calarts magazine #12

The Magazine of California Institute of the Arts | Spring/Summer 2012

CalArts is published twice each year by the CalArts Office of Advancement.

California Institute of the Arts Steven D. Lavine, President

Bianca Roberts, Vice President, Advancement Editorial: Stuart I. Frolick and Freddie Sharmini Creative Direction: Scott Taylor Design: Joseph Prichard (Art mfa 08)

Type in this issue includes: Roletta Sans and Roletta Serif by Andrea Tinnes (Art mfa 98), Cholla Slab and Odile by Sibylle Hagmann (Art mfa 96) and Precrime Serif by Jens Gehlhaar (Art mfa 97)

Photography: Scott Groller and Steven A. Gunther

Telephone: (661) 255-1050 E-mail: [email protected]

Letter Fromthe President

The Magazine of California Institute of the Arts | Spring/Summer 2012

The subject of creativity is very much in the news. Corporate leaders issue reports describing creativity as an essential 21st-century job skill; legislators debate the feasibility of a creativity index as one measure of school performance; science writers (most recently, Jonah Lehrer in his illuminating book Imagine: How Creativity Works) draw on cutting-edge neurological research to explain the workings of creativity—that elusive catalyst of groundbreaking inventions and innovative breakthroughs. While it can feel as if this is yet another of those ever-shifting American fads, the fact that this discussion is also taking place in China and Korea, in Malaysia and the European Union, suggests something more substantial is at work: the ever-growing recognition that fresh ideas and inventive problem-solving will drive the world’s new economies and open up economic and social possibilities not foreseeable even a generation ago. Creativity has always been at the center of CalArts. Students are admitted not only on the basis of previous achievement but, even more, on the evidence of their curiosity, intellectual openness, and, yes, creative potential. Once students arrive at the Institute, they find the focus is on identifying each student’s unique capacities and helping guide that student on his or her own creative path. And among our alumni, creative achieve-ment of the highest order is an everyday fact, and sometimes in arenas they might not have imagined when they first entered school. When Newsweek/Daily Beast named CalArts America’s no. 1 college for “artistic students,” the survey’s authors stated that this college, more so than any other, provides the educational environment for recognizing and nurturing the individual creative skills of its students. The focus of this issue of CalArts magazine, then, is on creativity. You will find profiles of representative alumni—most of them recent graduates—who are charting their own distinctive creative ways; a discussion between two gifted faculty members about the pedagogy that helps develop student creativity; a brief article about a group of students from Hongik University in Korea who came to campus in January for a month-long immersion in our uniquely stimulative environment; the announcement of a developing Center for Research on Creativity; and more. These stories reflect that, to the best of our ability, we strive to bring the people, programs and institutional priorities together to incubate and sustain that often ineffable, fragile, but ultimately decisive, game-changing factor—creativity.

steven d. lavine President, CalArts

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Carmina Escobar (Music mfa 10) performs John Cage’s 1958 piece Aria at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (redcat) as part of a two-night festival celebrating the 100th anniversary of the visionary American composer’s birth. This program of rarely played works was presented in February by The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts.

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Three years ago, Austin Beutner, chair of the Institute’s Board of Trustees, and his wife Virginia expressed their commitment to arts education with a $1 million gift to enable outstanding CalArts students to complete their studies and make strong entrances into professional life. This support takes the form of the Beutner Family Award for Excellence in the Arts, a scholarship that helps ease the financial burdens on excep-tionally talented CalArts students who are about to launch their professional careers. The Beutners’ gift is structured to provide five scholarships a year, up to $50,000 each, to fund undergraduate and graduate students in their final year of study, covering tuition and the cost of living. The overarching considerations for awarding the individual scholarships are financial need, the applicants’ demonstrated excellence in their work, and their potential for a promising career in the arts.

“We are trying to help students pursue their pas-sion in the arts without the staggering burden of college loans,” said the CalArts chairman.

“Higher education needs to be more affordable so every student can pursue his or her dream.”

The Institute announced the five 2012 recipients of the Beutner Family Award in March. They are: Christopher Burnett (bfa Program in Graphic Design, School of Art), Sofia Canales (bfa Program in Film and Video, School of Film/Video), Drew Foster (mfa Scene Design Program, School of Theater), Antonio Gennaro (bfa Percussion Program, The Herb Alpert School of Music) and Arturo Molinar-Avitia (mfa Program in Art, School of Art).

“The Beutner Family Award is not just a vote of confidence in my artistry,” said scene designer Drew Foster, “but a validation and encourage-ment of the tremendous work created within the School of Theater—a vote for the necessity and vitality of live performance.”

Added graphic designer Christopher Burnett: “The award isn’t only a scholarship; it’s a won-derful incentive for me to maintain the level of hard work and determination that I have pursued during my time at CalArts. I am very honored to be selected as a recipient and to represent the excellence this school continues to inspire.”

Five Students Collect the Beutner Family Award for Excellence in the Arts

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Beutner Family Award recipi-ents (from left) Sofia Canales, Arturo Molinar-Avitia, Drew Foster, Christopher Burnett and Antonio Gennaro

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Noted artist, art historian and educator Jeannene M. Przyblyski (pronounced “Shabilski”) has been named as the Institute's new provost. Arriving with an impressive combination of accomplishments in higher education leadership and urban affairs, Przyblyski will oversee the academic affairs of CalArts’ six schools, beginning on August 1.

“We are delighted to welcome Jeannene to CalArts,” said President Steven Lavine. “As a skilled administrator, educator and practicing artist, she provides the right mix of abilities for the position. This experience, combined with her serious commitment to consensus-building and collaboration, positions her to help CalArts meet the challenges ahead. I expect the next five years to be a period of continual change at CalArts, as it will be in the world around us. Jeannene is the right person to draw out the best in our community as we examine our cur-rent educational assumptions and ask how to become even better at preparing students for this changing world.”

Przyblyski brings a strong track record in arts education to CalArts, having served, since 2009, as vice president and dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute (sfai) and, since 2004, as a tenured faculty member of sfai’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies. Com-menting on her new position, she said: “CalArts has always stood for a deep and rich commit-ment to contemporary art—in all its diverse forms and multiple contexts. I am honored and excited by the opportunity to work with faculty and students to ensure that we continue to push the boundaries of artmaking and world-visioning for years to come.”

Outside of academia, Przyblyski’s work has linked the arts with a wide range of local com-munities. Since 2001, she has been executive director of the San Francisco Bureau of Urban Secrets, a visual arts and urbanism think tank that promotes art as a mode of civic engage-ment and creative problem-solving. In 2004, she led the team that helped develop San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s arts policy paper for the city. Przyblyski was also an artist and consul-tant for the Golden Gate National Parks Conser-vancy. Additionally, she served on the board and

advisory council of the San Francisco Planning and Research Association and the San Francisco Arts Commission, on which she chaired the Visual Arts Committee and was a member of the Civic Design Review and Executive Commit-tees. This past month, Przyblyski’s public his-tory and guerilla broadcasting project, k-bridge, made its debut as part of International Orange, a series of works commissioned by the for-site Foundation to mark the the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge.

An accomplished speaker and writer, Przyblyski has lectured frequently at Bay Area cultural institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her publications span topics in the history of art, photography and urbanism.

Przyblyski holds a PhD in the History of Art, with a specialization in 19th- and 20th-Century Photography, and an ma in the History of Art—both from the University of California, Berkeley.

“Each applicant made such an impressive and heartfelt application for the award,” noted Virginia Beutner. “After getting to know the candidates and their work, we felt a personal connection to each one and a real desire to help them achieve their creative goals. We are truly honored to help support their work, their dreams, and the vision that recipients have to make a difference in the world through their art.” The recipients of the Beutner Family Award for Excellence in the Arts were chosen by a selec-tion committee comprising Austin and Virginia Beutner, President Steven Lavine, Vice Presi-dent Bianca Roberts, Dean David Rosenboom, Acting Provost Jacqueline Elam, and alumnus Stephen Hillenburg (Film/Video mfa 92).

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Jeannene M. Przyblyski, incoming provost

CalArts AppointsNew Provost

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In a first in Institute history, the National Science Foundation (nsf) has awarded CalArts a grant of $112,000 to implement an innovative, freshly developed computer science curriculum for stu-dents in the arts. Classes offered through the two-semester course of study will be available this fall to students in all six CalArts schools. The novel arts-centered curriculum allows students with little background in computers and technology to quickly acquire and use more advanced open-source programming skills in the course of various creative projects. Developed by Ajay Kapur, the Institute’s recently named associate dean of Research and Development in Digital Arts, and Permanent Visiting Lecturer Perry R. Cook, founder of the Princeton University Sound Lab, the novel curricular approach offers a model for technical teaching that can be repli-cated at other arts institutions and extended to non-traditional educational settings.

“As artists increasingly employ technology,” said President Steven Lavine, “it is essential that arts institutions provide the training and tools with which students can conceptualize and gen-erate new ideas, new artistic approaches, and potentially new technologies. At CalArts, we prepare students for success in today’s creative economy—and this means guiding their artistic development while offering them a cutting-edge technological curriculum tailored specifically to their needs as artists.”

“Every assignment is an artmaking assignment,” Kapur pointed out. “We are teaching computer science principles through the arts, and, with each creative project, students build upon a growing repertoire of technical skills.” The nsf is the federal agency that supports fundamental scientific research and education in all non-medical fields. The CalArts grant is part of the nsf’s ongoing efforts to bolster sci-ence, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) education nationwide.

Longtime School of Art faculty member Allan Sekula has received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art from the College Art Association (caa). Sekula was on hand to collect the award at caa’s 100th annual conference, which was held in February at the Los Angeles Convention Center, drawing more than 5,000 artists, educators, students and visual arts professionals.

From the caa’s award citation:

Allan Sekula has devoted his life as an artist to writing, photography, installation and film. While his multidisciplinary approach to problems of representation and politics has earned him accolades as an artist, his writ-ings have helped students, scholars and the

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Allan Sekula of the School of Art’s Program in Photography and Media

Allan Sekula Honored with CAA Lifetime Achievement Award

public to think critically about interventions in the political and social realities of our world. The essays collected in his first book, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–83 (1984), significantly altered the way in which the documentary function of photography was conceptualized. His more recent volumes—such as Fish Story (1995), Titanic’s Wake (2003) and Performance Under Working Conditions (2003)—mobilize us through his vision and words to carefully consider the effects of capitalism, globaliza-tion, information formats and the demateri-alization of image and word.

Sekula is the holder of the Institute’s Robert Corrigan Chair in Art.

