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation
Robin Pogrebin (faculty, MA Design Research, Writing and Criticism) and Kate Kelly Portfolio Hardcover/e-book/audio $29/$14.99/$14.99
The Freelance Hustle: The Complete Guide to Making a Living as a Freelance Artist
David Heredia (BFA 2000 Animation) Hardcover, $19.99
Mother Winter: A Memoir
Sophia Shalmiyev (MPS 2005 Art Therapy)
Simon & Schuster Hardcover/paperback/
e-book/audio
$25/$17/$12.99/$17.99
Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West
Lauren Redniss (MFA 2000 Illustration as Visual Essay) Random House Hardcover/e-book/audio $30/$14.99/$14.95 (See page 58.)
The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television
Andrew Moore (faculty, MFA Photography, Video and Related Media)
Damiani Hardcover, €50
Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Communities
Dawoud Bey (1977 Photography) Aperture Paperback, $29.95
Far From All That Allows
Edited by Joseph Maida (chair, BFA Photography and Video); books by BFA Photography alumni Zak Krevitt (2014), Molly Matalon (2014), Cory Olsen (2014), Pat O’Malley (2014), Tim Schutsky (2015) and Caroline Tompkins (2014) Convoke Limited-edition set of seven books with slipcase, $100
Just Jerry: Photographs by Bob Minkin
Bob Minkin (BFA 1981 Graphic Design)
Bob Minkin Photography Limited-edition hardcover $250
Midlife
Elinor Carucci (faculty, MFA Photography, Video and Related Media)
The Monacelli Press Hardcover, $45
Neighborhood Stroll
David Brandon Geeting (BFA 2011 Photography) Skinnerboox Hardcover, €45
Volume 3: Frank Ockenfels 3 Frank Ockenfels 3 (BFA 1983 Photography) teNeues Hardcover, $50
CREATIVE
LIFE
Navigating the great wide world of work
Linkedin Logic
by Natelegé Whaley
LinkedIn is a valuable part of your career tool kit in this digital era. Whether you’re a recent graduate, an experienced professional or a zealous freelancer, taking advantage of the site’s network of 260 million monthly active users is a no-brainer.
According to U.S. News & World Report, about 95 percent of recruiters use LinkedIn as a primary resource to discover talent.
TO FIND OUT how creative professionals can get the most out of their profiles on the site, we spoke with three recruiters in the creative fields: Rod Berg, director of talent acquisition, design, at apparel company VF Corporation, which includes such brands such as Timberland, JanSport and The North Face; Tiffany Feeney, founder of Talent Outpost, which provides staffing services for studios seeking to fill animation, visual effects, and gaming roles; and Angela Yeh, founder of Thrive by Design, an executive career coaching program for design professionals, and Yeh IDeology, a firm connecting employers with design professionals.
Add Images
First, having a profile avatar is a must. According to LinkedIn, your profile is 14 times more likely to be viewed if it has a picture.
When it comes to what your avatar should look like, recruiters differ. Yeh recommends a photo that shows your face and a pleasant smile. As for attire, “Show your style, but err on the more professional side. Your expertise will show you’re a creative; the other question employers will have is, ‘Are you also professional and accountable?’”
However, for those concerned that a hiring manager may judge candidates based on appearance, Feeney says that a piece of art, or a self-portrait or caricature, in lieu of a headshot is fine. “I don’t care if it’s a picture of you,” she says. “That doesn’t concern me. I don’t want to introduce that bias, and I really try to be blind to that.” Feeney adds that you can also use the banner space, which appears along the top of your profile, to showcase a sample of your best work and further distinguish your page.
Be Detail-Oriented
When writing your profile headline and background summary and listing your work experiences, be sure to include keywords that recruiters use in their searches to improve the chances of your page showing up in search results on LinkedIn and Google. These include position titles, responsibilities and relevant education and certifications, as well as skill sets relevant to your career path. “If I’m searching for a brand designer in New York City, I’m going to search ‘SVA,’ ‘Parsons,’ ‘Pratt’ and the keywords ‘branding,’ ‘packaging,’ ‘typography,’ et cetera,” Berg says. When a recruiter lands on your profile after finding you in a search, they will next review your background summary—a short description of your experience, skills and professional goals—to learn more about your interests and specializations. “Reference where you’ve been and what you’ve accomplished,” Yeh says, “but don’t forget to talk about where you’re going next.”
“Reference where you’ve been and what you’ve accomplished, but don’t forget to talk about where you’re going.”
If you’ve had a LinkedIn profile for a while, check that any websites, email addresses and portfolio links are up to date.
“Often people link to their portfolio from when they finished school 10 years ago and it’s a dead link—and a missed opportunity for them,” Feeney says. When those in hiring positions ask her for potential candidates, she passes on LinkedIn profiles for review, so an up-to-date profile with working links and multiple forms of contact is critical for further consideration. And though it may be a tedious task to list all of your job experiences, it’s worth it in the end. LinkedIn claims that those users who list more than one current or prior job are 12 times more likely to have their profiles viewed by potential employers. When describing your experience, don’t just offer general responsibilities you’ve held; specify projects you executed that helped businesses meet their goals, to show that you work well with non-creative coworkers. This is a big selling point, Yeh says.
“If you’re designing a new platform and interaction, while it’s beautiful, are you being realistic about what it costs for the company to make it? Or how
tight the deadlines are? Are you able to work within a group and keep track of what everybody else wants versus what you want to build? There is a balance you want to demonstrate here.”
Go for Extra Credits
Once you’ve filled out the core sections on your profile, you can spend time taking advantage of the site’s other features. LinkedIn recommends posting status updates and blogs to engage your connections; the latter isn’t a must, Yeh says, but it can be an effective way to keep your page looking active and share recent work highlights, such as sketches or designs. “You could also post updates of conversations that you think are important to your world and people similar to you or your clients,” she adds—namely, news and trends in your industry.
Perhaps more important, Berg says, is accruing testimonials—these can be either endorsements of specific skills or more general testaments to your professionalism and ability, and may be solicited from trusted people in your network. Berg likes to see what others in the industry says about candidates’ work, whether the endorsement be from a colleague, client or former instructor. “That’s something you can’t do independently,” he said. “It’s got to be written for you. So everything there is authentic.”
Be Proactive
As much as LinkedIn is about showcasing your hard work, don’t forget that it is also a social network—your future boss, client or colleague could be a few messages away. Don’t be afraid to make the first move to connect with recruiters and senior staff at the companies you’re interested in working at, Feeney says. “If it’s a company where you want your first job or your next job, you can use LinkedIn to find the leads in those departments and send an invitation and a friendly, ‘Hi. My name is so-and-so. I do this. I’m really interested in your company and I wanted to share my work with you in case there are future openings at your company and in your department.’ Then you can go and share your portfolio. That is exchanging value for the connection.”◆
Basic or Premium?
Abasic LinkedIn account is free, but for those looking to get more from the site there are four paid Premium plans. Of those, Premium Career is the one for people who are looking to expand their network or get a leg up on finding new opportunities—for around $30 per month, subscribers can see when a hiring manager or recruiter has viewed their profile and can message anyone outside of their connections up to three times monthly, using the InMail feature. Premium Career members are also promised more tailored job recommendations than basic-level account holders, and have exclusive access to salary data and LinkedIn Learning, an online-learning service featuring 13,000 professional-development courses. Is it worth it? It depends on how active you will be, Feeney says, who suggests taking advantage of the free monthly trial. She adds that making connections with recruiters on LinkedIn is a way to get around not having the InMail feature. “LinkedIn invitations with a brief note are a great way to connect with a recruiter and hiring managers without a subscription,” she says. “And often recruiters include their direct email address in their profile. If you’re connected with the person, you will not have to use your InMail credits.”
NATELEGÉ WHALEY is a Brooklyn-based culture journalist. She has written for NBC News, Pitchfork, Eater and other outlets.
Making soap at Even Keel, alumnus En Tsao’s botanical-based skincare company
WHEN NAMING HER Brooklyn-based skincare line, En Tsao (BFA 2011 Graphic Design) chose Even Keel, because she felt the nautical term embodied her philosophy of creating multi-use products that might help simplify and calm the lives of her customers. What she’s discovered, however, after hand-making scores of batches and expanding her business over the past several years, is something more personal and aspirational. “The most important thing I’ve learned is how to be even-keeled in my own life,” she says. “The process has made me look deeper into myself.”
Tsao’s approach to making her natural soaps, balms, salves and home products has long been guided by her own influences and introspection. While a student at SVA, she
BALANCING ACT
BY JOYCE RUTTER KAYE
Photographs by Jacqueline Iannacone
tried soap-making on a whim after finding an instructional book on the $3 rack at the Strand Book Store. She quickly became entranced by the practice’s transformative aspects, which reminded her of the art and science behind baking.
After graduating and working in design and advertising, she continued making soap but also found herself increasingly drawn to the outdoors. The more time she spent hiking and camping, the more she wanted to know about the natural world around her. “Somehow, nature miraculously found a spot for itself in my urban, closed heart and grew through me,” she says.
While Tsao was growing up in Singapore, her mother would ply her daily with healthful herbal drinks, which she admits she found unappetizing. Newly inspired to learn more about botanicals and the Eastern medicine that her mother embraced, she enrolled in a yearlong clinical herbalism program at the ArborVitae School of Traditional Herbalism, in New York City, and in 2018, Even Keel was born. (As another twist on the company’s name and a nod to her mother’s influence, “Even” is a contraction of Tsao’s mother’s first name, Evelyn, and her own.)
Even Keel products are made with natural ingredients that are believed to have healing properties—such as clays and activated charcoal, said to aid skin detoxification—as well as natural processes, such as using the warmth of the sun to infuse organic oils with herbs. Tsao continually updates her formulations to enhance their beneficial qualities and incorporate customer feedback. From the start, she has maintained a commitment to giving back to organizations benefiting the environment; a portion of each year’s profits go to The Rainforest Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.
Though a part-time staff now helps with packaging and shipping orders, Tsao continues to hand-craft every Even Keel item, working out of her own mixeduse retail space in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood. After having had more private set-ups elsewhere, including a kitchen in Ho Chi Minh City during a year spent exploring sourcing opportunities in Southeast Asia, her biggest challenge now is staying focused on production during certain hours and available for customers during others. “[This] allows me to expand and push my knowledge to a higher level as I learn how to satisfy their needs as well as mine,” she says.
Recently, Tsao invited two visitors into her cozy workspace to demonstrate the process of making a batch of Even Keel’s rose clay soap. Read on to learn more.
Even Keel’s Rose Clay Soap
En Tsao, founder of the bath and body company Even Keel, demonstrates the process of making one of her signature soaps.
1
“Bar soap is made using a process called saponification, the chemical reaction created when lye and water are blended with oils. After measuring and weighing dry lye, I slowly add it to hot water and stir carefully until it’s fully dissolved and the liquid is clear, then set it aside to cool.”
7
“I pour each color in the funnel pitchers into a new pitcher, using even counts of three to create a layered pattern and cycling through the batters until I’ve reached the end of each.”
2
“For a stable shower bar, you need a good balance of hard and soft oils. Even Keel soaps use a base oil blend of organic coldpressed olive, avocado and coconut oils, and shea and cocoa butters.”
8
“The layered batter then gets slowly poured into a soap mold—starting at the corner and then spreading out—to make a marbled design.”
3
“The oils are gently heated, to combine them, and then strained. In this batch, the olive oil has been infused with calendula, and the avocado oil with rose hips, elderflower, yarrow, hops and comfrey. These herbs have antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties.”
9
“To top the soaps, I blend the leftover batter with kaolin and French pink clay and cranberry seeds, then pour it carefully into the mold, which creates a clean, cross-section look for the finished bar. Then I firmly tap the mold on the counter to release any air bubbles in the batter.”
4
“Next, I scoop three teaspoons each of French pink, rhassoul and kaolin clay into funnel pitchers. Clay soaps help protect skin from the effects of free radicals in the environment. For each pitcher, I blend in four tablespoons of essential oils, which are pure plant extracts, used for scenting and aromatherapy.”
10
“If there’s still leftover batter in any of the pitchers, I’ll spatter it on the top and drag a stick lightly across the surface to marble the colors. The top is then sprayed with 99% isopropyl alcohol to prevent soda ash.”
5
“Once the lye water and the oil blend have cooled to 130 degrees or below, I combine them in a bowl with an immersion blender until I’ve got a ‘thin trace’ mixture. Trace is the point at which the lye water and oils have emulsified; thin trace is the first sign of thickening.”
11
“Our soaps typically dry for three to four days. Sometimes, if they’re still not popping out of the mold, we’ll put them in the freezer or wait longer. Once a soap’s out of the mold, it’s cut into bars and then cured for four to six weeks.”
6
“The emulsification is then poured into the three pitchers with the clays, with about one-third left over in the bowl. Each pitcher’s batter gets blended again, so the colors are even throughout.”
12
“After the soap has cured, it’s ready to wrap in packaging I designed. For the logo, I wanted to play on the nautical theme of the name Even Keel, so the E and K are abstracted to look like waves. All packaging is recyclable, uses 60% post-consumer waste and is printed in Vietnam.”
PORTFOLIO
Ali Banisadr
by greg herbowy
Artist Ali Banisadr keeps an organized studio in a two-level Brooklyn condominium, where the area dedicated to painting has a front-burner/back-burner setup. The front-burner end, outfitted with a supply-laden cart and a custom pegboard wall, is for the work in progress. During a visit to the studio late last year, a sizable blank canvas hung there. Banisadr—who concentrates on only one painting at a time, discovering each piece along the way—indicated that it could stay that way for a week or longer, while he waited for the right mood, color or idea to occur.
PREVIOUS Ali Banisadr, Thought Police , 2019, oil on linen, 82 x 120 "
OPPOSITE Ali Banisadr, Annunciation, 2011, oil on linen, 10 x 8 "
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, London, Salzburg. Photos: Jeffrey Sturges.
“My speed is my speed,” he said, shrugging. “I can’t do anything about it.”
Hanging in the back-burner end of the room were two smaller canvases, one of which he judged to be 90 percent done, the other maybe 40 percent. Banisadr often works on a grand scale, painting bustling, usually vivid assortments of odd and amorphous beings that emerge from, congregate within and resolve back into abstracted, churning compositions that can sprawl across one, two or three large panels. His works are deliberate mysteries. Their scattered details—a bird’s beak, a patterned robe, a row of teeth—add up to no easy narrative, and their titles tend toward the gnomic: Thought Police, The Myth Makers, World Upside Down, It’s in the Air
The paintings in his studio this day were comparatively muted and less expansive, zeroed in on a select few of his enigmatic, monstrous subjects. But even with this tighter focus the figures were inscrutable—not wholly human, not wholly animal, not even wholly there. “I want my paintings to have that feeling of metamorphosis, where you’re looking at things becoming something else,” he said. “Because that’s the truest mirror of imagination and memory and dreams—things are always changing.”
