Spring/Summer 2022 by SVA Visual Arts Journal

jou rna l VISUAL ARTS

SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS MAGAZINE

SPRING/SUMMER 2022

SP R I N G /SUMME R 2022 FROM THE PRESIDENT | 2 MYSVA | 3

Meet the alumnus–artist behind this issue’s cover

CHAPTER AND VERSE

“Music held such a sacred place in my life.”

SVA CLOSE UP | 4

News and events from around the College WHAT’S IN STORE | 12

Products and services by SVA artists and entrepreneurs

CREATIVE LIFE | 20

SVA Career Development’s Fulbright assistance program PORTFOLIO: JAMES (JAMIE) NARES | 22

PORTFOLIO

“It’s like a little trace, or something.”

The artist and alumnus captures and recalibrates motion SPOTLIGHT: PHILADELPHIA | 34

FROM TOP: COUR TESY OF BOOK OF LOVE /RHINO RECORDS (POR TR AIT BY FR ANK OCKENFEL S 3); COUR TESY OF J A M E S N A R E S A N D K A S M I N G A L L E R Y ; C O U R T E S Y O F I N T E R N AT I O N A L L I B R A R Y O F F A S H I O N R E S E A R C H .

Four alumni living and working in Pennsylvania’s largest city CHAPTER AND VERSE | 40

The SVA alumni of synth-pop’s Book of Love look back CLOTHES READING | 48

How a late alumnus’s collection of fashion ephemera became an institution A RARE BIRD | 54

The alumni-founded Titmouse animation studio Q+A: MICHELE WASHINGTON | 60

The alumnus and design multihyphenate on her new podcast FROM THE ARCHIVES | 64

Designers

ALUMNI AFFAIRS | 66

For Your Benefit A Message From the Director SVA Alumni Society Awards Donors Alumni Notes and Exhibitions In Memoriam

48 CLOTHES READING

“The space was filled with books and magazines and paper.” SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL Spring/Summer 2022 Volume 30, Number 1

EDITORIAL STAFF Joyce Rutter Kaye, editorial director Greg Herbowy, editor Tricia Tisak, copy editor

VISUAL ARTS PRESS, LTD Anthony P. Rhodes, executive creative director Gail Anderson, creative director Brian E. Smith, design director Mark Maltais, art director Jennifer Liang, assistant director

FROM THE PR ESIDENT

COVER FRONT Cannaday Chapman,

I’ll Be Drawing You, 2022, pen and ink, digital color. BACK James Nares, Tetragram, 1999, oil on linen, 109 x 92 in. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery. INSIDE James Nares, brushes, varying years, materials and dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

ADVERTISING SALES 212.592.2207

CONTRIBUTORS Katheryn Brock Cannaday Chapman Maeri Ferguson Alexander Gelfand Beth Kleber Raquel Lanieri Vanessa Machir Michelle Mackin Sean Morton Jane Nuzzo Miranda Pierce Anuj Shrestha Anne Quito © 2022, Visual Arts Press, Ltd. Visual Arts Journal is published twice a year by SVA External Relations. School of Visual Arts 209 East 23rd Street New York, NY 10010-3994 David Rhodes PRESIDENT

little more than a month after this issue’s publication, SVA will end the 2021 – 2022 academic year with our first in-person commencement exercises since the COVID-19 pandemic began. A few weeks later, the College will hold a second ceremony, to celebrate its classes of 2020 and 2021. This will conclude our first full year of (mostly) in-person instruction since 2018 – 2019 and usher in our 75th anniversary, which will start in earnest this fall. Seeing the campus fill again with students, faculty and staff these past months has been heartening, to say the least. It has not been quite like old times: The winter’s Omicron surge necessitated a brief return to remote learning in January, and our mask, vaccine and booster mandates, as of late February, remain in effect. But as we approach the most significant milestone in our still-young institution’s existence, I believe we are heading in the right direction. I hope you enjoy this issue of the Visual Arts Journal.

Anthony P. Rhodes EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

instagram.com/svanyc schoolofvisualarts.tumblr.com twitter.com/sva_news youtube.com/user/svanewyorkcity TO READ THE VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL ONLINE, VISIT: ISSUU.COM/SVAVISUALARTSJOURNAL

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VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

pr e si de n t school of v isua l a rts PHOTO BY NIR ARIELI

facebook.com/schoolofvisualarts

MYSVA Cannaday Chapman BFA 2008 Illustration cannadaychapman.com

For this issue’s MySVA assignment, Visual Arts Journal turned over its cover to illustrator Cannaday Chapman. His piece, titled I’ll Be Drawing You, captures a subway scene that just about every New Yorker has encountered at one time or another: an artist on the train, sketching portraits of her fellow riders. (His other cover ideas, all centered on the theme of SVA in the spring, can be seen in the rough sketches at the top right of this page.) Chapman—whose clients include Airbnb, Google, The New York Times, The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine Portrait photograph by BRIT TA N Y M A RIEL HUDA K .

and Rolling Stone—grew up in Rochester, New York, and for the past two years has made his home in Berlin, fulfilling a longtime dream to live and work abroad. But his most formative years as an artist were spent in Cleveland, where he worked for seven years at American Greetings, illustrating cards in all types of styles, for all sorts of holidays and occasions. (Halloween was his favorite.) “The city was very good to me, and its art scene was very good to me,” he says. In late 2019, just before he left, local nonprofit Hingetown Culture Works hired him to paint a 107-foot-long mural— Chapman’s first such work—on the side of a downtown building. Earlier this year, Chapman illustrated a multipart series on the U.S. and France’s exploitative history with Haiti for The New York Times. His art can also be seen in All Star: How Larry Doby Smashed the Color Barrier in Baseball, published in January by Clarion Books, and Feed Your Mind: A Story of August Wilson, published in 2019 by Abrams Books for Young Readers.

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CLOSE UP

News and events from around the College

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VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Bearing Witness

n the fall, SVA will honor acclaimed photographer Lynsey Addario with its 32nd annual Master Series Award and Exhibition. Established in 1988 by the College’s founder, Silas Rhodes, the Masters Series honors groundbreaking visual communicators whose diverse and multidisciplinary works are widely recognized and celebrated, but whose names are less well-known by the general public. Addario’s show, originally planned for the fall of 2020, has been delayed for the past two years by COVID-19. Born and raised in Connecticut, Lynsey Addario moved to Argentina after graduating from college in the 1990s, beginning her photojournalism career, despite having no prior experience, at the Buenos Aires Herald. Her work has since taken her all over the world, often to places riven by armed conflict, natural disaster and other humanitarian crises. She has photographed the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq; asylum-seeking Syrian refugees; wildfires in California; flooding in South Sudan; English funeral homes during the coronavirus pandemic; Afghanistan before and during America’s 20-year war in the country; and, most recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Her work often centers on women’s welfare, shining a light on the borderless

scourges of gender-based violence, rape as a weapon of war and maternal mortality. Addario’s photography and writing have appeared in publications such as The Christian Science Monitor, National Geographic, The New York Times and Time, and in the books Of Love & War (2018) and It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War (2015), her best-selling memoir. Her many distinctions include a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize, and honorary doctorates from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (her alma mater), Bates College and University of York in the United Kingdom. In January of this year, the National Geographic Society awarded her its Eliza Scidmore Award for Outstanding Storytelling. “The Masters Series: Lynsey Addario” will open the fall 2022 exhibition schedule at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th floor. The dates and times for the exhibition, the reception and awards ceremony, and an artist’s talk will be announced at a later date. For more information, visit sva.edu/ events. [Maeri Ferguson and Greg Herbowy]

CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT Over the

course of her decorated photojournalism career, 2022 SVA Masters Series honoree Lynsey Addario has covered the Afghanistan War, wildfires in California, refugee crises, flooding in South Sudan, the Iraq War and gender-based violence in eastern Congo. Images courtesy of Lynsey Addario.

ABOVE Photographer

and 2022 SVA Masters Series honoree Lynsey Addario. Portrait by Sam Taylor Johnson, courtesy of Lynsey Addario.

SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

CLOSE UP News and events from around the College

An Authorial Voice

he renowned and best-selling writer Roxane Gay will be the keynote speaker at SVA’s 47th annual commencement exercises, to be held Sunday, May 22, 1:00pm, at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. This will be the College’s first in-person graduation ceremony since 2019. The 2020 and 2021 events were held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic; a special ceremony celebrating those classes will be held on Monday, June 27, 1:00pm, also at Radio City. Gay’s writing traverses genres and forms. Her books include her debut short-story collection, Ayiti (2011); the novel An Untamed State (2014); essay collections Bad Feminist (2014) and Difficult Women (2017); and Hunger (2017), a memoir. Her work has appeared in the Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Short Stories and Best Sex Writing anthologies, and in literary publications such as McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American and Virginia Quarterly Review. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times; primary writer of the Marvel comic-book series World of Wakanda (2017); writer and editor of The Audacity, an e-newsletter on the Substack platform; and is currently developing several book, television and film projects. In addition to her printed work, Gay hosts a podcast, The Roxane Gay

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VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Writer and 2022 SVA Commencement speaker Roxane Gay. Photo courtesy of Roxane Gay.

Agenda, in which she discusses topics like feminism, sexuality, race, culture, politics and food with an array of guests, and is currently teaching at Occidental College in Los Angeles as the institution’s inaugural presidential professor. Though her own chosen medium is language, “visual art is a big part of my life,” Gay says. “I find it to be incredibly inspiring and very useful to my creative practice because I love seeing the risks that artists are willing to take.” (Participating in SVA’s commencement also holds a personal significance for her: Her wife, Debbie Millman, chairs the College’s MPS Branding program.) “I think it’s always exciting to talk to younger people and to people who are about to embark on another exciting journey,” Gay says of addressing the class of 2022. “I think that college graduation is a beginning.” The 2022 commencement will celebrate the achievements of some 1,130 bachelor’s and master’s degree candidates enrolled in the College’s 30 degree programs. The exercises will also stream live online, and be archived thereafter, at sva.edu/commencement. [MF]

Openings Day

n March, SVA Career Development held its second virtual career fair for graduate students and fourth-year undergraduates. Operated via the Symplicity and Zoom platforms, the online fair was adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It maintains the typical career-fair setup— candidates meet one-on-one with recruiters for interviews and portfolio reviews—with two differences: Employers don’t need to be in New York to participate and can host info sessions during the event. Ahead of this year’s fair, Career Development offered virtual workshops on résumé basics, interview prep and platform walk-throughs. Although 2022 numbers were not available by press time, attendance for the 2021 fair was strong, with 196 students and 40 employers— including Penguin Random House, Dreamworks Animation, Fantasma Toys, FuseFX, Hornet Animation and Nickelodeon—participating. To learn more about SVA Career Development resources, visit sva.edu/career. [GH]

Cold Comfort Located in the SVA Student Center, the community fridge and pantry are available to students whenever the center is open, and offer fruits, vegetables, eggs, bread, rice, pasta and granola bars, as well as boxed salads, sandwiches and wraps donated from the local Trader Joe’s. The fridge stock is maintained with a “take what you need, leave what you can” approach, and funded primarily through donations to the Visual Arts Foundation. “I’ve seen a lot of struggle,” Van Meter says. “By opening a community fridge and providing

HEARD AT SVA

ast fall, Kalani Van Meter, a second-year BFA Animation student and president of the College’s Indigenous Student Union, proposed an SVA “community fridge”—a free resource providing healthy food for students in need—to the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Student Affairs offices. With the offices’ support and the backing of the Visual Arts Foundation, the College’s nonprofit foundation, Van Meter’s idea became reality in late November, shortly after Thanksgiving.

NOTABLE QUOTES FROM COLLEGE EVENTS

accessible healthy food options to SVA students, I hope to lift some of the burdens of being a working student in the city, so that someone won’t have to worry about where their next meal will come from again.” To learn more about the community fridge, follow it on Instagram, @svacommunityfridge. To contribute, visit visualartsfoundation.org; type “community fridge” in the comment box of the donate screen to ensure that funds will be properly allocated. [Rodrigo Perez]

BFA Animation student Kalani Van Meter (top), fellow students and Student Affairs Director Bill Martino stock the College’s new community fridge. Logo by Van Meter.

“Community design—done by the community, for the community— is actually about relocating the power and the decisionmaking away from the individual.” —Sloan Leo (faculty, MFA Design for Social Innovation and MFA Products of Design), founder and CEO, Flox Studio. From “Our House: Claiming ‘Home’ Through Art and Design,” hosted by SVA Continuing Education.

“Yes, there is enough work for all of us. Yes, you can support somebody else and that’s not going to take away from you at all. That’s some of the work I’m most proud of.” —Polly Irungu, journalist, photographer and founder of Black Women Photographers. From a talk hosted by MPS Digital Photography.

SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

CLOSE UP News and events from around the College

SVA Milton Glaser (PART 2)

s mentioned in the previous Visual Arts Journal, SVA has dedicated its 2021 – 2022 academic year to celebrating the life and work of the late designer, longtime faculty member and former acting chairman of the College’s board, Milton Glaser, who died in 2020. Milton: The Legacy of Milton Last December, “SVA Glaser,” an exhibition covering the designer’s upbringing and career, opened at the SVA Gramercy Gallery. The show was created by 3D Design Chair Kevin O’Callaghan (BFA 1980 Graphic Design), who incorporated Glaser’s typefaces, 3D displays and the extensive holdings of the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives, which is housed in the SVA Library. Concurrently, an exhibition of videos and wall texts of Glaser quotes was on view at the SVA Flatiron Windows and SVA Flatiron Project Space, designed by Matthew Iacovelli (BFA 2019 Design), assistant to the chair, BFA Advertising and BFA Design. The exhibitions’ other organizers included Gail Anderson (BFA 1984 Graphic Design), chair of BFA Advertising and BFA Design and creative director of the Visual Arts Press, SVA’s inhouse design studio; Beth Kleber, the College’s head archivist; and Brian E. Smith (MFA 2006 Design), BFA Design and Art History faculty member and design director of the Visual Arts Press. The second issue of the Glaser Gazette, a limited publication produced by the Visual Arts Press—dedicated to chronicling Glaser’s achievements, influence and idiosyncrasies—was distributed on campus at the start of the spring 2022 semester; two more issues are due later this year. (PDFs of the Glaser Gazette are also available on sva. Milton” banner edu.) And the “SVA unveiled last September, featuring a portrait of Glaser by photographer Michael Somoroff, will hang outside the College’s 209 East 23rd Street building through the summer. [GH]

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VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

“SVA Milton” installation photographs by Fana Feng (MFA 2017 Photography, Video and Related Media).

SVA’s winter/ spring 2022 poster, by faculty member and alumnus Peter Hristoff.

Peter’s Gabriel

rtist Peter Hristoff (BFA 1981 Fine Arts)—a longtime SVA faculty member who teaches in the BFA Design, BFA Fine Arts and BFA Visual & Critical Studies departments, as well as the Continuing Education division—created the first 2022 poster in SVA’s long-running “subway series,” an advertising campaign created for display in New York City’s subway stations. Hristoff’s contribution could be seen on platforms throughout the boroughs starting in February; a summer 2022 poster, by BFA Illustration faculty member Marcos Chin, is set to begin its run in June. The Hristoff poster’s image—the silhouette of a man holding a bouquet of tulips like a megaphone or horn, announcing the news

of spring—comes from one of his online drawing classes from last year. Hristoff often gives imaginative prompts and props to the figure models he works with, and will

occasionally draw alongside his students to engage and encourage them. “The silhouette is something I’ve worked with for years, and tulips are also a

favorite subject of mine,” he says. “Tulip mania”—an irrational runup and subsequent crash in tulip-bulb prices in 17th-century Europe—“was like an early version of cryptocurrency speculation.” Working with Peter Kruty Editions in Brooklyn, Hristoff created a series of five letterpress images based on the model-drawing session, choosing the pose for the poster for its “heraldic” and joyful quality, emphasized by the flowers’ transition from black to red—an effect achieved in the printmaking process, rather than digitally altered after the fact. In March, Hristoff presented “Memento Istanbul,” an autobiographical exhibition about his Bulgarian family’s history and migration to Turkey in the early 20th century, at the Yapi Kredi Cultural Center in Istanbul. And in May, C.A.M. Gallery, Istanbul, will present “Flower Passage,” a solo show of new work. [GH]

S C H O O L O F VI S UAL A RTS

INSIDE

Gazette

}

The Assistant

Steven Heller interviews one of Glaser’s last assistants, Ignacio Serrano

4 Silas H. Rhodes A magisterial essay on Glaser from the founder of SVA

Vl.2

I NY: The logo that won’t quit for the city that never sleeps

Iconic Works One look and you know: “It’s a Milton!”

Highlights of Glaser’s best work on the glossy page

S VA S P E C I A L T R I B U T E

Tributes from seven former students

And More

From the Archives Early sketches and finished pieces

Magazine Revolution

In His Own Words Glaser’s timeless commencement speech to the Class of 1979

Remembering Milton

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Art by MFA Visual Narrative students and new scholarship recipients Oret Peña (top left, below, bottom left) and Laura Brown (middle left, bottom right).

CLOSE UP News and events from around the College

HEARD AT SVA

NOTABLE QUOTES FROM COLLEGE EVENTS

“How can we imagine institutions as not monolithic, but potentially infrastructure that we could leverage in service of social movements?” —Beka Economopoulos, co-founder and director, Not an Alternative/ The Natural History Museum. From a talk hosted by MA Curatorial Practice.

Brain Trust

n February, SVA and the Visual Arts Foundation, the nonprofit that provides SVA student scholarships, announced a partnership with the studio Braintreehouse, creator of the Sketchboard Pro iPad stand, to offer a new

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scholarship for MFA Visual Narrative students. The Sketchboard Pro scholarship, which will be awarded to two students each year in support of their thesis projects, comprises $2,500, an iPad Pro, a package of Braintreehouse artist’s

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

tools, including the Sketchboard Pro, and access to professional mentors. The first scholarship recipients are Laura Brown and Oret Peña, who are both in their final year of the threeyear, low-residency MFA program. [MF]

“You have to have doses of encouragement. You’re going to be slammed down most of the time, but you have to have the confidence to get through those and have islands of encouragement that you swim to, to get you through the dark times.” —Alexis Rockman (BFA 1985 Fine Arts), artist. From a talk hosted by SVA Career Development and MFA Fine Arts.

Coming Attractions For more information on SVA events, visit sva.edu/events. SVA Shows 2022

Screenings and exhibitions featuring work by graduating students in various disciplines. Online and various locations through September. Full schedule at sva.edu/ svashows. Practice Lecture Series

MFA Art Practice hosts online talks by arts professionals. Tuesdays, June 21 through July 26, 12:30pm ET. Full schedule at artpractice. sva.edu. Summer Residency Programs Open Studios

Featuring work by artists in SVA Continuing Education’s summer residencies. Wednesday, June 29 and August 3, 6:00 – 9:00pm. 133/141 West 21st Street. Juried Exhibitions

Two themed exhibitions of SVA student work, selected from the annual SVA Galleries call for entries. Thursday, August 4, through Monday, August 22. SVA Flatiron Gallery, 133/141 West 21st Street, and SVA Gramercy Gallery, 209 East 23rd Street. After School Special 2022

Screenings and talks with SVA alumni working in animation, film and television. Week of September 19. SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street.

Special Appearances

T FROM TOP Fiorucci Walls (1983), by Angel Ortiz and SVA alumnus Keith Haring, on view at New York City Center; banners by SVA alumnus Chemin Hsiao for the Noguchi Museum; mural by SVA alumnus and faculty member Yuko Shimizu for The Hugh. Courtesy of Paula Lobo, Chemin Hsiao and Eric Vitale/The Hugh.

hree noteworthy projects featuring work by SVA alumni have been recent bright spots at the city’s arts institutions and gathering spaces, as New York’s cultural and public life continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Audiences at dance performances held during the New York City Center’s 2021 – 2022 season have been treated to a viewing of Fiorucci Walls (1983), a collaborative work by artists Angel Ortiz (a.k.a. LA II) and the late Keith Haring (1979 Fine Arts) on display in the Manhattan venue’s Shuman Lounge. Originally created as part of an installation for fashion designer Elio Fiorucci’s store in Milan, the painting is now held by a contemporary art museum in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The City Center opened viewing to the general public for four days last fall. Also last fall: The Hugh, a 30,000-squarefoot public space and food hall in the midtown

skyscraper formerly known as the Citigroup building, opened its doors. The Hugh was designed by Bentel & Bentel, the architecture firm of BFA Interior Design Chair Dr. Carol Bentel, and features a permanent mural by BFA Illustration faculty member Yuko Shimizu (MFA 2003 Illustration as Visual Essay). (Additionally, for its opening weeks, The Hugh hosted two exhibitions of SVA student work, both of them curated by 3D Design Chair and BFA 1980 Graphic Design alumnus Kevin O’Callaghan.) And in November, the Noguchi Museum in Queens, dedicated to preserving and celebrating the work of artist Isamu Noguchi, unveiled a series of outdoor banners, titled “Dandelions Know,” by Chemin Hsiao (MFA 2013 Illustration as Visual Essay). Hsiao’s work, aimed at raising awareness of the pandemic-fueled rise in anti-Asian racism, was chosen in an open-call competition and will be on view outside the museum through the spring. [GH]

SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

Putting Green MINI-GOLF

WHAT’S IN STORE

The latest from SVA entrepreneurs: books, movies, products and more

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VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Adults, $5 – $10 Children and seniors, $2 – $5 River Street and North 1st Street, Brooklyn puttinggreenbk.org A new attraction opened last summer along the north Brooklyn waterfront. Putting Green, a climate change–themed mini-golf course created by real-estate development company Two Trees, offers 18 holes designed by environmental advocacy organizations, city agencies, local schools, community groups and, notably, two SVA alumni and one department chair. Paul Amenta (MFA 2000 Fine Arts), founder of SiTE:LAB, an organization that executes temporary public-art projects and site-specific installations with an emphasis on reviving vacant urban spaces, was invited to collaborate with fellow artist Blane De St. Croix on two designs. “Ice Melt,” at the ninth hole, sends putters through a treacherous path of cracking “ice” made from repurposed plastic bottles, evoking fast-melting Arctic glaciers. At the 10th hole, “Forest Fires” players move from a lush green to parched earth and finally into a forest fire, accompanied by a soundtrack of crackling flames. Marina Zurkow (BFA 1985 Fine Arts), co-founder of the Dear Climate collective, collaborated with fellow collective member Una Chaudhuri, artist Taryn Urushido and architect Blake Global on “Whale Fall Feast” at the second hole, creating a whale carcass out of used plastic bags and industrial fishing garbage (nets, buoys, traps) to raise awareness about ocean biodiversity decline. “We thought a whale carcass would make an excellent mini-golf hole: It’s big; it’s vivid; it’s sculptural,” Zurkow says. “A whale that dies and falls to the bottom of the ocean floor becomes a feast for myriad creatures.”

