GRAPHIC DESIGN STUDENTS GO UNDERGROUND

Next time you are rushing through one of the San Francisco BART stations beneath Market Street and notice that the escalators are out of service, don’t get cranky—get curious! Stop for a moment to check out the vibrant graphic designs enlivening the construction barricades. CCA’s own Hyunsoo Kang and Walker Lambert (both Graphic Design students) teamed up to create colorful graphics for some of the more than 40 barricades erected as part of the renovation of BART station escalators.

The project came out of TBD*, CCA’s in-house design studio led by instructor Eric Heiman that pairs students with

Vote Of Confidence

CCA made the honor roll! The ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge named CCA one of the best colleges for student voting. This is thanks to Creative Citizens in Action (CCA@CCA), the campus initiative that weaves creative activism into the life of the college. To make the honor roll, colleges had to demonstrate a commitment to increasing student voting over the course of the past four years.

clients for real-world graphic design experience. Working with BART staff, Kang and Lambert developed three different designs that they hope offer moments of delight. And there are surprises as well: point your phone at one of the QR codes incorporated into the designs for an augmented reality experience!

Moving With The Rhythm

Drum Listens to Heart, a multilayered three-part exhibition on view at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts for most of this academic year, took percussion—as elemental as the human heartbeat and as eternal as the beating of a drum—as its point of departure. And then it traveled widely. Over the course of six months, the expansive exhibition brought together an international roster of artists who explore symbolic, historical, or social manifestations of the percussive through a variety of media. Related events, including live music, art performances, and lectures, offered other avenues for experiencing the aesthetic, expressive, and political potential of drumming and rhythm.

Nationwide, according to exit polls, young voters turned out in high numbers for the 2022 midterm elections, where their votes made a difference. Issues that directly affect college-age students, from abortion rights to climate change to student debt relief, were motivating factors. Campus initiatives like CCA’s played a role, too, by spearheading voter registration, education, and turnout campaigns. Facilitating this democratic engagement is just one way CCA@ CCA is supporting students to actively participate as creative citizens in their communities.

“I wanted to see how a vocabulary borrowed from music might activate new layers of meaning for visual artworks,” says Anthony Huberman, the former director and chief curator of the Wattis Institute who conceived and organized the exhibition. “It didn’t try to ‘illustrate’ or ‘explain’ what percussion is, but established a rhythm between specific works that invited viewers to recognize percussive forms in new and surprising places.”