CalArts Secures Grant from the National Science Foundation

Headliners

This past January, the National Endowment for the Arts (nea) announced the recipients of its annual Jazz Masters Fellowship awards, the highest honors the nation bestows on jazz artists. Among this year’s honorees was bassist, band-leader and composer Charlie Haden, the founder of CalArts’ Jazz Studies Program. Since 1982, the Jazz Masters Fellowship has “elevated to its ranks a select number of living legends who have made exceptional contributions to the advancement of jazz.” In addition to Haden, the four other 2012 recipients were: Jack DeJohnette, drummer, keyboardist and composer; Von Freeman, saxo-phonist; Sheila Jordan, vocalist and educator; and Jimmy Owens, educator, trumpeter, flugelhorn player, composer and arranger.

Marking the awards’ 30th anniversary, the presen-tation ceremony was web- and radio-broadcast live from Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in New York. The program included an all-star concert featuring the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis.

The rich body of work produced by School of Film/Video faculty member Nina Menkes was the sub-ject of two retrospectives—the first at her alma mater, at ucla Film and Television Archive, and immediately afterward at Anthology Film Archives in New York. The two programs covered some 30 years of filmmaking.

“[Menkes] has secured a distinct and indispensable position within the international film avant-garde,” announced ucla’s program notes. “Her collected works, honored by international awards and criti-cal accolades, iconoclastically and passionately

Jazz Masters Fellowship Awarded to Charlie Haden

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Music legend Charlie Haden founded the CalArts Jazz Program 30 years ago.

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Still from faculty member Nina Menkes’ feature film The Bloody Child, 1996, 86 min.

Bi-Coastal Showcases of Nina Menkes' Filmography

In advance of the ceremony, the nea prepared a tribute video for each of this year’s honorees. From the nea:

Musician, composer, bandleader, educator, producer and activist, Charlie Haden has created a powerful collection of work during his long and productive career. Lyrical and expressive on the bass, he has embraced a variety of musical genres, ranging from jazz to country to world music. His work as an educator led to the creation of the Jazz Program at California Institute of the Arts in 1982 where he focuses on the spirituality of improvisation. Haden’s jazz career has spanned more than five decades, first gaining notice as an original member of the groundbreaking Ornette Coleman Quartet, which ushered in a new era of avant-garde jazz in the late 1950s. His extensive discography is a testament to his long and storied career.

map a psychic universe characterized by entropy—implicitly churning with destructive, if undeniably vital, power. Disconnectedness haunts Menkes’ work, as human figures negotiate steep slopes of trauma, self-definition and survival, against a gen-eralized existential plane that seems unconcerned with such consideration.”

The Anthology series in New York accompanied a weeklong run of Menkes’ most recent feature, the award-winning Dissolution (2010, 88 min.), which is loosely inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and set in contemporary Tel Aviv.

“Menkes’ films are not literally autobiographical,” said The New York Times, “but they are intensely personal… They seem to emanate directly from her psyche. All are efforts to give form to something intangible, to film an inner state. It’s a tricky task that Ms. Menkes accomplishes through long takes and wide-angle compositions, layered sound designs and oblique editing schemes, all of which make time and space seem like subjective dimen-sions, vulnerable to the warping effects of mood and memory.”

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MALISSA FERUZZI SHRIVER

“I’ve been involved with the California Arts Council [cac] for eight years, and in that time we’ve tried to focus funding and leadership toward restoring creative education to public schools,” said Malissa Feruzzi Shriver, who recently joined CalArts’ Board of Trustees. “The cac is working with the Department of Educa-tion, the California Alliance for Arts Education, ccsesa [the California County Superintendents Educational Services Association], the State Superintendent of Schools, Tom Torlakson, the pta and many industry leaders in an effort called ‘Create the State,’ which addresses policy issues, legislation and systemic changes needed to restore the arts to curricula. As arts educa-tion becomes further privatized, we aim to be part of the solution to the alarming drop-out rates by engaging with students and encourag-ing them to develop the critical thinking skills necessary for success in a knowledge economy.” Feruzzi Shriver comes from a family of accom-plished artists. A professional painter and writer, she studied painting and sculpture at the University of California, Los Angeles, and later, portraiture with Stephen Douglas, and sculpture with Jonathan Bickhart. The owner of Feruzzi Fine Arts, Feruzzi Shriver also serves on the boards of the California Alliance for Arts Educa-tion Policy, the National Assembly of State Art Agencies (nasaa), the Western States Arts Fed-eration (westaf), as well as its Congressional Advocacy Committee. She is a former board member of the California Music Project.

TOM LLOYD

Currently vice president of Capital International Research Inc., Trustee Tom Lloyd attended Oberlin College for one year before heading to Boston to form and then tour with the roots rock band The Del Fuegos, a group that won critical favor and a loyal cult following in the 1980s. Lloyd, The Del Fuegos’ bassist, left after the band’s third album, going to uc Berkeley to complete his bachelor’s degree before earning a PhD in Environmental Engineering from Caltech in 1999.

Lloyd first worked for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company and later became execu-tive director of the Los Angeles nonprofit My Friend’s Place, a low-barrier drop-in shelter for homeless youth in Hollywood. Lloyd has worked for Capital International Research for the past 15 years and continues to serve on the Board of Trustees of My Friend’s Place, which is a CalArts Community Arts Partnership (cap) partner.

“My path,” said Lloyd in a recent interview, “has not been what you’d call the normal path… In early 1984, we drove from Boston to L.A. to make our first album with Slash Records. At the time, we had played a bunch of gigs with fellow Slash bands the Blasters and X, and they were excellent hosts to the young wide-eyed visitors from New England. While we were getting ready for the recording studio, we couldn’t really sit still in our second-floor apartment, so out we ventured to play wherever would have us. We took our acoustic instruments to Venice Beach or played full-volume at Club Lingerie, Music Machine, Al’s Bar, the Palace, and we warmed up for X at CalArts. Fun, dark. I think it was an acoustic gig, but perhaps not!”

Two New Trustees Onboard

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Trustees Malissa Feruzzi Shriver and Tom Lloyd

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CalArts and the California Arts Council held a conference at redcat earlier this year to discuss ways to research and document the development of creative skills in k–12 education.

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Education researcher James Catterall and arts administrator Linda Johannesen

On January 26, CalArts and the California Arts Council co-sponsored a conference at redcat on the role of research in making the case for arts education in public schools. More than 30 key advocates representing public and private sectors convened to imagine and articulate a California agenda for arts and creativity research and doc-umentation. At the event, CalArts President Steven Lavine announced the launch of a new Center for Research on Creativity at the Institute to study the correlation between k–12 educa-tion in the arts and the development of creativ-ity. “At a time when all sides are saying that creativity is key to productive 21st-century life and work, and even with the knowledge that the arts offer powerful ways to develop creativ-ity, school districts across the U.S. are cutting back or eliminating arts funding," Lavine said.

"The arts are not the only way to encourage cre-ativity, but because the arts are intrinsically motivating, dance, music, theater, visual arts and media arts offer students the shortest and most engaging route for developing a sense of their own creative agency.

"With CalArts’ reputation as a hotbed of creativ-ity, and more than 20 years of bringing arts education to children in greater Los Angeles through our Community Arts Partnership (cap), I’m confident that others will see the advantage of establishing a center for creativity here, and will partner with us.”

Linda Johannesen, former president of the Santa Monica-based Galef Institute, who will serve as executive director of the new center, organized the conference at redcat. “Because the arts and creativity are serious business in California,” she said, “we were delighted by the high level of participation by leaders at the community, school district, city, county and state levels—as well from corporations and foundations—at our initial event. Receiving such an enthusiastic response to this initial conference, we’ve been invited to plan a larger annual gathering of local and international art-ists, researchers and education stakeholders to increase our shared understanding of the rela-tionship between arts learning and creativity, and to widen the scope of the discourse to include the expanding space we call arts-science- technology.” Robin Lithgow, administrative coordinator of the Arts Education Branch at the Los Angeles Unified School District (lausd) and an attendee of the conference, underscored the urgency of the challenges faced by the public

New Research Center at CalArts

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school system. “lausd looks forward to working with Linda and the CalArts center to create a more accurate picture of what’s happening in arts instruction—including the work of our skilled and dedicated elementary classroom teachers and talented community artists.”

Facilitating the meeting on the 26th was James Catterall, professor emeritus at the UCLA Gradu-ate School of Education and Information Studies and the center’s principal investigator. Catterall is a leading researcher in the area of cognitive development and motivation in the context of learning in the arts. Said Catterall: “The Center for Research on Creativity at CalArts is poised to provide international leadership on how children gain creative skills and dispositions as well as to advance the ways human creativity is assessed. Under a new $75,000 grant from the Walt Disney Company entitled ‘Next Generation Creativity Testing,’ we will explore creative development at six diverse Disney after-school arts programs in the u.s. and Europe.”

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Patricia A. Disney, a great and beloved friend, passed away on February 7. Patty, together with her late husband Roy E. Disney, were involved with CalArts from the beginning, fulfilling a sustaining role through thick and thin. Given the centrality of their support over the years, Patty and Roy never asked the Institute to pur-sue any one conventional direction in the arts and instead stood as fierce defenders of CalArts’ continuing artistic and educational independence.

Born Patricia Ann Dailey in New Orleans in 1935, she was raised from the age of six in the Toluca Lake district of Los Angeles, where one of her neighbors was her future husband Roy Disney, the only child of Roy O. Disney—Walt Disney’s brother and partner in building the Walt Disney Company. After a year at the University of Colorado in Boulder and subsequently working in adver-tising in New York, she returned to Los Angeles

Patricia A. Disney (1935–2012)

and married her childhood friend Roy in 1955. They remained married for more than 50 years and together they had four children—Roy Patrick Disney, Susan Disney Lord, Abigail Disney and Timothy Disney—and 17 grandchildren.

A passionate advocate of higher education, Patty served as a trustee of Occidental College in Los Angeles and a regent of St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. She also was a member of the board of the Peregrine Fund, a foundation dedicated to preserving endangered birds of prey. Her chief philanthropic endeavors were donating $5 million to establish the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (redcat) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles, and $10 million to Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank to launch the Roy and Patricia Disney Family Cancer Center.

“I met Patty when my wife Janet and I first came to CalArts,” recalled President Steven Lavine,

“and immediately we were joined by our shared love of books. I saw Patty often through the years and always she was ready to laugh, to engage, to enter into the spirit of the occasion, and, on the side, to talk about what she was reading at the time. When I visited her during her long illness, she was that same woman, ris-ing to take me out to see the garden in bloom. Full of life as Patty was, it is hard to believe that she is gone. What she and Roy made possible for the CalArts community, including redcat—which they characteristically named not after them-selves but after Roy’s parents—will be a lasting legacy. We will miss her deeply.”