Ever since his first solo show, in 2008, Banisadr’s creative heritage has been attributed to an array of predecessors spanning eras and styles, and their diversity speaks to the singularity of his vision. In his art, observers have claimed traces of Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings, the details of Persian miniatures, the vibrant abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky and, above all, the clamorous, zoomed-out panoramas of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel.
he heard outside of his home, an early example of a sort of synesthesia, or intermingling of the senses, that he says still guides his creativity today.
When Banisadr was 12, his family relocated to the San Diego area, settling in a suburban environment that felt alien to his sensibilities. After high school, he moved to San Francisco, where he studied psychology and became active in the local graffiti art community. After a few years, he decided to pursue art full-time and enrolled at SVA, where he studied a mix of fine arts and illustration. He graduated with his BFA in 2005 and went on to the New York Academy of Art, for his MFA. Artist Amy Cutler visited his studio at the latter, and introduced Banisadr to his first gallerist, Leslie Tonkonow, which started his career.
“There was so much going on in his paintings as well as in his head,” Cutler says. “It was evident that he was well-versed in the history of painting, but he wasn’t recycling old ideas.”
“My speed is my speed,” he said, shrugging.
“I can’t do anything about it.”
Banisadr acknowledges all of these influences and more. But if he aligns himself with any one tradition, it is that of artists like Bosch, Bruegel and Francisco Goya. All of them made work with allegorical power, taking what he calls a “macro view” of the human condition— our perpetually fallen state, our helplessness in the face of the unaccountable forces that govern or wreck societies, our sense of greater truths that are beyond our reach. “Where do these things come from?” he said. “These archetypes, these stories that we’ve told ourselves forever? What’s the root cause that’s creating those sorts of images in your mind?”
Born in Tehran in 1976, Banisadr spent his first years in an Iran buffeted by the successive upheavals of the Iranian Revolution and the Iran–Iraq War. His artmaking began in early childhood, and he used it to process the violence and unrest that surrounded him. He drew monsters and other menacing forms to represent the explosions and other sounds of conflict
Banisadr approached his art education like an apprenticeship, forgoing any personal expression to concentrate on mastering a variety of techniques. His paintings today are not just great feats of imagination; they are also showcases of practical ingenuity and practiced skill. In addition to storebought oil paints, he makes his own, mixing pigments with a variety of mediums. His mark-making toggles between “spontaneous and gestural” and detail-oriented modes, “so that you get something different whether you’re 20 feet from it, or you can be rubbing your nose in it and there’s stuff there, too,” he said.
To ensure that he gives equal attention to all sections of a composition, he moves large canvases up and down his pegboard wall as he works. If a painting incorporates lots of color, he will photograph it and look at it in black and white to be sure it has a dramatic balance of tones. He has used wire scrub brushes, to etch into his paintings, and, at the suggestion of one of his two young daughters, paintbrushes taped to crooked sticks. These clumsier tools build in an element of unpredictability, and give him something to fight against.
“Over the years his work has steadily grown in size and volume,” Cutler says. “The paintbrushes have become extensions of his arms, and the viewer is now invited into the mania of his sweeping strokes and visual sounds. Ali’s art is confrontational, and the result of a private performance.”
In addition to paintings, Banisadr makes drawings in ink and charcoal, and he has recently begun making prints with Burnet Editions, a printmaking studio in Manhattan. After six months of back and forth, he created two works that combine an array of techniques—“aquatint, etching, spit-bite and a couple other things”—and are finished in his studio with a wash of watercolor. Titled Nocturne and Cannons Hidden
Ali Banisadr, World Upside Down 4 , 2018, ink on paper, 24 x 30 ". Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, London, Salzburg. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges.
“It’s like a dream where you’re trying to grasp things and nail them down and they’re escaping.”
in Roses, in tribute to Frédéric Chopin, one of his favorite composers (Chopin wrote a series of works called nocturnes, and fellow composer Robert Schumann described his work as “cannons hidden among blossoms”), they have been acquired by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo, New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. (Both also have his paintings in their collections.)
He is already thinking of a larger, more ambitious print, though the work of translating his intuitive process to the step-by-step work of printmaking is a challenge. “I had to deconstruct my understanding of my own paintings,” he said.
“Everything’s in a state of flux while I’m working. It’s like a dream where you’re trying to grasp things and nail them down and they’re escaping. I’ll look at a painting and I’ll see stuff and want to catch it immediately. And then you come in the next day and it just goes away, and something else happens.”
Banisadr’s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 60 group and solo exhibitions, and is in the permanent collections of such institutions as Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC;
and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This year, he will show work in exhibitions hosted by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Museo Stefano Bardini and Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy. He is represented by the Kasmin Gallery in New York City and Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in Paris, and by Cristea Roberts Gallery in London for his print works. For more information, visit alibanisadr.com. ◆
ABOVE: Ali Banisadr, Oil, 2016, oil on linen, 66 x 88”. OPPOSITE, TOP: Ali Banisadr, Blackwater, 2010, etching painting, 11 x 14”.
OPPOSITE, BELOW: Ali Banisadr, Cannons Hidden in Roses , 2019, hand-colored aquatint with photogravure, spit-bite, drypoint and burnishing on paper, 19 x 25”.
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, London, Salzburg. Photos: Jeffrey Sturges.
Ali Banisadr, Fravashi, 2013, oil on linen (triptych), 96 x 180 "
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, London, Salzburg. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges.
ABOVE Ali Banisadr, Fact/Fiction, 2018, oil on linen, 24 x 24".
OPPOSITE Ali Banisadr, Hold the Fort , 2019, oil on linen, 24 x 24”.
FOLLOWING Ali Banisadr, Prisoners of the Sun (TV), 2008, oil on linen, 54 x 72”.
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, London, Salzburg. Photos: Jeffrey Sturges.
CHICAGO
“Since 1914, when poet Carl Sandburg labeled it ‘City of the Big Shoulders,’ Chicago has been considered a gritty Midwestern American town,” says artist, former graphic designer and native Chicagoan Richmond Jones (1961 Advertising). “However, over the decades it has become an amazing gem of international customs, culture and art.” Today, Chicago’s world-class architecture, food, music, theater and literature make it a natural draw for creative professionals of all types. Here are six SVA alumni who have made their homes and found their niche in the Midwestern metropolis.
BY MICHELLE MACKIN
Portraits by Delilah Anaya
(BFA 2019 PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO)
LATOYA FLOWERS
MFA 2012 Social
Documentary Film Neighborhood: South Side
Growing up, native Chicagoan Latoya Flowers always liked science and had dreams of working in a museum, but she had no idea that her path of study would eventually lead her there. After graduating from SVA, however, she found that her documentary-film experience made her well-suited for pro-
ducing factual yet captivating multimedia installations. So she brought her skills to Museum Campus, a park on Lake Michigan that is home to three of Chicago’s natural science museums: the Adler Planetarium, Field Museum of Natural History and Shedd Aquarium. Flowers worked at the planetarium for several years; then, in 2017, she became the exhibition media producer at the Field Museum, and has had a hand in all of the museum’s major exhibitions since.
One of Flowers’ first tasks at Field was a lofty one. The institution’s pride and joy, “SUE,” one of the world’s largest, most complete and best preserved T. rex skeletons, was being moved to a new room, in which Flowers was to create an immersive experience. In late 2018, after a year and a half of research, prototyping and implementation, the museum rolled out
Flowers’ production, which utilizes projection mapping to highlight specific bones, while a recorded narration covers topics such as how many bones in the skeleton are from the original fossil (90 percent), which ribs had been broken and healed, and how scientists were able to discover how SUE may have died (a jaw infection).
“During the first few weeks after opening, visitors applauded after every show,” Flowers says. “That isn’t something you normally witness in a museum exhibit.”
A version of “SUE: The T. rex Experience” will travel to other museums starting this spring, with a cast of SUE’s skeleton and a more portable light show.
Meanwhile, a temporary exhibition, “Apsáalooke Women and Warriors,” highlighting the history of the Native American tribe as well as contemporary beadwork,
music and fashion created by current Apsáalooke community members, is on view at Field until April 2021. Flowers produced several videos for the show, including a process film about an Apsáalooke beadwork artist. And in June, the museum’s latest traveling exhibition, “Antarctic Dinosaurs,” which features four multimedia installations created by Flowers, debuts at the Natural History Museum of Utah.
OPPOSITE, TOP AND LOWER LEFT Exhibition media producer Latoya Flowers developed an immersive show for the Field Museum’s “SUE: The T. rex Experience ” using precise projection mapping and narration.
OPPOSITE, BOTTOM AND LOWER RIGHT
A still from a process video about contemporary Apsáalooke beadwork artist Elias Not Afraid, produced by Flowers for the Field Museum’s exhibition “Apsáalooke Women and Warriors”; a photograph by Flowers of the 2019 Crow Fair Pow Wow in Montana, which she attended as part of her work for the exhibition.
MFA 2016 Fine Arts and MPS 2017 Digital Photography Neighborhood: Oak Park
Artists and educators
Delano Dunn and Anna Ogier-Bloomer moved their family to Chicago from New York City a little over a year ago, when Dunn was selected as a teaching fellow at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Today, both of them work there: Late last year, Ogier-Bloomer—who taught at SVA and served as an assistant director of Career Development—was hired as SAIC’s director of curriculum analysis and planning, responsible for recommending and implementing curricular changes to the school’s undergraduate and graduate programs.
Dunn, who is represented by the Lesley Heller Gallery in New York City, has been gaining increasing attention for his collages, which often incorporate historical images, bright colors, bold lines and household materials such as shoe polish and varnish, and deal with
personal biography, popular culture and the legacy of racism in America. The New York Times named him one of four artists to watch last April; actor and singer Leslie Odom, Jr., commissioned Dunn to create original artwork for his latest album, Mr, released last November; and PBS News Hour recently featured Dunn in their “Brief but Spectacular” series, in which he discussed making work with his daughter, Violet, in mind. “It’s a rough world out there, particularly for women and particularly for women of color,” Dunn says in the video. “I make sure I have images of women in the work and that these women are not seen through the male gaze and they are depicted in positions of power and strength.”
In addition to his SAIC fellowship, Dunn is a resident at the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator, where he has begun work on a new series centered around an ominous artifact that came into his possession from a friend—a bill of trade originating from the 19th century for an enslaved person named David.
“I’ve been sitting on this for four or five years, unsure of what to do because it is so heavy,” he says. The planned series will form a narrative
“going from emancipation to reconstruction and jubilation … until finally falling to the Jim Crow era,” and incorporate images from 1960s and ’70s comic books, when African American superheroes like Black Panther started to appear. Dunn hopes to show in the Arts Incubator’s gallery in Washington Park at the end of his residency, in August.
Ogier-Bloomer, a photographer whose documentary-style portraits of her immediate and extended family illustrate the tension between the expectations and realities of domestic life, will also participate in a residency this summer, as the invited artist-in-residence at the Columbus Area Arts Council, in Columbus, Indiana. Her work was recently included in the inaugural Rust Belt Biennial, an online exhibition created by MFA Photography, Video and Related Media alumni Niko Kallianiotis (2013) and Yoav Friedlander (2014). She also created a new course at SAIC, Redefining Success as an Artist, which she began teaching this year. “The idea is to educate students on the economic realities of living as an artist, and to help them visualize and work toward the unique,
creative life that makes them happy.”
For his part, Dunn, who teaches painting, drawing and research courses to SAIC undergraduates, says the rewards of teaching—which he had never done before moving to Chicago—have motivated him to continue doing so once his fellowship ends.
“It’s inspiring,” he says. “With teaching, it’s like a satisfaction that’s warm. … It’s a warmth like a huge hug.”
BELOW, FROM LEFT Delano Dunn, Why Must We Give Up Our Hearts to the Past , 2019, paper, glitter, shoe polish and vinyl on wood; Try and Love Again, 2019, paper, glitter, shoe polish, vinyl and vintage carbon paper on wood. OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Delano Dunn, All Aboard the Carib Cannibal, 2019, paper; Anna Ogier-Bloomer, At Mom’s place, socializing happened at the pool, Indian Creek Apartments, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2012; Anna Ogier-Bloomer, My nephew watching YouTube, his morning routine at Grandma’s house, where he stays two days a week to be with his dad, Anderson Township, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2019.
DELANO DUNN AND ANNA OGIER-BLOOMER
Rebecca Snow transferred to SVA to pursue a BFA in Interior Design after she surprised a graphic design professor at her first college with her idea of examples of good design: “I brought in pictures of a faucet and a kitchen,” she says with a laugh.
After graduating in 2011, Snow returned to her hometown of Libertyville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and began her career at a highend residential design firm; she then spent some time in commercial and hospitality design. Snow is now the lead of the interiors studio at architecture and design firm Valerio Dewalt Train Associates (VDT), where she collaborates with other internal teams on corporate interior, student housing and spec suite projects. At VDT, the interior design team works closely with architects on projects, which Snow says sets it apart from other firms. “Ours is intermixed and the lines are more blurred. It makes for a really creative process because anyone from
the team could solve any design problem.”
Snow has contributed her interior-design industry knowledge and expertise on many Chicago-based projects, including the first offices in the city for Glassdoor, the employment-review website; the laboratory at Omega Yeast, which produces liquid yeast for homebrewers; the Presidents Plaza business center near O’Hare Airport, and more. At one of her previous firms, Studio K, she also worked on the executive lounge and offices at Wrigley Field, home to the Chicago Cubs, where fellow alumnus Kelly King (see opposite) spends her workdays.
REBECCA SNOW
BFA 2011 Interior Design Neighborhood: Uptown
FROM TOP Among her many projects, interior designer Rebecca Snow worked on the HUB Ann Arbor, an off-campus student housing project for University of Michigan, while at Studio K; a spec suite for real-estate firm Glenstar, with her current firm Valerio Dewalt Train Associates, and the Chicago Cubs offices attached to Wrigley Field, with Studio K.
2019 OFFICIAL SCORECARD
KELLY KING
MFA 2013 Computer Art
Neighborhood: Old Town
When Chicago native and lifelong Chicago Cubs
fan Kelly King heard that the Cubs—one of the oldest and most storied clubs in Major League Baseball—planned to install the first-ever video boards in its beloved Wrigley
THIS BUD’S FOR THE HOME TEAM
Field for the 2015 season, she was interested in the challenge of helping modernize a historic ballpark, but in a way that tradition-minded fans would enjoy.
In 2015, King was hired as the Cubs’ video and graphics producer. “I didn’t want a kiss cam or a ‘loud-o-meter,’” she says. “That would take away from my experience of going to a game.” Instead, she focused on aspects that enhanced the experience of the game for Wrigley’s 40,000–capacity crowd— namely lineup information, stats and replays.