MFA Fine Arts Chair Mark Tribe, not a mini-golf fan, first dismissed the proposal when approached by Two Trees. But the idea of using something so seemingly anodyne “as a way to make the imminent danger of climate change viscerally palpable,” he says, lingered in his mind. His “Higher Ground,” at the fourth hole, presents a near-future Manhattan that has succumbed to rising sea levels. Players putt from Washington Heights down to Wall Street, surrounded by submerged city landmarks. “You can’t play it without seeing what will be underwater by the end of the century if we don’t decarbonize now,” he says. The Putting Green mini-golf course is open from spring through fall. For more information, visit puttinggreenbk.org. [Maeri Ferguson]

New Kid: We Fit Together JIGSAW PUZZLE

$16.99 Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed As fans of the best-selling New Kid and Class Act graphic novels by Jerry Craft (BFA 1984 Cartooning) wait for the third installment in the series—which follows teens confronting issues of race, class and coming of age at an exclusive New York City private school— they can while away some time with this 450-piece puzzle. The design features new art by Craft and a box that doubles as storage for keepsakes. [Greg Herbowy]

Brooklyn’s Putting Green features work by SVA MFA Fine Arts Chair Mark Tribe (below left, foreground) and the Dear Climate collective, cofounded by alumnus Marina Zurkow (below right). Courtesy of Two Trees Management.

SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

WHAT’S IN STORE

Alberta’s Pizza PIZZA TRUCK

Personal pies, $9 – $15 Various locations, Pittsburgh albertaspizzapgh.com As a college student and then young graduate living in New York, Beau Mitall (BFA 2000 Fine Arts) fell in love with the city’s world-class pizza culture. When he and his wife moved to Cape Town, South Africa, to open a café in the early 2000s, he found himself missing the ready availability of a Neapolitan-style pie. So he began making his own for family and friends, continuing the practice even after returning to New York a few years later. In 2015, Mitall moved back to his hometown of Pittsburgh with his family. He opened his own pizza truck a year later, naming it after his late mother, Alberta. Alberta’s menu changes daily, offering everything from a classic margherita to more inventive options like “Electric Banana,” named after the Pittsburgh punk-rock club and topped with gorgonzola and banana peppers. To date, Mitall has made each pizza himself—though he may need help soon: He hopes to open a storefront location in the near future. [Michelle Mackin] 14 |

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Compottery Terra Blocks

COMPOSTER–PLANTERS Two pots and coco coir, $260 compottery.com

ABOVE

Alberta’s Pizza photos courtesy of Beau Mitall. RIGHT

Compottery Terra Block photos courtesy of Compottery.

When used individually, Compottery Terra Blocks, created by Jessica Panicola (MFA 2019 Design for Social Innovation), make for stylish planters. Stacked two or higher, they become a composting system compact enough for even tiny-apartment dwellers to recycle their kitchen scraps with ease. Fruit and vegetable trimmings, coffee grounds and more are added to the bottom pot and covered with the provided coco coir—the fiber from coconut shells—to keep away flies and prevent foul smells as the food scraps undergo the natural process of vermicomposting, through which red worms break down organic matter. (Panicola provides information about where to buy

red worms on her website.) The resulting compost, when mixed with more coco coir, makes for a nutrient-rich potting soil. Compottery’s terracotta pots can be used both indoors and outside; stack them to fit in small living spaces or arrange them side by side to make a garden. [MM]

Skinn Design

Light Phone II UNLOCKED 4G LTE SMARTPHONE $299 thelightphone.com When the Visual Arts Journal first covered the Light Phone, in spring 2017, the minimalist device, created by designers Joe Hollier (BFA 2012 Graphic Design) and Kaiwei Tang as an antidote to our collective screen addiction, could only make and receive calls and store up to seven saved numbers.

BIODEGRADABLE PILLOW COVERS AND INSERTS

LEFT Light Phone II photos courtesy of Light. BELOW Skinn Design pillow photos courtesy of Skinn Design.

$175 – $300 skinndesign.com Merging her degree in socially minded design with her lifelong “obsession” with bedding, Danielle Skinn (MFA 2020 Design for Social Innovation) has developed a line of luxurious, fully biodegradable pillow covers, trimmed

with swooping designs in vibrant colors and made with wool, wooden buttons and natural dyes. Each cover comes with an (also biodegradable) pillow insert made of down feathers and all-cotton fabric. [MM]

The Light Phone II, rolled out two years later, offers more functionality while keeping a pared-down approach. Users can now text, listen to music and podcasts and set an alarm, for example, all on custom applications, and the phone is designed to accommodate additional, optional tools as they are released by the company—the most recent, a navigation app, became available last fall. They can also get $30 or $70 monthly service plans, supported by the AT&T network. But they will never be able to use the Light Phone’s matte display to check social media or email, stream videos or browse the Internet. “We always encourage less is more, whenever possible,” Hollier says, “and everything we do is about intentionality and maintaining user privacy.” [GH] SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

WHAT’S IN STORE

BOTTOM Avinash Rajagopal photo by Mark Wickens; courtesy of Sandow Design Group. RIGHT Images courtesy of No Plan Press.

Deep Green PODCAST

metropolismag.com/ deep-green-podcast Avinash Rajagopal (MFA 2011 Design Criticism), editor in chief of design magazine Metropolis, hosts this podcast, on how the architecture, infrastructure and activities of the cities and towns in which we live affect the environment, for good and bad. [GH]

United Shapes of America LETTERPRESS PRINTS $24 each noplan.press Jesse Kirsch (BFA 2008 Graphic Design), proprietor of No Plan Press, a letterpress and design studio in Takoma Park, Maryland, is creating a series of geometric interpretations of the United States (and the District of Columbia), called “United Shapes of

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VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

America.” Each work gets three passes through Kirsch’s 19thcentury press: one to print the shape in a solid hue; one to print the state’s name, in black; and one to emboss information about the state, as well as the studio’s seal. Kirsch has created designs for New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington, D.C., so far. No Plan Press also offers cards, stickers and other prints, and Kirsch recently contributed a sculpture for the 2021 National Cherry Blossom Festival, which is permanently on view in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood. [GH]

Screen time with SVA alumni and faculty

Watch List

THE NORTHMAN PHOTO BY AIDAN MONA GHAN/ © 2022 F O CUS FE ATURES, LLC; PROCE SSION AND CONV ERG ENC E I MAGES COURTESY OF NETFLIX; THE FUNGIES! I MA GE COURTESY OF C ARTOON NET W ORK STUDIO S, INC. ; T HE FALL OF TH E HOUSE OF USHER IMAGE COURTESY OF BO STON LYR IC O PER A ; THE CHOSEN IMAGE COURTESY OF VI DANGEL STUDI OS.

The Northman

Procession

Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke (BFA 2000 Film and Video) earned an Academy Award nomination for his work on Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse (2019), and now he is back for the director’s latest, a Viking-era thriller starring Ethan Hawke, Nicole Kidman and Alexander Skarsgård, due in theaters this spring.

Released late last year on Netflix, this documentary— produced by Bennett Elliott and shot by Robert Kolodny (both BFA 2010 Film and Video)—follows six men who as children were sexually abused by Catholic priests, and who collaborate on an film based on their experiences as a way to process their lingering trauma.

Convergence: Courage in a Crisis

The Fungies!

Netflix’s COVID-19 documentary, which presents stories on the pandemic from around the world, includes a segment on the 2020 lockdown in Tehran that was co-directed by Sara Khaki (MFA 2012 Social Documentary Film) and Mohammad Reza Eyni. An earlier version of Khaki and Eyni’s film originally streamed on the website of the British newspaper The Guardian.

This lighthearted Cartoon Network/HBO Max show, about a society of mushroom people living in a prehistoric world, began its third and final season last December. Sonja von Marensdorff (BFA 2018 Animation) was a storyboard artist for the series; she is now working on storyboards for Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob SquarePants spinoff, Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years.

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Chosen

Composer Philip Glass’s 1988 opera, based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, has been reimagined as an animated film about an immigrant child detained at the U.S.–Mexico border. The production features a screenplay by Raúl Santos (MFA 2011 Social Documentary Film) and is available to stream on the Boston Lyric Opera company’s operabox.tv platform.

Jonathan Roumie (BFA 1996 Film and Video) stars in this streaming series about the life of Jesus, now in its second season and available to watch for free via its own app or at thechosen.tv. Though produced and distributed independently, The Chosen has won a large audience and high-profile press; a Christmas special screened in theaters late last year. SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

WHAT’S IN STORE

ART/PHOTOGRAPHY A Certain Logic of Expectations Arturo Soto (MFA 2008 Photography, Video and Related Media) The Eriskay Connection Hardcover, €28

A Glint in the Kindling Michael Bailey-Gates (BFA 2015 Photography) Pinch Publishing Hardcover, €45

Book They Might Be Giants (John Flansburgh and John Linnell); designed by Paul Sahre (faculty, BFA Design); photographs by Brian Karlsson Limited-edition hardcover with CD/digital album, $49

The Stick Justine Kurland (BFA 1996 Photography) and Bruce Kurland; poems by Lisa Jarnot TIS books Softbound, $50

Still Here: Moments in Isolation Edited by Mafalda Millies and Roya Sachs; contributors include Katherine Bernhardt

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Shelf Liners Books by SVA alumni and faculty

(MFA 2000 Fine Arts), Elizabeth Peyton (BFA 1987 Fine Arts) and Christine Sun Kim (MFA 2006 Fine Arts) Distanz Hardcover, €44

Illustration as Visual Essay; MFA 2011 Illustration as Visual Essay) Who’s Got My Tail Hardcover, $13

The Street Becomes

Katie Yamasaki (MFA 2003 Illustration as Visual Essay) Norton Young Readers Hardcover, $17.95

Jaime Permuth (faculty, MPS Digital Photography; MPS 2009 Digital Photography; MFA 1994 Photography and Related Media) Meteoro Editions Hardcover/with signed archival print/with two signed archival prints, €35/€125/€250

Twin Sisters Melanie Hausberger and Stephanie Hausberger (both BFA 2016 Fine Arts) Spotz Hardcover, $60

White Shoes Nona Faustine (BFA 1994 Photography) Mack Hardcover, $60

CHILDREN’S/PICTURE The Best Spot to Pee, New York Hyesu Lee (faculty, MFA

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Dad Bakes

The Froggies Do NOT Want to Sleep Adam Gustavson (MFA 1999 Illustration as Visual Essay) Charlesbridge Hardcover/e-book, $16.99/$9.99

Horizontal Parenting: How to Entertain Your Kids While Lying Down Michelle Woo; illustrated by Dasha Tolstikova (MFA 2012 Illustration as Visual Essay) Chronicle Books Hardcover/e-book, $14.95/$8.99

On Eagles’ Wings Ellen Javernick; illustrated by Jill Alexander (MFA 2006 Fine Arts) Paulist Press Hardcover, $16.95

The Paper Bird Lisa Anchin (MFA 2011 Illustration as Visual Essay) Dial Books Hardcover/e-book, $17.99/$10.99

Spectacular Sisters: Amazing Stories of Sisters from Around the World Aura Lewis (MFA 2017 Illustration as Visual Essay) Quill Tree Books Hardcover/e-book/audio, $16.99/$9.99/$15.99

COMICS/GRAPHIC NOVELS Epically Earnest Molly Horan (faculty, Humanities and Sciences) Clarion Books Hardcover/e-book, $18.99/$9.99

Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Dracula Koren Shadmi (faculty, BFA Illustration; BFA 2006 Illustration) Life Drawn Softcover, $24.99

NONFICTION Burnt Toast and Other Disasters: A Book of Heroic Hacks, Fabulous Fixes, and Secret Sauces Cal Peternell (BFA 1987 Fine Arts) William Morrow Cookbooks Hardcover/e-book, $25.99/$12.99

Draw Like a Child: Take Chances, Make Mistakes, and Find Your Artistic Style Haleigh Mun (BFA 2018 Illustration) Abrams Books Paperback, $15.99

Edible Flowers: How, Why, and When We Eat Flowers Monica Nelson (MA 2019 Design Research, Writing and Criticism) Monacelli Press Hardcover, $35

Savage Love from A to Z: Advice on Sex and Relationships, Dating and Mating, Exes and Extras Dan Savage; illustrated by Joe Newton (faculty, BFA Design) Sasquatch Books Hardcover, $19.95

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CREATIVE LIFE

Navigating the great wide world of work

Apply Yourself For SVA students and recent graduates looking to study or teach abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the College’s Career Development office is here to help. by vanessa machir Established by the U.S. government in 1946, the prestigious Fulbright international exchange program gives people from diverse disciplines and backgrounds the opportunity to travel abroad and pursue their academic, creative and professional passions. It awards grants for projects and research lasting anywhere from a few months to a full year in more than 160 countries. Due to their renown and the rare opportunity they provide, Fulbright awards are highly competitive. Fortunately, SVA students and recent alumni have a boost: Since 2017, SVA Career Development has offered assistance to those applying to the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, which awards one-year grants for research, study or teaching around the world to U.S.-citizen undergraduates 20 |

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(who must complete their degree by the time the grant begins), graduate students and young professionals with up to seven years of experience. Patricia Romeu, associate director of Career Development, currently serves as the office’s Fulbright program advisor, helping to guide applicants through the yearlong process, edit and shape their application materials and serve as a sponsor for their candidacy. Career Development’s Fulbright initiative has achieved notable success to date. Two SVA-supported applicants have been awarded grants, and nine other applicants have made it to the semi-finalist stage. Last year, The Chronicle of Higher Education named SVA a top Fulbright-producing institution for the second year in a row.

To get an insider’s perspective on what’s most important when applying, we spoke with Romeu and SVA Fulbright recipients Julia Volonts (MPS 2017 Art Therapy), who traveled to Latvia’s Rīga Stradiņš University to research art therapy practices in 2019 and 2020, and Tyler Glenn (BFA 2020 Fine Arts), who won a Fulbright grant to teach English in Mongolia. (Glenn was unable to make her trip due to the pandemic, but is still considered a program alumnus.)

Plan Ahead From application opening to finalist notification, the full process takes about a year. Romeu begins consulting prospective applicants in early spring; the deadline to submit all materials is in early fall; semi-finalists are notified in mid-winter; and the finalists are chosen throughout the spring. “Definitely prepare as early as possible. . . . You need a lot of materials,” Volonts says. These materials include biographical data, a personal statement, a statement of grant purpose, three letters of recommendation, transcripts and an affiliation letter (from the institution abroad where the applicant would be based), as well as other supplemental materials, depending on which Fulbright grant you’ve chosen.

Make the application “a big priority in your life if you really want it,” Glenn says; gathering and preparing all of the materials is time-consuming.

Choose Your Grant Before you commit to applying, first decide which type of U.S. Student Program grant is right for you and your project. The first option is Open Study/Research, which is the grant Volonts received. With an Open Study/ Research grant, you can undertake an art or research project in one country or enroll in a graduate degree program abroad, with Fulbright typically covering the cost of one year. You’re required to find an educational institution or other sponsor to be officially affiliated with, so they can indicate to Fulbright that they’re willing to work with you and your project is feasible. The second option is an English Teaching Assistantship, for which an official affiliation is not needed to apply. This is the grant that Glenn received. Fulbright awardees with an English Teaching Assistantship are placed in classrooms in their chosen country to work alongside a certified teacher, and an additional community-engagement component is required.

Focus on Writing “It’s hard to overstate how important the essays are to the Fulbright application, and how much work applicants should be prepared to devote to them,” Romeu says. At maximum, the personal statement, which provides a picture of yourself as an individual, is one page long and the statement of grant purpose, which defines what you plan to do, is two pages, so every word counts. The writing must be concise and polished, with a clear and compelling rationale to support the proposal. Here, working with Career Development and the Fulbright program advisor can make all the difference. “They were extremely helpful,” Volonts says. In her earliest essay drafts, she says, she catered to what she thought Fulbright wanted, highlighting the cultural-exchange aspect of her

Apply via SVA to the 2023–24 Fulbright U.S. Student Program: What to Do and When 1. Spring 2022

Submit your Fulbright Intent to Apply form. If you haven’t already, compile and review the required application materials as outlined on the Fulbright site.

2. Summer 2022

Meet with the SVA Fulbright program advisor and develop your personal statement and statement of grant purpose before the late-summer campus deadline, when all completed materials need to be submitted to Career Development. You are also required to meet with the Campus Review

proposed trip. “But when I went to SVA, they told me it was too general.” After explaining that she wanted to focus her studies on intergenerational trauma but thought the topic was too dark for the application, the advisor at the time, Anna Ogier-Bloomer (MPS 2017 Digital Photography), told her, “‘No—write from your heart,’” Volonts says. “I’m very passionate about what I do, and they brought that out in me.” Glenn, who estimates she wrote 12 drafts of her personal statement and statement grant of purpose, went to Romeu’s office weekly to edit her writing line by line. “It made me a better writer in the end, and that makes it easier to get grants in the future,” she says.

Stay the Course “It’s a very vulnerable process, to feel like you need to measure up,” says Volonts, who encourages applicants to be proactive about asking for guidance and support. Glenn agrees, admitting to struggles with impostor syndrome while applying.

Committee, so you can speak with panelists about your proposal and rationale.

3. Fall 2022

Submit your final application online to the Fulbright Program; the SVA Fulbright program advisor will also submit an application evaluation and official endorsement on your behalf.

4. Winter/Spring 2023

Semi-finalists are notified in the winter. Finalists are selected from that group—and grant offers are made—throughout the spring.

But it’s important to focus on the positive. “I’ve learned from this that passion gets you far,” Glenn says. “I know that I really put my all into it.” And if you’re not chosen in a given year, don’t give up: Fulbright strongly encourages you to re-apply in the next cycle. “Moving to Latvia for Fulbright changed my life and really opened things up for me professionally,” Volonts says. Thanks to connections she made in the country during her time in the program, she is now working on a pilot program for ISSP Latvia—a contemporary photography platform offering educational programming, exhibitions and residencies—to research the benefits of art in treating anxiety and depression in adolescents and adults. For more information about the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, visit us.fulbrightonline.org. To learn more about SVA Career Development’s Fulbright assistance initiative, visit sva.edu/fulbright. ◆ Vanessa Machir (MPS 2016 Branding) is a regular contributor to the Visual Arts Journal. She lives in New York City. SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

JAMES (JAMIE) NARES PO RTFO L I O

BY GREG HERBOWY

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IN 2011,

the artist James (Jamie) Nares (1975 Fine Arts), mounted an industrial high-speed camera into the back of an SUV and for the next several days rode through Manhattan, filming pedestrians doing pedestrian things—crossing avenues, sheltering themselves from the rain, hailing cabs—at 860 frames per second. The resulting footage, which was edited down, played back at 30 frames per second—about a 30-fold slowdown—and soundtracked with guitar by musician Thurston Moore, became Street, an hourlong video and arguably Nares’s best-known work to date. Throughout her career, Nares has experimented with ways that motion can be documented; her 2019 retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum was called “Nares: Moves.” Nares’s methods can be low-tech and unfussy or near-scientific in their precision and sophistication. She has presented abraded sheets of sandpaper as art, and she has created In Street, the slow motion of the footage transforms seconds-long shots multiple-exposure photographs of pendulums of New York City’s hectic street-level bustle into dreamy, dense tapestries of swinging and dancers performing. She makes what Nares calls “mini-narratives,” subject to all kinds of interpretation. The large-scale gestural paintings with homemade rare people who notice the camera serve as “the Greek chorus,” she says, pebrushes whose filaments and feathers have riodically breaking the movie’s odd spell to regard the audience as the camera been chosen for their unique mark-making passes by. The late writer Glenn O’Brien, a longtime Nares friend and admirer, qualities, and with a brutish machine that was described Street in an essay as “an ‘angel’s eye view’ of humanity.” built for laying road lines on asphalt. She has Despite this quality of reverie, the film can also be seen as a straight anthrofilmed a concrete ball rolling down a West Side pological study of a specific time and place. “Street revealed a certain thing Highway off-ramp, struggling to keep up as about how people self-choreographed in crowded streets,” says critic Amy she runs behind it with the camera, and she Taubin (faculty, MFA Photography, Video and Related Media), another longhas made super-slo-mo, high-definition video time supporter of Nares’s work. Seen now, just a decade later, with our brains portraits of peers and loved ones, in which even and behavior rewired after two years of pandemic life, “it’s become a historic the slightest changes of expression unfold in artifact,” she says. “The choreography of the street is totally different now.” microscopic detail. Born and raised in England, Nares moved to New York in the early 1970s to attend the School of Visual Arts, having read that several artists she admired, like Vito Acconci, Mel Bochner and Joseph Kosuth, taught at the College. As it turned out, she would never study with any of them. Not realizing she needed to register for courses in advance, Nares showed up for the first day with nothing on her schedule and had to sign up for what few options were left.

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PREVIOUS James Nares, What’s Not Obvious, 2010, iridescent pigment and wax on linen, 37 x 144 in. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery. ABOVE James Nares, Hit the Road, 2013,

thermoplastic on linen, 120 x 96 in. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery.

OPPOSITE James Nares, Burn Rubber,

2013, thermoplastic on linen, 120 x 96 in. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery.