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Fall Risk, a solo piece choreo-graphed and performed by third-year bfa student Tiara Jackson, was featured in The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance’s Student Choice/mfa-1 Dance Concert in February. The two-part program included dances choreographed by first-year mfa candidates and a student-curated selection of works by undergraduates.

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CULTIVATINGCREATIVITY

How CalArts Does It

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11Cultivating Creativity

At the meeting last November of the CalArts Board of Overseers, the New York-based advisory panel heard two presentations by faculty members David Roitstein, chair of the Jazz Program, and Martin Kersels, of the Program in Art, about the current methods and prac-tices used by the Institute to stimulate “creativity” in students.

CalArts magazine asked the pair to revisit some of their talking points, chief among them how the creative freedom afforded to CalArts students helps them to develop and refine their own individual artistic voices—not just in the two programs, but throughout the Institute.

DAvID ROITSTEIN: There are two ways for me to talk about how we try to bring out creativity at CalArts: One way regards The Herb Alpert School of Music in the context of music schools generally, and the other our Jazz Program specifically. The music school is a micro-cosm of the Institute in that all the programs in the school work together, and that’s really unusual; it almost never happens. At music schools elsewhere in the country, you could have a classical performance program, a composition program, and a jazz program, but they’re separated nearly all the time. (And most of them wouldn’t know what a world music program looks like.) Here, at the School of Music, on the other hand, it can be hard to remember each student’s actual major, because everybody’s working across different programs all the time, and that’s the way we think it works best for creative musicians.

We had, for example, a drummer a few years ago who had started out as a jazz drumset major at a school in New York, but he also wanted to study orchestral percussion and composition. His school wouldn’t let him do either, because his major was jazz drumset. After a while he just got fed up and started looking around and found CalArts, where he could do all of the things he wanted—and get a lot of support and encour-agement from the faculty to do them. One of the features of a small advanced program like ours, is, yes, it’s hard to get in, but once you’re in, the students can get what-ever they want. Basically, if the students can imagine a project, we’ll find a way to say “yes” and help them do it.

MARTIN KERSElS: Speaking for the Program in Art, I believe we do offer something that is different from a lot of other art programs, even though it’s correct to say that the basic CalArts pedagogical model developed in the ’70 and ’80s has been employed in numerous schools around the country with a number of varia-tions in structure and types of critique. All the same, one of the bedrock tenets of the program has always been dealing with students on a one-on-one basis, as individual artists, on their own terms, rather than as a class of artists. As in, “Oh, you make installations, so we need for you to look at this person and that person, and so on, because you’re making installations.” We might have the students read some texts and look at a range of work, but my list is likely to be quite different from [faculty member] Leslie Dick’s or [faculty member] Charles Gaines’. And I think it’s then, by using all those disparate reading lists or references or sources, that the student can come to his or her own individual point of view, which is what we’re trying to get to. We certainly don’t want to make anyone in our own image.

I feel part of this—making it possible for students to develop their own positions, encouraging them to take artistic risks—is actually tamping down expectations as a faculty, and also among other students. In other words, not to anticipate what the result of one student’s work is going to be; rather, it’s for us to accept the results that are created. Sure, there are rounds of questioning, along the lines of, “Was it by accident that you came to this, or is it something you believe in? Something you want to continue exploring—however you want to, with the sources and methodologies you’re using?” But I’ve never heard the words, “You need to stop and do something else.” The point is, if I’m looking for something that I expect, then I’m working towards a

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thing that, in a way, already exists, and I’m not finding something new or unusual or out-of-tune with the dominant culture. As a whole, our faculty tries to look for the extraordinary. We all like to be surprised.

DAvID ROITSTEIN: We have to identify creative poten-tial in the first place and it starts with the admissions process. Most other jazz programs have extremely specific application requirements. They’ll say, “Well, we want ‘Billie’s Bounce’ [a 1945 composition by Charlie Parker], and we want it at quarter-note equals 2/16, two choruses in this key with this instrumentation.” So what they’re looking for is not creativity; it’s just technical proficiency. It would be impossible to show a player’s unique characteristics and imagination in that context, when you get hundreds of versions of the same thing. At CalArts, portfolio requirements are far more flexible and open. In our program, we ask for four contrasting compositions—two standards and two of the applicant’s choice. Original compositions are encouraged but not required, because we don’t want to discourage artists who haven’t written anything yet from applying. In the past, we’ve had so many people who hadn’t done original composition before they got here, and then ended up as composers.

Another big difference in the jazz admissions process is that we listen only to recordings, not live auditions. [Ed. note: other music programs at CalArts, such as the Programs in Performance, do hold live auditions.] In a live audition, all the applicants would get five to 10 minutes at most. They would go in, really nervous, into a totally unnatural situation with a committee of people, who are tired and grouchy, and it’s like some terrible contest. It’s really, really hard to get a read on somebody’s creative ability in that little time in such an artificial situation. Some people do well in those situations, but a lot of creative people don’t. And it’s very difficult to present an original composition in a live audition. Say you’ve written a piece for a band and you’re auditioning by yourself: You can’t even pretend to demonstrate that music adequately. This is why we want applicants to have as much time and freedom to

represent their music at its best. The other part of the emphasis on recorded music is that we do so much recording in the Jazz Program and spend so much time in the studio. We want the students to have some experience recording their music before they come here.

MARTIN KERSElS: The students we get in the Program in Art—as in all programs at CalArts—are very much handpicked. We look for indicators of someone who’s self-motivated; who’s looking at the world slightly differently; who’s aware of what’s going on but at the same time not responding in a rote way; who has some interesting twist on, say, politics or gender or Minimal-ism; or who’s just really curious about things. Someone who gives some indication that they can make a space for themselves to be creative, because, while we provide that space here, it’s something they’re going to have to do on their own after school. Making a space wherever you are—that’s really respected here, a kind of ethos.

For artists today, the “studio” is more than just a room. The internet is also their studio. I look at my car as my studio. So the art program is built to be just as expan-sive and flexible to deal with, or accommodate, any number of ways and methods people have of working. If someone needs to have more input, you’re able to do that. Or if you need less input, you can have that too. You have, of course, minimum course requirements, balancing the amount of critique with the amount of independent studies, for example, yet at the same time we understand that maybe you don’t need to, or want to, talk to someone for three weeks. [Former faculty] Al Ruppersberg [Chouinard 67] talks about this: He reads a whole lot and then, all of a sudden, it’s, “Oh, time to go to the cellar! Time to formulate all the material I’ve been thinking about.” This goes back to addressing the artistic situation of each student on an individual basis.

I know we have to have structure. But we, as faculty, also need to know when to stop at a certain place, so people aren’t always thinking about what they have to do, and have the leeway to dream and to actually accomplish the things that they’re dreaming about.

DAvID ROITSTEIN: We don’t segregate our first-year students. We want people coming in, from any back-ground and at any age, to be right in the center of every-thing in their first semester. Students are performing and recording immediately, instead of a long adjust-ment period. The pace can be a little overwhelming


at first, especially if you’re used to a very structured academic-type environment. But they see that we really do mean all the things we talk about—that there is all of this creative freedom and you have to jump in and take advantage. So we spend most of the beginning of the year letting everybody know what opportunities are available throughout the school. By the time we get to the spring semester, I find that most students have gotten the picture. And we can back off a little bit, because everybody is already so busy that they don’t want us to interfere too much.

What makes this possible to begin with is that the Jazz Program is built around small ensembles, where students are performing constantly and each member of the group, if it’s small enough, matters creatively in shaping the music. This is a big deal, and it’s what [program founder] Charlie [Haden] and I always believed in. Typically, jazz programs are centered around a big band, just as most classical programs are centered around a symphony orchestra. (It’s obvious why: because you can have one faculty member for 30 students, as opposed to one faculty member for four students—like the School of Music does.) Now I love big bands, but, from a creativity standpoint, the one who’s creative is the writer; everyone else is just

playing a part, which pretty much anybody could play. You get very little improvisation time. Improvisation is universal to any music termed jazz, and improvisation, by definition, is spontaneous creativity.

The other thing the big band, or symphony orchestra, system does is make the students compete against each other. Most schools do everything that way. There is a top band and a second band and so forth, and every-body is competing to get into that best band throughout the entire time in school. The problem is, in a contest, you’re figuring out what you have to do to win the contest, not how to express your imagination. Here, we want a safe place for all our students to contribute and really experiment and explore what’s special and unique about their music, as opposed to just following instructions and winning the spot. It’s competitive to get in, but once they’re here, everyone works together.

So, we emphasize small groups, but just as important is the apprenticeship system with the faculty—where, basically, you are in a band with a great, experienced, established professional, and from there you observe and figure out the music on a day-to-day basis. In many other institutions, the music faculty are not actually performing with students; they watch you play and critique and teach. Here, the faculty don’t teach by telling you, “Okay, now do this”; they teach by example.

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For jazz players, especially, this is the most effective way of learning. The most famous example of the apprenticeship system is [drummer and composer] Art Blakey’s band from the ’50s and ’60s. If you really wanted to go to school, you would get in to play with Blakey, and he’d show you how to play, how to write, how to arrange—how to do everything.

MARTIN KERSElS: When I first came to teach here [in 1996], I already had known a lot of CalArts people from the ’80s, and I was thinking, “Well, that’s really not me. That’s not how I learned or did things.” But then I realized that we didn’t have to do things the way they were done before. The art program itself wanted to keep moving ahead, be current and contemporary, not just looking back, stuck in the past.

Back then [in the ’90s], for instance, there was no real internet. Today, the internet has completely changed the way we gather information; it’s changed us. A bfa-1 [first-year undergraduate] student can see things that, before, it would’ve taken a lot of effort to see—like, say, [Ed Ruscha’s 1967 artist book] Royal Road Test, or some obscure piece. Now it’s all easily available, at every student’s fingertips, and so it falls to us to help contex-tualize this huge amount of information. To the students, it can sometimes seem like “equalized” information, whether it’s Ed Ruscha or someone’s Facebook account. Part of what we do today is to respond to this overload, not raising Ruscha above the Facebook page, but talk-ing about how all of the pieces are related within a broader spectrum of information.

DAvID ROITSTEIN: In most school situations, you rehearse for three months for just one performance; that’s totally academic. You would never do music that way in the world; you couldn’t pay somebody for three months to rehearse for one performance. Musicians don’t work like that. They’ll rehearse once or twice for a gig. And so our students, within the apprenticeship set-up, are expected to rise to the occasion with very little rehearsal time—to manifest all their preparation and experience in any one situation. The students see we can do that, and they have to do it as well. “Okay, let’s put the parts on the stand. Let’s go.” And the frequency

of the performances and recording opportunities—the quantity—really matters, because of the continuity, and there’s no substitute for continuity. Otherwise, having only one performance each semester is definitely a

“creativity killer.” Because you’re likely to say, “I’ve got this one big-deal opportunity, everything’s riding on it, and I can’t afford to take any chances.” Whereas at CalArts, you’d say, “I have another performance tomor-row, another one the day after, and another next week, and I can take some chances and see how it works out.”