Five years later, King is the manager of graphics with Cubs Productions, a newly formed in-house production team, creating films, motion graphics and printed materials like scorecards and programs for essentially every corner of the organization. “Every day is different, and I’m constantly learning and getting to work on something new,” she says. The work of King’s team can be seen all over
Wrigley Field, on the Cubs’ social media—they have an especially robust YouTube presence—and on television. Her main goal is to deliver what Cubs fans want to see, which means updating the brand’s traditions with the latest in technology and design. For example, for the video boards, King usually keeps to the green-and-white color palette of the original manual scoreboard (which is still in use), so that the whole display looks cohesive and not too flashy. The work has been so successful that King has won four Chicago Emmys since 2016—the same year the team won its first World Series title since 1908. (King was also one of the employees who received a World Series ring.)
King is committed to tying sports and art together—it’s the impetus behind the forthcoming Gallery Shepard, an exhibition space at Wrigley Field that will spotlight the art and contributions of Otis Shepard, the Cubs’ first art director, who started in the
1930s, as well as his wife, Dorothy. (King plans to eventually make a documentary about the couple.) Another area in the gallery will be dedicated to Cubs Creators, a collaboration with Chicago artists to design apparel, giveaways and limitededition posters. The Cubs intend to host art-related events and workshops in this space as well.
“A lot of people don’t think of art and sports going hand in hand, but there’s this huge creative world encompassing both,” she says. “So we’re embracing that.”
As manager of graphics with Cubs Productions, Kelly King oversees a range of creative projects for the Chicago Cubs organization. This includes printed materials for game days at Wrigley Field, such as scorecards and programs.
RICHMOND JONES
1961 Advertising Neighborhood: Lincoln Square
Richmond Jones enrolled at SVA in the late 1950s, studying with several of the College’s original instructors, including founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth, both of whom he remembers making an effort to get to know students, “dragging stories out of them over coffee” and having them over for dinner. After a post-graduation, two-year stint in the U.S. Army and almost 10 years as an art director in New York, Jones returned to his native Chicago, where he spent the next 31 years running his own, eponymous graphic design shop, serving clients like IBM, the Illinois Central Railroad and Miller Brewing Company. That work is now in the archives of the University of Illinois at Chicago University Library’s Special Collections, which, upon
receiving the gift, declared it to be “a testament to the important, but all too neglected, work of black graphic designers, both in Chicago and at the national level.”
Jones left the design industry about 20 years ago, and since then has dedicated his energy to detailed, sunlit watercolor paintings of everything from bicycles and automobiles to produce and people.
“At SVA, they taught me to break the rules,” he says, “and in watercolors, that’s what you do.”
He learned the medium at the Palette & Chisel Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago in the early 2000s, and has exhibited watercolors there, alongside paintings by his wife, Christine Osada Jones, in several joint shows, as well as at other galleries in Chicago and across the country.
Today, he sells his watercolors through his website, richmondajones.com, and to private collectors. Driven by the joy that he gets from painting, Jones says he hopes that viewers find “my watercolors as exciting as I did when I painted them.” ◆
LEFT AND BELOW, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP Watercolors by Richmond Jones: Memories Past , 2014; Still Running , 2008; Rest Easy, 2012; Michigan Avenue Rhythm, 2015.
RIGHT, FROM TOP Photos via the Old Town School of Folk Music, Girl & the Goat, Library of Congress.
LOCAL FAVORITES
Chicago-based SVA alumni share their tips for a visit to the city.
“ THE OLD TOWN SCHOOL OF FOLK MUSIC , which offers a world view of new and classical ‘folk’ music, concerts and numerous classes for all ages.”
—Richmond Jones
“MONTROSE DOG BEACH, Chicago’s first legal offleash beach.”
—Rebecca Snow
“Try the thin-crust pizza at LOU MALNATI’S , a Chicagoan pizza chain that’s best known for its deep-dish, and go to SUPERDAWG DRIVE-IN for a Chicagostyle hot dog.” —Kelly King
“The city really comes alive in the SUMMERTIME .”
—Latoya Flowers
“MERCADITO in River North has amazing Mexican food and the best margaritas.”
—Delano Dunn
“One place I love is the FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT HOME AND STUDIO, in Oak Park. … The neighborhood is also the PRAIRIE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE HISTORIC DISTRICT, so there are lots of homes he designed or inspired.”
—Anna Ogier-Bloomer
“The DIAL BOOKSHOP and PILSEN COMMUNITY BOOKS have great selections, and sections filled with local writers. GIRL & THE GOAT has foods you never would’ve expected to make a great combination. Also, don’t leave Chicago without trying ramen at FURIOUS SPOON!”
—Delilah Anaya
Art Space
THIS PAGE Satellite Art Show organizers and SVA alumni (from left) Quinn Dukes, Brian Andrew Whiteley and AnnaLiisa Benston at the 2019 Satellite Art Show in Miami.
OPPOSITE Installation by Furong Zhang at the 2019 Satellite Art Show in Miami.
The Satellite Art Show Offers a Cure for the Common Fair Oddity
BY EMMA DREW
MFA 2017 ART WRITING
Photographs
by
Aylin Marcelo
Five years ago, artist Brian Andrew Whiteley (MFA 2013 Fine Arts) felt a kind of void in the art fair scene—it was missing “something that’s a little more authentic, a little more inclusive,” he says. In response, he founded Satellite Art Show, an artist-centric, experience-focused fair first held during Miami Art Week, arguably the art world’s premier annual event,
which is anchored by the international mega-fair Art Basel Miami Beach. Satellite has drawn attention from the start. In 2015, its first year, the popular blog Art F City included it in its roundup of the year’s 25 best shows. A year later, Hyperallergic called it “a reminder of why you like art in the first place,” while Art Basel sent a cease-and-desist letter after Satellite’s “#notbasel” social-media
campaign. This past fall, the city of Miami Beach presented a mayoral proclamation to Whiteley and fellow organizers AnnaLiisa Benston (MFA 2016 Fine Arts) and Quinn Dukes (MFA 2015 Art Practice), declaring December 5, 2019, to be “Satellite Art Show Day.”
“I thought this was going to be a onetime project,” Whiteley says. “But the response and the press drove me to do
it a second time, a third time, a fourth time, to where we’re at now.”
Since its beginning, Satellite has prided itself on having what other art fairs don’t: a defiantly experimental and DIY spirit, low exhibition costs for artists, robust performance programming, a lively and welcoming social atmosphere, and truly immersive, interactive, out-there installations. After three years of showing solely in Miami, Satellite produced shows in Brooklyn, in 2018 and again last year, and in Austin, Texas, as part of the city’s 2019 South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference and Festivals. (Satellite’s organizers are already laying the groundwork for 2020 presentations in Brooklyn and Miami, with plans to return to SXSW in 2021; for more information, visit satellite-show.com.)
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP
LEFT Scenes from the 2019 Satellite Art Show in Miami: installations by MFA Art Practice
student Colleen T. Comer, BravinLee Gallery and SoMad Studios/Carla Maldonado (MFA 2019 Photography, Video and Related Media); performance by Kiyo Gutiérrez.
Whiteley, whose own practice combines performance, social satire and multimedia installations, got the idea for Satellite after working at several art fairs (including co-founding the former SELECT Fair), where he was dismayed by what he saw. “What happens at the commerce level is so far removed from what is happening at the studio or creative level,” he says. “It all felt super-superficial—the antithesis to the way and the reason artists create.” For its first showing, Satellite took over vacant properties around Miami’s North Beach—including the abandoned Ocean Terrace Hotel, a former pharmacy and an Art Deco bandshell—and featured 50 installations, live music, film screenings and performance art. It cost $250 for artists to participate, $10 for visitors to get in. (In Miami last year, no Satellite exhibitor paid more than $1,500, versus the $5,000 to $7,000 typical at a smaller fair like AQUA; larger fairs can charge $25,000 and up.)
From the start, exhibitors have been urged to transform their spaces. Even if they are showing paintings or photos or sculptures, the works are to be integrated into fully realized, and largely interactive, worlds where, Whiteley says, “you’re walking into someone’s concept, not just a showcase space.”
“I want people to push it to the limit,” he adds. “That’s the goal of the project, and I think it resonates.” Past Satellite installations include Paul Outlaw and Jen Catron’s inflatable Doughboy pool filled with blow-up Cap’n Crunch cereal and a steady stream of faux milk; a hair salon from artist collective TANGA!, which offered free haircuts; hypnotic floor-to-ceiling video projections by Holly Danger; Alfredo Salazar-Caro and William James Robertson’s Digital Museum of Digital Art, a virtual museum experienced via an Oculus Rift VR headset; a Soothing Center, offering holistic cleansing and an opportunity to purge oneself of unwanted pamphlets accumulated at other fairs; and a dark velvet-lined room in which
visitors apply pigments to the artist or to one another, examining the damaging effects of invisible air and light pollution.
To add to its unpredictability, Satellite has rarely returned to the same venue. Its 2019 Miami edition took place in an old warehouse in the city’s Wynwood district; previous artist “booths” have been installed in shipping containers, hotel bathrooms and co-working cubicles.
“We’re not the white box, cookie-cutter thing, where every time you go in you know what to expect: the one pop artist is going to be there, the glossy, candy-colored sculpture is going to be there,” says Benston, Satellite’s creative producer and partnership liaison. This constant change, while creatively exciting, demands much of the participants, who may find themselves dealing with a wonky wall or ceiling, at the very least.
“It is very much like So You Think You Can Art?,” she jokes. “It’s not enough to be a really good artist to show at Satellite. You have to be a doer.”
Thanks in part to this rigor, as well as the event’s spirit of inclusivity and its growing cachet—along with a reduced “family” rate for returning exhibitors—many artists show at Satellite year after year. Within that family are many other SVA alumni, including Elizabeth Chick, Andrew Prieto, Alfredo Travieso (all MFA 2014 Art Practice), Cat Del Buono (MFA 2008 Photography, Video and Related Media), Giulia Mangoni (MFA 2019 Art Practice), Emily Klass (MFA 2020 Art Practice), Carla Maldonado (MFA 2019 Photography, Video and Related Media), Erin Davis and Max C Lee (both MFA 2016 Photography, Video and Related Media). The MFA Art Practice and MFA Fine Arts departments at SVA have also organized installations, bringing in students and alumni as exhibitors. In addition to the core team of Benston, Dukes and Whiteley, past Satellite crew include Jesse Bandler Firestone (MA 2019 Curatorial Practice), Jason Derek North and Alex Paik.
Benston originally got involved as a Satellite exhibitor, in 2016. She stills shows at the fair as Famous on Mars, her concept-store installation decked out with handmade garments, a feminist sensibility and cheeky activist slogans, and hosts a Chicano-themed tattoo parlor run by Jon Gomez (MFA 2017 Fine Arts). Gomez has now participated in five Satellites, and “they have all been different in so many ways but the constant is the community,” he says. “I’ve seen some of the same people at every iteration.”
“The vibe is friendly, fun and dynamic,” says multimedia artist Juan Bravo (MFA 2019 Fine Arts). “It feels like a day camp when you’ve been there for five days interacting with the other exhibitors.”
After visiting the fair in its first year, Dukes, who is also associate director of SVA Admissions, became Satellite’s performance curator in 2016, through a partnership with her curatorial
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Installations by Holly Danger, Famous on Mars, Colleen T. Comer and MFA Art Practice student Emily Klass at the 2019 Satellite Art Show in Miami.
“We’re not the white box, cookie-cutter thing, where every time you go in you know what to expect.”
“It’s very difficult to exist as a fair that is really
platform, Performance Is Alive. When Whiteley asked her to join, her condition was that the performance programming not be relegated to an off-site venue or obscure corner, as is typically the case. Since then, a live performance schedule lasting the duration of each fair has become a defining attribute of Satellite.
LEFT
by
student
“That is truly unique to any art fair,” Dukes says, “and I do my best to present the wide scope that exists within performance art, because it’s not just sensational, body-based projects where artists are getting naked and getting messy. Some artists definitely do that, but there’s so much more to it.” Last year in New York, she curated a lineup of 40 presentations, offering a mix of live and video works that addressed environmental issues, gender politics, technology and more.
“We’re trying to create opportunities for the underrepresented artist who is really focusing in on the message, the concept, the content,” Dukes says. “It’s very difficult to exist as a fair that is really respecting the craft. This is our current form of activism.”
Given its origins, it is not surprising that Satellite has become a draw for artists whose work critique the dominant, financially driven power structures of their field, where what Whiteley calls the “pay-to-play” economics compel artists and dealers to favor “market-tested art” over more difficult work on urgent topics. “I think we’re doing a greater service for the community
in forcing people to take a few more risks at the very least,” he says. “People are dying to see something a little more fresh.”
As Satellite considers bringing its show to other cities or more permanent venues, growth and funding remain vital, if not without their own risks. Aside from a handful of sponsorships and some crowdsourced fund-raising, Satellite functions on the support of the artists who work with them. “Scalability and sustainability are a big focus in my mind as producer, but so is integrity,” Benston says. “It might be that we find there is a size and shape that we can fill and once we leave that, we leave what we are behind.”
And what Satellite is, ultimately, is straightforward, if still rather challenging and radical: a seriously enjoyable, engaging art experience.
“This is an opportunity for people to have a good time, get involved with art, talk with people and make connections,” Whiteley says. “People will come and expect it to be like another fair, then be there for five hours and leave drunk and with a tattoo—having experienced all sorts of weird, fantastic art—and walk out going, ‘That was amazing.’”
EMMA DREW is a regular contributor to the Visual Arts Journal. She lives in San Francisco.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP
Installations
Furong Zhang, MFA Fine Arts
Daniel Almeida, Juan Bravo (MFA 2019 Fine Arts) and Tori Swanson at the 2019 Satellite Art Show in Miami.
respecting the craft. This is our current form of activism.”
LACMA
AObscura
solo exhibition, three years in the making, that features the work of Vera Lutter (MFA 1995 Photography and Related Media) opens this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in California. “Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera” features 44 large-scale images of LACMA’s holdings, galleries and campus grounds, all made with Lutter’s signature camera obscura technique.
One of photography’s oldest technologies, a camera obscura, also known as a pinhole camera, is a box of any size made light-tight with the exception of a tiny aperture. Images are made directly onto photo-sensitive paper, which is exposed over long periods of time to the low levels of light that are projected via this opening.
For more information about “Vera Lutter: Museum in the Camera” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art visit lacma.org.
Lutter, who began working with pinhole cameras while at SVA, has used them to photograph Egyptian pyramids, trees in Manhattan’s Central Park, shipping yards and airfields, often creating large-scale images with custom-built cameras that are the size of a small room.