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This didn’t matter much, in the end. Known then as James (Nares went public as transgender three years ago, and continues to use her birth name professionally), she arrived at SVA “pretty much knowing what I wanted to do,” she says, and already making accomplished work. One day, she and a friend surprised their sculpture class by staging Nares’s Shelf (1974), for which they laid on diagonal platforms Nares had mounted on opposite walls of the studio and silently stared at each other. (The instructor, artist Richard Van Buren—“a real beatnik type,” Nares says—was apparently delighted.) Within a year, she would be an integral member of the thriving arts community that lived and worked in the Tribeca neighborhood of lower Manhattan. “There was an incredible cross-pollination of disciplines happening,” Nares says. In between odd jobs like sandblasting and plumbing (an early call was to fix composer Philip Glass’s toilet),

she not only pursued her own multifaceted practice but collaborated freely with others in what came to be known as the No Wave movement, so-called for its “feigned indifference to just about everything,” she says. She operated the camera for nobudget films by director Eric Mitchell and artist and musician John Lurie; played an onscreen role in G Man (1978), co-directed by former classmate Beth B (faculty, BFA Fine Arts; BFA 1976 Fine Arts); and directed her own feature, the farcical Rome ’78, a No Wave touchstone and favorite of then-Village Voice critic J. Hoberman. She was an early member of the Colab artist collective and co-founded New Cinema, a theater that showed Super-8 and 16mm films that had been transferred to video for screening. And she played in two foundational No Wave bands: as the original guitarist for James Chance and the Contortions, and drummer for the Del-Byzanteens, which also featured filmmaker Jim Jarmusch on keyboards and sound artist Phil Kline on guitar. Though the latter act was “not much more than a lark,” she says, they had a hardworking manager and played often enough that Nares supported herself “for a year or so” on income from their shows. “There was a lawlessness back then,” says B, who recalls driving a car into the East River, with no fear of repercussions, for one of her films. Even in a scene crowded with underground legends-to-be, Nares, she says, stood out for her “extraordinary, ethereal” charisma and an ability to channel the “insanity” of the time through conceptual films like Pendulum (1976), in which a large sphere hung from a catwalk swings with seemingly dangerous abandon on an empty street. “It so vividly reflected this kind of disturbance, this feeling of being unmoored from one’s beginnings in life and one’s family,”

“THERE WAS AN INCREDIBLE CROSSPOLLINATION OF DISCIPLINES HAPPENING.” ABOVE James Nares, Half of Life, 2008,

oil on linen, 90 x 33 in.; “Nares: Moves” at Milwaukee Art Museum, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery.

OPPOSITE James Nares, Asleep on a Slope, 2021, oil on linen, 58 x 78 in. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery.

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B says. “And it was also emblematic of New York City as a playground and canvas. I think Jamie was able to have real freedom. There were no rules.” In 1975 Nares began creating— and filming herself creating—what she calls Giotto Circles, works for which she rotates either her arm or a self-made etching tool, inscribing a remarkably precise circle on a wall. The pieces are named for the preRenaissance artist, who was reputed to have drawn a perfect circle freehand, and what is remarkable about Giotto Circles is less the symmetry of the proABOVE James Nares, Untitled, 1976, blackduced shape, and more that something so seemingly exact could be made with and-white photograph. Courtesy of the the simple action of windmilling one’s arm. artist and Kasmin Gallery. As objects of formal beauty that double as records of performances, these OPPOSITE, TOP James Nares, Shelf, circles would be a forebear of what has become Nares’s signature artistic 1974, black-and-white photograph. project, an ongoing series of works, begun in the 1990s, known as brushNares staged this work, and took this photograph, in the sculpture studio at stroke paintings. Consisting of a single gesture made with one continuous SVA. Courtesy of the artist. movement on a grand scale, these strip the act of painting down to its most OPPOSITE, BOTTOM James Nares, Giotto basic building block, and invite viewers to consider the limitless possibilities Circle (Tooled), 1975, Super 8 transferred for expression contained in that element alone. A Nares brushstroke can be to 16mm film and digital video. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery. spattering and wild like a wave; it can swirl and zigzag like a mop on a floor; or it can flutter like fabric in the wind (a phenomenon that Nares has explored in her video work). While they impress the viewer as unmediated and spontaneous compositions, brushstroke The brushes Nares uses are their own works of art. She has constructed, paintings are more often the painstaking result by her estimate, hundreds of them, all with a specific scale and mark-making of a repeatedly rehearsed movement that Nares quality in mind, and is well acquainted with the properties of different bristles executes as she travels the length of the canvas, and feathers, and the pros and cons of different handle types. A section of which can measure up to 25 feet wide, sweeping her Long Island City studio is dedicated to brush building, with drawers full and twisting the brush as she goes. She begins of parts, and dozens of finished models—“all characters in my drama,” she each with an intention or gesture in mind, and says—hang near her painting table in irregular rows. will make however many passes at the canvas The success of Street has encouraged Nares in recent years to “revisit my are necessary to get it right—a process that can old art-making process of doing whatever came to mind,” she says. “I’d always sometimes take a full day or more. been doing different things but not showing them, because I was concentrating “The extraordinary thing about the brushon painting.” stroke works is how Jamie incorporates the In 2013, Nares debuted her “Road Paint” paintings, a series of black-andelements of performance art—the stamina and white works created with a road-line painter that she had found and bought the acrobatics—into the paintings,” Taubin online, having long been fascinated with the machines. The paint, actually a says. “It really is a physical dance extended melted thermoplastic, is thick on the canvas, and dusted before it dries with onto the canvas.” tiny glass beads made to reflect headlights in the dark. From certain angles, To make all of this possible takes considerthe works glitter. “There’s a toughness to the road paintings,” Taubin says, able engineering. So that she can make quick an uncompromising solidity that provides ballast to Nares’s often weightless and successive attempts at a painting without brushstrokes and the similarly floating Street. breaking focus, Nares and her assistants esContinuing in this vein, in 2019 Nares began making “Monuments,” a series sentially varnish the canvas, giving it a smooth of wax rubbings of 19th-century sidewalk stones in downtown Manhattan surface that can be squeegeed clean again and that are then gilded with 22-karat gold leaf. Cut from granite, with grooves again. The paint is mixed with mineral spirits hand-chiseled into them to keep pedestrians from slipping, and worn soft over and wax, giving it a motor oil-like consistency. time, the blocks offer the works a variety of textures and patterns. To keep the paint from dripping and running, “Monuments” is obliquely political—a tribute to the “anonymous immigrant the canvas lies flat while Nares works from laborers who built the city,” Nares says, made by an immigrant herself at a above. For a while, she painted on canvases laid time of heightened nativist actions and rhetoric. The gilded pieces (commemon the floor while suspended in a harness on a orating Gilded Age construction, as Nares points out) recast those laborers’ pulley. These days, the canvases are placed on a humble work as an inscrutable, awesome achievement from a long-ago civililong table with a trough beneath a drainhole at zation. They’re another record of movement in the artist’s catalog, enshrining the far end. This collects the paint from unsata form of communication, however obscure, from an increasingly distant past. isfactory takes, so that it can be reused. In making their marks, the workers “inevitably fell into patternmaking,” Nares says, “because that’s what people do. “There’s something very intimate about that. It’s like a little trace, or something.” James (Jamie) Nares is represented by the Kasmin Gallery in New York. For more information, visit kasmingallery.com. ◆ 28 |

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“THE EXTRAORDINARY THING . . . IS HOW JAMIE INCORPORATES THE ELEMENTS OF PERFORMANCE ART INTO THE PAINTINGS.”

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PREVIOUS James Nares, stills from Street, 2011, HD video, 61 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery.

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ABOVE James Nares, Untitled, 1990,

oil on paper, 20 x 16 in. Courtesy of the artist.

OPPOSITE James Nares, Laight I, 2018,

22-karat gold leaf on Evolon, 129 x 77 x 2 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery.

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SPOTLIGHT PHILADELPHIA

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT Recent projects produced by Fireball Printing, co-founded by SVA alumnus Catherine Dentino: Shane Confectionery x Wild Fox Provisions print, designed by As Cold As Earth; a pamphlet by artist Caitlin McCormack; and a comic by illustrator Marta Syrup.

Catherine Dentino

BFA 2005 Photography

illiam penn’s conceptual layout for Philadelphia, drawn in 1682, used the rectangular grid to organize plots of land around residences. It was among the first gridded cities in America, shaping the urban architecture in many burgeoning towns and cities across the country. That grid is still palpable in present-day Philadelphia, embedded in its organic sprawl of cultural resources, deep-rooted communities and nonprofit initiatives. It’s a major metropolis with a smaller town feel, layered with history on every block. “It’s a funny, fierce city with terrible roads and wonderful people,” says Andrea Tsurumi (MFA 2013 Illustration as Visual Essay), “and I’ll love it until I die.” Here are four SVA alumni who have made Philly their home.

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by Katheryn Brock Portraits by Anuj Shrestha (MFA 2005 Illustration as Visual Essay)

Not long after graduating from SVA and beginning her master’s program in arts and cultural management at Pratt, Catherine Dentino met her now-husband, Paul, who lived in Philadelphia. Early in their relationship, the two began discussing the concept of an artist-run print shop that would make quality prints at affordable rates. Dentino soon moved from New Jersey to join Paul, and developed a plan for the business as her graduate thesis. They opened Fireball Printing in 2008, and it has since grown from a lone photocopier to a thriving operation offering digital, large format and offset printing, with a core staff of 13. Through many years of “12-plus hour days, living with very little pay and racking up debt,” she says, Fireball established its reputation and increased its clientele, creating art prints, booklets,

✽ LOCAL RECOMMENDATION “ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS IN PHILLY IS SEEING THINGS COME ABOUT THAT DON’ T FEEL OVERLY MANUFACTURED —

posters and other printed matter for artists and businesses alike. “When I went to SVA, my original goal was to be an artist,” she says. “I’ve realized over the years that being an artist and making art isn’t just about making an object. I’ve found so many different ways to be creative and to push myself through my role at Fireball.” Dentino likes engaging with the intimacy of physical print, as well as its capability, to reach a wide audience of viewers. Through Fireball, she has been able to host Weirdo, a local arts, food, performance and book fair that gathers

“people and artists that might not normally be together in the same place and time,” she says. (Find out more at weirdo.pizza.) And recently, Fireball began curating a shop of prints with some of their favorite artists, along with other art objects; a selection of works will be up for sale on their website, fireballprinting.com, later this year.

VENUES, EVENTS AND LITTLE MOMENTS THAT FEEL UNEXPECTED AND BEAUTIFUL IN AN ORGANIC WAY. SOME PL ACES TO CHECK OUT: THE WAGNER FREE INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE, FIUME, BARTRAM’S GARDEN, FORT MIFFLIN, CONCERTS

ABOVE Resident Aliens, a 2018 zine

by illustrator, SVA alumnus and Philadelphia resident Anuj Shrestha, produced by Fireball Printing.

AT GERMANTOWN KITCHEN GARDEN, YOUNG AMERICAN CIDER , GREENSGROW, THE WOODL ANDS.” SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

SPOTLIGHT PHILADELPHIA

✽ LOCAL RECOMMENDATION “ THE PUBLIC MURALS MAKE THE CITY SO SPECIAL . THE COMMUNITY PARTNERS WITH ARTISTS, SOMETIMES FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD, TO WORK TOGETHER TO CREATE MURALS REFLECTING THEIR EXPERIENCE. AND DEFINITELY CHECK OUT PENN KNOX ALONG THE DEL AWARE RIVER , WHERE THE FOOD AND BEER SCENES ARE UNIQUELY PHILLY.”

Jason Prunty MFA 2001 Photography and Related Media

TOP AND ABOVE The 2021 Día de los Muertos celebration presented by La Calaca Flaca and Fleisher Art Memorial, for which SVA alumnus Jason Prunty serves as a board member. Photo by Joe Piette, courtesy Fleisher Art Memorial. RIGHT Screenshots of Trucendent, the online estate- and trust-planning platform for which Prunty is CXO.

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Adept in many disciplines, Jason Prunty has worked in photography, industrial design, architecture and software. In each field, “creativity was really important to me,” he says. As chief experience officer at Trucendent, an estate- and trust-planning online platform, Prunty and his team work to make what is often a complicated process more streamlined and accessible through user-centered approaches to software. Trucendent pairs financial advisors with attorneys through their web application, which will soon be available for mobile browsing, and provides software that advisors can use to walk clients through key decisions in the estate-planning process. Prunty is designing visualizations to give clients a clear overview of their estate plans, free of legal jargon. Growing up south of Denver, Prunty felt disconnected from centers of culture. He moved east to study electrical engineering at the University of Rochester before enrolling at SVA. After graduating, he taught photography at Montclair State University in New Jersey, eventually returning to school for a master’s in architecture, to which he attributes his design “understanding of how pieces fit together, how parts come together to form a functioning whole.” Prunty moved to Philadelphia when starting his family, a little over 10 years ago, and has become increasingly involved in the community. Around

2018, his eldest daughter attended after-school classes at Fleisher Art Memorial, a local nonprofit that offers free and affordable art education for all ages. Impressed with the organization, Prunty took a painting class to refresh his own artistic practice, before joining their board at the start of last year. Prunty is now working to develop a Fleisher-owned lot, as part of its efforts to offer encounters with art to every neighborhood in the city, and helping to form the committee to hire a new executive director for the organization.

FROM TOP Books written and/or illustrated by SVA alumnus and faculty member Andrea Tsurumi include I’m On It! (2021), an “Elephant & Piggie Like Reading!” book; Kondo & Kezumi Are Not Alone (2021), written by David Goodner; and Accident! (2017).

Andrea Tsurumi MFA 2013 Illustration as Visual Essay

In 2016, illustrator, author and cartoonist Andrea Tsurumi’s life underwent two big changes: Tsurumi’s first picture book, Accident!, sold to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Tsurumi and their partner, eager for a change from New York City, moved to Philadelphia. After graduating from Harvard in 2007, Tsurumi made indie comics and zines while working in publishing in Manhattan. In 2009 they took a continuing education course at SVA taught by cartoonist Tom Hart.

and the undergraduate illustration program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Hand-drawn illustration and narrative storytelling allows them to communicate the intimacy of personal geographies and how experience intermingles with place and history. From a home studio with walls covered in sketches and a big red chair for their dog, Spatula, Tsurumi is now working on the illustrations for Life Log, an activity book written by maker and artist Lea Redmond due out this spring from Chronicle Books. “As a newcomer to Philly, I’m aware of how much I do not know about here,” Tsurumi says. “My experience skates over the top of layers and layers of older associations I’m learning about while joining them.” “There was this transformative feeling that when you walked in, you belonged there,” Tsurumi says. “You were a cartoonist if you made comics, no matter what your level . . . no hierarchy, no posturing, just a room full of permission to be excited about making stories together.” Two years later, Tsurumi enrolled in the College’s MFA illustration program. Tsurumi has published numerous children’s books, visual essays and comics, and taught comics and illustration in the summer illustration residency at SVA

✽ LOCAL RECOMMENDATION “ THE ASIAN ARTS INITIATIVE BRINGS TOGETHER ARTISTS AND OTHER FOLKS TO EXPLORE THE ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT HISTORICAL SITES HERE IS MOTHER BETHEL AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, THE OLDEST CHURCH IN THE U.S. TO BE CONTINUOUSLY OWNED BY AFRICAN AMERICANS. I ALSO LOVE UNCLE BOBBIE’S COFFEE AND BOOKS, BIG BLUE MARBLE BOOKSTORE, A NOVEL IDEA AND THE MÜTTER MUSEUM.”

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SPOTLIGHT PHILADELPHIA

Mary Salvante BFA 1988 Illustration

As director and chief curator of Rowan University Art Gallery in nearby Glassboro, New Jersey, Mary Salvante brings over 25 years of experience in arts administration, public arts and curatorship to the role—with 22 of them spent in the Philadelphia area, where her achievements include a citywide expansion of the annual Philadelphia Open Studio Tours event and founding the environmental arts program at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. Salvante found her first arts-advisory job, with Suzanne Randolph Fine Arts, not long after graduating from SVA, via a listing on the College’s Career 38 |

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Development job board. She found the work compelling. Through her work, Salvante managed public art installations, such as the Korean War veterans monument in New York City’s Battery Park, and she began to curate, continuing to do so in Philadelphia, where she integrated her passion for socially engaged art with community programming in the 20th-anniversary exhibition for Mural Arts Philadelphia, the country’s largest public arts program. Salvante joined Rowan in 2009, and in 2018 founded the university’s Center for Art and Social Engagement, which provides a venue for exploring social issues through art-based inquiry. “I’ve always been interested in activism in the art world and bringing attention to artists who are focused on giving voice to social issues,” she says. At Rowan, she has curated and shown work by such internationally recognized artists as Mel Chin, Willie Cole (BFA 1976 Media Arts), Jeanne Jaffe, Ebony G. Patterson and Beverly Semmes; SVA MFA Fine Arts faculty member Dread Scott; and former SVA faculty Brandon Ballengée and Joyce Kozloff. This spring, the gallery will present a show by Syd Carpenter, a Philadelphia-based sculptor whose work deals with the history of African American farming, gardening and memory. Collaboration is an increasingly common value among artists and arts professionals in the area, Salvante says. “Philadelphia’s art community is a supportive one. I sense that in a big way.” ◆

Katheryn Brock (MFA 2021 Art Writing) is a painter and writer living in Philadelphia.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Dread Scott (2016), Brandon Ballengée (2017) and Saya Woolfalk (2021) shows at Rowan University Art Gallery, curated by SVA alumnus Mary Salvante; Salvante with artists Colette Gaiter (left) and Ebony G. Patterson (right) at Patterson’s 2019 Rowan show; Salvante gives an interview for Rowan’s 2020 Federico Solmi show. Installation photos by Jack Ramsdale, courtesy of Rowan University Art Gallery.

✽ LOCAL RECOMMENDATION “PHIL ADELPHIA IS FULL OF OPP ORTUNITIES FOR TALENTED ARTISTS, INCLUDING ARTISTRUN EXHIBITION SPACES AND ORGANIZATION S, SUCH AS THE C ENTER FOR EMERGING VISUAL ARTISTS, AS WELL AS SMALL GALLERIES AND MAJOR INSTITUTIONS.”

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By Maeri Ferguson 40 |

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Photog raph b David LaC y hapelle

Chapter and Verse A of History L Book o of v e

S P FR AI NL LG // W S UI NMTMEERR 2 2002 21 2 | | 41 41

Book of Love

B In the early o days, o k of Love

members Ted Ottaviano, Lauren Roselli Johnson (both BFA 1983 Photography), Jade Lee and Susan Ottaviano (no relation to Ted) would have a regular Sunday rehearsal, after which Johnson and Ted would go out clubbing. The band—a synth-pop quartet whose propulsive, romantic songs would make them a dance-floor mainstay in the late 1980s—was still unknown, and New York City nightlife was at one of its storied zeniths. Legendary spots like Danceteria and Area were playgrounds for self-expression, and the post-punk and new wave scenes radiated with the energy of the new. The music industry is famously capricious; even the most well-deserved success stories hinge on moments of good fortune or fate. Book of Love, by its members’ own account, has had several, and a big one happened on a Sunday night out at the Pyramid Club, a favorite haunt of theirs. Johnson had brought with her a demo of one of the band’s latest songs, “Boy,” a driving, minimalist number in which Susan, the band’s frontwoman, sings about being denied entry to a men’s-only bar and, more

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universally and arrestingly, the fictions associated with gender. “It’s not my fault that I’m not a boy,” she protests. Johnson gave the tape to the club’s DJ, Ivan Ivan, who had just begun scouting talent for music executive Seymour Stein, co-founder of the Warner Music Group label Sire Records, home to such acts as The Cure, Madonna, The Pretenders and Talking Heads. When Stein first heard “Boy,” the story goes, he agreed to release the song before it even got to the chorus. The single took off on the dance charts, and the band was signed to a deal and soon joined label mates Depeche Mode on tour. In little more than a year, Book of Love had gone from begging friends to come see them at a small club to opening for one of the era’s biggest bands in front of 20,000 people at the Palais Omnisport in Paris.

he early 1980s were “such a fertile time for New York,” Ted says. “I felt like I was a student by day and this creature of the night in these clubs. People wax poetic about that period because it really was unparalleled in many ways.” Ted and Susan grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, where both of their families were part of the city’s large Italian American community. “It wasn’t clear whether we were related and how we were related,” Ted says. “It was always this weird thing”—an early bit of kismet. The two were high-school friends and connected through a shared love of music, occasionally jamming together on the Farfisa organ at Susan’s house. Ted’s big album, then and now, was David Bowie’s Low (1977), the first release in

1. Singer Susan

Ottaviano at the Grand Canyon. 2. Book of Love backstage, circa 1985.

3. Band portrait by Janette Beckman.

4. With producer Ivan Ivan in Paris. 5. Keyboardist

Jade Lee, on Book of Love’s U.S. tour with Depeche Mode. 6. Sightseeing at Niagara Falls.

PRE V IOUS SPRE A D: DAV ID L ACH A PELLE PHOTO COUR TESY OF BOOK OF LOVE /RHINO RECORDS.

the star’s so-called “Berlin trilogy,” and a radical departure from his earlier, more traditional pop and rock songwriting. At first Ted found Low’s strangeness off-putting—“I used to separate it and keep it in a different place than my other records,” he recalls—but in time it became his creative lodestar. “All roads lead to David Bowie,” he says. After high school, Susan enrolled at the Philadelphia College of Art, while Ted joined another hometown friend, John Dugdale (BFA 1983 Photography), in applying to SVA, but the two Ottavianos’ musical collaboration continued long-distance: When Susan formed a post-punk band with her classmate Jade Lee, Ted contributed songwriting and the group’s “intentionally raunchy” name, Head Cheese. (“My father owned a deli,” he explains.) Ted also wrote music on his own, occasionally bringing his musical efforts into his photo and art classes for critiques, where he found a receptive audience. “They understood, in a weird way,” he says of his instructors and classmates. “Even though you had a major you were concentrating on, if you were going to exist in the current fabric, you had to be open to being ‘multimedia.’” After graduating from PCA, Susan and Jade moved to New York City, starting Book of Love—named for the 1957 song by doo-wop group The Monotones—with Ted. He would become the group’s primary songwriter; he and Lee would play keyboards; Susan would sing. “I had this idea for a new sound,” he says—a more synth-based music, built with “simple and naïve” parts and lyrics that were “like nursery rhymes.” But it was not

7. Keyboardist and SVA

alumnus Lauren Roselli Johnson with Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). 8. Keyboardist and SVA alumnus Ted Ottaviano on tour in Texas. 9. Johnson with the Akai S900 sampler. The Silence of the Lambs still © Orion/MGM; all other images courtesy of Ted Ottaviano.

until Johnson was added as a third keyboardist a few months later that the band fully gelled. “We were looking for a fourth member and I remember saying, ‘Lauren’s perfect for the band,’” Ted says. He and Johnson had gotten friendly through seeing each other in class and the clubs, and she was always interested in hearing about his music. “I think we just hit it off,” he recalls. “Lauren just radiates, and we just had so much in common in so many different ways.” But he didn’t know if she even played an instrument when he asked her to join. As it turned out, she didn’t.

ohnson grew up in northern New Jersey, an artistic child in a supportive, academically inclined family. As a teenager she loved music—mainly classic rock and singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne, thanks to the influence of her older siblings and the prevailing local radio formats—but “never thought it was a possibility” that she would be a musician herself, she says. “Music held such a special and sacred place in my life.” After enrolling at SVA and eventually moving to New York City, Johnson immersed herself in the local scene, digging through East Village record stores and going out dancing. “I was on my own for the first time with no curfew,” she says. “As long as I made it to my class the next day, there was nothing to keep me from staying out until two in the morning.” For her early parts in Book of Love, “I was assigned easy-toplay parts, like bell lines and chord-pad parts,” she says, and the Casios the band played were “toy-like and fun to play with.” She SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

c “We all h hymns and Christmas carols. u grew up with r I think that has always c been in Ted’s h songwriting.”