MARTIN KERSElS: I went to a university and, while the film school was nearby, I mostly hung out in my building. Here my building is the whole place, every-thing going on all at once, with students from different schools in one big pot. There are immediate examples of other types of work being produced right next door. And the students do get to hang together, party together, and eventually some wind up working together, and even if not literally working together, they talk about what they’re doing with an artist who has a totally different experience, in different medium, and they gain from that. So it’s super-valuable. But it’s not a structured liberal arts college environment with en-forced collaboration. What happens here happens naturally—like putting neutrinos in a box and shaking it up. You can’t predict what happens, and that’s the beauty of it.

DAvID ROITSTEIN: Our work in the Jazz Program is by nature collaborative. As part of the curriculum, we let the students put their own bands together by request; they decide what they want to do and who they want to do it with. We follow their requests in almost every case, with our guidance, of course. There are plenty of official interschool projects, but I find some of the most interesting collaborations come from the interaction, on a daily basis, among the students from the different schools. It’s musicians making original music for an

Spring/Summer 2012

“If the students can imagine a project, we’ll find a way to say ‘yes’ and help them do it.”

— David Roitstein Chair, Jazz Program The Herb Alpert School of Music


“What happens here happens naturally — like putting neutrinos in a box and shaking it up. You can’t predict what happens, and that’s the beauty of it.”

— Martin Kersels Faculty, Program in Art School of Art



animator or a choreographer, or visual art or theater students contributing to a music project. These aren’t done for credit; they’re not on the schedule and many of them don’t really exist on paper anywhere. The students are doing the work because there’s a building full of amazing people. Sometimes they look for a class for this type of collaboration, but I don’t think a class would accomplish anything as deep as a spontaneous idea and a personal commitment.

MARTIN KERSElS: It’s interesting that, over the past several years especially, we’ve had students who don’t do just one type of work. They would have their own studio practice, involving different media, maybe, and then start a space where they show other artists, or do a curatorial project, or organize a performance series. They’re able to multitask, they have an entrepreneurial spirit, and they keep doing what they want to do—against the odds of the culture. I mean, it’s not that the culture doesn’t want you to make art or do whatever else your work is; it just doesn’t care whether you do it or not. You have to find, individually, how to keep a

practice going. And if you know, through your time here—after having had the work critiqued and batted about—that you could put your practice back together, then that gives you the know-how and confidence to do it outside of school.

DAvID ROITSTEIN: It’s easier now than ever to get your music out into the world; it really is. It’s cheaper and more democratic. As a result, though, everybody’s just inundated with… stuff. It’s going to be our students who will have to figure out how to deal with that; they’re the ones who have to apply some of the same

“creative” principles they’ve been honing to the music business and careers and ways of working. You see, coming out from most schools, people just go and apply for existing jobs. Whereas I find that CalArts graduates, in all the programs—who are so used to doing what they love to do—they go on to create their own path-ways. They’ll start their own concert series, or their own labels, or their own schools. They’ll do whatever they need to do to get their work out into the world and to make their own opportunities. They’re the ones who are going to come up with the new ideas—as in, “Wow! Nobody ever thought of that!” That’s why we encourage them to actually try things that may seem totally out there, because if they’re just re-doing what’s been done before, there’s no chance of finding new ways of creat-ing art. If they keep trying a whole bunch of different ways and maybe nine of them don’t work but one of them succeeds, then, all of a sudden, that becomes the new model. This applies to all the art forms we teach at CalArts.


Mike Kelley (1954–2012)

The CalArts community was shocked and saddened to learn of the sudden passing of iconic artist Mike Kelley (Art mfa 78) on January 31. The New York Times, in its obituary, described him as “one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion.” According to Paul Schimmel, chief curator of moca, “L.A. would not have become a great international capital of contemporary art without Mike Kelley. Of all the artists in the 1980s, he was the one who really broke out and established a new and complex identity for his generation.”

A prolific artist whose work ranged from performance and sculpture to painting, installation and video, from experimental music to writing, Kelley combined con-ceptual and formal rigor with lively pop figuration,

provocative psychological dimension, and irrepressible, anarchic humor.

“Mike was an intellectual who expressed himself in a visceral way,” said Tom Lawson, dean of the CalArts School of Art. “He was able to merge big ideas and more makeshift materials . . . On a mundane level, Mike was one of the early CalArts artists who chose not to go to New York and prostrate themselves in front of the gallery system. He stayed in Los Angeles and it proved more productive for him since his subjects were here.”

Born in the Detroit suburb of Wayne in 1954, Kelley became involved in the proto-punk scene that fomented such bands as Iggy and the Stooges and the mc5. At the University of Michigan in 1973, Kelley formed his own

“anti-rock” band, Destroy All Monsters, with fellow art student Jim Shaw.

In 1976, Kelley and Shaw (Art mfa 78) arrived at CalArts, where Kelley studied with John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler and David Askevold. His CalArts mfa show featured droll bird-house sculptures, which juxtaposed Minimalism with craft, and, after school, he became known on the Los Angeles scene for blistering live-wire performances.

Kelley maintained his passion for music throughout his career, forming The Poetics at CalArts, with John Miller (Art mfa 79) and Tony Oursler (Art bfa 79), and performing in various hybrid punk-art-rock groups over the years. He was also a dedicated teacher, briefly at CalArts and subsequently at Art Center College of Design.

The artist’s major solo exhibitions included Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1993) and lacma (1994); Mike Kelley at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (1997); Mike Kelley: The Uncanny at the Tate Liverpool (2004); and Mike Kelley: Profondeurs Vertes at the Musée du Louvre (2006). In 2007, redcat held the world theatrical premiere of Kelley’s feature-length video Day is Done, a “carnivalesque” take on American subcultures and folk themes.

The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is presenting Mike Kelley: Themes and Variations from 35 Years this up-coming December. The retrospective will also travel to the Centre Georges Pompidou, moma ps1, and moca.

christine ziemba

Symmetrical Sets, 1982–83, 8 framed panels, acrylic on paper, 18 × 24 inches each. Photo courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

19Mike Kelley

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, 1987, mixed media, 96 × 127 × 5 inches, and The Wages of Sin, 1987, mixed media, 52 × 23 × 23 inches. Installation view, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo by Douglas M. Parker. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art


Pay For Your Pleasure, 1988, oil on 43 Tyvek banners, donation box, work of art by local murderer or violent criminal, variable installation dimensions, approxi-mately 9 × 12 × 82 feet. Installation view, Haus der Kunst, Munich. Photo by Wilfried Petzli


21Mike Kelley

Drawing for Repressed Spatial Relationships Rendered as Fluid, No. 6: St. Mary’s Church and School (Cry Room in the Sky), 2002, mixed media on butcher paper mounted on rag paper. 35¾ × 53¾ inches. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen

Educational Complex, 1995, acrylic, latex, foamcore, fiberglass, wood, 51 × 192 × 96 inches. Installation view, Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö. Photo by Göran Örtegren


Detail, Kandor 10a, 2010, foam coated with elastomer, blown glass with water-based resin coating, wood, enamel, urethane rubber, acrylic, lighting fixtures, clothing, lenticular sheets, 11 × 16 × 12 feet. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen

Installation view of the exhibition Day is Done, 2005, Gagosian Gallery, New York. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen


23Mike Kelley


THIS PAGE

Background: Motion graphics storyboard sketches drawn by Hongik University students during the Intensive Winter Program at CalArts.

Foreground: CalArts alum Daryn Wakasa (left) instructs a group of Hongik design students.

OPPOSITE

The end-of-program “Winter Motion Show” screened at the Bijou Theater.

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by stuart i. frolick

FIRST IN T ENSI V E W IN T ER SESSION

With a curriculum developed by Michael Worthington (Art mfa 95), co-director of the CalArts Program in Graphic Design, Techniques and Design in Motion Graphics used the music video format to explore a variety of concepts and techniques for motion graphics in broadcasting and cinema. In addition to Worthington, three instructors from the industry—alumnus Daryn Wakasa (Art mfa 10), part-time faculty Chris Lopez, and Taekyu Kim—team-taught the students, with four CalArts students serving as teaching assis-tants. “It was a valuable and productive experience for everyone involved,” says Worthington. “The three guest faculty worked seamlessly together, each handling a different component of the process, from ideation, storyboards and key frames to animatics and shooting, to editing and final animation. The students worked very hard, and it was really unusual for them to be able to focus on a single piece of work with such intensity for an extended

In January 2012, during the four-week period between the fall and spring semesters, 20 undergraduate students from Hongik University, a major university in Seoul, South Korea, became the first to participate in CalArts’ new Intensive Winter Program.

First Intensive Winter Session


Creativetime. It was important for us to replicate a real motion graphics production process, and have the students experience a wide range of roles, yet still come out of the workshop with a finished piece of motion design as well as the knowledge gained from the experience.”

Also included in the residency were field trips to the Prologue, Stardust and Brand New School motion graphics studios in Santa Monica, as well as to Rhythm & Hues, DreamWorks Animation and Disney Animation. The Intensive culminated in a Bijou Theater screening of the students’ work on January 27. Upon completion of the program, the participating students received three credits from CalArts, transferable to Hongik.

CalArts’ ongoing relationship with Hongik has strength-ened within recent years. “More Hongik alumni are accepted to CalArts’ mfa programs than from any other Korean university,” says Carol Kim, vice president of International Relations at CalArts. “In addition, one of

Hongik’s graphic design faculty members and former chair, Don Ryun Chang, is an alumnus of the Institute [Art mfa 83]. While CalArts has many partnerships with universities and arts institutions throughout the world, we’re hoping that the success of this Intensive, the first of its kind for us, will inspire not only a continuing relationship with Hongik but also similar intensives with other colleges and universities. Our students and faculty, campus environment, and course offerings— altogether the ‘CalArts experience’—are unique, and the Hongik students truly enjoyed the freedom, the collaboration and the creativity that our students live and breathe on a daily basis. They craved more time with CalArts students, and many expressed the desire to return here for their mfa studies. I think this Winter Intensive will definitely be a part of Hongik University’s curriculum for years to come, just as it will, in turn, help deepen and enrich the CalArts experience for all students.”