Lutter first conceived of the LACMA project as an opportunity to make images of select paintings in the museum, but it also captures the institution at the edge of a great change. This year, LACMA began an ambitious renovation that will ultimately see four of its campus’ buildings razed and a new, single building for its permanent collection constructed in their place. -GREG HERBOWY
“One of the poignant aspects of Vera’s long duration exposures is that while they don’t capture people, one can sometimes see faint evidence of their presence.”
TOP Vera Lutter, European Old Masters: December 7, 2018–January 9, 2019 , 2018–19, unique gelatin silver prints, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery.
Lauren Redniss (MFA 2000 Illustration as Visual Essay) is an artist and author whose next book, Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West, tells the human stories around a proposed copper mine on sacred Apache territory in southeastern Arizona. A former Guggenheim fellow and American Museum of Natural History artist-in-residence, 2016 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient, Pulitzer Prize nominee, PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award winner and Parsons School of Design faculty member, Redniss is known for her illustrated works of visual nonfiction, all of which focus on individual stories to explore universal themes.
Oak Flat is the latest in a string of high-profile projects for Redniss. Her 2010 book Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, a National Book Award finalist, was adapted into a movie directed by Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) and starring Rosamund Pike; it opened in the UK in March. And the New York City Ballet recently hired her to create the latest installment of its interdisciplinary Art Series, in which visual artists create site-specific works for the company’s Lincoln Center’s home; Redniss’ 100-plus portraits of behind-the-scenes NYCB workers were on view in February. Earlier this year, Redniss and I spoke about her latest book, due out later this year, the concept of success and her personal connection to the NYCB project.
How did you get started working on Oak Flat ?
I read an op-ed in The New York Times that outlined the situation around the development of a copper mine on land considered sacred by the San Carlos Apache, and I decided to look further into it. Native issues are some of the least understood in this country, and the most underrepresented in the press. Something like 90 percent of what’s taught about Native people in U.S. schools stops before the 20th century. So that’s 130 years
of indigeneous history left out, and, as you can imagine, the way the earlier history is narrated is often distorted and incomplete. Many of the injustices of the past continue to be perpetrated today. Oak Flat tells one such story. It’s a book about a place, and about the people connected to that place. That simple premise opens up all these complicated questions about the history and contemporary lives of indigenous people in the United States, climate change, geology,
automation, corporate power, systemic injustice as perpetrated through legislation and judicial decisions.…
What surprised you during your research?
It’s hard to name just one, two or even three things. In addition to the Apache family I profile in the book, I spent time with three generations of a mining family in Superior, Arizona, the small town where the proposed mine would be located. I learned a lot about the constrained choices that are pressed upon a community like that. The people making decisions are far removed, geographically and, I would argue, emotionally, from the places that are affected by mining. Yet they are the ones who will reap the massive economic rewards. They are not living in this community. I don’t know that this comes as a surprise, exactly, but it still points to dysfunction in the system, and shows how environmental injustice is perpetrated.
That said, while the story about the mine forms the backbone of the book, Oak Flat is also about the people and their lives beyond this current controversy. It’s about multiple generations of two families, an Apache family on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation and the family from Superior that I mentioned, whose patriarch was the town’s first sheriff. I spent time with his children and grandchildren, who told me amazing stories.
The debate over the mine is just part of the story the book tells.
Regarding that debate, did you find yourself changing your own mind about it as you worked on the book?
The proposed mine at Oak Flat is part of a continuing story that dates back to the arrival of Europeans in the so-called New World: outsiders come to expropriate natural resources, and in the
process decimate peoples, cultures and the environment. Many people are aware of this history, of course; fewer may recognize that the pattern is ongoing.
Presenting human stories from multiple sides and leaving it up to the reader to take a message from it seems to be a commonality among your books.
I think that’s true. I’m interested in complicated situations. I’m always trying to look at social and political issues, but in an oblique way, and through a human lens. To connect broader questions to real people and real lives in a way that’s not didactic or moralistic.
I want to tell stories where there is nuance and tension. That gray zone feels truer to me, and I hope that it’s a better reflection of reality. I think there are systemic problems on the level of governments and institutions and corporations that are worthy of criticism; I’m less interested in casting blame on individuals.
One of the reasons I was interested in looking at copper itself is because it’s not a fossil fuel. It’s not something that’s as easily villainized. Copper is an important component of clean energy, too—we need copper for solar and wind power, for instance. We need it for our smartphones, high-speed Internet, air conditioning, subways—it’s a metal integral to many aspects of our lives. I like that the book asks us to grapple a little more deeply with our own choices. Like, how are we implicated in the chain of supply and demand?
Pivoting to your NYCB project—are you or were you ever a dancer? The collaboration seems like a natural match, since your work has such graceful and expressive lines. My mom put me in movement classes when I was very small, and I continued to study ballet for most of my life. My mom was a
ballet dancer and a modern dancer—and she’s now a ballroom dancer. I never danced professionally, but my drawing style, the fluidity of line and my sense of anatomy are all very much linked to my history of considering the body in space.
The discipline that dance requires has also been really important to me. The visual arts don’t have a formal structure the same way that ballet does, for instance: the daily class, the rituals. Painters don’t often get together at 10:00am in one room and go through a set of daily exercises, say. So I’ve tried to adapt and translate some of that discipline into my own visual art practice.
What does your own practice look like?
A lot of drawing. Drawing on location, drawing wherever I am. If I don’t draw something, I don’t feel like I’ve really observed it or taken it in fully. So if I go to a museum, I’m drawing what I see, otherwise I feel like I didn’t really see that exhibit.
What do you draw with?
Pencils. Mechanical pencils.
How involved were you in the making of Radioactive the movie?
The book was optioned; I didn’t have any formal creative involvement, which was perfect. They sent me scripts, I gave a couple little comments, but it wasn’t my
project, which made the process pure pleasure—I had no work to do. It was thrilling for me to sit back and see the movie get made. I was knocked out by the set designers and the art direction. For instance, for Marie Curie’s lab, there was all of this beautiful 19th-century glassware—test tubes, beakers—the costumes were incredible, the light was incredible, it was really magical to walk into that transformed space. And just meeting Marjane and the actors on set—it was so fun.
What was it like to see your project becoming another person’s project?
It was surreal. I was pretty emotional watching the trailer, for instance. It was wild and delightful to see quirky decisions that I made in the book being realized on film. The whole structure of the movie does follow the
idiosyncratic way that I structured the book. So that was really fun to see.
What is especially challenging for you to draw?
Oh gosh. Well, I only see with one eye, so perspective is something I think I don’t actually perceive.
Oh wow.
Yeah. So the way I depict space might sometimes get compressed or flat, and so I have to push myself to draw deep space. And to really think about three-dimensionality, because I don’t really see it.
What happened to your eye?
I had an accident when I was two. My grandfather was holding me, and we were in a pharmacy, and one of the hooks that hold toothbrushes or gum got in my eye and scratched my cornea. My eye was patched for a long time, and it was damaged.
I can imagine that’s been an asset for your artwork in ways that are impossible to quantify. I’ve never known any other way, since I was so young, but yeah. I hope so!
You rarely include yourself as a character in your work but at the same time your work feels very personal, since the stories are filtered through your hand and mind. How much of that is intentional?
My work is not confessional or memoiristic—I don’t write about myself. So in that way, there’s a distance, but I feel incredibly invested in the people that I write about and
It’s not a choice that I think I’ll make at least for a good long time, because there’s just so much else I want to do, and so much else I’d like to see, so many other people I want to talk with.
You have had such a cool career, your books are so well-received, you have all these things going on and your art is so beautiful, and then there’s the MacArthur genius grant, and the Pulitzer Prize nomination. … Do you feel successful? Or at what point did you feel like you had arrived in the life you’re currently living? Wow. Well, a few things: For better and for worse, I
I feel a deep sense of responsibility when someone trusts me with their story or their time. So I am passionately invested in any person that I speak to and any story that’s given to me. And so there’s no detachment or distance there.
Would you ever write about yourself in a first-person way?
I have thought about it, but there are so many other things to see and do in the world. A big motivation for me is curiosity about what I don’t know. So I want to find places that I haven’t been to—and make that travel part of the story—and talk to people whose stories embody some kind of universal struggle.
definitely separate out recognition from how I make sense of my own trajectory. I’m so grateful for it, and there’s no question that recognition has made it possible for me to do my work. It wasn’t always clear that it would be the case for me. The work I make is pretty weird, in certain ways. The first book I made was roundly rejected by every publisher in existence, I think. No one wanted to return my phone calls. I had like six different day jobs.
I think maybe because of that or just because of my personality, I try not to take anything for granted. I never think, “Ah, I’m all set now.”
I see the cracks in my work, I see what isn’t up to snuff and I want to improve those things. Each project gives me new ideas for the future, because I see what I could have done. Going into each project, I picture what’s possible—some kind of sublime ideal of what could be. And then I start, and what I’m able to accomplish in the end of course never matches up to that ideal, but each time I try to narrow that gap. I feel like if each thing I do narrows
OPPOSITE Excerpts from Lauren Redniss’ 2010 book, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout , which was a finalist for a 2011 National Book Award in the nonfiction category. Courtesy Lauren Redniss.
that gap between the vision and the reality a little bit, then that’s progress.
One last goofy question. Are there any weather-related details from Thunder & Lightning —my favorite book of yours—that still stand out in memory?
I think about fog a lot. About the actual phenomenon, but also fog as a metaphor. In some ways I think of my early life as living in a bit of a fog. And then feeling that fog lift at a certain point with certain things that have happened.
I have kids now, too, so the weather is a natural topic of conversation, and it’s a pleasure to have a bit of knowledge about the physics of lightning or whatever, to be able to talk about that. That’s really, really fun. ◆
This conversation has been condensed and edited.
Edith Zimmerman is a writer living in Brooklyn. She has contributed to New York, The New York Times Magazine and GQ, and publishes the illustrated newsletter Drawing Links
Rosamund Pike (Marie Curie) and Sam Riley (Pierre Curie) in a scene from Radioactive , a 2019 movie based on Redniss’ book; Redniss on set in Budapest for the making of the film.
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ALUMNI AFFAIRS
BUILDING COMMUNITY: Alumni Affinity Associations
A message from Jane Nuzzo, director of alumni affairs and development at SVA
❋As the SVA alumni community continues to expand and diversify, we at SVA Alumni Affairs work to advocate for and provide contemporary, relevant and meaningful ways for its members to interact. To that end, I am excited to report the formal launch of SVA Alumni Affinity Associations (SVA AAA), volunteer-managed organizations that are supported by our office, and which encourage alumni to deepen their SVA affiliation through programs designed around shared interests, locations and identities.
SVA alumni Carolina Dalfó (MA 2016 Critical Theory and the Arts) and María Alejandra Sáenz (MA 2019 Curatorial Practice) are working closely with Alumni Affairs to establish an SVA AAA group—LATA, Latinx Alumni Together in the Arts—on behalf of alumni of Latin and Hispanic background, as well as those interested in Latin culture.
“When people get together, the space for dialogue opens up and with it, the exchange of experiences and perspectives and the opportunity to learn from and of each other,” Dalfó says. “Amazing things happen when people work together, and I’m confident LATA, with the support of SVA, will generate some incredible initiatives.”
Concurrently, three recent BFA Design graduates, Julie Zhu (2019), Lin Cao (2019) and Li Zhuoyuan (2019), have begun the Chinese Alumni Association (CAA). With the support of Alumni Affairs, they hosted their inaugural New York City gathering in February and have established outreach and communication over WeChat. “The primary goal of CAA is to create a lifelong bond among each other and SVA, building an international network,” Zhu says. “We want to provide opportunities for professional development, networking and communication for all Chinese graduates.”
And then, of course, there is the Korean Alumni Association (KAA), a long-thriving group and template for the SVA AAA initiative. The KAA has served the Korean SVA alumni community for more than 20 years, primarily with activities based in Seoul. Established under the guidance of Andrew Chang (MFA 1987 Illustration as Visual Essay; director, Office for Programs for International Students) with former longtime president Myoung Duck Seo (MFA 1992 Illustration as Visual Essay), the KAA recently welcomed new leadership—notable alumnus Tak Hoon Kim (MFA 2005 Computer Art) now serves as its president—and is
New
tour,
Alejandra Sáenz; fall 2019 KAA reception in Seoul, photo: by Soyeon Bae.
enthusiastically forging ahead.
“Korean society has a strong culture,” Kim says. “For the KAA, it is important to bring together senior alumni and recent graduates who have never met. Together we can share information, work and become friends and colleagues. With more than 2,000 graduates living around the world, SVA’s Korean alumni must find new ways of building relationships.” With this in mind, Kim and the
KAA cabinet are overseeing the launch of a new website and online job board, maintaining a presence on social media, continuing to host receptions and exhibitions, and working to raise money for SVA student scholarships that will support the next generation of Korean alumni.
For information about SVA AAA, visit sva.edu/alumni. Questions? Call 212.592.2300 or email alumni@sva.edu. ◆
FROM TOP CAA founders (from left) Li Zhuoyuan, Julie Zhu and Lin Cao, photo: BFA Design student Zhenyang Rong; LATA members on a private
Museum
photo: María
SVA ALUMNI SOCIETY AWARDS 2020
Thanks to generous contributions from alumni and supporters, the Alumni Society was able to grant a total of $60,500 in awards to these students in support of their thesis projects.