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B of Love o o k

Oldham’s “Tubular Bells,” made famous as the theme for the seminal horror film The Exorcist. “Those bells are as responsible for our career as our whole play with gender,” Ted says. “We all grew up with church hymns and Christmas carols,” Johnson says. “I think that has always been manifest in Ted’s songwriting and informs his way of hearing.”

ook of Love’s self-titled debut, released in 1986, was a “classic first album situation,” Ted says, “where we ended up having a few years to write and write.” The album sleeve features band portraits by Michael Halsband (BFA 1980 Photography), whom Johnson had come to know through the late SVA faculty member Walt Silver. Book of Love’s songs showcase Ted’s knack for folding evocative lyrics into danceable, melodic arrangements. The production, by Ivan Ivan, has a quintessentially 1980s sound—all echoing synth, pulsating beats and low, breathy vocals, ideal for sweating among strangers in a dark disco. “I Touch Roses,” the album’s centerpiece and a gnomic ode to self-empowerment, has come to be the band’s trademark song and remains Ted’s proudest moment as a songwriter. “It’s our mini-masterpiece,” he says. (Johnson, though she has other favorites, too, agrees.) The springy “You Make Me Feel So Good” became a surprise hit on Texas radio, earning the group a sizable following in the state. And “Modigliani (Lost in Your Eyes)”—a hopeless-love song that later featured on the soundtracks of the zeitgeisty TV series Miami Vice and the John Candy–Steve Martin comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles— started another Book of Love motif of working art references into the band’s music and visual presentation. “We ended up utilizing our art-school influences like crazy, and [Amedeo] Modigliani was an artist that we all loved,” Ted says. “Patti Smith, who we just idolized, wrote ‘Dancing Barefoot,’ which was inspired by Modigliani’s mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne. So we thought it would be great to write our own song about Modigliani, and the difference was it would be kind of a dance song.” After another stretch of touring, Book of Love released their second album, Lullaby (1988), which they made with the British producer Flood, recording in New York and mixing at Berlin’s Hansa Studios, where David Bowie had finished Low two decades prior. Flood, who had worked with Depeche Mode, New Order and U2, brought a new level of technological sophistication to the band’s process, particularly, Ted says, in his

FROM TOP ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT 1. “Modigliani (Lost in Your Eyes)” 12" single, 1987.

2. The MMXVI 30th anniversary compilation, 2016. 3. All Girl Band

EP, 2017.

4. Book of Love

LP, 1986.

5. “Boy” 12" single, 1985. 6. Candy Carol

LP, 1991.

7. “You Make Me Feel So Good” 12" single, 1986.

also sang backing vocals—that’s her whispering the song title on “Boy”—and in time would become skilled with the early Akai S900 sampler, which she would use to record sounds, like a toy cash register or xylophone, that the band would then incorporate into their music. Book of Love rehearsed in the basement of a former morgue on Mott Street, a “scary, dark and dank” location with “strangely good acoustics,” Johnson says, that was popular with underground acts at the time—pop-rock group Wygals, the thrashers in Helmet, and psychnoise outfit Butthole Surfers all made appearances in the space. (The building now houses luxury condominiums.) “You could go down there at, like, two or three in the morning and just work,” Ted says. “Nobody knew where you were or could hear you because you were in this sub-basement.” After about a year of diligent woodshedding, Book of Love recorded their demo for “Boy” at Noise New York, a rundown studio in midtown Manhattan. There, in another piece of good fortune, Ted unearthed a dusty 8. “I Touch Roses” old set of tubular 12" single, 1985. bells, or chimes, an instrument that had long 9. Lovebubble intrigued him both for its appearance in “I Could LP, 1993. Be Happy,” a 1981 single by Scottish band Altered 10. “ Lullaby” 12" single, 1989. Images, and how the sound recalled the church 11. Lullaby album, music of his Catholic upbringing. Inspired, he 1988. played the chimes for the song’s hook, and their 12. “Witchcraft” anachronistic, vaguely religious quality thereaf12" single, 1989. ter became integral to Book of Love’s work—the 13. Candy Carol promo glossy, photography group would even go on to record a cover of Mike by Janette Beckman, 1991.

All images courtesy of Book of Love/ Rhino Records.

Photograph by

kenfels 3 phy) c O k n a r F Photogra (BFA 1983

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Book of Love

understanding of how to best integrate their combination of digital and analog sounds. “I’d arrived in the studio feeling like all of the songs were fully realized, but he was able to open them up and take them into this technicolor place.” The cover of Lullaby features a sepia-toned image of a cherubic child with white dove wings, created by Victorian-era photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. “I was basically going through my own personal exorcism in my first few years in New York,” Ted says, “so that album had a lot of religious themes.” The record opens with “Tubular Bells”; immortality and amulets abound on the rap-sung oddball track “Witchcraft”; and for “With a Little Bit of Love,” the band recorded a part on the organ at Manhattan’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The album’s most enduring song, however, is the jittery “Pretty Boys and Pretty Girls,” in which Susan sings of forbidden, gender-agnostic desire and alludes to the AIDS crisis at a time when the disease was still heavily stigmatized: Strangers in the night Exchanging glances But sex is dangerous I don’t take my chances The track was catchy enough to be chosen as a single, but the band, who had experienced the loss of friends and loved ones to the disease, refused to sideline or soft-pedal its message. They declined an opportunity to license it for a soft-drink commercial and filmed a video for the song that ends on a screen reading “FIND A CURE.” While doing the promotional rounds, they made an appearance on Club MTV, an American Bandstand– type series. The production taped the guests for several days’ episodes in one block; Book of Love’s turn immediately followed one by The Ramones, who were heroes of theirs. (Lee and Ted got to meet frontman Joey Ramone, who was “such a sweetheart,” Ted says.) In a post-performance interview, Susan fields a question about the song’s meaning.

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“We wanted to deal with the issue of AIDS,” she answers, earnest and halting. “We wanted to do what we could to show that we care.”

he group’s third album, Candy Carol (1991), was suffused with a growing sense of loss as the AIDS epidemic raged on, though superficially it was their brightest-sounding record yet, a collection of songs that paid homage to their shared love of 1960s pop, the sound of their childhoods. After what had been a rushed process to write Lullaby, Ted again took his time honing the material, and songs like “Alice Everyday” and the title track signaled a sonic turning point for Book of Love. But the times were changing as was, inevitably, the state of popular music. After a fourth album, 1993’s Lovebubble—an adventurous, eclectic range of material that includes a cover of Low’s “Sound and Vision” and the chilly, electronic “Salve My Soul”—Book of Love decided to go on an indefinite hiatus. “We didn't realize how we were going to be identified with the ’80s until the ’90s hit,” Ted says now. “The way that music trends go is you need to push away the previous trends in order to forge forward. “It wasn’t until the millennium that there was a new appreciation for what we had done.”

ometime after Lullaby, Johnson was working a side job in the Metropolitan Museum of Art when she ran into acquaintances of hers, film director Jonathan Demme and his wife, artist Joanne Howard. The couple were new parents, and Johnson offered to babysit sometime, to give them an occasional night out. They took her up on the offer, and soon Demme—an avid music fan with a habit of putting friends and favorite artists in his projects—cast her in a small role in his next movie, The Silence of the Lambs, playing the friend of a serial killer’s victim who is interviewed by Jodie Foster’s character, FBI trainee Clarice Starling. (The film also features “Sunny Day,” one of the rare Ted-fronted Book of Love

Book of Love performing in San Francisco in 2017 (left) and 2013 (center and right). Photographs by Jason DeBord, courtesy of RockSubculture. com/Jason DeBord.

“It wasn’t until the millennium that as there w a new appreciation for what we had done.”

songs, on its soundtrack.) Strange good fortune had struck once again. In the waning days of Book of Love’s first run and after the band’s initial retirement, Johnson would go on to appear in Demme’s Philadelphia (1993), Beloved (1998) and 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate. She married, worked for fashion designer Daryl K and became a mother. Lee pursued graphic design. Susan went to culinary school and found work as a food stylist, recipe developer and visual artist. Ted continued in music, remixing songs by artists like Hole (“Malibu”), David Byrne (“Wicked Little Doll”) and Fleetwood Mac (“Landslide,” for which the arduous process of getting access to the original tracks was “like having the 10 Commandments sent to my house,” he says). He also taught and lectured on production at such institutions as Case Western Reserve University (in collaboration with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame), New York University and Long Island University. The four remained close, all staying in or around New York City.

n the early aughts, Book of Love released a best-of compilation, featuring three new tracks and new band photos by Ted and Johnson’s former classmate Frank Ockenfels 3 (BFA 1983 Photography), and its warm reception—Spin called it “crafty twee keyboard punk”; Time Out called it “irresistible”—heralded a revival of interest in their music. The group played some shows together, and a few years later Ted and Johnson began writing and recording together again as The Myrmidons, a side project created for a new era of synth and electronic pop. “Lauren was good friends with Lori Lindsay, who was in this group The Prissteens, so she ended up being our vocalist for these tracks,” Ted says. As with Book of Love, The Myrmidons developed something of a cult following. They released a handful of singles, the covers of which, as with Book of Love’s

discography, were designed with particular care—a testament, Ted and Johnson say, to their experiences at SVA. “You really had to know what you were trying to do, and how well you were reaching your goals,” Ted says. “I felt like all those skills that we learned, we were utilizing in the music business. It sounds strange, but we really were.” By the turn of the last decade, Book of Love was performing live again with some frequency, though usually as either a duo, comprising Ted and Susan, or a trio, with Johnson joining in—Lee, though still involved in the band, was disinclined to resume steady touring. In 2016 the entire quartet embarked on a 30th anniversary tour and released MMXVI, another greatest-hits compilation, with two new tracks; an EP single, All Girl Band, followed in 2017. Since then, Ted and Susan have continued to perform, with the entire group getting together for occasional reunion shows. A more comprehensive career survey, The Sire Years: 1985 – 1993, came out in 2018. Live appearances have been on hold since the onset of the pandemic, but Ted hopes to get out on the road once more when the situation allows. “Our audience is so loyal to us,” he says. “The music has really been this sort of soundtrack for them.” And while the band’s present-day efforts are mostly toward tending to their unique legacy, he hints that Book of Love still has another chapter to write. “We’re all still in touch and talk a lot, and I think we all agree that we’ve got one more big project left in us. But what that is or what shape that will take, I can’t say just yet.” ◆ Maeri Ferguson is the manager of media relations at the School of Visual Arts. SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

CLOTHES READING

OPPOSITE, TOP Klein at home.

Photograph by Willy Busfield.

THIS PAGE Fashion publications

and ephemera in the apartment of the late SVA alumnus Steven Mark Klein. Courtesy of the International Library of Fashion Research.

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OPPOSITE, BELOW Aleph: A

Collection of Daily Inspiration, Faena, 2014; Paul Smith postcards, 2020. Courtesy of the International Library of Fashion Research.

How a late alumnus and a wunderkind editor established a one-of-a-kind fashion archive BY RAQUEL LANIERI

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serves as its director. The library will open this fall inside the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, in Oslo. One floor will feature changing exhibitions, and another will be a study space where researchers, designers, students and anyone else with a love of fashion and design can browse the idiosyncratic archive. “It’s an incredibly incredible thing to be entrusted with, but it’s also a huge responsibility,” Olsen says. “It was very important that the archive be something that can benefit more people beyond myself—something that people can access, because it’s historical.” After graduating from SVA, Klein got a job handling limited-edition art books at The Strand and collected monographs by artists like Lawrence Weiner and Sol LeWitt (1953 Illustration). But a trip to France in 1982 changed everything for him. While in Paris he accompanied his then-wife, dancer Molissa Fenley, to a fashion show by the Japanese label Comme des Garcons—featuring designer Rei Kawakubo’s now-legendary slashed dresses and frayed sweaters riddled with holes. The next day, he and Fenley visited the brand’s showroom and received a lookbook of that season’s ensembles. “On closer inspection, I realized that Rei, or whoever was working with Rei, had some knowledge of conceptual art books,” Klein said in an interview for the International Library of Fashion Research’s website. “It was from there that the collecting began.” Klein had some unorthodox gathering methods. He would walk into boutiques and ask for press booklets or catalogs they would have lying around, or request Fashion Week invitations from his vast circle of creative friends from the art and hospitality worlds. One of Klein’s accomplices told Olsen that Klein used to steal copies of T: The New York Times Style Magazine from his neighbors’ doorsteps. “He had every T magazine since the beginning [2004]—there were no holes in that collection,” Olsen says. “I was wondering how that was even possible!”

An invitation to Prada’s 2020 runway presentation. A 2006 shopping guide from the Financial Times. An outdated sneaker catalog. A collection of postcards picked up during a visit to a Yohji Yamamoto store in the 1980s. A plastic Bic lighter decorated with a photograph by Ryan McGinley. To most people, these items have a fleeting charm, an expiration date. They’ll throw out the invitation once the show’s over, pitch the shopping guides and catalogs when the season changes. They’ll send the postcards. They’ll discard the lighter when it no longer works. Not Steven Mark Klein (BFA 1974 Fine Arts). The brand consultant and “fashion gadfly,” per The New York Times, spent three decades collecting and preserving fashion ephemera: the kinds of disposable promotional materials that curators and institutions tend to ignore: press releases, lookbooks, magazines, fliers. By the time he died last October at the age of 70, he had amassed some 5,000 objects spanning from 1975 to 2020. “I remember going to his apartment on East Broadway, in downtown Manhattan,” recalls Klein’s friend Elise By Olsen, a 22-year-old Norwegian magazine editor who has inherited his massive archive. “The whole space was just filled up with books and magazines and paper.” Yet he had a system, expertly navigating the towering piles of stuff in his cramped home. “He was just living and breathing this collection that he had been working on for so many years,” she says. Klein’s collection now forms the basis for the new International Library of Fashion Research, curated by Olsen, who 50 |

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FROM LEFT Limited-edition Nan Goldin pack of

Camel cigarettes, 1999; Ryan McGinley Bic lighter, date unknown; Vogue Paris, May 2003; Philippe Starck with Virgin, Conscience CD, 1998; Capsule menswear catalog, fall/winter 2012; Zipper, August 1972; Blumarine catalog, with photography by Juergen Teller, spring/summer 1996.

BELOW Barneys New York catalog, 2020.

All images courtesy of the International Library of Fashion Research.

Olsen first heard from Klein in 2015, when the older fashion enthusiast sent an email to the 15-year-old—who by then had her own fashion and youth culture magazine, Recens—asking, “Who are you?” “It was a very strange email correspondence that felt a little like he was trolling me,” Olsen says. “But I was very intrigued, and we started emailing and then speaking on the phone and he ended up becoming a mentor to me.” She finally met him on her first trip to New York, at 17, where she accompanied him to the Gucci store to ask for catalogs and took a first look at his massive archive. He eventually bequeathed it to her in 2019—and the next year had two tons of material shipped to Oslo. (It is currently in storage.) The collection includes some legendary Versace catalogs from the 1990s, photographed by Steven Meisel; a rare set of toy robots produced by the fashion publisher Visionaire in 2004; and several books and materials taken by the art photographer Nan Goldin, including a pack of Camel cigarettes that she designed in the 1990s featuring a buzz-cut punk at a pay phone. While these items were made for commercial or promotional purposes, they often rise to the level of art, on par with the greatest shoots for Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, according to photography critic and curator Vince Aletti. “The materials that a lot of designers produce to promote their work are often done by really interesting photographers,” Aletti says, citing Meisel, Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Richard Avedon, Wolfgang Tillmans and others. “It’s a kind of history of contemporary photography, as well as a record of a particular designer’s work.” (He also mentions that many photographers

don’t include their commercial work in their books, so it’s especially important to preserve these equally groundbreaking images, which most people outside the fashion industry don’t even know exist.) Plus, he adds, “for me, it’s all the stuff related to fashion that makes it something besides fabric and clothes and gives it a historical context.” That is something Olsen believes as well. These materials “are so often overlooked in the intellectual fashion discourse,” she says. But “the commerciality is ultimately what sets fashion apart, it’s inherent to fashion, it’s what makes fashion, fashion. Most fashion museums are sort of like costume libraries.” She has since doubled the size of Klein’s initial collection, with donations from magazines like The Gentlewoman and brands like Comme des Garçons, which will donate copies of its annual mailers done with artists like Ai Weiwei and René Burri. (She hopes to work out a deal with T, so she won’t have to resort to stealing them, like Klein.) She’s also working on broadening the geographic scope of the collection, which is now very “Europe-centered.” It’s a mission that would make her late mentor proud. “I’m going to be striving to push his legacy forward and develop it in the best way possible,”she says. For more information on the International Library of Fashion Research, visit fashionresearchlibrary.com. ◆ Raquel Laneri is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Post, The Daily Beast, Time and The New Inquiry, among other publications. SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

1. Comme des Garçons flyer, fall/ winter 2013.

4. T: The New York Times Style

6. Surface, August 2015.

9. FT Weekend, February 2020.

Magazine, April 14, 2019.

7. Visionaire limited-edition Kidrobot

2. Studio Voice, September 1994.

5. Yves Saint Laurent posters, fall/

toys, 2004.

3. Helmut Lang postcard, fall/winter

winter 2008 – 2009.

8. Isabel Marant Étoile catalog, spring/summer 2017.

All images courtesy of the International Library of Fashion Research.

2002 – 2003.

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6 5

10. Tomorrowland

catalog, fall/winter 2015. 11. Hermès tie catalog,

2008. 12. Invitation to

a performance of The Times Are Racing (New York City Ballet), hosted by Humberto Leon and Carol Lim of Opening Ceremony, 2017.

13. V, July/August 2001. 14. Visionaire 23: The Emperor’s New Clothes, featuring photography by Karl Lagerfeld, 1997.

9 10

11 12

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VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

titmouse Animation Studio

Flies High

BY ALEXANDER GELFAND

When chris and and shannon prynoski, co-owners of the independent animation studio Titmouse, moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 2000, things were looking a bit uncertain. Shannon (BFA 1994 Film and Video) had quit her job as a photo editor; Downtown, the animated series that Chris (BFA 1994 Animation) had created for MTV, had been canceled; and their landlord had sold the house in Williamsburg where they had been living. Things look a lot better now. Titmouse, the company that

the couple originally established to sell their T-shirt designs online, is a thriving animation studio with 1,200 employees staffing offices in Los Angeles, New York and Vancouver. The studio partners with streaming powerhouses like Amazon, Apple, Disney and Netflix to produce series as varied as the raunchy coming-of-age comedy Big Mouth and Harriet the Spy, based on the classic children’s book by Louise Fitzhugh. And it provides content for an ever-growing list of films, music videos, commercials and video games. 56 |

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In short, the Prynoskis have become moguls. And no one is more surprised about it than they are. “It’s very surreal. I don’t really believe it,” says Shannon, who is responsible for supervising everything from the studio’s COVID-19 protocols to the preparation of a new, 95,000-square-foot office space in Burbank. In retrospect, the duo’s timing was impeccable. They arrived in Los Angeles at the beginning of an animation boom enabled by Flash, a software platform that greatly streamlined the production process, and just as the Cartoon Network cable channel was about to launch Adult Swim, its adult-oriented programming block. The result was a steady stream of projects for the pair, including such iconic series as Metalocalypse and The Venture Bros. Shannon focused on production, while Chris concentrated on animation. As their workload grew, the Prynoskis reorganized their company, took on additional staff and built a reputation as a studio with a facility for left-of-center and adventurous material. In addition to Downtown, Chris (who has also taught animation at SVA) had previously worked on MTV’s Daria and Beavis and ButtHead; an early Titmouse calling card was their animated sequence for comedian Tom Green’s directorial debut Freddy Got Fingered (2001), an initial critical and commercial flop that has since acquired a cult following. More recently, the explosive growth of digital streaming platforms has driven a massive increase in demand for animation. “They all want content, and they want it fast,” Shannon says. “We have something like 20 series in production,” Chris says. “Twenty years ago, that would have been almost the whole animation industry.” For many years, Titmouse handled everything from editing to sound recording in-house. But the increase in volume has led to more collaboration and outsourcing. Disney, for example, might handle pre-production on a project that will ultimately be animated at Titmouse’s Vancouver operation, while the studio’s Hollywood office might handle pre-production on a project before handing it off to animators in South Korea. Last year, the studio worked with 80 artists in 10 countries to produce a series of animated videos for the electronic music duo AREA21. As the number of projects has increased, so too has the variety of roles that Titmouse plays in the development and production process.

ABOVE Stills from Fairfax (2021 – ), an animated Amazon Prime Video series co-produced by Titmouse. Courtesy of Prime Video. OPPOSITE Titmouse’s new Burbank studio. Photograph by Chris Prynoski. PREVIOUS Chris and Shannon Prynoski portraits courtesy of Titmouse, Inc.

“Sometimes they come with hardly anything, and sometimes the SVA Theatre and elsewhere, and has become as indicative they come with a lot,” Chris says of the clients who hire Tit- of the studio’s collected talents, imaginations and sensibilities mouse to turn their ideas into reality. (These clients often get as its official résumé. (And they still sell T-shirts: Check out help from SVA alumni, dozens of whom work, or have worked, titmousestuff.com.) for the studio—no doubt in part because the company’s sole Having a child—the two have a son, Conan, who is now nine— recruiter, BFA 2013 Computer Art, Computer Animation and also changed things for the couple. The demands of parenting Visual Effects alumnus Ellen Su, also teaches at the College.) led Shannon to step back from the day-to-day production work Sometimes Titmouse produces projects for animator–creators that previously consumed her life. And for a while, Chris found such as Pendleton Ward (The Midnight Gospel, on Netflix) or himself walking into meetings with network executives with a Brad Neely (The Harper House, on Paramount+), who bring baby strapped to his chest. their own concepts and distinct As Conan has gotten older, the visual styles. work-life balance has become easier— “Then we have a lighter touch; which is good, because his parents we’re the facilitators of their vihave ambitious plans. Chris hopes to sion,” Chris says. produce more full-length animated The studio’s growth has had features. Titmouse’s first, Nerdland, other consequences as well. “I feel came out in 2016; their latest, Arlo like I’m way less connected to the the Alligator Boy, came out last year. creative than I used to be,” Chris Shannon is working on an initiative to says. “I end up getting pulled into support greater inclusion and diverthe projects that have problems or sity in the animation industry. issues, as opposed to just getting “I’m trying to show people, ‘You can invited to the fun stuff.” be a woman and own a studio. You can All the same, the Prynoskis strive be a lead person and still have a baby,’” to maintain a fun-loving and supshe says—even if she sometimes finds portive workplace environment. it hard to believe herself. ◆ . Early on, Shannon established an Alexander Gelfand is a freelance annual “5-Second Animation Day” TWENTY YEARS AGO, journalist in New York City who often at the studio, providing employees THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN writes about technology, business the time and resources to create and the arts. their own short, personal animated ALMOST THE WHOLE projects. The resulting work has ANIMATION INDUSTRY.” been screened for several years at

“ We have something like 20 series in production

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Stills from Harriet the Spy (2021 – ), an Apple TV+ series animated by Titmouse, Inc. Courtesy of Apple.