ClOCKWISE FROM TOP lEFT

Screen image by Minjin Choi of Hongik University; CalArts’ Michael Worthington; instructor Daryn Wakasa and Hongik student Suemin Lee; the poster for the Winter Intensive’s culminating showcase, designed by CalArts students Edwin Alvarenga and Lila Burns; screen image by Hongik’s Hwa Young Sung

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Creative Minds 27

MindsIn the pages that follow, this edition of CalArts magazine offers a special feature in lieu of the usual round-up of news from our community: a cross-sectional survey, albeit nonscientific, of how alumni are applying their creative training in the professional world. Many are producing extraordinarily original work in their chosen métiers; others are opening up new spaces across boundaries of traditional disciplines. Yet other alums are devising innovative, self-reliant solu-tions for sustaining and growing their artmaking practices and connecting with audiences, while

CreativeCalArtians—A Snapshot in Time

some have taken their creative and problem-solving skills to other areas, such as business and science. “CalArts alumni are in leadership positions in a broad array of careers around the world,” says Nicole Stark Lane, the Institute’s director of Alumni Relations. “The profiles in these pages demonstrate the dynamic and uniquely CalArtian ways our alumni are using their creative gifts to have an impact on their respective fields and our broader culture.”

by freddie sharmini


Known for “drop-dead trumpet chops” and “music as clean and airy and sophisticated and disciplined as post-modern progressive jazz gets” (Jazz Times), Ralph Alessi earned degrees in trumpet and bass at CalArts

—under the tutelage of the legendary Charlie Haden—and headed east to become an ubiquitous presence on the downtown New York scene. He has frequently collaborated with the likes of Steve Coleman, Don Byron, Ravi Coltrane (Music bfa 90), Uri Caine, Fred Hersch, Drew Gress and Jason Moran—most of whom have also played and recorded in Alessi’s own groups. Alessi has recorded seven albums of originals that draw on everything from post-bop to neo-classical, beginning with his group This Against That’s acclaimed debut outing to last year’s Wiry Strong.

A member of the jazz faculty of nyu, Alessi is also the founder and director of the Brooklyn-based School for Improvisational Music (sim), a non-profit holding improvisational music workshops and summer intensives in New York and Norway. This summer, Alessi says, sim is offering its first-ever intensive for high school students.

“I can safely say that I have a sincere love for teaching,” Alessi declares, “with the biggest reason being that it is so satisfying to guide an individual down a path of discovery. Selfishly, I also teach because I often learn so much!

“What I learned at CalArts is that you don’t learn about this world of improvised music on a chalkboard or in a book. You simply commune with like-minded individuals who know more than you do, are sympathetic to your situation, and above all help facilitate a positive learning environment. That’s what I strive for at sim—where you learn by actually doing.”

The always public-minded, always-spirited John D’Amico returned to CalArts in 2008, 25 years after his five semesters as a bfa candidate in the School of Theater. In the decade prior, he project managed con-struction of the ucla Santa Monica Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital; he also worked for Walt Disney Studios on the abc World Head-quarters Building and on Liz Larner’s (Art bfa 85) bridge/sculpture across Riverside Drive. In the 1990s, he managed more than 250 afford-able housing units in historic buildings along the Wilshire corridor for the L.A. Housing Partnership, and co-directed public policy for aids Project Los Angeles, managing and raising funds for services and housing for people with aids.

Finding himself at a mid-career crossroads, D’Amico returned to CalArts, enrolling in the School of Critical Studies’ Aesthetics and Politics Program.

“CalArts is the kind of place that can support an entire cohort of students like me—mid-career professionals looking for access to the very thing CalArts provides,” says D’Amico. “I met other older students, well into the second half of their careers, and we all experienced a rejuvena-tion and refinement of our ideas and ourselves. Faculty Norman Klein and Martín Plot, in particular, encouraged me to apply my political ideas to local community action.”

In 2011, d’Amico won a seat on the West Hollywood City Council, out-campaigning incumbents and/or their handpicked successors. Among other accomplishments, he has established the West Hollywood Aesthet-ics and Politics (whap) public lecture series at the West Hollywood Library, with the programming provided by his alma mater program.

(Music mfa 90, bfa 87), Trumpeter,

(Critical Studies ma 09),

Composer, Educator

West Hollywood City Councilmember

Ralph Alessi

John D’Amico

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Ralph Alessi Bottom left: Liz Glynn, On the Museum’s Ruin (Morris Hunt – Corbusier – Piano) I & II, 2011, rubble from the renovation of the Fogg Museum of Art, lightweight concrete aggregate, stainless steel LC2 chair frame, 30 × 26 ½ × 28 inches each. Installation view, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (designed by Le Corbusier), Harvard University

Top: New York Times Magazine spread designed by Hilary Greenbaum for a feature article about “decision fatigue”

THIS PAGE OPPOSITE

Creative Minds 29

Before her appointment last month as the new design director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hilary Greenbaum was a staff designer and weekly columnist at The New York Times Magazine. Greenbaum’s deceptively straightforward yet wittily informative

“Who Made That?” column first appeared as part of a group blog by the magazine’s staffers but was soon upgraded to a regular fixture in the print publication. “It aimed to encourage those who appreciate design and art to become more familiar with the people who make what we see on a daily basis,” explains Greenbaum, who, along with her collaborators, had traced the quirky design (and social) histories of items like the radiation sign, the nasa logo, artificial snow, and Chinese restaurant takeout containers, to name a few.

“I started out at The New York Times Magazine as a freelance designer and, after a month, was offered a staff position,” says Greenbaum, who was creating covers, feature story layouts and infographics prior to the addition of her writing gig. “At the time, I had primarily designed books for studios such as Green Dragon Office and Heavy Meta, and was interested in a change of pace, both in the type of work I was doing and the gestation period it took to complete that work. A weekly magazine like the Times, which maintains a high standard of design, but also requires a fast process, was really appealing.

“Writing had always been a part of my practice, but not usually a part that was made public,” she adds. “Most design writing out there is written primarily for other designers; there are not many people who write about the subject with the general public in mind.

“At CalArts, we read many influential texts about design to help us establish our own perspectives about the field, and I think that process of developing our personal sensibilities through critical thinking has definitely allowed me to better understand the role I can play as a designer and the role design can play within our society.”

(Art mfa 06), Graphic Designer, Writerco

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Hilary Greenbaum

A high-speed staging, in card board, of the rise and fall of Rome (“not built in a day”) over 24 hours… The construction of “surrogate” antiq-uities, made out of California yard trash, to replace those the Getty had to repatriate… A choreographic reenactment of Buckminster Fuller’s initial failed attempt to erect a geodesic dome… The reconstruction of signature Le Corbusier furniture using rubble from a museum resto-ration… These are only some of the pithily tongue-in-cheek projects carried out by prolific Los Angeles artist Liz Glynn since she gradu-ated from the CalArts Program in Art four years ago. Concerned in part with “cycles of growth and decay,” Glynn’s sculp-tures and participatory performances use meticulous research to explore, and crosswire, the narratives that confer exalted or special status on art objects, artifacts, monuments, or moments in cultural history. Her practice proceeds as much from a keen sense of history’s ironies—and of the hubris often underlying mythic narratives—as from the blunt materiality of things. “I was [faculty member] Michael Asher’s teaching assistant,” Glynn says,

“and his consideration of how a viewer could ‘complete’ the work of art through the act of interpreta-tion was central to our conversation at CalArts." Her own work, accord-ingly, requires the active engagement of the audience in various event-based contexts, in which the view-er’s prior knowledge informs their

(Art mfa 08), Artist

experience of the artwork. Glynn’s democratic impulse is evinced, in fact, by a number of projects in which she has provided a space—sometimes literally a platform—for her colleagues, many of them from CalArts, to create art and perfor-mance. “It grows out of an interest in person-to-person relationships, and the potentiality of fleeting connections among strangers,” she explains.

“One of the biggest misconceptions about art school is that curators and gallerists are going to come looking for you,” Glynn insists.

“Actually, it’s friends asking friends, who then ask their friends, to see if you want to do something. Many of the first opportunities I had after completing CalArts came through peers and alumni at non-profits and artist-run spaces. But it’s still up to you to do the work. I wasn’t waiting around for a museum to ask me.” Glynn’s latest suite of sculptures, From Giza to Gaza, is on view at the Hammer Museum this summer as part of Made in l.a. 2012, the inaugural Los Angeles biennial exhibition.

Liz Glynn

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These are exhilarating days for Aurora Guerrero: Her breakout debut feature, Mosquita y Mari, received its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival to much acclaim and has since been picked up for theatrical dis-tribution. The vividly observed, “in-the-moment” semiautobiographical story relates the friendship between two Chicana teens (high-achiever Yolanda and the adventurous, charismatic Mari) that eventually blossoms into a “first crush”—with the romance, albeit, left unspoken, expressed instead through fleeting glances and awkward silences. “It’s this deepening relationship that becomes transformational; the sense of self-discovery is the vehicle for how the characters ‘come of age,’” explains Guerrero. The poignant narrative of Mosquita y Mari notwithstanding, the back story of the work’s financing and production has already become lore in independent film circles. After receiving an initial grant from Latino Public Broadcasting, Guerrero turned to the networks of contacts she had devel-oped both in indie film and through her work as a community organizer (which dates back to her time at CalArts.) The filmmaker set out to raise the remainder of the production budget by soliciting small, individual donations through Kickstarter, the crowd-sourced fundraising site. With the Kickstarter “all-or-nothing” deadline looming in two days, the film was still $35,000 short of its $80,000 target. This is when Guerrero’s supporters (numbering nearly 900, from various backgrounds) came together en masse to push Mosquita past its goal—a Kickstarter record comeback. Even as the film was being conceived, Guerrero wanted the communities of the Huntington Park filming location to be as involved as possible in the production. Via the local group Communities for A Better Environ-ment, with which she had worked before, Guerrero put out word that she

“wanted to open the doors of independent film to Latinos, for young people to learn about filmmaking.” As a result, each production department on Mosquita included a group of local mentees and interns, who would apprentice under the guidance of that department’s head. “We learned so much from [the mentees and interns] about the neighborhood and its particular social dynamics,” Guerrero says.

(Film/Video mfa 99), Filmmaker, Screenwriter,Community Activist

Aurora Guerrero(Music mfa 98), Composer, Executive

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After obtaining an undergradu-ate degree from Harvard and an mba from Oxford, Steve Hoey had an eight-year spell as a man-agement consultant in London. There, he developed an intense passion for music and decided to “make a go for it," coming to CalArts’ mfa Composition Pro-gram in 1995. “It was fantastic,” he recalls. “Those years were a heady explosion of creativity.” Hoey taught at the Institute following graduation, and later earned a PhD from uc San Diego. His music has been performed at numerous u.s. and European venues, by ensembles such as the CalArts New Century Players, the California e.a.r Unit, and the La Jolla Symphony Orchestra,among others. Hoey has won several awards, including the prestigious Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Letters.