ALUMNI SCHOLARSHIP AWARDS
Alicia Olushola Ajayi, MA Design Research, Writing and Criticism
LaTonia Allen, MFA Fine Arts
Daniel Almeida , MFA Fine Arts
Victoria Ayo, MFA Products of Design
Kate Benedict, MA Curatorial Practice
Adam Bohorquez, BFA Animation
Luciannys Camacho, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects
Verena Chang with thesis partners Wenjie Wu and Zhike Yang , MFA Computer Arts
Helen Chen, MFA Products of Design
Wega Chen, MPS Directing
Jinuk Choi, MFA Computer Arts
Sihan Cui, MFA Photography, Video and Related Media
Emily Curran, BFA Animation
Claudia Delaplace, MA Curatorial Practice
Dongwei Di, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects
Daniela Dwek with thesis partners Chrisy Baek and Maya Mendonca , BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects
Yinka Elujoba , MFA Art Writing
Veronique Engel, MFA Social Documentary Film
Max Esby, BFA Animation Becca Guzzo, MFA Fine Arts
Eva Louise Hall, MFA Visual Narrative
Kelsie Hoffman with thesis partner Yanying Fan, MFA Computer Arts
Jennifer Holcomb, MFA Design
Jianpu Huang , BFA Film
Maximilian Julia , MFA Fine Arts
Aditi Kapre with thesis partner
Kartik Krishnan, MFA Design for Social Innovation
Emily Klass, MFA Art Practice
Natasha Korzeniewski, MAT Art Education
Yi Hsuan Lai, MFA Photography, Video and Related Media
Carol Li, BFA Visual & Critical Studies
Rui Li, MFA Design
Guyu Liang , BFA Animation
Kangmin Lim, MFA Computer Arts
Chenhui Lin , MFA Social Documentary Film
Kuan Ting (Lu CK) Lu with thesis partner Max Liu, MFA Computer Arts
Sarah Malekzadeh , MFA Fine Arts
Mike Marrella , MFA Fine Arts
Jimmy Mezei, MFA Fine Arts
Oxana Onipko, MFA Social Documentary Film
Eli Santos, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects
Carol Silverman, MFA Visual Narrative
Benjamin Swift , MFA Art Writing
Shihhan Tung , MFA Fine Arts
Patrick Wang , MFA Computer Arts
Yany Wang , BFA Interior Design
Heather Williams, MFA Art Practice
Chenwei Xu, MFA Design
Matthew Yturralde, BFA Film
Shuming Zhang , MFA Social Documentary Film
Zooey Zhang , MFA Social Documentary Film
Lu Zheng , BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects
NAMED FUND AWARDS
727 Award
Qianyu Li, BFA Illustration
Yanjun Li, BFA Illustration
Jasmine Haomin Shi, BFA Illustration
Amelia Geocos Memorial Award
Cianna Cao, BFA Fine Arts
BFA Illustration and Cartooning Award
Xiaoling “kodsuno.l” Li, BFA Illustration
Colete Martin, BFA Illustration
Bob Guglielmo Memorial Award
Matthew Francis Bustamonte, BFA Cartooning
Cody Evan Silver, BFA Cartooning
Edward Zutrau
Memorial Award
Jason Elizondo, MFA Fine Arts
Jack Endewelt Memorial Award
Ming Wang , BFA Illustration
Luyao Yan, BFA Cartooning
James Richard Janowsky Award
Jaelan Acosta with thesis partner Ryan Devita , BFA Film
MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Award
Cecilia Abeid
Jiawen Chen
Ishita Jain
Hwarim Lee
Xinmei Liu
Michael Halsband Award
Cat Crandall Duffy, BFA Photography and Video
Sangwoo Suh , BFA Photography and Video
Robert I. Blumenthal
Memorial Award
Xiaoyu (littletoe) Xue, BFA Design
Sylvia Lipson Allen Memorial Award
Veronica Fernandez, BFA Fine Arts
Thomas Reiss Memorial Award
Jaizi Abedania , MFA Photography, Video and Related Media
William C. Arkell Memorial Award
Bhurin Treetampinich, BFA Film
OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT
1. Adam Bohorquez, still from Millenium Hour, 2020, animation
2. Jinuk Choi, Beyond the Line , 2019, 3D digital illustration
3. Xinmei Liu, Boys and Girls Should Stay Away from Each Other, 2020, ink and digital
4. Xiaoyu Xue, Design Intelligence Award opening style frame digital illustration
5. Ishta Jain, Pfizer Lab, New York Botanical Gardens, Oct. 29, 2019 , 2019, watercolor on paper
6. Chenwei Xu, product design for Brailly, 2020
7. Daniela Dwek, still from Hamsa , 2020, 3D animation
8. Jaizi Abedania, The Albatross (for Travelers)
9. Shih Han Tung, still from Instant Cinema, 2020, HD digital video
10. Ming Wang, Night Out, 2019, oil on canvas
11. Jason Elizondo, still from Those Big Brown (Almost Black) Gay Eyes , 2019, digital video, filmed by Darrin Faires
12. Xiaoling Li, I Don’t Want to Kill You, You Don’t Want to Die , digital illustration
13. Sarah Malekzadeh, tufted carpets
14. Veronica Fernandez, Find Me
When I’m Not Hungry and Tired, 2020, oil and acrylic on canvas
DONORS
The Alumni Society gratefully acknowledges these SVA alumni who gave to the society from July 1 through December 31, 2019.
Kim Ablondi
BFA 1984 Photography
Arthur Ackermann
BFA 1982 Cartooning
Al Adasse 1968
Everett Aison 1959 Graphic Design
Evie Aksel BFA 2010 Photography
Dawn E. Albore
BFA 1981 Illustration
Alexandra Alcantara BFA 2010 Graphic Design
Adam P. Ames
MFA 1997 Photography and Related Media
Gail Anderson
BFA 1984 Graphic Design
Michael J. Angley 1971 Advertising Anonymous (5)
George Arthur 1967
Sara Bailin
MPS 2011 Live Action Short Film
Scott M. Bakal
BFA 1993 Illustration
Gina Barbusci
BFA 1984 Illustration
Paul Basile 1969 Advertising
Cynthia Bittenfield
MFA 2009 Photography, Video and Related Media
Cindy E. Blomquist
BFA 1982 Illustration
Eva Bokosky
BFA 1978 Illustration
James R. Bomeisl
BFA 1978 Graphic Design
Marguerita Zerillo Brinton 1976
John Bruce BFA 1987 Fine Arts
Sharon BurrisBrown BFA 1984 Illustration
Brian Callaghan BFA 1977 Media Arts
Roger Caruana BFA 1985 Illustration
Kevin J. Casey BFA 1976 Photography
Paul K. Caullett
BFA 2000 Graphic Design
Terese Cavanagh 1968 Media Arts
Frank S. Colosa 1965
Gregory J. Coyle
BFA 2002 Illustration
John Coyne
BFA 1980 Film and Video
Julia and Phil Coyne with fond memories and in honor of Carl Nicolas Titolo
BFA 1988 Media Arts
BFA 1986 Media Arts
Cora Cronemeyer 1966 Fine Arts
Diane Cuddy
BFA 1988 Graphic Design
Therese Curtin
BFA 1980 Illustration
Diane Dawson Hearn
BFA 1975 Illustration
Cat Del Buono
MFA 2008 Photography, Video and Related Media
Thomas DeLuca 1965
Brooks P. DeRyder
BFA 1999 Illustration
Theresa DeSalvio
BFA 1976 Fine Arts
Haydee Diaz
BFA 1986 Graphic Design
Sophia DiBartolomeo
BFA 2017 Photography and Video
Rael Jean DiDomenico-Schwab
BFA 1990 Advertising
Candace (alumnus) and Jeffrey Dobro
MPS 2010 Digital Photography
James Ewing 1973
Carol Fabricatore
MFA 1992 Illustration as Visual Essay
Charles Fazzino
BFA 1977 Graphic Design
Jeanne FinneranMillett BFA 1985 Media Arts
Peter H. Fischman
BFA 1976 Photography
Brian Floca
MFA 2001 Illustration as Visual Essay
Lawrence Flood
BFA 1980 Fine Arts
Vanessa Pineda Fox
BFA 1993 Graphic Design
Neil M. Gallo
BFA 1977 Graphic Design
Mariette Gelfand
BFA 1983 Graphic Design
Jeremy George BFA 1983 Photography
Suzanne C. Giovanetti
BFA 1981 Graphic Design
Jelani Gould-Bailey
MFA 2009 Computer Art
Meghan Day Healey
BFA 1993 Graphic Design
Jean Held 1969
Sandra F. Holzman BFA 1976 Media Arts
Alex Hovet MFA 2017 Photography, Video and Related Media
Gerald Hull 1968
Nanette Mahlab Jiji
BFA 1981 Illustration
Catherine A. Jones
BFA 1979 Graphic Design
Mahala Jordan MPS 2017 Art Therapy
Patrice Kaplan BFA 1988 Graphic Design
Dionisios Kavvadias
BFA 1997 Computer Art
Songyup Kim MFA 2011 Computer Art
Sardi Klein 1970 Photography
Alex Knowlton BFA 1987 Graphic Design
Robert Kohr BFA 2003 Animation
Abby Kreh 1962 Illustration
Karleen Kubat MFA 1985 Fine Arts
Steven Langerman 1972 Photography
Roxanne Lorch Lipman 1984
Sakura Maku
BFA 2004 Illustration
Laura Maley BFA 1978 Fine Arts
Sam Martine BFA 1980 Illustration
Nancy Mazzone BFA 1982 Fine Arts
Christopher McDonnell BFA 2001 Animation
Ilya Meshchaninov 1986
Jenny Moradfar Meyer
BFA 1980 Illustration
Wyatt Mills BFA 2013 Fine Arts
Anand Mistry
MFA 2015 Computer Art
David Moir 1975 Photography
Bethanie Deeney
Murguia
MFA 1998 Illustration as Visual Essay
Joseph J. Nicholson, III BFA 1997 Fine Arts
Renee NyahayGonzalez
BFA 1985 Graphic Design
Susan Koliadko O'Brien
BFA 1984 Graphic Design
Donald Orehek 1951 Cartooning
Romaine Orthwein
MFA 2003 Photography and Related Media
Edith Ostrowsky 1972
Peter Papulis
BFA 1977 Fine Arts
Searfino Patti
BFA 1992 Fine Arts
Mr. and Mrs. Kevin Petrilak (alumnus) BFA 1976 Animation
Gary Petrini 1979 Media Arts
Bernard Putter 1970
Todd L. Radom
BFA 1986 Graphic Design
Paul Rappaport 1963 Fine Arts
Bob Ratynski
BFA 1984 Photography
Esther Regelson
BFA 1982 Film and Video
Elaine ReneWeissman
BFA 1976 Fine Arts
Lisa Rettig-Falcone
BFA 1983 Advertising
Vernon C. Riddick 1973
Jorge Luis Rodriguez BFA 1976 Fine Art
Jaime Cody Rosman
MPS 2014 Digital Photography
Joseph M. Rutt
BFA 1985 Illustration
Nelson Montalvo Sanchez
BFA 1980 Photography
Gini Santos MFA 1996 Computer Art
Herb Savran
BFA 1977 Film and Video
Joanne Scannello
BFA 1984 Advertising
Joel Scharf
BFA 1983 Graphic Design
Jerold M. Siegel
BFA 1975 Fine Arts
Stewart Siskind
BFA 1977 Media Arts
Tom and Pat Sito
BFA 1977 Animation
BFA 1979 Animation
Suzanne Slattery
BFA 1992 Fine Arts
Rena Sokolow / one2tree
BFA 1986 Graphic Design
Kirsten Sorton
MFA 2005 Design
Vesper I. Stamper
MFA 2016 Illustration as Visual Essay
Art G. Stiefel
BFA 1987 Advertising
James M. Szczodrowski
BFA 1984 Cartooning
Retsu Takahashi
MFA 2002 Illustration as Visual Essay
Tony Tallarico 1954 Illustration
Caryn Tanis
BFA 1975 Advertising
Lianna Tarantin
BFA 2007 Photography
Eugene J. Thompson 1957 Illustration
Rosemarie
Sohmer Turk
BFA 1980 Graphic Design
Bonnie Sue Kaplan Valentino
1971 Advertising
Barbara Vasquez
BFA 1998 Graphic Design
Tom Wai-Shek 1970 Advertising
Elushika Weerakoon MFA 2017 Interaction Design
Elaine Westerman
BFA 1983 Graphic Design
Dennis Wierl
BFA 1996 Photography
Richard and Judith Wilde (alumnus)
MFA 1994 Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 1979 Fine Arts
Mark Willis
BFA 1998 Illustration
Denise (Malin) Young BFA 1983 Media Arts
Gary N. Zaccaria BFA 1981 Graphic Design
Alan H. Zwiebel 1963 Advertising
We also thank these parents and friends of SVA who supported the SVA Alumni Society.
BMS
BP Air
Thomas and Georgeann Carnevali
Colony Pest Management, Inc.
Ralph Colucci
Christopher Cyphers
Ronald Derevjanik
Sue Epstein
Exclusive Contracting
Gabriel Falsetta
Elizabeth Fama and John Cochrane
James Farek
Neil Friedland
Ganer + Ganer, PLLC
General Plumbing
Susan Ginsburg
Global Security Group
A. J. R. and C. G. Greene
Edith Gross and Yoseph Feit
John and Helen Guglielmo
Mary Hendricks Hodgson Russ, LLP
Dr. J. Isenberg
Glenn Jacobson
Michael Kahn / Benefits Unlimited, Inc.
Carol Kloss
KTM Electronics, Inc.
Brooke Larsen
Laurence G. Jones
Architects, PLLC
LDI Color Toolbox
Edward Lefferman
Karen and Michael
Lefkowitz
Stephanie Leyva
Priscilla Lindenauer
Lipinski Real Estate Advisors, LLC
Jason Little
Lodestar Management Group, LLC
John and Niki Madias
Ronnie and Al Martella
William McAllister
Lynn and Jim McNulty
S. A. Modenstein
Kevin R. Noel
Millie Pagan
Richard Perloff
Ned and Ellin Purdom
Andrew Ras
William Rednour
Safety Facility Service
Barbara Salander
Schindler Elevator Corp.
SCS Agency Insurance
Andrew Stanton
Robert Sylvor
The TelCar Group
Kathleen Treat
TVG
Patricia Valentine
Irra Verbitsky
Charles R. Vermilyea, Jr.
W. B. Mason
Webster Bank
Ms. Peggy Whitlock
Bob and Debra Williams
Barry Winick
ALUMNI NOTES & EXHIBITIONS
GARY (MFA 2014 Social Documentary Film), still from The Giverny Document (Single Channel), 2019, film, 42 minutes, color/black-and-white, singlechannel video, stereo sound, dimensions variable. Gary screened The Giverny Document at Locarno Film Festival, Locarno, Switzerland, 8/10-8/17/19, and was awarded the festival's Moving Ahead Award, 8/17/19. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
GROUP EFFORTS
Kenneth Rivero (BFA 2010 Film and Video) curated the group exhibition “Hold On, Hold Me,” which included work by Peter Hristoff (BFA 1981 Fine Arts), at Charles Moffett Gallery, NYC, 6/26-8/1/19.
MA Curatorial Practice alumni Noelia Lecue (2018), Maria Saenz (2019), Andrea Valencia (2019) and Natalia Viera (2018) co-curated “Female Migrations,” La Nacional, NYC, 7/10-8/14/19.
At the Emmy Awards, Anthony Lioi (BFA 1994 Animation), Chris Prynoski (BFA 1994 Animation), Shannon Prynoski (BFA 1994 Film and Video) and Jody Schaeffer (BFA 1994 Animation) were nominated in the category Animated Program; Thomas Zimny (BFA 1990 Film and Video) was nominated in the category Directing for a Variety Special; Zachary Bellissimo (BFA 2011 Animation), Joseph Cappabianca (BFA 2006 Animation), Thomas Herpich (BFA 2002 Cartooning), Katherine Morris (BFA 2008 Animation), Aleth Romanillos (BFA 2008 Animation), Rebecca Sugar (BFA 2009 Animation) and Paul Villeco (BFA 2009 Animation) were nominated in the category Short Form Animated Program; Matthew Yonks (BFA 2001 Film and Video) was nominated in the category Short Form Nonfiction; Melanie McLean Brooks (MFA 2017 Social Documentary) was nominated in the category Short Form Nonfiction/Reality Series; and Daniel Minahan (BFA 1987 Film and Video) was nominated in the category Television Movie, 7/16/19.
