Spring 2014

School of Visual Arts Magazine

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL Spring 2014

Jonathan Bartlett, A Cognitive Representation of Time and Place (detail), 2014.

For Denim & Supply Ralph Lauren Art Wall Project. See “Drawing a Crowd,” page 7.

SPRING 2014

Contents

3 From the President 4 SVA Close Up News and events from around the College 10 What’s in Store New products created by SVA entrepreneurs 18 Subject Matter: All Together Now Faculty member Lynn Gamwell discusses the shared philosophies of art and science 20 Hire Ed: The Future of Design Work A discussion on forward-looking career options and opportunities for designers 22 Portfolio: Brian Adam Douglas Douglas’ work shows a glimmer of hope and the human spirit in times of disaster 32 Color Commentary What does it take to produce a successful art-fair booth?

A look at SVA’s contribution to the 2013 Miami Project

40 Unveiling the Truth How members of the SVA community use art for science and science for art 48 Q+A: Craig Gillespie The award-winning advertising and film director discusses his career behind the camera 52 Tastemakers SVA alumni who chose palates over palettes

62 Alumni Affairs The 2014 Alumni Survey • Exhibitions and Notes • 2014 Scholarship Recipients • In Memoriam • Donors List 80 From the SVA Archives The Dusty Film & Animation Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary

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VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL School of Visual Arts Magazine Spring 2014 Volume 22, Number 1

From the President

EDITORIAL STAFF S. A. Modenstein, senior editor Greg Herbowy, editor James S. Harrison, copy editor Dan Halm, visuals coordinator VISUAL ARTS PRESS, LTD. Anthony P. Rhodes, creative director Michael J. Walsh, director of design and digital media Brian Smith, art director Sheilah Ledwidge, associate editor COVER FRONT: From top: Jonathan Bartlett, L’ancien photo by Harry Zernike

Style, 2014, mixed media; Coma, 2014, mixed media.

For Denim & Supply Ralph Lauren Art Wall Project.

See “Drawing a Crowd,” page 7.

BACK: Suzanne McClelland, Untitled, (36-24-36 a winning hand) (detail), 2013, charcoal, dry-pigment, polymer and spray paint on portrait linen. Courtesy of the Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, and Team Gallery, New York. See “Hybrid Vehicles,” page 4.

ADVERTISING SALES 212.592.2207 CONTRIBUTORS Lisa Batchelder Christopher Darling Lynn Gamwell Alexander Gelfand Michael Grant James Grimaldi Dan Halm Jamie Keesling Carrie Lincourt Lee Ann Norman Jane Nuzzo Jennifer Phillips Miranda Pierce Angela Riechers Ken Switzer Angie Wojak © 2014, Visual Arts Press, Ltd. Visual Arts Journal is published twice a year

by External Relations, School of Visual Arts, 209 East 23rd Street, New York, NY 100103994. Milton Glaser, acting chairman; David Rhodes, president; Anthony P. Rhodes, executive vice president.

facebook.com/schoolofvisualarts

Much of our daily world is a result of design.

This will come as no surprise to many SVA students, faculty and alumni. Employers are increasingly looking to designers to make their business more competitive and socially responsible. Against this backdrop, this issue of Visual Arts Journal features a conversation about the future of design with Allan Chochinov, chair of MFA Products of Design; Angela Yeh, president and founder of Yeh IDeology LLC, a design and strategy recruitment firm; and Angie Wojak (BFA 1990 Media Arts), director of SVA Career Development.

Design also plays an explicit role in three College initiatives discussed in the pages of this issue.

One, called Canvas, is a new learning management system that provides students with 24/7 access to course materials from any device with an Internet connection; it was launched last fall by our Office of Learning Technologies. Exhibition design is the topic addressed in Color Commentary. Here, Dan Halm, project coordinator in SVA External Relations, revisits last December’s Miami Project art fair, where he curated a presentation of work by recent alumni. Looking ahead, there is a discussion of a new SVA student residence that is in the works, for which ground will be broken this coming summer. When it opens in 2016, the College expects that the design of this facility will set a new standard for student housing.

Design also has a special role to play in what we eat—and how we think about what we eat— whether it’s the homespun aesthetic of the Canal House cookbooks by Melissa Hamilton (BFA 1983 Fine Arts) or the carefully considered menus devised by Cal Peternell (BFA 1987 Fine Arts), a head chef at Alice Waters’ famed Chez Panisse restaurant. Both alumni, along with fellow food world luminaries Jim Lahey (1986 Fine Arts) and Grace Parisi (BFA 1986 Fine Arts), talk with Visual Arts Journal in “Tastemakers.”

Designers often have the opportunity to bridge different disciplines and build consensus around shared interests. “Unveiling the Truth” introduces readers to two SVA alumni and two faculty members who are doing so by means of illustration, animation, photography, sculpture or installation projects.

Also in this issue, readers meet alumnus Craig Gillespie (BFA 1989 Media Arts), best known for directing the 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl.

Gillespie studied illustration, graphic design and advertising during his years at SVA before dedicating himself to directing and producing commercials and films. Gillespie’s latest feature, about a sports agent who stages an unconventional recruitment strategy to get talented Asian cricket players to play Major League Baseball, is scheduled for release this summer.