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Stills from Star Wars: Galaxy of Adventures (2018 – ), a Disney series animated by Titmouse, Inc. Courtesy of Lucasfilm.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Stills from Big Mouth (2017 – ), an animated Netflix series produced by Titmouse, Inc. Courtesy of Netflix.

Stills from Chicago Party Aunt (2021 – ), an animated Netflix series produced by Titmouse, Inc. Courtesy of Netflix.

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Q+A MICHELE WASHINGTON BY ANNE QUITO

“Diversity

and inclusion is a term that has been monetized,”

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CLOCKWISE FROM OPPOSITE Michele

Washington portrait by Anthony Barboza; the Curious Story Lab logo; We Sing A Black Girl’s Song (left), a book designed by Washington for “Black Girlhood Altar” (2021 – 2022), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, presented by the nonprofit A Long Walk Home; type design by Washington for “Race, Myth, Art and Justice” (2019), Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, New York; website rebrand for A Long Walk Home. All images courtesy of Michele Washington.

says Michele Washington (MFA 2011 Design Criticism). “People think that, if they use it, it makes them acceptable.” And even the most well-meaning initiatives can quickly be co-opted by brands and devolve into hollow corporate gestures. Washington, who has built a career working with diverse communities, is vigilant against simplistic solutions. Through her design consultancy, she has tackled complex issues such as food scarcity, gender-based violence and racial justice with civic-minded orga-

nizations like the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, A Long Walk Home, Romare Bearden Foundation and Sprout by Design. She has also been an advisor to institutions such as the AIGA, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Poster House museum and Society for Experiential Graphic Design. As a design researcher, strategist and teacher, Washington believes that the best paths to learning and social change involve engaging the audience’s own curiosity—a journey that can lead to rewarding, if circuitous, tangents. Her new podcast, Curious Story Lab (curiousstorylab.com), which debuted this past December, is vital proof of this approach. Through a series of

conversations with creative professionals who embody the omnivorous, multidisciplinary ethos Washington champions, she exposes listeners to “visionaries of color” who are reshaping culture, one project at a time. Her first-season guests include writer and curator Prem Krishnamurthy, graphic designer Forest Young and researcher Lesley-Ann Noel. On the precipice of Curious Story Lab’s launch, Washington spoke about her aspirations for the podcast, a new book project, the value of deep research and how studying history helps us put present crises in better perspective. We’ve gone through some pretty big upheavals over the past few years—from a global health crisis to an ongoing cultural reckoning about race and gender. How have things changed for you?

As a Black woman in my age group, things haven’t changed much. While different voices brought the issues to a higher level of hype, all of those issues

have existed over a long period of time; you just have different voices championing the same cause now. I do think technology plays a more amplified role today. We’re in a state where we have super media highways where you can get all this information instantly. But I always think of what the poet Gil Scott-Heron once said: “The revolution will not be televised.” While we think we see everything, we won’t always know what’s going on behind the scenes. When a big event happens, it may feel like it’s the defining moment for that particular issue. But I’ve learned that there’s often always someone or something that’s come before. For instance, during a talk I gave at Columbia University about the afro, I pointed something out about the American Health and Beauty Aids Institute’s “Proud Lady Buy Black” symbol that was used on Black hair-care products in the 1960s and 1970s as being one of the first such logos. But A’Lelia Bundles—who is the great-great granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker, the entrepreneur who built the first African American hair-care empire—kindly pointed out a precedent from the 1920s in Harlem. Sometimes we just don’t know it or haven’t done the leg work to do the research. SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

On This Season of Curious Story Lab

SVA alumnus Michele Washington’s podcast spotlights “visionaries of color”—here’s a look at some of her guests’ work.

4 1./2. London and Central Park maps by Alfalfa Studios principal and SVA Continuing Education faculty member Rafael Esquer (pictured). 7 6

3. Materials for Black Girls STEAMing Through Dance, a community-based after-school program led by Drexel University professors Raja Schaar, Ayana Allen-Handy, Valerie Ifill and Michelle Rogers. 4. The Reach villa in Ontario, Canada, designed by rhed, a studio founded by Del Terrelonge. 5. Polimorfo, journal of the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico’s School of Architecture, designed by Rubberband Design Studio, which was founded by Dr. María de Mater O’Neill. 6. “Empathy Games for Children” activity cards prototype by Lesley-Ann Noel, designer, researcher and NC State University assistant professor. 7. FLAVA, a book celebrating the 10th anniversary of Wedge Curatorial Projects, Toronto, produced by Del Terrelonge’s design studio, rhed.

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1. /2 . COUR TESY OF ALFALFA STUDIO S. 3. PHOTO BY R A JA SC HA AR, COURTESY O F R A JA SCHA AR. 4. COURTESY OF RHED. 5. COURTESY OF RUBBERBAND DESI GN STUDI O. 6. COURTES Y OF LESL EY-ANN NOEL . 7. FL AVA P HO TOS BY RICO BELL A (LEF T ) AND MALK A GREENE, COURTESY OF RHED.

“I was a very observant and I was accepted in the Columbia Unicurious child. versity A’Lelia Bundles Community Scholars program, which enabled me to The old folks audit courses that mesh with my interests and research for my projects. We would call had a three-year time period and a small stipend to work on a project. That’s that being when I developed the podcast. I’ve since turned one of my closets into a mini a ‘busybody,’ home recording studio. I literally have but I always moving blankets up on one of the windows. asked a lot Before I started producing Curious Story Lab, I did some research about of questions my intended audience and potential interview subjects—Black, Latino, and was very Asian and Indigenous people within the design discipline or the creative realm. curious.” I spent quite a bit of time conducting a How did the Curious Story Lab podcast come about?

survey, reaching out to colleagues and interviewing professionals in the field, academics, and undergraduate and graduate students about what role culture played in their lives. I asked about their listening habits, what they read, what movies they liked, their buying habits. One of the architects whom I interviewed, who was an active podcast listener, said that, to her knowledge, there was no podcast for Latino architects or designers. I also dug through reports on listening habits and researched how the podcasting landscape has changed since when I was in graduate school. And I have made full use of Columbia’s libraries and amazing library services: I interviewed a whole slew of Black designers at least 20 years ago—Charles Jefferson, John Morning, Eugene Winslow, LeRoy Winbush and Reynold Ruffins, among others—and I have it all on cassette tapes. I was able to digitize them, thinking that I wanted some of the recordings to be part of the podcast. What types of stories and personalities are you featuring on the show?

I really wanted to interview people who work in multiple disciplines. I wasn’t interested in people who have become famous for doing one thing. For me, the most interesting minds can’t be contained within one creative entity or job title. For example, I talk with [Columbia University professor] Mabel O. Wilson, who isn’t just an academic but also an architect, a designer, a writer, a researcher and a curator. The first episode features Del Terrelonge, a

Toronto-based designer who has a “design ecosystem” where he works in graphic design, art, architecture and technology. We’ll end up with about eight episodes for the first season, and I’ve been in conversations with a colleague, [designer and educator] Norman Teague, about collaborating on season two, and having it be about designers of color who live and work in the Midwest. Has anything from your time in MFA Design Criticism—now MA Design Research, Writing and Criticism— proven to be especially useful in your current work?

I’ve always loved research, and in producing a podcast, you have to do deep research on the person you’re interviewing. I definitely improved my writing skills in the program, though I wouldn’t ever consider myself a picture-perfect writer like Toni Morrison, who painted her words on the page. I teach part-time and I always tell my students that we read maybe 100 to 200 pages a week at D-Crit! It was daunting but reading widely really helps you become a much better writer. A fellow graduate, Alicia Ajayi [MA 2020 Design Research, Writing and Criticism], serves as the podcast’s producer. She came on board after I

started planning out the series, but she was pivotal in mapping out each episode, developing themes, selecting and inviting guests and managing the production schedule. Alicia also assists with preparing the audio for mixing and editing and she helps with music selection, too. And she is great with organizing and scheduling workflows. And a former teacher, Leital Molad [also the vice president of content at audiobook and podcast company Pushkin Industries], gave me really helpful podcasting advice. She said that I should record in a studio for quality sound, and suggested that I explore the resources at the Columbia Journalism School. They have a sound studio for interviewing and mixing. I understand that you’re also working on a book that’s inspired by your SVA thesis topic?

I’m working on a book project about Black graphic designers with [designer] Maurice Cherry and Gail Anderson [chair, BFA Advertising and BFA Design; BFA 1984 Graphic Design] for Princeton Architectural Press. We’re calling it I Didn’t Know They Were Black, which comes from the title of a talk that I once gave on the history of Black designers. I had initially wanted to do it for my thesis but the scope seemed too large for the time frame we had. I’ve interviewed a lot of Black graphic designers over the years, and the book really is a passion project. We’re excited about it. I feel that other projects will emerge from this, whether it’s an oral history or another book spin-off. How would you describe the overall sensibility with which you approach your work?

Curiosity. I was a very observant and curious child. The old folks would call that being a “busybody,” but I always asked a lot of questions and was very curious. ◆ This interview has been condensed and edited. Anne Quito (MFA 2014 Design Criti-

cism) is a journalist and design critic. She wrote Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines (2019) with Walter Bernard (1961 Graphic Design) and the late Milton Glaser, a longtime SVA faculty member and former acting chairman of the College’s board. SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

FROM THE ARCHIVES

To learn more, visit archives.sva.edu.

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ilton Glaser (see page 8) was likely speaking for all designers when he created the I NY logo. And New York City clients of every stripe—including cultural and educational institutions, publications, restaurants and retailers—have long turned to the incredible local talent pool for the logos and promotional materials that burnish their image and attract both residents and

culture publication The Brooklyn Rail, juxtaposing the casual scrawl of his own handwriting with the block-like shapes of a silhouetted city skyline. As a Manhattan-based resource filled with the work of New York City designers, the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives houses many projects for the places and things that make New York great. Here are samples from each borough of our little city.

1. THE BRONX BFA Illustration faculty member and 2012 SVA Masters Series honoree James McMullan foregrounded a magnificent elephant in his 1989 poster for the Bronx Zoo, signaling the wildlife oasis that the zoo represents.

3 out-of-towners. (It doesn’t hurt that these artists also count among their most prized and influential patrons.) For the designers who accept such assignments, the appeal is obvious: Who wouldn’t want to contribute to something that has personal meaning for them, in the place they call home?

Images courtesy of the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives.

2. BROOKLYN The late Tony Palladino, a longtime faculty member and the 1999 SVA Masters Series recipient, created the front and back covers for the March – April 2002 issue of arts and

3./4. MANHATTAN BFA Design faculty member and 2016 SVA Masters Series honoree Louise Fili specializes in identity projects for restaurants and food packaging. Her logos for such past and present Manhattan restaurants as Via Carota, Metropole, Métrazur and, pictured here, Pace and The Mermaid Inn each represent a fully realized and inhabited concept. 5. QUEENS This 1982 poster for an exhibition at the Queens Museum, designed by MFA Design faculty member Stephen Doyle, makes art from the labor and tools of the art-making process. 6. STATEN ISLAND The late MFA Design faculty member Keith Godard’s 1985 booklet for the “Building Buildings” installation at the Staten Island Children’s Museum presents an unfolding interactive view of the life of buildings, from design to construction. ◆ Beth Kleber is the head of archives at the School of Visual Arts. SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

VISIT SVA.EDU/ALUMNI TO

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• Update your contact information

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CONNECT ON SOCIAL MEDIA @svanycalumni @svanycalumni School of Visual Arts Alumni group Share your work with us using #SVAwesome

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For complete details and up-to-date information visit sva.edu/alumni Questions? Contact SVA Alumni Affairs at 212.592.2300 or alumni@sva.edu

ALUMNI AFFAIRS

The Lives and Experiences of Art and Design Alumni A message from Jane Nuzzo, director of Alumni Affairs and Development at SVA

❋

I am pleased to announce that the School of Visual Arts will once again participate in the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), which will take place this fall. Launched in 2008, SNAAP gathers, analyzes and reports on survey data from arts alumni to better understand their professional success, educational satisfaction and personal fulfillment. SNAAP survey data delivers a national profile of how artists living in America prepare for their careers and allows for a deepened understanding of what constitutes success in the arts, and the extent of artists’ contributions to culture and society. In short, SNAAP helps us better understand the professional success, educational satisfaction and personal fulfillment of our alumni. This year’s SNAAP is especially timely, given the changing environment in which arts institutions operate: Career opportunities are shifting, competition among institutions of higher education for both students and resources is on the rise, a generational shift in leadership is under

way and an unpredictable pandemic rages on. Colleges like ours, dedicated to preparing future generations of creative leaders, require data to plan, educate and support effectively. We also want to understand the new challenges you face and gain insight into the systemic forces affecting your careers and lives. To that end, SVA is participating with an eye on benchmarking against peer institutions, addressing alumni career development needs, providing better alumni engagement and support of the alumni community, and strengthening our strategic planning, student recruitment efforts and curriculums.

The SNAAP survey will be administered in October. But in the coming months, alumni should stay tuned as we provide more information about how you can participate and share your experiences. Updates will be made available online at sva.edu/alumni and communicated via our monthly e-newsletter. Wishing you a safe and happy summer.

To ensure that your contact information is up-to-date and for complete details about alumni benefits and resources, visit sva.edu/alumni.

SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

SPRING 2022 SVA ALUMNI SOCIETY AWARDS Thanks to generous contributions from alumni and supporters, the SVA Alumni Society was able to grant a total of $52,500 in awards to these students in support of their thesis projects. 727 AWARD

Amit Lerner, BFA Film

AMELIA GEOCOS MEMORIAL AWARD

Han Bao, BFA Design Haotian Wu, BFA Design

Tierra Lindsey, MPS Art Therapy

Chong Xu, BFA Fine Arts

Carina N. Martinez, MA Curatorial Practice

BFA ILLUSTRATION AND

ALUMNI SCHOLARSHIP AWARDS

Christopher Anasoulis, BFA Visual & Critical Studies

Charlie Mercier, BFA Animation

Shaoyang Chen, MFA Design Gabriella DeJesus with thesis partners Deniz Mani and Julia Sutton, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects Ida Anita del Mundo, MPS Directing Tashmon Dimps, BFA Animation Lamie Doan with thesis partner Lanbing Lyu, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects

Sonja Moses, MFA Social Documentary Film Ruike Pan, MFA Design for Social Innovation Dylan Rose Rheingold, MFA Fine Arts Kate Song, MPS Directing Shaoxiong Song, MFA Computer Arts

Jiacong Gu, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects Xayvier Haughton, MFA Fine Arts

Mav Vitale with thesis partners Lisa Qingyi Liu and Ben Meyer, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects Jesseter Wang with thesis partner Zhen Liu, MFA Computer Arts Nerte Wu, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects

Jamya Hicks, BFA Animation

Quan Yuan, BFA Photography and Video

Di Hu, BFA Photography and Video

Lan Zhan, BFA Animation

Zhaowei Hu, MFA Social Documentary Film

Bingbing Zhang, MFA Design

David Doyoon Kim, BFA Advertising Ailyn Lee, MFA Fine Arts Ashley Lee, BFA Animation Jungwoo “luenfire” Lee, BFA Illustration Mindy Lee with thesis partners Jocelyn Lee and Yu Hsin Miao, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects

Xinyi Zhang with thesis partner Gracia Wang, MPS Directing Xuemeng Zhang, MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Yuetian Zhang with thesis partners Nelson Mai and Kaitlin Yu, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects Vi Zhao, MFA Social Documentary Film Man Zhu, MPS Digital Photography

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JACK ENDEWELT MEMORIAL AWARD

Violeta Encarnacion, BFA Illustration JAMES RICHARD JANOWSKY AWARD

MFA ILLUSTRATION AS

Steven Uccello, MFA Photography, Video and Related Media

Juan David Figueroa Bernal, MFA Computer Arts

Davina Hsu, MFA Fine Arts Zhishu Xie, MFA Fine Arts

Yuki Sun, MFA Computer Arts

Eleanor Early, BFA Animation

Mickey Ferrara, MFA Design for Social Innovation

EDWARD ZUTRAU MEMORIAL AWARD

Tatiana Tift, BFA Film

Claudia Tay, MFA Computer Arts

Theodora Eliezer, MFA Art Practice

Tianqi Chen, BFA Illustration Maithili Joshi, BFA Illustration Jordan Lisicky, BFA Illustration Wenjing Yang, BFA Illustration

Anna Sørrig, MPS Directing

Daniel DuBoulay, BFA Animation Christianne Ebel, MFA Art Practice

CARTOONING AWARD

VISUAL ESSAY AWARD

Lillian Ansell, MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Yunyi Dai, MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Stephish Liu, MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Yinhan Liu, MFA Illustration as Visual Essay MICHAEL HALSBAND AWARD

Stephanie S. Anderson, BFA Photography and Video ROBERT I. BLUMENTHAL MEMORIAL AWARD

Yantong Chen, BFA Design SYLVIA LIPSON ALLEN MEMORIAL AWARD

Chris Cortez, BFA Fine Arts Adi Dahlke, BFA Visual & Critical Studies THOMAS REISS MEMORIAL AWARD

Alexandra Leav, MFA Photography, Video and Related Media WILLIAM C. ARKELL MEMORIAL AWARD

Fabian Palacios, BFA Film

1. Christianne Ebel, Bearing Witness: Being Pandemic Fine—Alma, 2021, DSLR image; 2. Chris Cortez, Inmaculada Concepción, 2021, oil on canvas; 3. Bingbing Zhang, from “Pollen,” 2022, editorial website; 4. Steven Uccello, Upper Flank Sans 125 lbs., 2022, infrared digital photograph; 5. Stephish Liu, The Orange Tree, 2022, digital illustration; 6. Gabriella DeJesus, Deniz Mani and Julia Sutton, still from Mission:2089, 2022, 3D computer animation.

9 6

7. Ailyn Lee, The Fourth Wall, 2020, performance installation, wood panels, oil paints and sticks, acrylic paint, frames, resin, candles, keys, keyholes and papers; 8. Jordan Lisicky, House Within the Marsh, 2021, Risograph print; 9. Lamie Doan and Lanbing Lyu, still from Etheræl, 2022, short visual effects film. All images courtesy of the artists.

SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

DONORS The Alumni Society gratefully acknowledges these SVA alumni who gave to the society from July 1 through December 31, 2021. Kim Ablondi

Patrick Coniconde

Neil Gallo

Noëlle King

Arthur Ackermann

Elizabeth Cook

Peter Geffert

Sardi Klein

Everett Aison

Dennis Corbo

Jeremy George

Alex Knowlton

Evin Aksel

Alice E. Meyers Corjescu

Christyn Godfrey

Robert Kohr

Joseph Alesi

John A. Cowan

Karen Goodsell

Barbara Kolo

Evelyn M. Alfaro

Julia and Phil Coyne

Dustin Grella

Edward Kulzer

David Haas

Barbara Laga

Nahid Hassanivanhari

J.P. Lee

Meghan Day Healey

John Lefteratos

Diane Dawson Hearn

Gary Leogrande

Joseph Herzfeld

Elizabeth Libert

BFA 1984 Photography BFA 1982 Cartooning 1959 Graphic Design BFA 2010 Photography BFA 1988 Graphic Design BFA 1985 Advertising

Juan Alfonso 1982

Olive Alpert

1980 Illustration

Adam P. Ames

BFA 1994 Illustration MFA 2014 Fine Arts 1972

1974 Fine Arts

BFA 1990 Photography BFA 1988 Media Arts BFA 1986 Media Arts

Diane Cuddy

BFA 1988 Graphic Design

Therese Curtin

BFA 1980 Illustration

MFA 1997 Photography and Related Media

Peter S. Deak

Gail Anderson

Robert B. Dewing

Michael Angley

Rael Jean DiDomenicoSchwab

BFA 1984 Graphic Design 1971 Advertising

BFA 1990 Film and Video BFA 2007 Cartooning

Anonymous (9)

BFA 1990 Advertising

Eric Arroyo

BFA 2007 Photography

1971 Advertis

BFA 2013 Cartooning

David Balkan

BFA 2017 Illustration

Rich Berry 1966

Gary Brinson

BFA 1985 Media Arts

Sharon Burris-Brown BFA 1984 Illustration

Brian Callaghan

Amy Elkins

Tom Engelhardt 1957 Cartooning

John Ettinger 1973

Gilda Everett

BFA 1979 Media Arts

James Ewing 1973

Carol Fabricatore

BFA 1977 Media Arts

MFA 1992 Illustration as Visual Essay

Angelo Canitano

Mary Fader

Kevin J. Casey

Matthew Farina

1970

BFA 1976 Photography

Terry Cavanagh 1968 Media Arts

Jeff Chabot

1981

MFA 2014 Art Criticism and Writing

Kevin J. Farley

BFA 1977 Photography

MFA 1997 Photography and Related Media

Miriam Fishman

Andrew Chang

Lawrence Flood

MFA 1987 Illustration as Visual Essay

Florence Cohen 1973

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BFA 1984 Photography BFA 1980 Fine Arts

Jaxon Flores

BFA 1997 Fine Arts

BFA 1977 Graphic Design BFA 1990 Advertising BFA 1983 Photography BFA 1987 Graphic Design BFA 1988 Graphic Design MFA 2009 Computer Art 1974

MFA 2017 Art Writing

BFA 1993 Graphic Design BFA 1975 Illustration BFA 1991 Fine Arts

Cybele Hsu

BFA 2003 Photography

Lyn Hughes

BFA 1981 Photography

Rona Hunter

MFA 2013 Art Practice 1970 Photography BFA 1987 Graphic Design BFA 2003 Animation BFA 1981 Media Arts MFA 2003 Computer Art BFA 1977 Media Arts MFA 1991 Computer Art BFA 1988 Graphic Design BFA 1978 Fine Arts

MFA 2010 Photography, Video and Related Media

Marc Librescu

BFA 1984 Photography

Nancy Librett 1982 Media Arts

BFA 1977 Graphic Design

Ingrid Andresen Lindfors

Ruth Hurd and Steven Hochberg (alumnus)

Dick Lopez

1975

Walter Jansson 1964

Nanette Mahlab Jiji BFA 1981 Illustration

Gary J. Joaquin

BFA 1981 Media Arts

Deborah Jones

BFA 1987 Photography

MFA 1994 Photography and Related Media

Marilu Lopez

BFA 1975 Graphic Design

Mark Madias

BFA 2001 Film and Video

Jennifer Makaw

BFA 2001 Photography

MFA 1987 Illustration as Visual Essay

Kymm Malatesta-Zak

Michael Kaczkowski

Laura Maley

BFA 1992 Fine Arts

BFA 1978 Fine Arts

Caitlin Kelch

Peter Malone

BFA 1991 Film and Video

BFA 1977 Fine Arts

John Kiley

Jesse Meikle

BFA 1999 Graphic Design

MFA 2016 Computer Art

Eun Jung Kim

Louis Mercurio / Mercurio Design

BFA 1999 Interior Design

Seoryung Kim

BFA 2012 Graphic Design

BFA 1986 Graphic Design

1970

Jenny Moradfar Meyer

Joseph M. Rutt

BFA 1985 Illustration

MFA 2007 Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 2001 Illustration

Gallagher O’Connor Developments

Wyatt Mills

Linda Saccoccio

Jaine Testa

1980 Graphic Design

General Plumbing Corporation

Robert Moore

Herb Savran

Mary Tomasulo-Mariano

Maryhelen Hendricks

Michael Morshuk

Joanne Scannello

Rosemarie Sohmer Turk

Bethanie Deeney Murguia

Robert A. Schadler

Barbara Vasquez

Jean A. Schapowal

Tom Wai-Shek

Joel Scharf

Judith Wilde

LDI Color Toolbox

Mark Willis

Karen and Michael Lefkowitz

BFA 1980 Illustration BFA 2013 Fine Arts BFA 1976 Fine Arts BFA 1985 Illustration

MFA 1998 Illustration as Visual Essay

Bill Murphy

BFA 1975 Illustration

Nancy Boecker Oates 1980 Media Arts

Susan Koliadko O’Brien BFA 1984 Graphic Design

Anna Ogier-Bloomer

MPS 2017 Digital Photography

Romaine Orthwein

MFA 2003 Photography and Related Media

Peter Papulis

MFA 1991 Fine Arts

BFA 1977 Film and Video BFA 1984 Advertising BFA 1991 Graphic Design BFA 1987 Cartooning

BFA 1983 Graphic Design

Joe Schwartz

BFA 1988 Graphic Design

Heewon Seo

MFA 2012 Fine Arts

Jerold M. Siegel BFA 1975 Fine Arts

Sirje B. Skerbergs

BFA 1987 Graphic Design

BFA 1977 Fine Arts

Suzanne Slattery

Mrs. and Mr. Kevin Petrilak (alumnus)

Brian E. Smith

BFA 1980 Graphic Design BFA 1998 Graphic Design 1970 Advertising

MFA 1994 Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 1979 Fine Arts BFA 1998 Illustration

Michelle M. Zadlock BFA 1990 Advertising

Albert Zayat 1969

Randy Zeiger-Globus BFA 1978 Fine Arts

MFA 2006 Design

Sal Petrosino

Rena Anderson Sokolow / one2tree BFA 1986 Graphic Design

Hodgson Russ LLP Kevin Hovet Michael Kahn / Benefits Unlimited, Inc. KTM Electronics, Inc. Lakeland Bank Edward Lefferman

Julia Lester Tina Levine Lipinski Real Estate Advisors LLC Michelle Mackin Major Air Ronnie and Al Martella

BFA 1992 Fine Arts

BFA 1976 Animation

BFA 1983 Film and Video

BFA 1985 Communication Arts

We also thank these parents and friends of SVA who supported the SVA Alumni Society.

Ace-Atlas Corp.

William McAllister Lynn and Jim McNulty S. A. Modenstein Jane Nuzzo

Anonymous (2)

Ned and Ellin Purdom William Rednour

1963 Fine Arts

Joni Blackburn and David Sandlin

Michele Rechler

Ellen Pliskin

BFA 2013 Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects

BMS

Gregory Puertolas

William Sponn

The Bonadio Group

Anthony and Killeen Rhodes

Todd L. Radom

Vesper Stamper

Lynn A. Pieroni

BFA 1986 Graphic Design

BFA 1985 Film and Video BFA 1986 Graphic Design

Paul Rappaport 1963 Fine Arts

Bob Ratynski

BFA 1984 Photography

Kate Renner

BFA 2008 Graphic Design

Lisa Rettig-Falcone BFA 1983 Advertising

Vernon C. Riddick 1973

Frank Riley

BFA 2003 Illustration

Eileen Robert 1973

Jaime Cody Rosman

MPS 2014 Digital Photography

Daniel Solomon

BFA 1985 Media Arts MFA 2016 Illustration as Visual Essay

Karen Steinecke-Dooley MFA 2013 Illustration as Visual Essay

Art Stiefel

BFA 1987 Advertising

Joann Stryszko 1973

Philip Sugden

BFA 1977 Fine Arts

Retsu Takahashi

MFA 2002 Illustration as Visual Essay

Tomomi Tanikawa and Mu Pan

MFA 2007 Illustration as Visual Essay

Bottom Line Savings BP Air Conditioning Corp.

Antonio Rico Rosenwach Tank Company

Richard Buntzen

James Rudnick

Colony Pest Management, Inc.

Safety Facility Service Salomon Sassoon

Charles Davis

Schindler Elevator Corp.

Francis and Carla Di Tommaso

Frances Schorr

Veronica Dube, in memory of Ronald Dube (1966 Illustration)

Maureen and Gary Shillet

Momma Dukes Sue Epstein Exclusive Contracting Elizabeth Fama and John Cochrane James Farek Allen B. Frame

SCS Agency, Inc. Robert Sylvor Jamie A. Thornton W.B. Mason Bruce E. Wands Webster Bank Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP Peggy Whitlock

SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

ALUMNI NOTES & EXHIBITIONS

SVA alumni achievements from June 1 through November 30, 2021. To submit an item, email alumni@sva.edu.

CLARA KIRKPATRICK (MFA 2018 Illustration as Visual Essay) works on the mural she painted in the summer

of 2021 for the tasting room at the Brooklyn Brewery, Brooklyn, NY. Courtesy of the artist.

GROUP EFFORTS

Paul Amenta (MFA 2000 Fine Arts) and Diana Shpungin (MFA 2002 Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Drawing For a Reliquary,” Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, MN, 2021. Dawoud Bey (1977 Photography) and Lorna Simpson (BFA 1982 Photography) had work in the group exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” New Museum, NYC, 2/6-6/6/21. Nona Faustine (BFA 1994 Photography) and Pacifico Silano (MFA 2012 Photography, Video and Related Media) had work in the group exhibition “Fantasy America,” The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, 3/5-8/30/21. Efrem Zelony-Mindell (BFA 2011 Photography) co-curated and Edward Gia (BFA 2020 Photography and Video), Dan Halm (MFA 2001 Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 1994 Illustration) and Nicholas Loffredo (BFA 2021 Photography and Video) had work in the group exhibition “Pride,” Culture Lab LIC at The Plaxall Gallery, Long Island City, NY, 6/3-6/27/21. Yasi Alipour (BFA 2015 Photography), George Boorujy (MFA 2002 Illustration as Visual Essay), Ketta Ioannidou (MFA 1999 Illustration as Visual Essay), Elizabeth Peyton (BFA 1987 Fine Arts), Dana Robinson (MFA 2019 Fine Arts) and Kenny Scharf (BFA 1981 Fine Arts) donated art to BAM Gala 2021, Brooklyn Academy of Music, NYC, 6/10-6/18/21. Brian Finke (BFA 1998 Photography) and Todd Radom (BFA 1986 Graphic Design) had work in the group exhibition “The Iconic Jersey: Baseball x Fashion,” Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, 6/12-9/12/21.

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VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Gail Anderson (BFA 1984 Graphic Design) and Matt Iacovelli (BFA 2019 Design) were featured in “The Daily Heller: ‘The Assistant,’ Matt Iacovelli,” Print, 6/15/21.

work in the group exhibition “The Rise of the Care Machines,” De:Formal, Art Club Brooklyn, NYC, 6/26-7/31/21.

MFA 2021 Fine Arts alumni Kristian Battell, Alyssa Freitas, Xianglong Li, Dan Xie and Boyang Yu were featured in “At SVA, MFA Grads Look Beyond the Pandemic With Resonant Projects,” Hyperallergic, 6/17/21.

Carol Fabricatore (MFA 1992 Illustration as Visual Essay), Denise Halpin (BFA 1977 Graphic Design) and Christopher Spinelli (BFA 1989 Illustration) had work in the group exhibition “The Art of Coney Island,” The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, NYC, 7/10-8/15/21.

Jon Gomez (MFA 2017 Fine Arts) and Marilyn Montufar (BFA 2009 Photography) had work in the group exhibition “El Zodíaco Familiar,” The Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA, 6/1910/24/21.

James Bascara (BFA 2011 Illustration) was a video/film finalist and Katelyn Kopenhaver (BFA 2016 Photography and Video) was named an interdisciplinary work fellow, 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellows, Finalists, and Panelists, 7/13/21.

John MacConnell (MFA 2009 Illustration as Visual Essay), Eric Rhein (MFA 2000 Fine Arts; BFA 1985 Fine Arts) and George Towne (MFA 1997 Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 1990 Media Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Connections V: Artists Selecting Artists,” Atlantic Gallery, NYC, 6/22-7/10/21.

Phuong Vo (MPS 2020 Digital Photography) produced and Natcha Wongchanglaw (MPS 2020 Digital Photography) translated the short film Centuries and Still, which premiered as a Vimeo Staff Pick, 7/15/21.

Gail Anderson (BFA 1984 Graphic Design) chaired the jury panel for and Jon Key (MA 2021 Design Research, Writing and Criticism) was a winner of “50 Books | 50 Covers,” AIGA, NYC, 6/23/21. Tong Wang (MFA 2021 Fine Arts) curated and Wednesday Kim (BFA 2015 Fine Arts) and MFA 2021 Fine Arts alumni Xianglong Li, Alexander Si, Fitz Wu and Boyang Yu had work in the group exhibition “Doomsday Evolution,” Satellite Art Club, NYC, 6/24-7/24/21. Jason Mena (MFA 2019 Art Practice) and Heather Williams (MFA 2020 Art Practice) had work in the group exhibition “Counter Flags,” Abrons Arts Center, NYC, 6/24-8/22/21. Wednesday Kim (BFA 2015 Fine Arts) co-curated and Faith Holland (MFA 2013 Photography, Video and Related Media) had

Yevgeniy Fiks (MFA 1999 Computer Art), Anna Sew Hoy (BFA 1998 Fine Arts), Tahir Carl Karmali (MPS 2015 Digital Photography) and Pacifico Silano (MFA 2012 Photography, Video and Related Media) had work in the group exhibition “OMNISCIENT: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture,” Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NYC, 7/16/21-1/2/22. MFA Fine Arts alumni Margaret Lanzetta (1989) and Mark Power (1993) had work in the group exhibition “Houston, We Have a Problem,” Chashama, NYC, 7/21-8/8/21. MFA 2020 Computer Arts alumni Han Chen Chang, Zhike Yang and Wenjie Wu were finalists for Animation (Domestic Film Schools); and Ella Cesari and Zoe Lyttle (both BFA 2021 Animation) and Yumin Zhang (MPS 2021 Directing) were semifinalists, 48th Student Academy Awards, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8/11/21.

MFA Art Writing alumni Blessy Augustine (2016), Hakim Bishara (2017), Katheryn Brock (2021), Ann Collins (2018), William Fenstermaker (2016), Sahar Khraibani (2019), Sahar Khraibani (2019), Zi Lin (2017), David Shuford (2021), Benjamin Swift (2020) and Sumeja Tulic (2019), and MFA Art Criticism and Writing alumni Kareem Estefan (2012) and Charles Schultz (2011), were featured in “A Tribute to SVA’s Art Writing MFA,” The Brooklyn Rail, 9/1/21. Katherine Bernhardt (MFA 2000 Fine Arts) and Olympia Gayot (BFA 2003 Fine Arts) were featured in “Fashion Briefing: Amid a Brand Refresh, J. Crew is Prioritizing Collaborations,” Glossy, 9/10/21. Valérie Hallier (MFA 1994 Computer Art) and Yalan Wen (MFA 2020 Computer Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Elements,” West Harlem Art Fund, NYC, 9/10-10/31/21.

MFA Social Documentary Film alumni Daniela Alatorre (2015) screened A Cop Movie, Lucas Groth (2012) screened The Bengali, Yunhong Pu (2019) screened Go Through the Dark, Yijia Zeng (2021) screened Whisper and Sofia Zhang (2021; BFA 2019 Film) screened Home Is the Story, DOCNYC, NYC, 11/10-11/18/21. BFA 2021 Fine Arts alumni Srishti Dass and Farwah Rizvi and BFA 2020 Visual & Critical Studies alumni Max Kornfield and Stella Song had work in the group exhibition “For the Spiritual Traveler: Reflections of Faith,” The Goblin Haus, NYC, 11/11-11/13/21. Katherine Bernhardt (MFA 2000 Fine Arts), Brian (KAWS) Donnelly (BFA 1996 Illustration), Keith Haring (1979 Fine Arts), Kenny Scharf (BFA 1981 Fine Arts), Amy Sillman (BFA 1979 Fine Arts) and Sarah Sze (MFA 1997 Fine Arts) had work in the Artist Plate Project 2021, Artware, 11/16/21.

BFA Computer Art alumni Leslie Chung (2007) won Special Visual Effects in a Single Episode for Star Trek: Discovery; Johnny Han (2003) was nominated for Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Single Episode for The Nevers; Charles Zambrano (2007) won Contemporary Makeup (Non-Prosthetic) for Pose, 73rd Emmy Awards, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 9/12/21.

Dawoud Bey (1977 Photography) and Brian (KAWS) Donnelly (BFA 1996 Illustration) contributed guest essays to The New York Times special project “Turning Points 2022,” 12/9/21 and 12/6/21, respectively.

Eugenia Mello (MFA 2017 Illustration as Visual Essay) and Carmen Pizarro (BFA 2015 Illustration) were featured in “20 Latino Artists to Watch,” Today.com, 9/15/21.

1951

BFA 2016 Fine Arts alumni Melanie Hausberger and Stephanie Hausberger were featured in “Photos exploring the unique bond between identical twin sisters,” Vice, 9/22/21. BFA Design alumni Chan Yu Chen (2020), Minkwan Kim (2020) and Zuheng Yin (2019) collaborated on the production of videos for “Tales of Dominica” and “Life After Salem,” from Lil Nas X’s album Montero, 9/22/21.

INDIVIDUAL NOTES & EXHIBITIONS George Booth (Cartooning) was the subject of the film Drawing Life, New Yorker Documentary Series, 11/18/21.

1954

John Dusko (Illustration) had a solo exhibition, “Untitled,” Yocum Institute for Arts Education, West Lawn, PA, 7/8-8/20/21.

1962

Theresa DeSalvio (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “America the Beautiful: The Real and Imagined,” Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, NYC, 9/18-10/30/21.

1963

Jorge Luis Rodriguez (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Seeing Voices de Visiones Boricua,” El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, NYC, 6/7-6/25/21; and celebrated the 36th anniversary of his installation Growth, Harlem Art Park, NYC, 6/26/21.

William Hogan (Graphic Design) had a solo exhibition, “Sense and Nonsense,” Pennswood Art Gallery, Newtown, PA, 9/12-11/7/21. Ellen Pliskin (Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Lost and Found: A Personal Vision,” The New York Artists Circle, 8/11/21.

1972

Kathleen McSherry (BFA Graphic Design) had work in the group exhibitions “Cerulean Arts Collective Members’ Exhibitions,” Cerulean Arts Gallery, Philadelphia, 9/15-10/10/21, and “Pieces and Places,” Stover Mill Art Gallery, Erwinna, PA, 8/28-9/26/21. Luke Ryan (Illustration) had a solo exhibition “Phenomenal Women,” Alacrity Frame Workshop, Albany, NY, 9/1-9/30/21. Linda Stillman (Graphic Design) had work in the group exhibition “Landscape Deconstructed: Mimi Czajka Graminski and Linda Stillman,” The Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden, North Salem, NY, 9/11/21-6/1/22.

1975

Margaret McCarthy (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Beloved: Photo Tanka Meditations,” On Landscape, 11/06/21.

1976

Beth B (BFA Fine Arts) screened Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over (2019), IFC Center, NYC, 6/30/21. A. Lucky Checkley (BFA Photography) had work in the group exhibitions “Friends Expo,” 7/20-8/14/21, and “Exposure 2021,” Ceres Gallery, NYC, 11/30-12/11/21.

Joni Sternbach (BFA Photography) was featured in “The T List: Five Things We Recommend This Week,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine, 10/28/21.

1979

Ray Billingsley (BFA Cartooning) was named 2020 Cartoonist of the Year, National Cartoonist Society, 10/16/21; and was featured in “Cartoonist Ray Billingsley Has Been Portraying Black Family Life for Decades—and Now He’s Getting His Due,” The Washington Post, 11/20/21. John Michael Pelech (BFA Media Arts) had work in the group exhibition “2021 Salmagundi Club Juried Exhibition and Auction,” The Galleries at Salmagundi, NYC, 9/27-10/22/21.

1980

Arthur Bonanno (BFA Illustration) had a solo exhibition, “Energy,” One Martine Gallery, White Plains, NY, 8/19-9/23/21. Ron Barbagallo (BFA Graphic Design) was featured in “Restoration wizard Ron Barbagallo brings new life to historic animation art,” Spectrum News 1, 8/9/21. David Anthony Fullard (BFA Photography) gave a talk, “The Art of Photographing Dance,” Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 6/3/21. Rita Maas (BFA Photography) had work in the group exhibition “Cladogram: 2nd KMA International Juried Biennial,” Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY, 7/13-9/19/21.

John Ferry (MFA 1994 Illustration as Visual Essay) curated and Colete Martin (BFA 2020 Illustration) had work in the group exhibition “Ambiguous,” The Carter Art Center Gallery, Metropolitan Community College-Penn Valley, Kansas City, MO, 9/30-12/2/21.

Kenny Scharf (BFA Fine Arts) donated a mural to the Los Angeles Mission, Los Angeles, July 2021; and designed a Scharf x Dior capsule with Kim Jones, Christian Dior, fall 2021.

BFA 2021 Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects alumni Roshel Amuruz, Carlos Taborda and Ashley Williams were recipients of Jury Special Mention, NewFest, NYC, 10/15-10/24/21.

1982

Lorna Simpson (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition “Everrrything,” Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, 9/14/21-1/9/22; and was featured in “Lorna Simpson’s ‘Heads’ coming to Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis,” St. Louis Magazine, 8/17/21; “Lorna Simpson Never Stops Inventing,” The Wall Street Journal, 9/24/21; and “The Many Layers of Lorna Simpson,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine, 9/30/21.

TM Davy (BFA 2002 Illustration) and Carlos Motta (BFA 2001 Photography) had work in the Benefit Art Sale, BOFFO, Fire Island Pines, NY, 10/15-12/17/21. BFA Design alumni Shiqing Chen (2021) and Woojoo Lim (2020) worked on They Might Be Giants’s album Book, 10/26/21.

Joey Skaggs (BFA Advertising) screened Joey Skaggs: Bad Guys Talent Management Agency, Newport Beach Film Festival, Newport Beach, CA, 10/23/21.

Alexandra Hammond (MFA 2015 Art Practice) and Alicia Smith (MFA 2018 Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Revisions,” Transmitter, NYC, 10/30-12/5/21.

Willie Cole (BFA 1976 Media Arts) and Lorna Simpson (BFA 1982 Photography) have work in the ongoing group exhibition “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, 11/5/21.

Dawoud Bey (Photography) had the solo exhibition “Dawoud Bey: An American Project,” Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, 4/1710/3/21; was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame, 10/29/21; and was named Artist of the Year, Apollo Awards 2021, 11/12/21.

1981

Keren Moscovitch (MFA 2005 Photography, Video and Related Media) curated and MFA 2019 Fine Arts alumni Yam Chew Oh and Arantxa Ximena Rodriguez had work in Affordable Art Fair, Metropolitan Pavilion, NYC, 9/22-9/25/21.

Aleathia Brown (BFA 1987 Media Arts) and Kristy Caldwell (MFA 2010 Illustration as Visual Essay) were recipients of City Artist Corps Grants, New York Foundation for the Arts, 10/31/21.

1977

1983 YEVGENIY FIKS (MFA 1999 Computer Art), Andy Warhol

and The Pittsburgh Labor Files (installation view), 2015, mixed media and archival material, dimensions variable. On view at the group exhibition “OMNISCIENT: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture,” Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NYC, 7/16/21-1/2/22. Photograph © Kristine Eudey, 2021. Courtesy of the artist/Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art.

Andrea Fraser (Fine Arts) was featured in “The ARTnews Accord: Artists Lorraine O’Grady and Andrea Fraser Talk Art World Activism and the Limits of Institutional Critique,” ARTnews, 6/17/21. Frank Ockenfels 3 (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “Introspection,” Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden, 6/4-10/17/21.

SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

1992

Kirsten Aune (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Selective Focus: Kirsten Aune’s North Coast Fashion,” Perfect Duluth Day, Duluth, MN, 7/3/21. Kate Brown (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Kate Brown, A Next Generation Yayoi Kusama,” The Ritz Herald, 9/1/21. Carol Fabricatore (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) had work in the group exhibition “(Your) Open Studios @ City Hall,” Rotunda Art Gallery, Jersey City, NJ, 7/5-7/31/21. Dinh Quang Lê (MFA Photography and Related Media) was featured in “Seeing Double,” Oregon Arts Watch, 8/30/21. Christine Romanell (BFA Graphic Design) had work in the group exhibition “Open Studios,” Manufacturers Village Artist Studios, East Orange, NJ, 10/16-10/17/21. Ray Villafane (BFA Illustration) was featured in “Meet Ray Villafane—Sculptor & Pumpkin Carving GOAT,” Remezcla, 10/26/21.