Several SVA alumni delivered talks at SIGGRAPH Los Angeles, 7/28-8/1/19: Dawn Fidrick (MFA 2010 Computer Art), a producer at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, spoke about producing the new 35 minute/8k 60fps planetarium show, Signs of Life, at the Foundry Exhibitor Session: Education Summit. Justin Melillo (BFA 2013 Computer Art) guided participants through experiences with Magic Leap in the Immersive Technology Pavilion. Joji Tsuruga (BFA 2008 Computer Art), senior artist at Epic Games, presented his work in real-time production on Fortnite Shorts.
MFA Photography, Video and Related Media alumni Yoav Friedländer (2014), Nicholas Kallianiotis (2013) and Dana Stirling (2016) participated in the group exhibition “Rust Belt Biennial,” Sordoni Gallery, Wilkes-Barre, PA, 8/27-10/5/19.
Brian Andrew Whiteley (MFA 2013 Fine Arts) co-founded, Quinn Dukes (MFA 2015 Art Practice) curated and AnnaLiisa Ariosa-Benston (MFA 2016 Fine Arts) served as the creative director and exhibited at Satellite Art Show, NYC, 10/3-10/6/19, which included work by Elizabeth Chick (MFA 2014 Art Practice), Dwain Davis (MFA 2016 Photography, Video and Related Media), Kathie Halfin (MFA 2015 Fine Arts), Markus Holtby (MFA 2019 Fine Arts), Maxwell Lee (MFA 2016 Photography,
Video and Related Media), Andrew Prieto (MFA 2014 Art Practice) and Alfredo Travieso (MFA 2014 Art Practice). Quinn Dukes curated and Pei Ling Ho (MFA 2019 Fine Arts) screened The Little Hand of Love at a screenings and pre-fair party presented by Satellite Art Show and Performance Is Alive, Grace Exhibition Space, NYC, 9/7/19.
At New York Comic Con, Jared Barel (MFA 2005 Design) exhibited work with Loaded Barrel Studios; Andrew Bell (BFA 2000 Computer Art) exhibited work with My Plastic Heart; Stephen Cup (MFA 2015 Illustration as Visual Essay) exhibited work with Topps Company; Jerry Ma (BFA 1997 Cartooning) exhibited work with Epic Proportions; Joshua Mirman (BFA 2006 Illustration) exhibited work with Zen Monkey Studios; Vincent Scala (BFA 2007 Illustration) exhibited work with PIQ; Edwin Vazquez (MFA 2009 Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 2007 Cartooning) exhibited work with Penguin/Random House; Dwayne Velasquez (BFA 1999 Cartooning) exhibited work with Creative One Comics; and Jonathan Zelenak (BFA 2006 Film and Video) managed social media coverage for Nickelodeon Studios, NYC, 10/3-10/6/19. Jason Adams (BFA 1990 Media Arts), Joel Adams (BFA 1988 Media Arts), Josh Adams (BFA 2009 Cartooning), Jennifer Bartel (BFA 2009 Illustration), Ian Bertram (BFA 2012 Cartooning), Tyler Boss (BFA 2014 Cartooning), Russell Braun (MFA 1991 Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 1984 Media Arts), Crystal Cheung (BFA 2009 Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects), Nathan Fox (MFA 2002 Illustration as Visual Essay), Isaac Goodhart (BFA 2010 Cartooning), Joshua Hixson (BFA 2014 Cartooning), Edwin Huang (BFA 2010 Cartooning), Philip Jimenez (BFA 1991 Cartooning), Mark Morales (BFA 1991 Media Arts), Ricardo Lopez Ortiz (BFA 2009 Illustration), Bill Plympton (1969 Cartooning), Khary Randolph (BFA 2000 Cartooning), Amanda Scurti (BFA 2014 Illustration) and Mark Sparacio (BFA 1983 Media Arts) exhibited at Artist Alley, NYC, 10/3-10/6/19. Jennifer Bartel (BFA 2009 Illustration) was a panelist for “New York Times OUT Presents LGBTQ+ in Comics,” and John Green (BFA 1997 Graphic Design) held a signing event with First Second/Macmillan Publishers, NYC, 10/6/19. Patrick McDonnell (BFA 1978 Media Arts) was a panelist for “25 Years of Mutts : Patrick McDonnell in Conversation with Chip Kidd,” and Dana Terrace (BFA 2013 Animation) was a panelist for “From Crew to Creator,” NYC, 10/5/19. Anthony Cupo (1994 Film and Video) and Chris Prynoski (BFA 1994 Animation) were panelists for “Titmouse—We Make Cartoons”; Rebecca Sugar (BFA 2009 Animation) was a panelist for “Steven Universe”; and Dana Terrace was a panelist for “Welcome to The Owl House,” NYC, 10/4/19. To
JA'TOVIA
TOP : HUGO (GUO) YU (BFA 2019 Photography and Video), Another Tragic Love Story (left) and Nothing to See Here , 2019, pigment inkjet prints. Yu s work was featured in “Primary Colours and Meticulous Compositions Define Hugo Yu s Photography,” It’s Nice That , 8/12/19.
BOTTOM: JOHNNIE CHATMAN (MFA 2018 Photography and Related Media), Self Portrait, Grand Canyon, 2018, archival inkjet print. From the group exhibition “Another West,” Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA, 9/5-10/19/19.
1967
Carole Feuerman (Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Carole A. Feuerman: 50 Years,” Chase Contemporary, NYC, 11/7-12/12/19.
1969
Luis Cruz Azaceta (Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Body/ Object,” George Adams Gallery, NYC, 7/11-8/23/19.
1971
Diane Moriarty (Film and Video) wrote a blog post, “Our Bodies, Our Real Estate,” The Human Life Review, 9/24/19.
1972
Kathleen McSherry (BFA Media Arts) had work in the group exhibition “The Soho Art Show,” Dacia Gallery, NYC, 10/12/19.
Linda Stillman (Graphic Design) had work included in the group exhibition “Madness in Vegetables: Hudson Valley Artists 2019,” Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY, 6/15 -11/10/19.
1973
Marilyn Church (Illustration) was featured in “Court Drawing—Lasting Life,” East Hampton Star, 6/20/19.
Carole Forman (Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Carole Forman,” Charlotte Patisserie and Cafe, NYC, 7/1-7/31/19.
1974
John Holmstrom (Cartooning) was featured in “This East Village Artist Eyes Reviving Comic Strip While Also Looking Back on Covering Ramones Albums and High Times,” Villager 10/8/19.
Joyce Korotkin (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Horizons,” MSK Bergen Gallery, Montvale, NJ, 7/28/19-3/28/20.
Walter O’Neill (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Textured,” Artserve, Fort Lauderdale, FL, 6/19-6/28/19.
1975
Margaret McCarthy (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Urban Dance,” The Plaxall Gallery, Long Island City, NY, 6/19-7/21/19.
1976
John Conn (BFA Photography) was featured in “An Accessible Art World Right Around the Corner,” Riverdale Press, 11/30/19.
Theresa DeSalvio (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “The Life and Times of the Blue Fairy,” Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, 9/3-12/13/19.
Effie Serlis (BFA Fine Arts) curated the group exhibition “Artist Talk in the Garden,” 6 & B Community Garden, NYC, 7/27/19.
1977
Willie Chu (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “Staten Island Artists,” Wagner College Gallery, NYC, 9/8/19.
Laurence Gartel (BFA Media Arts) was featured in “You Can Now Stay in a Giant Guitar-Shaped Hotel That You Have to See to Believe,” USA Today 10/25/19.
Denise Halpin (BFA Media Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Seeking Shelter,” Nazareth Center for the Arts, Nazareth, PA, 7/7-7/27/19.
Yolanda Skeete-Laessig (BFA Film and Video) participated in the fall 2019 Open Studios, Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ, 10/13/19.
Philip Sugden (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Pages from the Manual on Dismantling God,”
JANELLE LYNCH (MFA 1999 Photography and Related Media), Summer Wreath, 2016, archival pigment print. From the solo exhibition “Another Way of Looking at Love,” Flowers Gallery, London, UK, 11/12-11/23/19. Courtesy the artist and Flowers Gallery, London.
Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, Louisville, KY, 8/25/19.
1978
Richard Deon (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Richard Deon Resurrects Ben Franklin: 13 Impressions of Virtue,” Creative Pro, 11/4/19.
Patrick McDonnell (BFA Media Arts) gave a talk, “The Art of Nothing: 25 Years of Mutts and the Art of Patrick McDonnell,” Society of Illustrators, NYC, 11/6/19.
1979
John Pelech (BFA Media Arts) had work in the group exhibition “2019 Salmagundi Club Photography Show,” Salmagundi Art Club, NYC, 7/22-8/2/19.
Amy Sillman (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Amy Sillman discusses ‘The Shape of Shape’ at MoMA,” Artforum, 10/21/19.
1980
Judy Schiller (BFA Photography) screened It Happened in Havana: A Yiddish Love Story (2019), Jewish Federation of Western Connecticut, Southbury, CT, 9/8/19.
Nancy Ward (BFA Media Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Relevant Fictions,” Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, CA, 11/14-12/7/19.
1981
Ron Barbagallo (BFA Media Arts) gave a talk, “Maurice Noble and the Folder of Discarded Treasure,” University of Padua, Padua, Italy, 11/18/19.
Tracey K. Berglund (Media Arts) published her cartoon, “The Latest in Mid-Century-Modern Furniture,” The New Yorker, 10/20/19.
Rita Maas (BFA Photography) had work in the group exhibition “Imprints & Abstractions,” Filter/Space, Chicago, IL, 6/7-7/6/19.
Kenny Scharf (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Kenny Scharf Returns to Honor Fraser with ‘Optimistically Melting,’” Hi Fructose, 9/25/19.
Marc Yankus (BFA Media Arts) had a solo exhibition, “New York Unseen,” ClampArt, NYC, 10/3-11/16/19.
1982
James Meyer (Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Escaping Time,” Governors Island Colonels Row, NYC, 6/28-8/4/19.
Melissa Rubin (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Night Vision(s),” Atlantic Gallery, NYC, 9/3-9/21/19.
Lorna Simpson (BFA Photography) was featured in “I Want to Explore the Wonder of What It Is to Be a Black American,” The New York Times 10/8/19, and was awarded the 2019 Getty Medal, 9/13/19.
Joey Skaggs (BFA Media Arts) was featured in a comedy podcast, “Joey Skaggs: The Art of the Prank,” Rob Mulholland Has an Opinion, 6/19/19.
1983
Andrea Fraser (Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Celebration of Our Enemies: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 6/9-9/8/19.
Steven Petruccio (BFA Media Arts) published Apollo 11: First Men on the Moon Coloring Book (Dover Publications, 2019).
Kenneth Wenzel (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “11th Annual Lola Art Crawl,” Squirrel Haus Arts, Minneapolis, MN, 9/21-9/22/19.
1984
Lisa Argentieri (BFA Photography) had work featured on the cover, Aces Magazine, 7/1/19.
Eduardo Bolioli (Cartooning) was featured in “Painter Turns Hawaii into Vivid Pop Art Fantasies,” Forbes 6/13/19.
Lydia Panas (BFA Photography) had work in the group exhibition “Better Organized, Like a Tropical Storm,” Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, PA, 8/19-9/27/19.
Joseph Quesada (BFA Media Arts) was featured in “Joe Quesada, the Man Behind Marvel, Shares His Real-Life Heroic Journey,” Eyewitness News, 10/11/19.
1985
Christine Keefe (BFA Fine Arts) gave a talk, “IEEC5 Artists Presentation— Illustrated Talk,” Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY, 6/2/19.
Dana Marshall (BFA Photography) had work in the group exhibition “Exhibition at Midsummer Inspiration,” Midsummer Inspiration, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 6/22-6/23/19.
Ran Morin (BFA Fine Arts) published Three Trees: Environmental Projects on Mount Scopus, Jerusalem (Sciendo, 2019).
Collier Schorr (BFA Communication Arts) was featured in “Portfolio by Collier Schorr,” Bomb, 9/13/19.
1986
Kevin McCloskey (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) received the 2019 Arthur and Isabel Wiesenberger Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA, 9/27/19.
Michael Paraskevas (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 1984 Media Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Paint Your World: A 40-Year Retrospective of the Work of Michael Paraskevas,” Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY, 9/21-11/10/19.
Annie Sprinkle (BFA Photography) was featured in “Sexologist Annie Sprinkle Isn’t Covering Anything Up,” Interview, 9/30/19.
Rumiko Tsuda (MFA Fine Arts; BFA 1984 Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Kokoro-Heart,” Choplet, NYC, 9/7-10/10/19.
Susan Woldman (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “Artist Susan Woldman Elfer Wins Kuniyoshi Grant,” Whitehot, 6/10/19.
1987
Melanie Kozol (MFA Fine Arts) had work included in the group exhibition “On the Rocks,” Susan Eley Fine Art, NYC, 6/26-8/29/19.
Cal Peternell (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Longtime Chez Panisse Chef Cal Peternell Opens the Lede in
PELLI (BFA 1994 Fine Arts), Artist’s Lungs Fading I and II, 2016-18, oil on canvas. From the group exhibition “The Surreality of Fear,” BSB Gallery, Trenton, NJ, 10/3-10/26/19.
Oakland,” San Francisco Chronicle 9/23/19.
Gary Petersen (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Gary Petersen: Just Hold On,” McKenzie Fine Art, NYC, 9/4-10/20/19.
Elizabeth Peyton (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Elizabeth Peyton on Historic Portraits,” Frieze, 10/2/19.
1988
Kelynn Alder (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) had work in the group exhibition “Love No Borders,” Lower East Side Girls Club, NYC, 9/2311/30/19.
Joseph Fucigna (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “MATTER 2,” NCC Art Gallery, Norwalk, CT, 11/4/19-1/10/20.
Gary Simmons (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Gary Simmons Joins Board of Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts,” Artforum, 7/31/19.
1989
Seth Michael Forman (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “2nd Act with Seth Michael Forman, Magnolia Laurie and Hooper Turner,” Frosch & Portmann, NYC, 9/12-9/18/19.
Albert Nickerson (BFA Media Arts) had work included in “PJ Fan Fest,” Port Jervis Free Library, NYC, 9/28/19.
Seth Zeichner (BFA Media Arts) was featured in “Case Study: Innovative Comic Book Style Animation Made with Adobe Character Animator,” Cartoon Brew, 8/26/19.
1990
Hilary Brougher (BFA Film and Video) received the Mid-Life Achievement Award, MIFF (Maine International Film Festival), 7/14/19.
Steven DeFrank (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “On the Edge of Panic,” Flatiron Project Space, NYC, 10/10-11/1/19.