In 2007, Hoey renewed ties with the business world, joining San Diego-based connect, a non-profit that serves to link entre-preneurs, technology and life science research organizations, capital sources, and professional service providers. Since 1985, connect has assisted in the for-mation and development of more than 3,000 companies. “I’ve

always seen an affinity between artists and entrepreneurs,” avers Hoey, now connect’s director of Business Creation and Devel-opment.

“One of the things that was most helpful at CalArts was really learning to listen,” he says. “Not just to music, or sound, but lis-tening to people communicating their ideas, critically under-standing other points of view, coming from different areas of expertise. I recognized that as an important skill of the faculty and of the artists I admired. That is also a critical skill in an entre-preneurial venture, where you have high chaos, a lot of bright people—often Type A personali-ties—with a wide array of skills, who have to work together as a team. And part of it is having the confidence to be open to the cre-ative flux, to new ideas, to alter-native solutions.

“Education at CalArts provided me with a broader view of how organizations function, and what the creative process is. So much of what I do here [at connect] is work with problem-solvers, scientists, and entrepreneurs—from start-ups up to very success-ful large companies—all commit-ted to an arc of innovation.”

Steve Hoey

Since Mosquita’s stellar Sundance debut, Guerrero’s labor of love—the screenplay alone was years in the making—has been covered by numerous media, including npr, and was the subject of a national commercial for the search engine Bing, airing for the first time during the last Oscars ceremony. The San Francisco Bay Area native came to Los Angeles to attend CalArts and quickly “fell in love with the city and its Chicano heritage.” Guerrero recalls: “I came to CalArts with already a strong sense of my voice as a queer Chicana. The Film Directing faculty and in particular [then program director] Lou Florimonte really took me in to validate my perspective, and they were very nurturing about it. ‘That’s the artist you should be,’ is what Lou would say. So by the time I graduated, I was even more sure and confident about my own voice as a filmmaker.”

Creative Minds 31

Even on the printed page, the award-winning poetry of CalArts Critical Studies faculty member Douglas Kearney has a distinctly “performative” quality: The expert spoken-word artist has become known for using stylized, though carefully purposive, typographi-cal schemes and graphic layouts to set a dramatic, or annotative, context for the flow of his lyrical language. As a student in the MFA Writing Program a decade ago, Kearney began venturing into larger-scale dramatic works—librettos. In fact, his thesis was a libretto, entitled Jungaeyé. His latest entry in this arena is the book for Crescent City, a raucous, electronica-infused

“hyperopera” composed by CalArts music faculty Anne LeBaron. Expansively staged last month at the Atwa-ter Crossing arts complex in Los Angeles, Crescent City is the second collaboration by Kearney and LeBaron, following the solo opera Sucktion in 2008. Crescent City’s premiere was the inaugural produc-tion from the new L.A.-based experimental opera company The Industry, which brought together more than 50 artists from various disciplines, including many CalArtians. Directed by Yuval Sharon and pro-duced by Laura Kay Swanson (Theater-Music mfa 11), the tale unfolds in a “phantasmagorical” version of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, where the

“bad waters” of a great flood awaken ghosts of the city’s past—foremost among them the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau. Kearney, the author of the collections Fear, Some and The Black Automaton (a selection of the National Poetry Series) and a 2008 recipient of the prestigious Whiting Writers Award, says he strives for a continuity of voice across different presentation “platforms.”

“I use ‘performative typography’ on the page to bring out the dynamics of certain poetic effects—to create eruptions, interruptions, and layerings,” he explains.

“So, say, in the poem ‘Atomic Buckdance’ [from Fear, Some], the voices of different archetypes from African American folklore are each represented by a unique typographical treatment to play with the archetypical attributes of the characters. In performance, I used to imagine a one-to-one relationship of the live context to the integrity of the compositional system—which is not random—although that’s becoming more shaded; the performances become more complex the more you layer the language, the more you have ‘shadow meanings.’”

(Critical Studies mfa 04), Poet,

Still from Aurora Guerrero’s debut feature film Mosquita y Mari, 2012, 85 min., with Fenessa Pineda as Yolanda, aka

“Mosquita” (left), and Venecia Troncoso as Mari

Douglas Kearney performed the poem “Thank You But Don’t Buy My Babies Clothes with Monkeys on Them” at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, D.C.

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Regarding his libretto work, Kearney notes that “singing is related to poetry in that both distort lan-guage. As [poet] Paul Muldoon puts it, ‘A song is a poem with holes.’ And as librettist, you have to leave enough room for the com-poser, then the director, then the performers and then the visual artists who created the sets. The tensions and balances between our respective parts deliver the emo-tional arc of the overall piece.”

Performer, Librettist, Educator

KearneyDouglas

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Bo-Sul Kim

Currently based in her native Seoul, Bo-Sul Kim finds her work at the nexus of art and technology, of the physicality of live performance and the sheen of digital imagery, of intimate hand-drawn animations and large-scale media projections, of the aesthetic traditions of East and West. Kim’s most recent razzle-dazzle effort was on display earlier this year at

“Live Park 4d Art Factory”—a digital amusement park and virtual museum set up by the media company d’strict in Seoul—where she used holograms,

“media façades,” rfid (radio frequency identification) wristbands, and Kinect input devices to create a live interactive show and installation. As extraordinarily ambitious as Kim’s Live Park project was, it came on the heels of an already impressive post-CalArts track record. Her mfa thesis project, Shadow, My Shadow, a 15-minute live performance that combined dance theater with projected animation and video, was a selec-tion of the 2011 Prague Quadrennial, the world’s foremost showcase of performance design. Her gigs since graduation have included designing and producing video and other digital content for mode Studios, global entertainment outfit Blue Man Group, award-winning musician A.R. Rahman, and rappers Eminem and Ludacris.

“I grew up painting,” says Kim, “and when my interest expanded to moving images, and then to combining my visual art with other media, especially performance, the Program in Experimental Animation was a perfect place to explore my own way of expression. CalArts is so full of energy and it has such an experimental mentality.” In her quest to hone her artistic vision, and to provide audiences with unique live aesthetic experiences, Kim, ever the maximalist, availed her-self of as many learning opportunities as she could at the Institute. She steeped herself in film, video and animation, theatrical design, improvisa-tion in music, video and stage performance, composing movement, and, not least, seeking out new technologies.

“The subject of my work is an ‘inner story,’ a personal creative journey, and it is often a non-linear, metaphorical collage of memories, introspection, subjective history, and references to the different cultures I’ve experi-enced,” Kim says. “It’s like a visual dream.”

Following the 15-season run of Santa Barbara-based SonneBlauma Danscz Theatre, choreographer Misa Kelly, her husband Stephen, and award-winning Slovenian collaborator Mojca Majcen, have launched a new company called ArtBark. SonneBlauma—known for “surprisingly subtle choreography against feats of athleticism” (Santa Barbara Independent)—marked the start of its final season last summer with the debut of SB-ADaPT (A Dance and Physical Theatre) Festival, a three-week series that brought over 50 artists and companies from 5 countries and 23 cities to Santa Barbara. The mission of SonneBlauma’s successor, Kelly explains, is “to embrace more experimental and cross-genre collaborations with artists from around the world, devel-oping creative networks while continuing on with our commitment to building community. We’ve shed traditional titles such as ‘artistic director’ and are embracing collaborative and co-creative sensibilities as artists and administrators.” Upcoming ArtBark dates include the 2012 edition of ADaPT Fest at Palais Kabelwek in Vienna this June and, later, in the fall, Affinity II, with New York-California exchanges taking place in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. “Making opportuni-ties for others becomes part of the fun, and creates an opportunity for yourself as well,” attests the eminently resourceful choreographer.

Recalling her time at CalArts, Kelly says: “I knew CalArts was special during my first visit to the campus. My body felt as if it had been plugged into a light socket. In my undergraduate training, the dance department was cut off from other departments. At CalArts I was in hog heaven in that everything was under one roof. I found myself working and dialoging with artists in other mediums, and found my soul really satiated. The school was a wonderful container for explor-ing everything and anything, and ‘no’ was never a part of the vocab-ulary. The one area I felt could have been improved upon—and some of this activity is happening now—is preparing artists for life after college, and I think this holds true for most colleges. Artists can really benefit from training in how to create their own containers for their creative lives once they graduate. Our planet needs its artists, desper-ately—engaged and creating for the duration once the spark is ignited.”

(Dance mfa 96), Choreographer,

(Film/Video –Integrated Media mfa 09),Multimedia Artist

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Creative Minds 33

As one of only 24 ted (Technology Entertainment Design) Fellows selected for 2012, Christine Marie was at ted’s flagship Long Beach conference earlier this year to give a presentation about her unique form of shadow theater and perform an excerpt from her breakout piece Ground to Cloud. The visually spectacular, expressionist work explores the history of electric light (“an homage to the god of my art,” Marie says) by using large-scale cast shadows, actors, props, lighting effects, and a live sound score. Ground to Cloud was first developed at CalArts, and received its full premiere in 2010 at redcat’s New Original Works Festival—during which the visual effects were fur-ther accoutered with 3-d stereoscopic shadows, created with the art-ist’s proprietary shadow lighting instruments. The Los Angeles Times called the production “a striking example of pure kinetic performance.”

Now Marie has received a sizable production grant from the map (Multi-Arts Production) Fund to support her next shadow piece, Signaling Arcana, which debuts next year in San Francisco and l.a. Set in the 19th-century American wilderness and featuring arche-typical characters (a “trickster-hobo,” for example), the dialogue-less, cinematically-inflected story “explores the rise of the railroad and its effects on the environment and the human imagination,” she says. The production, being developed in collaboration with composer Dan Cantrell (Music bfa 98) and co-scene designer Kit Stolen (Theater mfa 09), will once again showcase Marie’s trademark 3-d shadows—which necessitate the use of 3-d opera glasses. “The 3-d effects are not a gimmick,” Marie explains. “They create a sense of intimacy, drawing the audience into key visual moments with the most emo-tional impact.”

Working with shadows first appeared to Marie in a dream. She went on to study traditional Balinese Wayang Kulit shadow puppetry and was a member of Larry Reed’s ShadowLight Productions in San Fran-cisco for 10 years before coming to CalArts. “I had become more inter-ested in what the puppeteers were doing behind the screen, so I began to turn that relationship of performer to audience inside out,” Marie says. “CalArts has the only experimental puppetry program in the country; it’s about object manipulation rather than conventional puppets. I mean, I don’t even work with puppets, and the actors in the shadow pieces don’t play to their own bodies, or even to each other; what they do is to animate their shadows.

“CalArts is where a lot of my collaborators come from, and our work together—even involving alumni who weren’t in school at the same time—owes to a common aesthetic vocabulary,” Marie notes. She also reserves special praise for redcat, which enthusiastically supported her early work and helped spread the word in wider circles.

ted (whose tagline reads, “Ideas Worth Spreading”) is not the only esteemed organization to recognize the inventiveness of Marie’s practice. In the past two years, she has been invited to conduct shadow workshops for artists at Pixar and DreamWorks.