1993

Lauren Berkowitz (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “The National 2021: New Australian Art,” The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, 3/26-8/22/21. Jeremy Dawson (MFA Photography and Related Media) was featured in “How The French Dispatch Took Over a French Town,” The New York Times, 9/10/21. Shawn Martinbrough (BFA Illustration) was featured in “Radhika Jones on the Birth of the Now,” Vanity Fair, 8/3/21. Vanessa Pineda Fox (BFA Graphic Design) had work in the group exhibition “Pastiche,” Chroma Fine Art Gallery, Katonah, NY, 10/19-11/14/21. Will Rosado (BFA Illustration) has work in the group exhibition “La Borinqueña,” Fundación Cortés, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 6/19/21-6/19/22.

1994

Gavin Benjamin (BFA Photography) was featured in “Pittsburgh Artist Explores Black Cultural Legacies through Collage and Photography,” WESA, 10/28/21. Joseph Castronova (MFA Fine Arts; BFA 1991 Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Reassembly,” M Galleries, Washington, NJ, 7/1-7/31/21. GUADALUPE MARAVILLA (BFA 2003 Photography) and trained sound healers perform a sound bath (top) and

an aerial view of Maravilla’s Tripa Chuca, 2021, both from the artist’s solo exhibition “Planeta Abuelx,” Socrates Sculpture Park, NYC, 5/15-9/6/21. Courtesy of the artist, Socrates Sculpture Park and P·P·O·W, New York; photograph by Scott Lynch, drone image by KMDECO Creative Solutions: Mark DiConzo.

1984

1987

Gail Anderson (BFA 1984 Graphic Design) was featured in “The Daily Heller: It’s My Party,” Print, 7/7/21.

Aleathia Brown (BFA Media Arts) performed “Project (Insomniac),” Kente Royal Gallery, NYC, 10/31/21.

1985

Gary Petersen (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in ”Mitsui Fudosan America’s 527 Madison Avenue Announces Gary Petersen Art Exhibition,” WFMZ-TV, Allentown, PA, 7/8/21; and had work in the group exhibition “Colored Pencil Redux,” McKenzie Fine Art, NYC, 7/9-8/20/21.

Michael Cuesta (BFA Photography) was featured in “Promised Land: Release Date, Cast, and More,” Slash Film, 11/10/21. Glenn Head (BFA Cartooning) was featured in “Sex abuse rituals at NJ boarding school exposed—in cartoons by survivor,” New York Post, 6/21/21. Collier Schorr (BFA Communication Arts) was featured in “Gigi Hadid Is Ready to Play By Her Own Rules,” Harper’s Bazaar, 7/14/21.

1986

Gregg Bordowitz (Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well,” MoMA PS1, NYC, 5/13-10/11/21; and was featured in “The AIDS crisis strained his relationship with Judaism. Now, it’s integral to his art—and activism,” Forward, 10/1/21.

74 |

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

1988

Joseph Fucigna (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Crowds Hail New HMA Exhibit Worth the Wait,” Patch.com, 11/10/21. Jeffrey Muhs (BFA Media Arts) had a solo exhibition “The Uncanny Valley,” Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY, 10/30/21-1/2/22. Gary Simmons (BFA Fine Arts) curated “Altered States,” Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco, 6/4-7/23/21; and was elected as an National Academician to the National Academy of Design, 9/30/21.

1989

Margaret Lanzetta (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Cool and Collected,” Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Kent, CT, 6/26-8/8/21; and had a solo exhibition, “Almost Enlightenment,” Russell Janis Projects, NYC, 11/3-11/28/21. Al Nickerson (BFA Media Arts) published “The Sword of Eden,” Diamond Comic Distributors, 11/3/21; and gave a talk “Creating Superhero Christian Comics with Al Nickerson!,” The Christian Comic Arts Society, 8/12/21.

1990

Erik Doescher (BFA Cartooning) was featured in “Professional illustrator Erik Doescher drawn to Walpole,” The Keene Sentinel, 9/11/21. Robert Lazzarini (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition “Rated R for Violence,” Lowell Ryan Projects, Los Angeles, 6/26-8/14/21.

1991

Dawn Henning (BFA Fine Arts) was the recipient of an artist residency, NYC Audubon on Governors Island, NYC, 7/3-10/31/21.

Inka Essenhigh (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Wild at Heart,” Marlborough, NYC, 7/14-9/11/21. Nona Faustine (BFA Photography) was featured in “Nona Faustine’s Family Album,” Hyperallergic, 6/26/21; was the recipient of the Baxter St Family Residency, Stoneleaf Retreat, Kingston, NY, July 2021; gave a talk, Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, NYC, 7/6/21; and hosted “Drink and Draw: The Slipstream with Nona Faustine,” Brooklyn Museum, NYC, 8/19/21. Steve Herold (BFA Film and Video) screened Waimea (2020), Valley Film Festival, Los Angeles, 11/3-11/7/21. Eileen Karakashian (BFA Advertising) had the solo exhibitions “Eileen Karakashian: In Quarantine,” Gallery at Oyster Point Hotel, Red Bank, NJ, 9/8-11/8/21, and “Abstraction,” Roost at Union Arts Center, Sparkill, NY, 11/5/21-1/31/22. Derick Melander (BFA Fine Arts) had an installation, The Witness, Diversity Plaza and Travers Park, NYC, 10/31-11/1/21 and 11/12-11/14/21. Leemour Pelli (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “NFT.NYC,” DorDor Gallery, NYC, 11/1/21.

1995

Michael DeFeo (BFA Graphic Design) had a solo exhibition, “Out of the Blue,” Hexton Contemporary, Aspen, CO, 6/11-7/6/21; gave

a talk, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY, 6/18/21; had work in the group exhibitions “The Flowers: Alex Katz and Michael De Feo,” Craven Contemporary, Kent, CT, 7/24-9/19/21, and “Pathological Landscape,” Marquee Projects, Bellport, NY, 8/6-9/12/21; and was featured in the book One Thing Well, Rice Gallery, 10/4/21. Vera Lutter (MFA Photography and Related Media) was featured in “Prior to Demolition, These LACMA Galleries Took Selfies With a Little Help From the Pinhole Photographer Vera Lutter,” Forbes, 6/30/21, and had photography in “Searching for Plato With My 7-Year-Old,” The New York Times Magazine, 9/22/21.

1996

Brian (KAWS) Donnelly (BFA Illustration) was featured in “A ‘Holy Grail’ of American Folk Art, Hiding in Plain Sight,” The New York Times, 10/18/21. Corinne Jones (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition “Analog Sunset,” Situations, NYC, 6/5-7/17/21. Justine Kurland (BFA Photography) was featured in “Reflecting on the complexities of a father-daughter relationship,” 1854 Photography, 8/20/21, and “Justine Kurland Selects 17 of Her Favourite Women and Non-Binary Artists,” AnOther, 10/6/21. Matthew Rothenberg (BFA Graphic Design) self-published Gorin Zander—The Mystery on Terrible Street, Kindle Edition, 7/28/21. Riccardo Vecchio (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) gave a talk, “31 Degrees Project Launch,” Brooklyn Public Library, NYC, 11/15/21.

1997

Karlos Cárcamo (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Subliminal Horizons,” Alexander Gray Associates, NYC, 7/1-8/14/21. Raul Manzano (BFA Illustration) had work in the group exhibition and selected the catalog cover for “Unprecedented: Art Responds to 2020,” View Center for Arts and Culture, Old Forge, NY, 6/12-8/1/21; and had a solo exhibition, “Our America—¡Nuestra América!,” SUNY Empire State College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 9/20-10/15/21. Vickie Pierre (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition “Be My Herald of What’s to Come,” Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL, 6/9-9/5/21; and was featured in “The Divine Feminine Interventions of Vickie Pierre on View at the Boca Raton Museum of Art,” Art Daily, 7/7/21. Sarah Sze (MFA Fine Arts) installed a permanent sculpture, Fallen Sky, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY, 6/26/21, and was featured in “A brush with... Sarah Sze,” The Art Newspaper, 9/29/21, and “Christie’s Will Sell Works by Dana Schutz, Nicolas Party, and Other Contemporary Art Stars to Benefit the NYC AIDS Memorial,” Artnet, 10/12/21.

1998

Dana Behrman (BFA Animation) gave a talk, “Is the Future Beautiful?,” Dezeen, 11/16/21. Chris Bors (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) had work in the group exhibition “Punk Waffel Remix: Chris Bors and Joe Waks,” IFAC Arts @ The Yard: Lower East Side, NYC, 6/28-9/24/21; had a solo exhibition, “Ackchyually,” Brian Leo Projects, NYC, 7/10-8/1/21; and curated “Nothing’s Shocking,” SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NYC, 9/8-9/13/21.

Forevers,” Thierry Goldberg Gallery, NYC, 7/298/27/21; and was featured in “Ketta Ioannidou,” Museum of Nonvisible Art, 9/16/21. Gerard Way (BFA Cartooning) was featured in “The Umbrella Academy’s Creator Gerard Way on How He Came Up With the Graphic Novels,” Cheatsheet, 8/26/21. Anna Zaderman (BFA Fine Arts) opened a business, SSunshineBeads, Etsy, 9/29/21.

2000

Katherine Bernhardt (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “David Zwirner to Represent Katherine Bernhardt,” Martin Cid, 7/5/21, and “These Colorful, Limited-Edition J.Crew Tees and Totes Support Teachers Across the Country,” Yahoo.com, 9/15/21.

George Boorujy (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) had work in the group exhibition “Good Heavens,” Gitler &, Santa Barbara, CA, 8/48/29/21. Marlena Buczek Smith (BFA Graphic Design) had work in the group exhibitions “ReVision & Respond,” The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ, 6/17-8/22/21; “International SocioPolitical Poster Biennale,” Cieszyn, Poland, 11/10-11/24/21; “Bienal del Cartel Bolivia Bicebe,” National Museum of Art, La Paz, Bolivia, 11/1511/19/21; and “Peru Design Biennial,” San Isidro, Lima, Peru, 11/18-12/2/21.

Katrin Eismann (MFA Design) was featured in “How to Snap Spectacular Fourth of July Fireworks This Summer,” PetaPixel, 6/28/21. Mariam Ghani (MFA Photography and Related Media) screened What We Left Unfinished (2019), Syndicated, NYC, 8/7/21; and was featured in “Mariam Ghani on Afghanistan’s unfinished histories,” Artforum, 9/22/21. Edward Hemingway (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) published Pigeon and Cat, Christy Ottaviano Books, 6/22/21. Crystal Moselle (BFA Film and Video) was featured in “Betty Rolls Through a Vibrant, Visceral Pandemic-Era New York,” New York, 6/10/21, and “HBO’s Betty Highlights the Lives

Kevin Cooley (MFA Photography and Related Media) had a solo exhibition, “Exploded Views,” Laney Contemporary Fine Art, Savannah, GA, 7/1/21-9/18/21. Alexander Lee (BFA Fine Arts) has work in the group exhibition “Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology,” Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM, 8/24/21-7/10/22. Nate Powell (BFA Cartooning) was featured in “Manufacturing Lightning: A Visual Account of John Lewis’s Legacy,” The New Yorker, 7/21/21. Lauren Redniss (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “Lauren Redniss and the Art of the Indescribable,” The New Yorker, 7/23/21. Eric Rhein (MFA Fine Arts; BFA 1985 Fine Arts) gave a talk, “LIFELINES: Art, Intimacy, and HIV—an Intergenerational Conversation,” Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, NYC, 6/18/21.

2001

Jose Carlos Casado (MFA Computer Art) had work in the group exhibition “Transfiguration: leaving reality behind,” Postmasters, NYC, 6/24-8/14/21. Bil Donovan (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Bil Donovan’s Whimsical Watercolor Illustrations are Fashion World Treasures,” Surface, 9/15/21. Brian Floca (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) gave a talk, Illustration Institute, Portland, ME, 8/31/21; and was featured in “The 2021 New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Books Winners at Work,” The New York Times, 11/12/21. Dan Halm (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 1994 Illustration) had work in the group exhibition “Brainbow,” Shelter Gallery, NYC, 7/29-8/28/21. Daina Higgins (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibitions “Seeing the Story,” Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA, 6/5-8/29/21, and “Taking Interest: Summer in the City,” Contemporary Art Matters, Columbus, OH, 6/189/30/21; and had a solo exhibition, “Pandemic/ Protest,” Contemporary Art Matters, Columbus, OH, 6/17-7/15/21. Carlos Motta (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “Carlos Motta,” Frieze Viewing Room, Los Angeles, 7/27-8/1/21. Mika Rottenberg (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Mika Rottenberg,” Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, 6/11-8/27/21. Danielle Scott (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “16 LGBTQ Visual Artists To Know,” Essence, 6/1/21.

Dice Tsutsumi (BFA Illustration) was featured in “Tonko House Reveals First Look at Oni, Taps Screenwriter Mari Okada,” Animation Magazine, 9/10/21.

Amy Talluto (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Amy Talluto: Moments of Light in the Forest,” Art Spiel, 8/26/21.

1999

Michael Alan (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Native New York: A Conversation with

Ketta Ioannidou (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) had work in the group exhibition “Seven

Contemporary Multi-Media Artist Michael Alan,” FAD, 9/22/21.

2002

GAVIN BENJAMIN (BFA 1994 Photography), No. 2 (top)

and No. 6, 2021, collage/mixed media. Benjamin was featured in “Pittsburgh Artist Explores Black Cultural Legacies through Collage and Photography,” WESA, 10/28/21. Courtesy of the artist.

SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

Jade Doskow (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had a solo exhibition, “Freshkills,” Tracey Morgan Gallery, Asheville, NC, 9/17-10/31/21, and screened Jade Doskow: Photographer of Lost Utopias (2021), International Center of Photography, NYC, 10/10/21.

of Women Skateboarders During the Pandemic,” NPR, 6/19/21. Reka Nyari (BFA Fine Arts) was included in A Woman’s Right to Pleasure, Black Book, 8/10/21; had a solo exhibition, “Punctured Ink,” Fremin Gallery, NYC, 9/9-10/23/21; and released her first collection of NFTs, Blindbox, 10/27/21.

Ashley Garrett (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Transfer-mations,” Love Apple Art Space, Ghent, NY, 10/8-12/1/21.

Christopher Reiger (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “The Latest Controversy in Duck Hunting: The Artwork,” The Wall Street Journal, 8/20/21.

Lynn Herring (BFA Fine Arts) made an appearance on Yale University Radio, New Haven, CT, 7/15/21; gave a talk, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT, 8/6/21; and had a solo exhibition, “Lynn Herring Retrospective,” C X Silver Gallery, Brattleboro, VT, 8/5-9/5/21.

Sam Tufnell (BFA Fine Arts) had a video installation, “Chicken Soup Is Not Good For Your Soul,” FiveMyles Gallery, NYC, 6/5-7/4/21.

2003

Dana James (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Something I Meant to Say,” Hollis Taggart, NYC, 6/3-7/2/21.

Phil Buehler (MFA Photography and Related Media) installed four large panoramic photo murals, “Re:Generation Tulsa 1921 – 2021,” Paradise Baptist Church, Tulsa, OK, 2021.

Jenny Morgan (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Our Secret Fire,” Hirschl & Adler, NYC, 9/9-10/8/21.

Natasha Jen (BFA Graphic Design) was featured in “Redesigning America’s Flag,” The New York Times, 9/28/21.

David Mramor (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Rainbow Lilies Gangrene Blues,” White Columns, NYC, 10/30-12/18/21.

Jade (MUMBOT) Kuei (BFA Animation) was the recipient of the Break-through Artist award, Designer Toy Awards 2020, 11/9/21. Guadalupe Maravilla (BFA Photography) had the solo exhibitions “Planeta Abuelx,” Socrates Sculpture Park, NYC, 5/15-9/6/21, and “Guadalupe Maravilla: Luz y fuerza,” Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 10/30/21- ; and was the recipient of The Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway, 10/5/21. Yuko Shimizu (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “Fighting Ignorance With Art: New York–Based Illustrator Yuko Shimizu Is Here to Kick Ass,” Tokyo Weekender, 8/17/21.

2004

Matthew Rota (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “The World through the Art of Matt Rota,” Dossier, 11/18/21.

ANNA SEW HOY (BFA 1998 Fine Arts), Destruction of Sculpture (stills), 2019, video, color, sound. Camera: Mariah Garnett; editing: Aimee Goguen. On view at the group exhibition “OMNISCIENT: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture,” Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NYC, 7/16/21-1/2/22. Courtesy of the artist.

Kira Nam Greene (MFA Fine Arts) is a finalist of the Sixth Triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, 10/7/21.

Zackary Drucker (BFA Photography) was featured in “Sterling K. Brown, Mark Duplass to star in sci-fi film Biosphere, directed by Mel Eslyn,” Firstpost, 8/26/21.

Vashtie Kola (BFA Film and Video) was featured in “How Culture Curator and DJ Vashtie Kola Pivoted Her Career to Work From Home,” Forbes, 6/2/21.

Christopher Hastings (BFA Cartooning) was featured in “‘Vote Loki’ Creator Pitches a President Loki MCU Spinoff,” Inverse, 7/7/21.

Nora Krug (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “The Road to Tyranny, a Graphic Narrative,” The New Yorker, 10/4/21. Collin Mura-Smith (MFA Computer Art) published “America Loves Guns,” The Nation, 8/9/21. Reuben Negron (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “Instagram Continues to Ghost Artists After Quietly Releasing a Feature That Unfairly Limits Content,” Cultbytes, 8/31/21. Anne Peabody (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Glasstress. Window to the Future,” The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, 9/11-10/31/21. Matthew Pillsbury (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was featured in “New York’s Dreamy, Disorienting Reopening,” The New Yorker, 7/26/21. Turner (BFA Graphic Design) was featured in “The Stylist Behind Grimes’s Futuristic Look,” The New York Times, 9/22/21.

2005

Ali Banisadr (BFA Illustration) has a solo exhibition, “Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians,” Asia Society Museum, NYC, 9/10/21-5/8/22. Valeria Cordero Reyes (BFA Photography) was appointed interim co-executive director, CruzDiez Foundation (CDF), Houston, 7/1/21.

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Thomas Holton (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was featured in “Intimate photos of the Chinese-American experience in NYC,” Huck, 6/2/21. Tak Hoon Kim (MFA Computer Art) was the recipient of the Outstanding Animation award, 2021 Catalyst Content Festival, Duluth, MN, 9/29-10/2/21. Mary O’Malley (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Salut! 6 Coaster Show,” Nucleus Portland, Portland, OR, 6/13-7/5/21, and created the Mary O’Malley sleepwear collection, Anthropologie, 7/26/21. Dash Shaw (BFA Illustration) was featured in “‘Spreadsheets Are the Best Things in the World’: Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski on Animating Cryptozoo,” Filmmaker Magazine, 8/20/21.

2006

Michael Bilsborough (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “‘Boundless Space’ Artist Stories Part 7: Drawing Through Grief and Destruction to New Beginnings,” Burning Man Journal, 10/7/21. Ryan Brown (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Dog Days,” Silo6776, New Hope, PA, 8/22/21. Kelli Farwell (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Matthew Rhys Hits the Seas,” The New York Times, 10/4/21. Joseph Grazi (BFA Animation) self-published “Heavy History: Episode One,” 6/13/21, and

“Heavy History: Episode Two,” 10/13/21, YouTube. Ian Jones-Quartey (BFA Animation) was featured in “LGBTQ characters of color are making animation history—but creatives of color can’t escape the industry’s discriminatory past,” Insider, 8/31/21. Keng-Ming Liu (MFA Computer Art) had a solo exhibition, “Swingphony, London Design Biennale, London, 6/1-6/27/21.

2007

Hannah Smith Allen (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had a solo exhibition, “Borderlands,” Swirbul Gallery at Adelphi University, Garden City, NY, 4/26-7/17/21. Amy Elkins (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “Parting Words,” South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN, 11/12/21-1/2/22. Ryan Feerer (MFA Design) was featured in “U.S. Postal Service to release new stamp with local ties,” In Forney, Forney, TX, 6/27/21. Timothy Goodman (BFA Graphic Design) had a solo exhibition, “Too Young to Not Set My Life on Fire,” Richard Taittinger Gallery, NYC, 8/19-9/23/21.

Arturo Soto (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had a solo exhibition, “Urban Visions,” SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, 9/2-12/19/21.

2009

Jen Bartel (BFA Illustration) was featured in “Marvel Comics Announced a New Series Called She-Hulk by Rainbow Rowell,” Animated Times, 10/25/21. Katherine Biese (BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) was nominated for Graphic Arts – Motion Graphics, The 64th Annual New York Emmy Awards, 6/30/21. Andrew Castrucci (MFA Fine Arts; BFA 1984 Media Arts) had a solo exhibition, “36 Years,” Bullet Space, NYC, 10/23-12/5/21, and was featured in “Design for a Difference: Andrew Castrucci Interviewed by Chris Molnar,” Bomb, 11/22/21. Dustin Grella (MFA Computer Art) had a solo exhibition, “Dustin Grella,” Youngstown State University, Youngstown, OH, 10/9-10/30/21. Daniel Loxton (BFA Film and Video) was featured in “Old World Meets the New,” The Highlands Current, 9/13/21. John MacConnell (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) had work in the group exhibitions “Fire Island Pines Arts Project’s 18th Biennial Art Show,” Whyte Hall, Fire Island, NY, 8/7/21, and “Closet to Quarantine: Queer Art Then and Now,” Childs Gallery, Boston, 9/7-11/6/21. Marilyn Montufar (BFA Photography) curated “Reverberations,” Small Talk Collective, Portland, OR, 2021.

Julie Klausner (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) is a writer and co-executive producer of Schmigadoon!, Apple TV+, 7/16/21.

Lissa Rivera (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was featured in “One Photographer’s Abiding Love Letter to Her Genderqueer Partner,” Feature Shoot, 8/26/21, and curated “Feeling the Space,” ClampArt, NYC, 11/4-12/18/21.

Ryan Pfluger (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was selected for the 2021 Out 100, Out, 11/1/21.

Rebecca Sugar (BFA Animation) was the recipient of the WIA Diversity Award, Women in Animation, 10/29/21.