Michael Giacchino (BFA Film and Video) was featured in “The Batman Enlists Composer Michael Giacchino,” Hollywood Reporter, 10/18/19.
Patricia Spergel (MFA Fine Arts) co-curated the group exhibition “About Face: Portraits in Paint & Clay,” The Painting Center, NYC, 6/18-7/13/19.
Darlene Stone-Blaurock (BFA Media Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Artists Who Teach,” Ellington-White Contemporary, Fayetteville, NC, 9/14-11/2/19.
Thomas Zimny (BFA Film and Video) screened The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash (2019), Telluride Film Festival, Telluride, CO, 8/30-9/2/19.
1991
Amy Jenkins (MFA Photography and Related Media) was featured in “Jenkins Chronicles Loss, Laughter, Life, Through a Lens,” Sentinel Source, 8/3/19.
1992
Lili Almog (BFA Photography) had work in the group exhibition “Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art,” Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, 9/6/191/5/20
Renée Cox (MFA Photography and Related Media) photographed Nick Cave for The New York Times, 10/15/19.
Darren Lemke (BFA Film and Video) was featured in “Meet the Writer of Gemini Man (Who Didn’t Actually Write Gemini Man),” Hollywood Reporter, 10/11/19.
Christine Romanell (BFA Graphic Design) participated in “The Open Studio Tour,” Manufacturers Village, East Orange, NJ, 10/19-10/20/19.
Dante Tomaselli (BFA Advertising) was featured in “5 Things You Should Do to Become a Thought Leader in Your Industry, with Filmmaker Dante Tomaselli,” Authority Magazine, 8/13/19.
Ray Villafane (BFA Illustration) had work featured in “25 Incredibly Detailed Pumpkin Carvings That Will Inspire You This Halloween,” Insider, 10/11/19.
1993
Lauren Berkowitz (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Ecosphere by Lauren Berkowitz,” Monash MPavilion, Melbourne, Australia, 6/8-6/16/19.
Miles Ladin (MFA Photography and Related Media) had a solo exhibition, “Masquerade,” The Java Project, NYC, 10/12-11/2/19.
Shawn Martinbrough (BFA Illustration) had work in the group exhibition “Illustrating Batman: Eighty Years of Comics and Pop Culture,” Society of Illustrators, NYC, 6/12-10/12/19.
1994
Inka Essenhigh (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “The Artists Putting a Contemporary Spin on Surrealism,” Artsy, 7/5/19.
Woo Young Kim (MFA Photography and Related Media; BFA 1992 Photography) was featured in “In Conversation with Korean Artist Kim Woo Young,” #legend, 9/10/19. John Leon (BFA Illustration) was featured in “John Paul Leon Opens Up on His Cancer Battle & Return to Finish Batman: Creature of the Night,” Newsarama, 11/6/19.
Michelle Lopez (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “First Major Institutional Exhibition of Michelle Lopez Opens Fall 2019 at Institute of Contemporary Art,” Art Daily, 9/17/19.
Riad Miah (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Waves of Light—Entwined Through the Tendrils of Time,” Wave Hill Sunroom Project Space, NYC, 7/21-9/2/19.
1995
Lynn Shelton (MFA Photography and Related Media) was featured in “How Little Fires Everywhere Director Lynn Shelton Learned to Love TV,” Vanity Fair, 6/21/19.
1996
Brian Donnelly a.k.a. KAWS (BFA Illustration) was featured in “6 Reasons to Take KAWS Seriously,” Artsy, 8/8/19.
Simen Johan (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “Conspiracy of Ravens,” Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC, 10/24-12/7/19.
Justine Kurland (BFA Photography) was featured in “Robert Frank’s Legacy: Nine Photographers Reflect,” The New York Times, 9/13/19.
Stephen Savage (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “Pretty in Paint: BPL Children’s Library Gets a Mural Makeover,” BK Reader 10/3/19.
Dice Tsutsumi (BFA Illustration) was featured in “Netflix & Tonko House Team for Oni Inspired by Japanese Folklore,” Animation Magazine, 11/21/19.
Marianne Vitale (BFA Film and Video) had work in the group exhibition “Double Vision,” New Discretions, East Hampton, NY, 8/24-8/31/19.
1997
Adam Ames (MFA Photography and Related Media) had work in the group exhibition “Type A: Menace,” Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art, NYC, 10/8-11/2/19.
Johanna Fateman (BFA Fine Arts) wrote “Art Matters Now: 12 Writers on 20 Years of Art: Johanna Fateman on the Founding of Creative Capital,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 9/26/19.
LEEMOUR
CURY MELO (BFA 2018 Film), still from Adrift (A La Deriva), 2019, digital short documentary. Melo received the Best Documentary Short Film Award, Rhode Island International Film Festival, 8/7/19.
Daniel Maldonado (BFA Film and Video) premiered his short video, Carnivale, The Plaxall Gallery, NYC, 10/12/19.
Raul Manzano (BFA Illustration) had a solo exhibition, “In the Eye of the Beholder,” Maggi Peyton Gallery, Manhattan Borough President’s Office, NYC, 9/10-10/11/19.
Sarah Sze (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “New York Galleries: What to See Right Now,” The New York Times, 9/11/19.
1998
Brian Finke (BFA Photography) photographed Elizabeth Warren in “Can Elizabeth Warren Win It All?”, The New Yorker, 6/24/19.
Scott Moy (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Portraits,” The Minerva Foundation for Figure Drawing Inc., NYC, 10/14-11/8/19.
Ryan Turek (BFA Film and Video) screened Halloween (2019), SVA Theatre, NYC, 9/21/19.
1999
Sheniqua Ewers (BFA Graphic Design) was featured in “Family Art Project on Display in Stratford,” Connecticut Post, 9/6/19.
Artem Mirolevich (BFA Illustration) had a solo exhibition, “May You Live in Interesting Times,” Artemiro Gallery, Venezia, Italy, 9/2/19.
2000
Esao Andrews (BFA Illustration) was featured in “Artist Esao Andrews Comes Full Circle,” Nearby News, 6/6/19.
Gonzalo Fuenmayor (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Inventory of Tears,” Galería Fernando Pradilla, Madrid, Spain, 11/14-12/14/19.
Atsushi Funahashi (BFA Film and Video) screened Lovers on Borders (2019), Pratt Institute, NYC, 6/10/19.
Naoto Hattori (BFA Illustration) was featured in “Hybrid Creatures with Oversized Eyes Reflect Imagined Landscapes in Surreal Paintings by Naoto Hattori,” Colossal, 9/15/19.
Lauren Redniss (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “The Most Exciting Movies Directed by Women Premiering at TIFF 2019,” Refinery 29 , 9/3/19.
Eric Rhein (MFA Fine Arts; BFA 1985 Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Eric Rhein: Lifelines,” Institute 193, Lexington, KY, 6/19-7/24/19.
2001
Jose Casado (MFA Computer Art) was featured in “11 Outdoor Installations to See in New York This Summer,” The New York Times, 6/21/19.
To submit items for consideration for Alumni Notes & Exhibitions, email
Dan Halm (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 1994 Illustration) was featured in “28 Self-Portraits Show the Beauty of Queer Creativity,” Out, 6/12/19.
Daina Higgins (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Cerulean Arts’ 7th Annual Juried Exhibition,” Cerulean Arts Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, 6/19-7/27/19.
Noah Landfield (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Contemporary Group Exhibition,” Findlay Galleries, NYC, 6/1-6/30/19.
Samantha Levin (BFA Fine Arts) curated the group exhibition “Black Is Such a Happy Color,” MF Gallery, NYC, 6/15-7/28/19.
Danwen Xing (MFA Photography and Related Media) had a solo exhibition, “She Says,” Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum, Chengdu, China, 11/9/19-2/29/20.
2002
Michael Alan (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Local Studio Confronts Artistic Censorship Head-On with New Exhibition,” Bushwick Daily, 6/13/19.
Marlena Buczek Smith (BFA Graphic Design) had work in the group exhibition “Mankind’s Fragile Heritage,” International Public Association Designer’s Central House, Moscow, Russia, 9/20-9/29/19.
Katrin Eismann (MFA Design) was featured in “The Visual Education of Katrin Eismann,” Explora, 8/14/19.
Nathan Fox (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) illustrated “The Legend of Super Cory,” Politico 6/21/19.
Mariam Ghani (MFA Photography and Related Media) had work in the group exhibition “We Refugees,” Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 6/28-10/20/19.
Timothy Mensching (BFA Illustration) had a solo exhibition, “This Marram,” Van Doren Waxter, NYC, 9/10-11/2/19.
Kate Neckel (MFA Computer Art) was featured in “Pearl Jam Guitarist Mike McCready’s Infinite Color and Sound Art Project Hits the Road,” Rolling Stone, 7/24/19.
Reka Nyari (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Ink Stories,” Galerie Claude Samuel, Paris, France, 6/6-6/30/19.
2003
Julianna Cox (BFA Animation) had a solo exhibition, “Small Marvels,” James Cox Gallery, NYC, 11/24-12/19/19.
John Hendrix (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was awarded the Emerson Electric Co. Excellence in Teaching Award, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, 11/17/19.
Natasha Jen (BFA Graphic Design) was featured in “Natasha Jen on Returning to School of Visual Arts and Confirming a Love of Book Design,” It’s Nice That, 9/5/19.
Yuko Shimizu (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “Yuko Shimizu’s Godzilla Box Set Illustrations Want to Make Us Spend Monstrous Money,” Digital Arts, 7/26/19.
2004
Rosson Crow (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Trust Fall,” The Hole, NYC, 11/21-12/28/19.
PAULA
Kira Nam Greene (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Women in Possession of Good Fortune,” Lyons Wier Gallery, NYC, 11/7-12/7/19.
Jeff Hoppa (MFA Fine Arts) screened Kaya Rooftop Films, NYC, 8/9/19.
Minos Papas (BFA Film and Video), producer and director of photography, screened a premiere of Slow Down: River to River, All Arts, NYC, 8/7/19.
Matthew Pillsbury (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was featured in “Photographs from the Extremities of the Earth,” The New York Times, 9/26/19.
2005
Ali Banisadr (BFA Illustration) had work exhibited alongside paintings by Hieronymus Bosch in “Bosch & Banisadr, Ali Banisadr: We Work in Shadows,” Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna, Austria, 9/6-12/1/19.
Lauren Castillo (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) illustrated a book that was selected as a 2019 finalist, The Kirkus Prize, 10/25/19.
Zackary Drucker (BFA Photography) was featured in “We Are Tough as Nails: LGBTQ Activists Reflect on 50 Years Since Stonewall,” Time, 6/20/19.
Karen Gibbons (MPS Art Therapy) had work in the group exhibition “Animalia,” Ann Street Gallery, Newburgh, NY, 11/18/19-1/11/20
Gillian Robespierre (BFA Film and Video) was featured in “m ss ng p eces Signs Filmmaker Gillian Robespierre,” Shots, 10/8/19.
Lorenzo Triburgo (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) screened Monumental Resistance: Stonewall (2019), Brooklyn Brewery, NYC, 6/27/19.
2006
Negar Ahkami (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Janet and Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize 2019 Finalists,” The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD, 6/15-8/11/19.
Michael Bilsborough (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) had a solo exhibition “Changing of the Guard,” Invisible-Exports, NYC, 7/5-7/14/19.
Ian Jones-Quartey (BFA Animation) was featured in “K.O. Creator Ian Jones-Quartey: ‘We Try Not to Have the Show Traffic in Cynicism,’” Cartoon Brew, 10/11/19.
Koren Shadmi (BFA Illustration) illustrated “How Did the Diner Menu Get So Long?”, The New York Times, 10/22/19.
Jeong Mee Yoon (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had a solo exhibition, “Pink and Blue Observation by Jeong Mee Yoon,” KAIST Gallery, Seoul, Korea, 8/29-10/17/19.
2007
Elizabeth Castaldo (BFA Fine Arts) gave a talk, “Celebrating Color,” Womenswork.art, Poughkeepsie, NY, 8/24/19.
Amy Elkins (BFA Photography) had work in the group exhibition “Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana,” Collins C. Diboll Art Gallery, Loyola University, New Orleans, LA, 8/26/19-1/19/20.
Katherine Moffett (BFA Graphic Design) illustrated “The 2019 National Book Awards Finalists,” Vanity Fair, 10/8/19.
2008
Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was featured in “The Art Stars of Entre Nous,” The Cut Portfolio, New York, 6/26/19.
Lynn Herring (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “XOX! Share the Love,” Gallery
Fifty 5, Kingston, NY, 10/11/19.
Sarah Palmer (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had a solo exhibition, “Outs and Ins,” Mrs., Maspeth, NY, 11/16/19-1/11/20
Jessica Ruliffson (BFA Illustration) published Invisible Wounds: Finding Peace After War (Fantagraphics Books, 2019).
Martin Wittfooth (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) had a solo exhibition, “A Retrospective,” Muroff-Kotler Visual Arts Gallery, Stone Ridge, NY, 9/12-10/18/19.
2009
Amber Boardman (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Crowd Scenes,” Chalk Horse, Sydney, Australia, 7/4-7/27/19.
Barbara Kalina (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had a solo exhibition, “From Behind the Documentarian’s Lens—Chelsea Music Festival, a Journey Through the Years,” St. Paul’s German Lutheran Church, NYC, 6/6-6/15/19.
John MacConnell (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) had work in the group exhibition “Batman Black and White: Sketch Covers Selected by Chip Kidd,” Society of Illustrators, NYC, 6/12-10/12/19.
Lissa Rivera (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was featured in “Rule Breakers: Lissa Rivera,” Don’t Take Pictures, 8/19/19.
Kimberly Sielbeck (BFA Illustration) was featured in “What to Do in New York Based on Your Astrological Sign,” Time Out, 7/23/19.
Trish Tillman (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Shore Leave,” Asya Geisberg Gallery, NYC, 11/7-12/20/19.
2010
Naoko Ito (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Saudade: Nothing That Is, Does Not Touch Something Else,” Art Festival Watou, Poperinge, Belgium, 6/29-9/2/19. Tarah Rhoda (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Agar Art Contest Winners Create Gorgeous Art from Live Bacteria,” National Geographic, 11/20/19.
Jason Bard Yarmosky (BFA Illustration) had a solo exhibition, “Lovers and Friends,” Double Diamond House, Westhampton, NY, 8/29-9/1/19.
2011
Bobby Doherty (BFA Photography) photographed “In Conversation: John Waters, The Pope of Trash, on Anna Wintour, Staying Youthful and Why Trump Ruined Camp,” Vulture, 6/28/19.w
Cynthia Hinant (MFA Fine Arts) was a panelist for the talk “New York New Wave: The Legacy of Feminist Art,” P.P.O.W. Gallery, NYC, 6/27/19. Jessica Honore (BFA Animation) was featured in “Enongo Doc Crowdfunds for Animation by Team of Black Women Artists,” Animation Magazine, 10/18/19.