Bottom left: Misa Kelly (left) and Mojca Majcen of ArtBark

Top: Bo-Sul Kim integrated live dance with projected video and animation in Shadow, My Shadow, 2009, 15 min.

Christine Marie used shadow puppetry, video and live performance in staging a work called Peter’s Shadow at CalArts in 2009.

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Shadow Theater Artist, Director, Inventor

Christine Marie (Theater–Integrated Media 09)


The brains behind the Hollywood-based studio Marco Marco, Marco Morante is the in-demand pur-veyor of outré original creations—often one-offs—favored by pop celebs who want maximum impact for stage shows, music videos, magazine shoots, and the red carpet. Among Morante’s memorable concoctions are Katy Perry’s famous cupcake bra (with hardware store caulking as frosting), the Samurai swimsuit worn by Nicki Minaj on the cover of Billboard, and Shakira’s trademark fringed chaps. Other clients include Fergie, Ke$ha, Mary J. Blige, and Diddy. His fashion lines, meanwhile are,

“[a] tossed salad of comfort and pizzazz that’s a uniquely Angeleno uniform infused with calcu-lated, off-the-cuff glamour,” said the la Weekly.

Morante started out at CalArts in the Scene Design Program but was urged by faculty to try his hand at designing costumes. A year after graduating, he launched his Marco Marco studio.

“[Constructing a look] is such a rag-tag process because a lot of times we get requests for things that nobody has really made and we’re not really sure how to do,” he said in a interview with Forbes magazine. “We spend a lot of time at Home Depot and the grocery store looking for materials that are going to read a certain way on screen.”

His initial training in theatrical design, instead of traditional fashion training, has been a boon to his work. “The big difference,” he explains, “is that fashion designers are taught to impose a concept, while costume designers are taught to amplify something already there.”

(Theater bfa 02), Costume andFashion Designer

Marco Morante

A jazz saxophone major at CalArts, Devin McNulty teamed up with friends Eric Kim (software company head), Dawn Kasper (artist), Giles Miller (musician) and Kathleen Kim (immigration law professor) to launch the volunteer-run art space Human Resources Los Angeles in 2010. Tilting toward live performance, conceptual art and “underexposed” forms of expression instead of conventional gallery exhibitions, Human Resources is set up to be “flexible enough to accommodate any number of meaning-ful conversations among the micro-niches of the creative community,” McNulty says. “Not just to say that we do it, but to actually deliver maxi-mum community access to new work by talented, relevant and motivated artists from all over.” The venue’s programming has no set parameters other than the consensus of the five founders. It runs the gamut from longer-term presentations (a monthlong residency by the interdisciplinary trio My Barbarian, for instance) to installations (multichannel slide projections by Karl Haendel; a “hagiography” of the New Zealand noise rock band The Dead C) to one-night music shows, screenings, readings, CD releases, and sundry other events (the live filming of a tableau vivant created by Marnie Weber is one such example). While artist-run spaces have proliferated in Los Angeles for the past decade, McNulty sees Human Resources as part of a second wave of Do-It-Yourself outfits that emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 economic meltdown.

“Even as opportunities were drying up, people were also already tired of ‘prescribed’ spaces for art, which is why I think there’s been a renaissance of performance, as opposed to commercial exhibitions,” he says. “We wanted to create an outlet for our friends and other people to make what we deem is exciting work, whatever shape it should take.

“At CalArts I was friends with people from almost every other métier,” McNulty recalls. “I worked in the film school’s sound transfer lab and took a lot of film courses. After CalArts, I composed music for several films, and worked as a sound recordist, which took me to shoots in places like Ghana and Cambodia.” In addition to his activities with Human Resources, McNulty is completing a feature-length documentary called The Process Is the Thing. The film follows the making of five large-scale works by Marnie Weber, Matthew Barney, Xu Zhongmin, Ball-Nogues Studio, and Matt Hope. He is also a member of the eclectic Los Angeles quartet Mad Gregs, which this year released its second album, Relatives.

(Music bfa 05), Musician, Filmmaker,

DIY Proponent

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Creative Minds 35

Animation Artist, Youth Arts Advocate

When Nirvan Mullick was a student in the mfa Program in Experimental Animation, he made an acclaimed stop-motion animation short called The Box Man that went on to screen at major festivals worldwide, includ-ing Cannes, Annecy and afi Fest, and earned the filmmaker a place as a finalist for the Student Academy Awards. Ten years later, Mullick has found, by far, his biggest viewership with the 11-minute documentary Caine’s Arcade—the viral internet sensation about a delightfully imagina-tive nine-year-old East Los Angeles boy named Caine Monroy and his elaborate, fun-filled cardboard game arcade that has everyone from Oprah to Justin Timberlake to Hollywood studio honchos to mit to the hacker col-lective Anonymous gushing. Since its April 9 posting on YouTube, Caine’s Arcade has racked up incredible numbers: as of this writing, more than 6 million internet views; 110,000 Facebook fans; nearly $200,000 donated to a college scholarship fund for Caine; and a matching dollar-for-dollar grant, up to $250,000, from the Goldhirsh Foundation to launch the new Caine’s Arcade Foundation, whose mission will be to “find, foster, and fund creativity and entrepreneurship in kids.” Caine’s story, moreover, has set off a worldwide surge of youth diy activity. “Countless cardboard arcades [are] popping up in kitchens and schoolrooms around the world,” wrote Mullick on the Caine’s Arcade Facebook page. Mullick had met the young impresario by happenstance last September when shopping in Caine’s father’s used auto parts store—where the bud-ding entrepreneur had set up shop—and became the homemade arcade’s first paying customer, handing over $2 for a “Fun Pass” with 500 plays. Describing his encounter with Caine and his can-do inventiveness as a

“perfect moment celebrating the creative process,” Mullick told The New Yorker: “[The moment] brought me back to when I was a kid, and reminded me of why I used to make things, why I wanted to make films, for the pure joy of creativity.” Wonderstruck, the CalArts alum returned to film Caine and his creation, in the process organizing a flashmob of new customers

Filmmaker Nirvan Mullick with card-board arcade impresario Caine Monroy

Custom-printed bra and harem leggings designed by Marco Morante

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(Film/Video mfa 01), Filmmaker,Nirvan Mullick

for the arcade. L.A.-based creative agency Interconnected, in which Mullick is a partner, served as the doc’s producer, while the filmmaker enlisted his friend Juli Crockett (Theater mfa 02) to write original music for the production. Mullick’s focus on capturing or constructing “the perfect moment” tracks with his ongoing animation project, The 1 Second Film. A global nonprofit collaboration, “the World’s Biggest Shortest Film” consists of 24 frames of 24 large-scale paint-ings created by Mullick’s CalArts colleagues, plus an hour of credits running over documentary footage of the film’s making. First begun at CalArts with the help of a $1,500 Interschool Grant and now being edited, The 1 Second Film has to date amassed more than 28,000 participants from 116 countries. Profits from the completed work, says Mullick, will be donated to charity.

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(Dance BFA 99), Dance Filmmaker, Arts Administrator, Writer

Having worked with the New York-based dance service nonprofit Pentacle for more than 10 years, Anna Brady Nuse has been the director of the organization’s Movement Media project since 2008. Separately, she is the artistic director of Straight to the Helicopter Productions, whose latest dance film is a triptych called What Comes Between Fear and Sex. Movement Media’s main activities consist of regular film and video screenings focused on contemporary dance, practical dance for screen workshops, consulting services, and online publications. “The program,” explains Nuse, “is designed to help artists make dance films—to learn how to make dance work well on screen in an artistic way—but also to engage with media, particularly online platforms, to reach audi-ences in today’s media-saturated world.” She says her own interest in making films originated at CalArts.

“I felt I had the creative freedom to look outside of my discipline and training and to collaborate with other artists, without being afraid of not having the same aesthetic vocabulary. The interesting challenge, actually, was to try and find a common language for creating work.” As Nuse was collaborating with film school colleagues—either as performer or choreographer—she began seeing herself in the role of filmmaker. “I remember seeing Maya Deren’s [1943 experimental film] Meshes of the Afternoon in a dance film theory class, and it opened my mind to the limitless creative possibilities that the screen could offer. At around the same time, I also realized that when I was cho-reographing, I was often thinking in terms of film editing. The work I was trying to do was very hard to achieve on stage, but it was achievable on film, and so I wanted to jump straight to the editing room, and create the work there.

“Once I graduated, I had the confidence to pick up a camera and make my own dance films. To me, a bigger presence on screen seemed really important to the development of dance as an art form. Choreography and movement can be as dynamic and wonderful on screen as on stage, and I felt the urge—and urgency—to help advance dance films as a whole.”

Anna Brady Nuse

Only four years out of CalArts, the prodigiously gifted Condola Rashad has already pulled off a pair of major star-making turns that have made the 25-year-old one of the brightest up-and-comers of the American stage. First came her breakout role as a fiercely resilient victim of rape and mutilation in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, the wrenching Pulitzer Prize-winning drama set in the civil war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, Rashad has earned a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Per-formance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play for her work in Lydia R. Diamond’s dramedy Stick Fly—the actress’ Broadway debut. In reviewing Stick Fly, in which the CalArts alumna appeared alongside seasoned television actors and Broadway performers, The New York Times made sure to note that “the discovery of the evening is the quietly captivating Ms. Rashad.” She played the part of Cheryl, a housekeeper’s daughter who takes over the duties of her ailing mother during a weekend of hothouse domestic turmoil at an upper-class African American family’s home on Martha’s Vineyard. “Even when she is hovering at the edges of the drama, passing in and out of the kitchen or refilling wineglasses in the living room, Ms. Rashad’s Cheryl is a powerful presence, sensitive to every hint of condescension directed her way,” observed the Times. Rashad’s earlier brilliant work in Ruined—a production that premiered in Chicago in 2008, had a long off-Broadway run, and finally arrived in Los Angeles in 2010—had prompted Time Out New York to declare, “A star is born.” Her character, Sophie, is at the emotional heart of a poignant story of mothers and daughters who bear the brunt of suffering in a brutal civil war. The Times, too, was duly wowed by Rashad, calling her performance

“exquisite” and “a masterly blend of delicacy and resourcefulness.” The director of Ruined, Kate Whoriskey, pointed to Rashad’s “preternatural understanding of acting” in a recent article in the Times. “What struck me about Condola’s audition was her economy of choices and her stillness,” Whoriskey said. “I think she is one of America’s great talents.”

“After Ruined,” Rashad told the Times in the same piece, “I was given all these very dramatic roles, which was awesome and I’m very grateful, but what I did in college, and what I really like to do, is comedy. It was nice to be able to do all of it in one play in Stick Fly.”