2008

Spencer Chalk-Levy (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Orange Nights,” Retramp Gallery, Berlin, 7/16-7/25/21; and had work in the group exhibition “Sky’s the Limit,” TW Fine Art, NYC, 10/19-11/28/21. Cat Del Buono (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) curated “Moonrise Over Bushwick,” Bushwick Wall, NYC, Summer 2021.

Rich Tu (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “Five Keys to Creative Success from Rich Tu, Creative Industry Leader,” Influencive, 7/27/21. Paul Vogeler (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Scrapes,” Slag & RX Galleries, NYC, 7/29-8/28/21.

Jesse Wright (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “No Rule—Multiply Alpha,” Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ, 6/16-9/11/21.

Documentary and Best Soundtrack awards, Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival, Los Angeles, 10/21-10/30/21.

Shellyne Rodriguez (BFA Visual & Critical Studies) was featured in “Bringing Abolition to the Museum,” Boston Review, 6/17/21.

2010

Kenny Rivero (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “The Floor Is Crooked,” The Momentary, Bentonville, AR, 6/22-10/24/21; and was featured in “At the Armory: All Cylinders Firing,” The New York Times, 9/9/21, and “What Kenny Rivero Learned About Being an Artist Working As a Doorman at a Fancy Manhattan Building,” New York, 9/17/21.

Tony Toscani (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “In the Studio With Tony Toscani, the Artist Capturing the Melancholy of Now,” W, 8/10/21; and had a solo exhibition, “Isolation,” Massey Klein Gallery, NYC, 9/3-10/9/21.

Sara Berks (BFA Graphic Design) was featured in “10 Questions With … Sara Berks of MINNA,” Interior Design, 6/22/21. Ross Bollinger (BFA Animation) was featured in “How ‘Pencilmation’ Became a YouTube Sensation,” The Wall Street Journal, 6/9/21. Allison Chase (BFA Film and Video) was featured in “A Spooky Tour of Brooklyn,” WNYC, 10/29/21. Frankie Cihi (BFA Fine Arts) gave a talk, “How to Make a Perfect Mural,” AdobeMAX, 10/27/21. Sophia Dawson (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “‘They sacrificed their freedom’: Remembering incarcerated black activists,” The Guardian, UK, 9/1/21. Natan Dvir (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had work in the group exhibition “The Sitter,” Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, TX, 6/3-9/5/21. Bibi Flores (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Voices of Women in Art = Inside and Out,” 1922 Gallery, NYC, 10/2010/31/21.

2011

Jadalia Britto (MPS Branding; BFA 2006 Graphic Design) was featured in “This Colgate-Palmolive design manager reinvented toothbrush packaging to make it plastic-free,” Fast Company, 8/10/21; and was selected as one of “The Most Creative People in Business 2021,” Fast Company, 9/13/21. Jennifer Dunlap (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Bon & Venture is a one-woman show of vibrant fashion and fibers here in Savannah,” Savannah Now, 9/11/21. Amanda Kopp (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Atmospheres: The Pace Staff Show,” Pace Gallery, NYC, 7/16-8/20/21, and had a solo exhibition, “Content and Control,” Trestle Art Space, NYC, 9/3-9/29/21.

Dina Litovsky (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had photography featured in “‘It Just Hurts a Little Bit, and It Helps You’: New York City Kids on Getting Vaxxed,” The New Yorker, 11/10/21.

Aileen Kwun (MFA Design Criticism) wrote “When a Track Suit Embodies a Nation,” The New York Times, 11/10/21.

Allegra Pacheco (BFA Photography) was featured in “Tica Artist Wins Two Awards at the Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival with Her New Documentary,” The Costa Rican News, 10/30/21; and was the recipient of the Best

Jim McKenzie (BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) was featured in Craftopia, HBO Max, 11/18/21.

Hyesu Lee (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) collaborated with Topo Chico, 11/30/21.

Support the Talent

Efrem Zelony-Mindell (BFA Photography) curated “Witness,” Texas Tech University School of Art, Lubbock, TX, 10/5/21.

2012

Andrew Brischler (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Monster,” Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, 6/12-8/14/21, and was featured in “Andrew Brischler Draws Inspiration from the Idea of the Monster,” Whitewall, 8/10/21. Dario Calmese (MPS Fashion Photography) was featured in “Google Built the Pixel 6 Camera to Better Portray People With Darker Skin Tones. Does It?,” The Wall Street Journal, 10/25/21. Latoya Flowers (MFA Social Documentary Film) was selected for the Inaugural Short-Film Fellowship, Still I Rise Films, 6/15/21, and for the Hulu/KartemquinAccelerator program, 7/6/21; and gave a talk, “Beyond the Single Screen,” DOC Chicago, Chicago, 11/5-11/7/21. Elektra KB (BFA Visual & Critical Studies) had work in the group exhibition “Who Will Write the History of Tears,” Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland, 11/26/21-2/13/22. Peter Ash Lee (MPS Fashion Photography; BFA 2009 Photography) photographed “Eye to Eye,” Vogue, 11/1/21. Laura Murray (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibitions “Garden of Earthly Delights,” SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NYC, 9/8-9/13/21,

and “Viva La Memento Mori,” AHA Fine Art, NYC, 10/15-11/7/21. Lee Ann Norman (MFA Art Criticism and Writing) was a panelist on “Read and Write about Artist Books: Approaches to Art Book Criticism,” hosted by Megan N. Liberty, Book Art Review, 7/15/21. Cecilia Ruiz (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) made backgrounds for “Latino Artists Collection,” Google, 9/20/21. Pacifico Silano (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards, 10/6/21, and guest edited an issue of Musée Magazine, 11/15/21. Keioui Keijaun Thomas (BFA Fine Arts) was featured in “For Keioui Keijaun Thomas, the Body Becomes a Vessel,” The New York Times, 7/13/21. Rebecca Ward (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Field of Vision,” Peter Blum Gallery, NYC, 5/22-7/30/21. An Rong Xu (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “New Romantics,” Home Gallery, NYC, 10/1-11/30/21. Catherine Sarah Young (MFA Interaction Design) was the recipient of a Thirteen Artists Award, Cultural Centre of the Philippines, Manila, Philippines, 6/15-7/31/21.

2013

Austin Chang (BFA Film and Video) screened The Riverside Bench (2021), San Francisco Latino Film Festival, San Francisco, 10/1-10/17/21 Supranav Dash (BFA Photography) had photography featured in “Lockdown Series,” Harper’s Magazine, 8/1/21.Chemin Hsiao (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay; BFA 2011Animation)

Kakei (Vicky) Chong MFA 2021 Design

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Fernando Palafox (BFA Photography) had work in the group exhibition “The Happening,” FLXT Contemporary, Chicago, 6/26-10/2/21. Anne Quito (MFA Design Criticism) wrote “Beware the Chilling Effects of Hot Desking,” Quartz, 7/2/21; “Milton Glaser’s iconic 9/11 poster is now helping New Yorkers emerge from the pandemic,” Quartz, 9/9/21; and “How Designing and Writing Are More Alike Than You Think,” Eye on Design, 10/6/21. Toba Siebzener (BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) technical-directed characters in Ron’s Gone Wrong, Locksmith Animation, 10/15/21, and participated in “Ron’s Gone Wrong: Bringing B*Bots to Life,” Spark Animation Festival, 11/11/21. Caroline Tompkins (BFA Photography) contributed to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph, Aperture, 7/13/21; and was featured in “Through the lens of photographer Caroline Tompkins,” Wallpaper, 10/6/21. Holly Trotta (BFA Advertising) was featured in “10 Questions with Witch Hunt Production Designer Holly Trotta,” TV Overmind, 11/5/21.

2015

Yasi Alipour (BFA Photography) had work in the group exhibition “Mutual Convergence,” Geary, NYC, 7/22-8/20/21; and wrote “Hold My Hand; the Ocean Is Marching,” The Brooklyn Rail, 11/15/21.

TONY TOSCANI (MFA 2011 Fine Arts), Woman in a Lake, 2020, oil on linen. On view at the solo exhibition “Isolation,” Massey Klein Gallery, NYC, 9/3-10/9/21. Courtesy of the artist.

Michael Bailey-Gates (BFA Photography) was featured in “The T List: Five Things We Recommend This Week,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine, 9/9/21; and had a solo exhibition, “A Glint in the Kindling,” The Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam, 9/18-10/16/21. Vincent Cy Chen (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Fill Me with Your Larvae, Daddy,” Field Projects, NYC, 10/9-10/23/21. Dana Davenport (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “Dana Davenport: Dana’s Beauty Supply,” Recess Art, NYC, 9/7-10/19/21.

gave a talk, “Shared Dialog, Shared Space,” Korean Art Forum, NYC, 6/5/21; had work in the group exhibitions “Sentiment,” SFA Project, NYC, 7/8-8/8/21, and “Out Front 24/7,” Flushing Town Hall, NYC, 8/18-9/3/21; and had a solo exhibition, “Sunflower’s Wedding,” jumbotron displays at the Shops at Skyview, NYC, 10/1-10/31/21. Bradford Kessler (MFA Art Practice) had a solo exhibition, “Deep Throats,” Ashes/Ashes, NYC, 6/18-8/1/21. Sara Kriendler (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Mother’s Milk,” PROXYCO Gallery, NYC, 11/16/21. Naomi Lev (MFA Art Criticism and Writing) curated “See You Soon,” Art Lot Brooklyn, 9/12-10/17/21. Olivia Locher (BFA Photography) was featured in “Replacing Anxiety with Unstoppable Confidence: An Interview with Photographer Olivia Locher,” TM Blog, 6/28/21. Justin Melillo (BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) founded MoNA Gallery, 10/1/21. Star Montana (BFA Photography) was featured in “Star Montana,” Artforum, 9/1/21. Keith Negley (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “Alumni Door County Profile: Keith Negley,” Door County Pulse, 7/22/21. Antonio Pulgarín (BFA Photography) had a solo exhibition, “Lost Throughout the Pages (Whispers of the Caballeros),” Baxter St, NYC, 9/8-10/6/21; and was featured in “Antonio Pulgarín Honors His Colombian Heritage With Archival Imagery,” Advocate, 9/27/21.

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Ilona Szwarc (BFA Photography) had work in the group exhibition “Mirror, Mirror,” Nathalie Karg Gallery, NYC, 6/8-8/27/21, and had a solo exhibition, “Virgin Soap,” Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles, 9/4-10/9/21.

Nico Del Giudice (BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) was featured in “VFX Supervisor Nico Del Giudice Brings the Terrifying World of Dr. Death to Life,” The Hashtag Show, 9/15/21. Quinn Dukes (MFA Art Practice) participated in “Alchemy & Intention: Summer Solstice Performance Art Festival,” Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, MN, 6/19/21. Nicasio Fernandez (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Within and Without,” 6/26-7/21/21, and curated “Potent,” 6/26-7/21/21, Harper’s, East Hampton, NY. Bryan Anthony Moore (MFA Art Practice) had a solo exhibition, “Washington B.C.,” Ming Studios, Boise, ID, 5/14-6/26/21. Júlia Standovár (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was featured in “The Questionnaire: Júlia Standovár by Carole Schmitz,” The Eye of Photography, 8/30/21. Katy Stubbs (BFA Illustration) was featured in “All Fired Up: 6 Stylish Ceramicists Throwing New Light on an Old Art Form,” Vogue, 7/18/21. Jocelyn Tsaih (BFA Design) had a solo exhibition, “Nowhere Else To Go But Within,” Glass Rice, San Francisco, 8/7-8/28/21.

2016

Maya Cozier (BFA Film) was featured in “She Paradise Director Maya Cozier Relates the Experiences of Real Caribbean Women for Debut Film,” Below the Line, 11/22/21. Delano Dunn (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Snowfall in L.A.,” Montague Contemporary, NYC, 9/23-10/28/21. Anthony Geathers (BFA Photography and Video) was featured in “Comme des Garçons’ Releases Nike Foamposite Collab,” Women’s Wear Daily, 10/28/21. Max Huffman (BFA Cartooning) was featured in “This Human Way: Carrboro Cartoonist Max Huffman Inks a Wry New Comic Collection,” Orange County Arts Commission, Hillsborough, NC, 6/5/21.

Patricia Voulgaris (BFA Photography) photographed “How to Save Your Knees Without Giving Up Your Workout,” The New York Times, 11/19/21. Brian Whiteley (MFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Justin Bieber is Suing Me,” Gablowsian Gallery, NYC, 11/4-11/7/21. Zipeng Zhu (BFA Design) was featured in “Celebrate Pride Month with Harry’s new digital platform,” Wallpaper, 6/5/21.

2014

Justin Aversano (BFA Photography) was featured in “Meet Photographer and NFTer Justin Aversano,” LA Weekly, 6/7/21. Jesse Chun (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) participated in “Close Looking at Shigeko Kubota,” Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 11/9/21. Lynda Decker (MFA Design Criticism) wrote “Can Your Law Firm Afford Not to Redesign Its Website?,” ABA Journal, 11/15/21. Kwesi Kwarteng (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Transformation,” Calabar Gallery, NYC, 10/30-12/4/21. Molly Matalon (BFA Photography) was featured in “Molly Matalon complicates our idealised view of love,” C41, 6/28/21, and “The Worldly Desires of Molly Matalon,” 10 Magazine, 7/1/21. Shohei Miyachi (BFA Photography) was featured in Issue 58 of Matte Magazine, 10/19/21.

CECILIA RUIZ (MFA 2012 Illustration as Visual Essay), Arbol de la Vida, 2021, traditional printmaking and digital. For “Latino Artists Collection,” Google, 9/20/21. Courtesy of the artist.

Netta Laufer (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had work in the group exhibition “Land. Milk. Honey.,” Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, Venice, Italy, 5/22-11/21/21.

Jiayue Li (MFA Design) was featured in “Jiayue Li’s Surreal Illustrations Ignite Sparkles of Thought and Excitement,” Creative Boom, 11/23/21.

Susan Luss (MFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Straight Forward, Image Driven,” The Painting Center, NYC, 10/5-10/30/21.

Ji Eun Lim (MAT Art Education) had a solo exhibition, “Perception of Ji Eun,” One Art Space, NYC, 6/3-6/6/21.

Sarah Wainio (MFA Social Documentary Film) directed The Lost Kitchen, Discovery+/Magnolia Network, 10/22/21.

Hsiang Hsi Lu (MPS Fashion Photography) was featured in “Gay Photographer Takes You Inside the NYC Homes of Grindr Profiles,” Edge Media Network, 11/13/21.

2017

Christy Bencosme (BFA Fine Arts) was the recipient of a Bridging the Divide residency, NYCHA Public Arts Program, NYC, 9/13/21.

Make Wen (BFA Illustration) illustrated a series of drawings of riders on the MTA, NYC, 7/15/21.

2020

Hakim Bishara (MFA Art Writing) wrote “Danish Artist Runs Away With Museum’s Cash and Calls It Art,” Hyperallergic, 9/30/21.

Yinka Elujoba (MFA Art Writing) was the recipient of a Rabkin Prize, Rabkin Foundation, 7/1/21.

Nottapon Boonprakob (MFA Social Documentary Film) directed Come and See, Netflix Thailand; and was featured in “Come and See on Netflix: 5 reasons to watch this Thai film now,” Lifestyle Asia, 8/3/21.

Amina Gingold (BFA Photography and Video) was featured in “Photographers on Photographers: Amina Gingold in Conversation with Cecilia Condit,” Lenscratch, 8/5/21.

Sangeun Hwang (BFA Fine Arts) had a solo exhibition, “Concrete Utopia,” Local Project, NYC, 7/23-7/31/21, and was featured in “‘Concrete Utopia,’ The New Exhibition from Photographer Saneun Hwang, Captures the Fleeting Nature of NYC,” Bust, 7/23/21.

Sarah Shaw (MFA Visual Narrative) had work featured in “The Build Back Better Framework,” The White House, 11/8/21. Ben Wang (MFA Social Documentary Film) was the recipient of the Special Jury Award, Workers Unite Festival, 11/9/21.

IN MEMORIAM Ronald H. Dube (1966 Illustration) died on March 23, 2021. A former resident of Ossining, New York, Dube was born on July 16, 1948, in Tarrytown, New York, to the late Alcide and Noella (Gagnon) Dube. Dube graduated from Ossining High School before attending SVA. He retired from Consolidated Edison after 42 years as a senior graphics designer. He was an avid photographer and runner who participated in the New York City and Boston marathons, and he enjoyed biking and pie baking. Dube is survived by his wife, Ronnie, his sons Michael and Brian (Corina), his beloved grandchildren Aaron and Emma, sisters Deborah Quinlan and Darlene Dube, and many nieces and nephews.

Branko Kljajic (BFA Animation) screened The Heist (2017), Short Nite 2, 7/20/21.

Heather Williams (MFA Art Practice) screened Safe Passage, ArtCrawl Harlem on Governors Island, NYC, 7/31/21.

Shinyeon Moon (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) was featured in “Flower Child: Charming illustrations by Shinyeon Moon that celebrate mindfulness in nature,” Creative Boom, 6/9/21.

Natcha Wongchanglaw (MPS Digital Photography) had work in the group exhibition “My Park Moment,” The Presidio, San Francisco, 9/1/21.

Keiko Nabila Yamazaki (BFA Illustration) was featured in “Keiko Nabila Yamazaki on Creating Cheerful Art For New Yorkers,” Forbes, 7/1/21, and had a solo exhibition, “Fine(ish) Art,” Usagi NY, NYC, 8/16-8/31/21.

2021

2018

Rosie Brock (BFA Photography and Video) was featured in “‘Interlude’ by Photographer Rosie Brock,” Booooooom, 9/20/21.

Aileen Barney (BFA Photography and Video) was featured in “Meet Photographer Aileen Barney, Whose Images Preserve the Fading Circus Industry,” The Daring, 6/3/21.

Ann Collins (MFA Art Writing) wrote “To Create a Space for Experimentation: School of Visual Arts MFA Fine Arts,” Art and Education, 11/1/21.

George Cathcart (MFA Visual Narrative) was featured in “One Eight Hundred Ghosts,” The Comics Journal, 10/20/21.

(BFA 1974 Fine Arts) died on October 25, 2021. He was born on December 16, 1950, in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. Klein, who studied art theory at SVA, made a living as a hospitality brand consultant. His influence—particularly his encyclopedic knowledge of arts and culture history—can be seen at the luxury Thompson Hotels brand, restaurants and in logos and brand advertising. His extensive collection of fashion ephemera is the basis of the International Library of Fashion Research in Oslo (see page 48). Klein is survived by his brother, Neil.

Kaitlyn Danielson (BFA Photography and Video) had a solo exhibition, “Of Breath and Dust,” Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, Narrowsburg, NY, 6/26-8/1/21.

Srishti Dass (BFA Fine Arts) had work in the group exhibition “Recumbent: The Art of Lying,” Equity Gallery, NYC, 9/8-10/2/21.

Renee NyahayGonzalez

Nicholas Loffredo (BFA Photography and Video) was featured in “Nicholas Loffredo Is Broadening the Definition of Queerness,” The Daring, 11/4/21.

(BFA 1985 Media Arts) died on August 5, 2021. She was born on December 12, 1963, in Yonkers, New York, to the late Joan (Flynn) and Richard Nyahay. Nyahay-Gonzalez graduated from Gorton High School in 1981, then from Elizabeth Seton College in 1983, earning a transfer scholarship to SVA. She was first employed by R.BIRD & Company, Inc., then by PepsiCo Inc., where she worked for over 18 years as a freelance designer, followed by more than five years at Amscan Inc., the parent company to Party City Holdings Inc. She was an avid participant in living-history reenactments of the Civil War, World War I and World War II, as well as period dancing, especially swing. She also loved to travel. She is survived by her husband, Joel Gonzalez-Blanco, sisters Robin and Regina, and several nieces and nephews.

Christopher Janaro (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) had a solo exhibition, “In the Moment: A Year Through the Arts in Wake County,” Betty Ray McCain Art Gallery, Raleigh, NC, 9/28-12/31/21. BonHyung Jeong (BFA Cartooning) was featured in “Blog Tour & Review: Kyle’s Little Sister,” Cindy’s Love of Books, 6/15/21. Clara Kirkpatrick (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) painted a mural for the Brooklyn Brewery tasting room, Brooklyn, NY, August 2021.

Akshat Bagla (BFA Photography and Video) was featured in “‘Kolkata’s Ethnicity Is Within People in Small Areas’: Akshat Bagla on Local Storytelling,” The Daring, 7/1/21.

Susannah Lohr (MFA Visual Narrative) was nominated for Outstanding Online Comic, Ignatz Awards, 9/20/21. Mary McClure (BFA Illustration) has work in the group exhibition “JFK Creative Portraits,” The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC, 9/1/21-6/1/22.

Alicia Smith (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Dia de los Muertos on Main Street: Oscillator Press Hosts Day of Dead Exhibition, Charity Drive and Procession,” The Norman Transcript, 10/8/21. Nina Tsur (BFA Design) was featured in “3-2-1 liftoff! Mural honoring New Jersey’s first space traveler launches in Oradell,” northjersey.com, 9/19/21.

2019

Aasmaan Vishal Bhardwaj (BFA Film) was featured in “After Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey, Son Aasmaan Bhardwaj Makes Debut With Kuttey,” The Quint, 8/23/21, and “Radhika Madan Says She Hopes to Live up to the Script of Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kuttey,” The Indian Express, 10/4/21.

To submit items for consideration for Alumni Notes & Exhibitions, email alumni@sva.edu.

Steven Mark Klein

Broadway ads art-directed by Vinny Sainato for SpotCo. Courtesy of SpotCo.

Vinny J. Sainato (BFA 1989 Graphic Design) died on January 8, 2022. Born in Brooklyn in 1966, Sainato was both an SVA alumnus and a faculty member, returning to the College to teach design courses in the late 2000s. Early in his career, Sainato worked as an art director at Viacom. He later held the same title at SpotCo, an agency specializing in advertising, branding and marketing for Broadway productions, founded by fellow Graphic Design alumnus Drew Hodges (1984). He continued his theater-related work at Serino Coyne, which he joined in 2013 as vice president of creative services. Sainato’s portfolio includes work for such noted shows as Avenue Q: The Musical, Chicago and Rent, and his recognitions include AIGA, BDA, Clio and Communication Arts awards. Following a 2018 cancer diagnosis, Sainato moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, and established Vinny J. Sainato Creative Consulting, through which he worked with local theater companies as well as Broadway. Sainato is survived by his husband, Martin Ruzicka, parents Kay and Vincent, brothers Darrin and Dominic, and his niece and nephews. SPRING/SUMMER 2022 |

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