Colleen Miller (MFA Interaction Design) was featured in “How Design Has Evolved from Sharpening Pixels to Product Strategy,” LBB Online, 11/18/19.
Signe Pierce (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “Signe Pierce,” Annka Kultys Gallery, London, UK, 6/6-7/6/19.
Julie Schenkelberg (MFA Fine Arts) was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Burke Prize, Museum of Arts and Design, NYC, 8/16/19.
ABOVE: JOHN FERRY (MFA 1994 Illustration as Visual Essay), ModernX2 #2 , 2019, oil on board. From the solo exhibition “John Ferry: Mid-Century Modern,” Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, 6/7-7/27/19.
RIGHT: SHARON ELIASSAF (MFA 2011 Fine Arts), Arrival of Diamond Planet , 2016, oil and spray paint on canvas. From the group exhibition “Plastic Garden,” Asya Geisberg Gallery, NYC, 7/11-8/16/19.
Anthony Toscani (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Toni Toscani: Daydreamers,” Massey Klein Gallery, NYC, 9/6-10/13/19.
Mary Young (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Arias Chromatic,” Clerestory Fine Art, Montclair, NJ, 6/20-8/2/19.
2012
Arsen Arzumanyan (BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) was interviewed in “How Ancient Rituals from Around the World Inspired Arsen Arzumanyan’s Avian Creation Myth Furnace of the Birds,” Directors Notes, 6/17/19.
Theodore Boyer (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Star Maps,” SHOW Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 10/19-11/3/19.
Ina Jang (MPS Fashion Photography; BFA 2010 Photography) photo-illustrated “The Unusual Tale of the Roaming Gallstones,” The New York Times, 9/11/19.
Anthony Kieren (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “12 Fab Illustrations From Fire Island’s Invasion of the Pines,” Fashion Week Daily, 7/8/19.
Ryan Koopmans (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was featured in “Photographer Ryan Koopmans Spent 10 Years Documenting the World’s Megacities from Above,” Creative Boom, 11/21/19.
Elektra KB (BFA Visual and Critical Studies) had work in the group exhibition “My Body
Is the House That We Live In,” Gibney, NYC, 9/25-10/10/19.
Peter Ash Lee (MPS Fashion Photography; BFA 2009 Photography) photographed musician Maggie Rogers for “Maggie Rogers on Calling Her Own Shots, Her Respect for Billie Eilish and What Comes After Heard It in a Past Life,” Teen Vogue, 6/3/19.
Laura Murray (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “#Pr0file,” Come Back Daily, NYC, 11/23/19.
Lorelei Ramirez (BFA Fine Arts) presented their performance, Weirdo Night, The Jewish Museum, NYC, 11/21/19.
Pacifico Silano (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had a solo exhibition, “Time Is an Ocean But It Ends at The Shore,” Rubber-Factory, NYC, 10/16-11/24/19.
Daria Tolstikova (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) led a workshop, “Telling Stories With Pictures,” Spruceton Inn, West Kill, NY, 8/4-8/7/19.
2013
Ben Grandgenett (BFA Design) was selected as one of the 2019 Ascenders, The Type Directors Club, 8/13/19.
Che Min Hsiao (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 2011 Animation) had work in the group exhibition “Urban Tribes,” El Taller Art Center, NYC, 6/8-8/3/19.
Scott Kalberer (BFA Film and Video) screened Placeholders (2019), Golden Door Film Festival, Jersey City, NJ, 9/18/19.
Keith Negley (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) illustrated “Stress Can Make You Sick. Take Steps to Reduce It,” The New York Times, 10/8/19.
Antonio Pulgarin (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “I Stand Here, Like the Sun That Frightens the Cold,” Kingsborough Art Museum, NYC, 10/30-12/4/19.
Ilona Szwarc (BFA Photography) was featured in “Six Women Artists Furthering Cindy Sherman’s Vision,” Artsy, 6/24/19.
Brian Whiteley (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Beasts,” Arts+Leisure, NYC, 11/16/19-1/5/20.
2014
Justin Aversano (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “Twin Flames,” The Storefront Project, NYC, 8/21-8/25/19.
Graciela Cassel (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Weather the Weather,” New York Hall of Science, NYC, 9/10/19-1/10/20.
Irene Chin (BFA Fine Arts) screened The Lost Arcade (2019), “Devin Kenny: Rootkits Rootwork” Film Series, MoMA PS1, 8/16/19.
Matthew Farina (MFA Art Criticism and Writing) had a solo exhibition, “Nearing Paradise,” Gallery Madison Park, NYC, 9/12-10/1/19.
2014
Corey Olsen (BFA Photography) photographed “Jeff Goldblum: Be Yourself, Whatever That Is,” The Face, 8/2/19.
Jose Maximiliano Paredes Sanchez (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Spalding,” Open Source Gallery, NYC, 09/13-10/19/19.
Oona Tempest (BFA Visual & Critical Studies) was featured in “Meet the Woman Making Waves in New York’s Sushi Chef World,” Edible Manhattan, 6/17/19.
2015
Angela Alba (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Feminist, Millennial Artist on Bodies, Hair & Gender,” Chronogram 8/1/19.
Yasi Alipour (BFA Photography) was featured in “Mark Dion with Yasi Alipour,” The Brooklyn Rail, 10/1/19.
Brandy Bajalia (MFA Fine Arts) presented their installation, Canopy, Liberty Park, NYC, 10/3-11/14/19.
Nadia DeLane (MFA Visual Narrative) was featured in “Live Talk with Film Premieres— Home & Utica,” Artfix Daily, 10/1/19.
Kathie Halfin (MFA Fine Arts) co-curated the group exhibition “The Syncope,” Bronx River Art Center, NYC, 9/14-10/19/19.
Zachary Krall (BFA Photography) was featured in “The Music You’re Dancing To? It’s Code,” The New York Times, 10/4/19.
Christy Lee (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Hello Kitty’s 45th Anniversary Group Show,” Corey Helford Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 6/29/19.
Natalya Margolin (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Home,” Vulcan Muse Gallery, Lorton, VA, 6/12-8/11/19.
Sasha Prood (MFA Design) was featured in “Library News: Explore Art in Many Ways at Swarthmore Public Library This Summer,” Daily Times, 7/8/19.
Tatiane Santa Rosa (MFA Art Criticism and Writing) curated the group exhibition “Young Latinx Artists 24: Buen Vivir/Vivir Bien,” Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX, 6/21/19.
2016
Shane Boddington (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “An American Dream,” Room Gallery, Mill Valley, CA, 11/15/19-1/5/20.
Alexander Cassetti (BFA Photography and Video) had work in the group exhibition “Atopia,” Greene House Gallery, NYC, 10/5-11/16/19.
Luiz Felipe d’Orey (BFA Illustration) was featured in “Luiz D’Orey at Elga Wimmer PCC,” Whitehot, 11/6/19.
Delano Dunn (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Brief but Spectacular: Delano Dunn,” PBS News Hour, 11/14/19.
Dozie Kanu (BFA Film) had a solo exhibition “Dozie Kanu: Function,” The Studio Museum, NYC, 11/15/19-3/15/20.
Georgia Lale (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “The Debate,” Art and Social Activism Festival, NYC, 10/5/19.
Netta Laufer (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had work in the group exhibition
International Alternative Processes Competition, 11/12/19.
Kyle Hislip (MPS Digital Photography) wrote “Coming of Age with Autism,” NJ.com, 9/1/19.
Cindy Kang (BFA Illustration) was featured in “It’s the Only Thing That Makes Me Feel Alive: Cindy Kang on Her Emotive Illustrations,” It’s Nice That, 6/12/19.
Hyeonwoo Lee (BFA Photography and Video) was featured in “Women Become Genre: DJ Foresight,” Vogue Korea, 8/1/19.
Seunghee Lee (BFA Design) was selected as one of the Student Communications Design Winners, The Type Directors Club, 8/8/19. w Pamela Nasr (MPS Directing) was featured in “Get to Know Our November Cover Star and Lebanese Film Director, Pam Nasr,” Emirates Woman, 11/19/19.
Philipp Rabovsky (MFA Art Practice) released a YouTube series, Capital A , 8/30/19.
Sarah von Puttkammer (BFA Fine Arts) co-curated the group exhibition “OUTlines, Art Show Aims to Target Commodification of Queerness,” One Art Space, NYC, 6/23-6/27/19.
2019
Nan Cao (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) had work in the group exhibition “I’m Just Too Hyper to Fall Asleep,” The Art League Gallery, Alexandria, VA, 9/10-10/6/19.
Asher Horowitz (BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) was featured in “Short Pick of the Day: Why Z? by Asher Horowitz,” Cartoon Brew, 6/29/19.
Junyan Hou (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was featured in “Bowery Teahouse Invites You to Relax the Nerves and Admire Its Art Shows,” Bedford + Bowery, 6/5/19.
“Camels in the Air,” Jerusalem Design Week, Jerusalem, Israel, 6/13-6/20/19.
Yoon Jung Lee (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Follow Your Flow,” Gallery iLHO, Seoul, Korea, 8/21-8/27/19.
Jessica Pettway (BFA Photography and Video) wrote the article “Chidera ‘The Slumflower’ Eggerue Doesn’t Care if You Call Her a Gold Digger,” Salty, 9/13/19.
Bat Ami Rivlin (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Landmarks,” Banhof Gallery, NYC, 6/14-6/23/19.
Benjamin Sperry (BFA Visual & Critical Studies) had a solo exhibition, “The Nothing Series and Pooka Up Close,” The Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington, DE, 6/7-6/30/19.
2017
Jason Isolini (BFA Photography and Video) was featured in “This Artist Is Hacking Google to Create Surreal Street View Art,” Vice, 6/19/19.
Andrew Jilka (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Meditations,” team (gallery, inc.), NYC, 11/14-12/21/19.
Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi (MA Curatorial Practice) co-curated the group exhibition “Celebration of Our Enemies: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection,” Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 6/9-9/8/19.
Sinjun Bergen Strom (BFA Photography and Video) gave a talk, “Exotic,” Picture Room, NYC, 9/14/19.
2018
Rose Brock (BFA Photography and Video) was featured in “Fifteen, a Photo Essay,” The Interval, 6/3/19.
Kaitlyn Danielson (BFA Photography and Video) was selected as the first-place winner,
Kinza Kasher (MFA Interaction Design) was featured in “Leoplus USA Wins Lyfebulb-Celgene 2019 Addressing Unmet Needs in MS: An Innovation Challenge,” PR Newswire, 6/14/19.
India McKinney (MPS Directing) screened The Truck (2019), Urbanworld Film Festival, NYC, 9/21/19.
Jason Mena (MFA Art Practice) and his volunteer work with Photo Requests from Solitary were featured in “What Do People in Solitary Confinement Want to See?”, The New Yorker, 7/8/19.
Courtney Menard (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 2014 Illustration) illustrated “Keeping Anxiety at Bay by ‘Hitting the Squares,’” The New York Times, 8/28/19.
Dana Robinson (MFA Fine Arts) participated in Playground Art Fair, NYC, 10/27/19.
Zachary Thompson (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Queer Artists in Their Own Words: Zac Thompson the Genderfuck Drag Queen,” Hyperallergic, 6/1/19.
Isa Wang (MFA Art Practice) had work in a solo exhibition, “Both Sides Now,” Chinatown Soup, NYC, 7/16-7/21/19.
Zitong Zhu (MFA Fine Arts; BFA 2017 Fine Arts) was featured in “Saatchi Art Rising Stars of 2019 List,” Flaunt, 9/16/19.
ABOVE Four of the more than 700 original artworks by late designer and SVA faculty member Ivan Chermayeff that are now part of the collections at the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives at SVA. Photo by Diana Egnatz.
Last year, the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives at SVA received more than 700 pieces of original art by legendary designer and longtime College faculty member Ivan Chermayeff, who died in 2017. The resulting Ivan Chermayeff Collection—consisting largely of personal work, made independently—will exist separately from the Chermayeff and Geismar Collection, which comprises the duo’s collaborative professional efforts.
Chermayeff’s daughters, Catherine, Maro and Sasha, and his son, Sam, made the gift, choosing a variety of professional and personal work from a vast archive—whether at work or home, Chermayeff was a prolific, instinctive image-maker. Recently, Maro, founder and chair of the MFA Social Documentary Film program at SVA, spoke about a few pieces in the collection, and about her father’s creative process and idiosyncrasies.
1. Ivan Chermayeff, Eric Standing, 1999, mixed media collage with glove.
“My father had a whole studio that was just scraps—he had drawers full of foils from the tops of wine bottles—and one of his favorite things to collect and make art with were gloves that were run over by cars. He loved the effect of how they got squished. But they couldn’t be any kind of glove, they had to be leather, and they were usually worker’s gloves. To him, for some reason, they looked like people.
“He collected them for decades. Looking for gloves was a childhood job. We’d give them to him for Christmas. Once, he found a run-over glove that was giving the finger. He was so excited!”
2. Ivan Chermayeff, American Artists, 1970, lithograph
“There’s a whole series of calligraphic works—he would write out the names of actors he liked or, like here, lists of artists from different countries. At a certain point, he stopped making them. These don’t go much beyond the ’70s.
“He created his own style of calligraphy. It was deliberately illegible—you weren’t really supposed to read it, it was more about how it looked. People would ask my father to write out invitations and things like that for them, and then complain that they couldn’t read them.”
BELOW Chermayeff (right) with longtime design partner Tom Geismar.
Photos courtesy Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv.
3. Ivan Chermayeff, Untitled, undated, collage.
“My father made many children’s books about animals, in partnership with my sister Catherine—Furry Facts, Scaly Facts, Feathery Facts—but he especially loved making pictures of elephants. I think it was because they were so prehistoric, but so sweet-natured and kind. For years, he did the posters and identity work for the Big Apple Circus. We went to every single season of it as children.”
Ivan Chermayeff, Young Girl in Costume, 2001, collage, marker and acrylic on paper; collage incorporates a 1963 drawing by Catherine Chermayeff.
“Dad made collages that use bills from hotels or restaurants, letters from friends, rocks or shells from the beach, anything.
“He believed that children were the best artists, and would say his own art was not as good as the pure art of a child. All of my and my siblings’ art hung on the walls, and it had pride of place. It would be over the couch, not hidden away somewhere.
“In everything, he treated his children as his best friends, and we were his best friends. It was a gift to feel so respected and acknowledged. Everything we had to say, every opinion we had, he treated as expert advice, and the conversation was never-ending.”
Maro Chermayeff, chair of MFA Social Documentary Film, is a documentary filmmaker and co-founder and partner of the production company Show of Force.
LEFT Ivan Chermayeff at work; poster for "The Masters Series: Ivan Chermayeff," a 1995 exhibition at SVA.
gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our