(Theater bfa 08), Stage and Screen ActressCondola Rashad

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Creative Minds 37

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Top: Condola Rashad as Sophie (left) and Quincy Tyler Bernstine in the 2010 L.A. production of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined

Bottom left: Still from Anna Brady Nuse’s dance film What Comes Between Fear and Sex, 2011, 14 min.

Top left: Douglas Rushkoff

Above: Still from Allison Schulnik’s claymation video Mound, 2011, 4:20 min.

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(Theater mfa 86), Public Intellectual,Author, Documentarian, Educator

“My fixation on rejects and misfits is not intended to exploit deficiencies,” says Allison Schulnik of the enig-matic, forlorn, lumpish—yet markedly sensuous— figures that populate her work, alternately in paintings, stop-motion animated films, sculptures and drawings.

“I’m trying to find valor in adversity,” she declares.

“Whether they’re hobo clowns, misshapen animals or alien beasts, the characters usually have an awkward humanity,” Schulnik explains. “I like to blend earthly fact, blatant fiction, and lots of oil paint and clay to form tragedy, farce, and raw, dark beauty. Sometimes it’s capturing an otherworldly buffoonery, and other times it’s presenting a down-to-earth dignified moment.” Having arrived at CalArts with a background in paint-ing, as well as some dance, she began taking cues from films, cartoons, comics and music as she worked closely with three of CalArts’ most venerated, beloved animation faculty—Jules Engel, Mike Mitchell and Corny Cole. “They were the most amazing people, and the best teachers for me,” she says, recalling how her dis-tinctive style of figuration, using thick, goopy paint and robustly handled clay, took on more confident, evocative shapes across a variety of media. “I’ve been making the characters in different media and then deciding what works the best visually.” After graduating, Schulnik took jobs at small anima-tion studios and did not make a film for another eight years. By 2007, finding little satisfaction in making work aimed at small children, she decided to turn

full-time to the churnings of her own idiosyncratic imagination. Since then, while her stop-motion claymations have been selected by festivals in Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, Melbourne and elsewhere, her out-put has been shown primarily in galleries and museums in the U.S. and Europe. “I like exhibiting the paintings and the films together,” Schulnik says, “to create a sense of conversation between the two.” The artist’s latest claymation, Mound, was the centerpiece of a one-person show last fall at ZieherSmith in New York. It also screened last month at lacma in connection with In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States. “Mound is a cel-ebration of the moving painting, featuring animation as a very physical macabre dance,” she says.

“Like all of my videos, it’s a purist hand-made claymation, with all the effects done in-camera.”

Schulnik’s current gallery show is on view through July 7 at Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City.

Allison Schulnik(Film/Video bfa 00), Artist, Filmmaker

Rushkoff

Taking on some of today’s thorniest issues in media, technology, culture and economics, Douglas Rushkoff is a cnn commentator and award-winning Frontline documentarian, author of numerous best-selling books of cultural criticism (Program or Be Pro-grammed: Ten Commands for the Digital Age, Life Inc.: How Corporations Conquered the World and How to Take It Back) and graphic novels (a.d.d.), and globe-trotting lecturer. He holds multiple degrees, including a master’s degree in Directing from the Institute.

“CalArts taught me how to engage with the world as an artist,” he says. “Where I went to college, being an artist was more of a lifestyle choice. At CalArts, I found people who understood that it’s about the work: the work of actually making art, and the work of experiencing the world so honestly it hurts. As an environment, the Institute provides the safety to develop those dual traits because, believe me, it’s a whole lot harder to do it in the real world, where market forces and other bad guys want to squash anything that helps wake people up from the con-sumerist stupor.

“I was doing theater and film because there was no such thing as ‘multimedia’ quite yet. I ended up becoming a writer and speaker and thinker about how networking changes what it means to be a human being—but also how it changes economics, values and politics. I make TV documentaries instead of narrative films like I did at school; and I do solo, improvised speeches instead of dramatic plays. But the skills are basically the same. Without the theater training, I wouldn’t be as good at standing up in front of a few thousand people every week or so, or doing my appearances on Colbert or cnn. And without the storytelling and film classes I had with [former Film/Video dean] Sandy Mackendrick, I’d be making random documentary.

“Most of all, though, I look to CalArts as the place where I got both the discipline and freedom to make what mattered to me matter to others.”


Composer, Educator

Beginning his study of tabla and the musical traditions of South Asia under Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri at Ali Akbar College in Northern California, Robin Sukhadia continued his work with the tabla maestro in CalArts’ mfa North Indian Music Program.

“The cultivation of a deep musicmaking practice in every culture has to be rooted in community,” Sukhadia says. “Community results in an atmosphere and ecology where music and art can flourish—and that is exactly what I experienced at CalArts. Each day, I interacted with practitioners, faculty and students who are not only focused on their intensive approach to learning and creating music, but are willing to share and collaborate. New possibilities are inevitable in such an environment, and they ultimately lead to the kind of fertile creative culture where innovation and critical thinking are valued—prized. I try to bring that same community-derived energy with me every day, whether I’m performing or teaching.”

In addition to composing, performing and arranging in a wide range of concert, film and album productions, Sukhadia has traveled inter-nationally on behalf of Project Ahimsa, an organization that seeks to empower youth through music education. He has also developed

(Music mfa 07), Tabla Player,

Robin Sukhadia

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As one of his many activities in India while on a Fulbright, Robin Sukhadia helped raise funds for a youth music and dance program at an adivasi cultural center in Khamargachi, West Bengal.

Henry Taylor, Resting, 2011, acrylic and collage on canvas, 64 × 77 ¾ inches

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music education programs for u.s. institutions from the Weill Insti-tute at Carnegie Hall to the Los Angeles County Museum, as well as for artist-run venues such as Machine Project (founded by fellow CalArtian Mark Allen [Art mfa 99]).

In 2010, Sukhadia went to India on a grant from the Fulbright Nehru Senior Research Program to study the developmental progress of stu-dents in youth music programs in the slums of Kolkata and Ahmadabad. During his time in India, the tabla player found time to take part in yet another youth music program, this one in Kathmandu, Nepal, alongside two CalArts faculty, Tom Leeser, head of the Center for Integrated Media and the Program in Art and Technology, and former provost Nancy Uscher.

Now back in Los Angeles, Sukhadia has been facilitating a global tour featuring 16 children from Ahmadabad. The young artists are performing a dance drama called ekatva—“oneness” in Sanskrit. Arriving in L.A. in June, the 90-minute performance conveys a message of compassion and non-violence based on the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.

Creative Minds 39

A clarinetist since the fourth grade, Salvatore “Sam” Torrisi came to CalArts to study composition and new media with David Rosenboom and James Tenney—a major figure in microtonal music, at the time Torrisi’s chief area of interest. His pursuits soon evolved to incorporate computer music, psy-choacoustics, and abstract animation. Eventually these various elements coalesced into “the general manner in which the human mind perceives and processes abstract languages,” Torrisi explains.

“My clarinet compositions became for me a tool for exploring these links as a kind of scientific arts.” He was encouraged by Rosenboom, whose own work has involved musical interfaces with the human nervous system.

Torrisi split his final semester at CalArts between the Institute and auditing a linguistics course at uc San Diego. Two years later, with the study of linguistics and the mind having overtaken compo-sition and the clarinet as his main preoccupations, he was at ucla, in the ma program in applied lin-guistics—the interdisciplinary field concerned with language-related real-life issues. There, his thesis project included observing and analyzing the social and communicative behavior of patients suffering from frontotemporal dementia, a neuropathology that causes severe behavioral changes. As intrigued as he was with the subject matter, Torrisi felt he wanted to use “less qualitative, more quantitative methodologies.”

After earning his ma degree, Torrisi’s circuitous, always fascinating course took still another turn, landing him in 2008 in ucla’s Neuroscience Inter-departmental Program, where he is now a fourth-year predoctoral fellow. His computational work today uses functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fmri) to investigate brain connectivity in bipolar disorder. “Neuroscience has been a perfect conver-gence for me,” Torrisi states. “It brings together the technical, creative and abstract aspects of what I was doing at CalArts with the social, human- centered and clinical aspects of my applied linguis-tics work. All those dimensions are important to investigating how the human brain is affected by disease, and, in my current research, how it par-ticularly regulates emotion.” He adds: “Both my previous degrees have been foundational stops on the way of how I got here, to neuroscience—which, by the way, is where I plan to remain!”

(Music mfa 03), Neuroscientist

Although Henry Taylor had been showing his figurative paintings and assemblage sculptures in Los Angeles, New York, Paris and elsewhere throughout the “aughts,” his major break-through came in 2007 with a one-person exhibition, entitled Sis and Bra, at The Studio Museum of Harlem. At once seemingly casual, breezy to the point of seeming effortless, and yet culturally and politically allusive and art-historically sophisticated, Taylor’s refreshing work drew more raves (“long overdue,” according to the Los Angeles Times) with a sweeping solo show at the gallery Blum & Poe in Culver City in 2011, and earlier this year a prestigious residency and exhibition at moma ps1 in New York. Calling the ps1 show “exuberantly vital,” The New York Times said: “[Taylor] paints roughly the rough world of his own experience, but he does so with a rare spirit of generosity and love.” Drawing and painting in his youth in a largely self-taught manner, California native Taylor came to the Institute when he was in his mid-30s, after 10 years of working as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Hospital.

Portraiture is the main thrust of the Los Angeles-based artist’s brushy, color-savvy paintings, which feature characters from his own surroundings—family and friends, iconic figures in African American history, even strangers from his Chinatown neighborhood. Taylor’s painterly eye is that of the attentive social observer, revealing all of his subjects with the same degree of empathy and equanimity. In addition to painting on stretched canvas, Taylor applies his brush to everyday found objects like suitcases, wooden crates, cardboard boxes, plastic jugs, and parts of cast-off furniture. His assemblages can evoke the mundane, even threadbare, aspects of urban life as much as they can pointedly refer to both 20th-century Western modernism and African tribal totems. Of his own deliberately unfussy style, Taylor said in a recent article in Modern Painters: “I try to embrace the naïve. There’s sincerity there. But I could go from that to [Romanian-born sculptor Constantin] Brâncusi… Still, water containers or a Purex detergent bottle—they all look like African sculptures to me.”

Taylor is among the artists featured in Made in l.a. 2012, the opening edition of the new citywide biennial exhibition series. His work can be seen this summer at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery at Barnsdall Park.

Sam Torrisi

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(Art bfa 96), Artist

Henry Taylor


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Detail from Bella Bronson’s food for thought, 2012, mixed media, approximately 80 × 36 × 36 inches. Bronson, of the Program in Art, graduated from CalArts with a bfa on May 18.

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