David Rhodes President

@SVA_News schoolofvisualarts.tumblr.com vimeo.com/svaedu youtube.com/user/SVANewYorkCity

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SVA Close Up

FOR UP-TO -DATE NEWS AND E VENT S , VISIT S VA CLOSE UP AT

blog.sva.edu

Hybrid Vehicles

HEARD AT SVA

Keith Mayerson, My Family, 2013, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Derek Eller Gallery, New York.

Photograph by Tom Powel Imaging.

“We can’t use guilt to create change. . . . We have to make the thing we want to change obsolete by designing something that is so superior that it becomes the natural course of events.”

Jason McLennan, architect, environmentalist and CEO of the International Living Future Institute. From Design for 100%: A Marfa Dialogues/NY Event, presented by MFA Design for Social Innovation and the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

SVA is well represented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which runs through May 25 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. On view are never-before-seen works by Ei Arakawa (BFA 2004 Fine Arts), Dawoud Bey (1977 Photography), Zackary Drucker (BFA 2005 Photography), BFA Illustration faculty member Keith Mayerson, MFA Fine Arts faculty Suzanne McClelland (MFA 1989 Fine Arts) and Dave McKenzie, Amy Sillman (BFA 1979 Fine Arts) and the late Sarah Charlesworth, who was an MFA Photography, Video and Related Media faculty member.

This year’s biennial is an ambitious, wide-ranging selection of cross-disciplinary works. In addition to the expected paintings, photographs and sculptures, it features works by academics, animators, dancers, filmmakers, musicians, performance artists, writers and publishers. The exhibition was organized by three outside curators— Stuart Comer, of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Anthony Elms, of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and Michelle Grabner, of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—and is the last biennial to be held in the Whitney’s current building at 945 Madison Avenue. The museum moves to a new location in downtown Manhattan in 2015. [Dan Halm]

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photo by Art Beach

An Icon of Icons

Virtually every biography of Geismar, a BFA Design faculty member, calls him a pioneer of American graphic design. His philosophy, like his work, is a paragon of simple elegance. “We try to do something that is memorable for a symbol,” he is quoted saying in a 1980 profile of Chermayeff & Geismar by design writer and critic C. Ray Smith, “something that has some barb to it that will make it stick in your mind, make

HEARD AT SVA

Thomas Geismar and Ivan Chermayeff met when they were both students at Yale in the mid-1950s, bonded over a shared obsession with typeface design, founded what would become a legendary design firm and turned the concept of brand identity on its ear. For instance, their octagonal logo for Chase Manhattan Bank, devoid of words or letters, was a conceptual breakthrough at the time of its launch in the 1960s. Their “P-head” on the PBS logo put the “public” in Public Broadcasting. Mobil Oil’s red “O,” the NBC peacock and countless other iconic corporate identities owe their memorable existence to Chermayeff & Geismar.

As this year’s SVA Masters Series honoree, Geismar joins an elite rank of visual communicators to be celebrated by the College for a lifetime of influential work. In conjunction with the award, a major retrospective of his work will be on view this fall at the SVA Chelsea Gallery.

it different from the others, perhaps unique. And we want to make it attractive, pleasant and appropriate. The challenge is to combine all those things into something simple.”

The Masters Series program was created in 1988 by SVA founder Silas H. Rhodes to give exposure to groundbreaking artists who are lauded by their peers, yet are not necessarily household names. [Lisa Batchelder]

“If you study the history of art, you discover that there were periods when artists were considered too colorful. Michelangelo thought Titian was using too much color and ought to pay more attention to drawing. And it goes on and on.”

Saul Leiter, photographer. From a conversation with New Yorker photography critic Vince Aletti, hosted by BFA Photography.

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SVA Close Up

On the Phone

HEARD AT SVA

Two of the selected images from the Nokia Future Creatives Project, by students Ailin Blasco (left) and Sarah Jun (right).

“One of the big things Milton Glaser taught me was that some of a designer’s most valuable moments are in that uncomfortable state when we haven’t quite solved the problem. It’s when the pieces of the puzzle aren’t fitting together that we’re most fertile.”

Deborah Adler (MFA 2002 Design), principal of Adler Design. From her Distinguished Alumnus Lecture.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Last fall, SVA was one of only five institutions in the world chosen to participate in the Nokia Future Creatives Project competition. Executives from Nokia Corporation spent seven consecutive days at the College, mentoring budding photographers in MPS Digital Photography in how to use the communications technology giant’s brand-new high performance devices, such as the Nokia 808 PureView and Nokia Lumina 1020 phones. They also presented students with a creative brief, which outlined the project’s scope, timeline and ultimate goal—evocative images with broad appeal and relevance, and which could be used for the company’s internal and external marketing, advertising and communications purposes. All photographs had to be taken using Nokia devices.

“Giving digital photography students a new, state-of-the-art phone camera to use was like giving a child a toy at Christmas,” student Sarah Jun says. “Never before has there been a 34-megapixel phone camera, and when I first heard about it I was very excited.”

Students created work in three categories: hyper natural (landscapes), hyper focal (details) and hyper real (objects, situations and environments).

When the project ended, the Nokia team evaluated the submissions from all participating institutions at the company’s headquarters in Finland. In all, 20 images were selected—with an impressive nine of them by Jun—and licensed for commercial use.

“We’re always looking for realworld opportunities for our students to work with new, unreleased technology,” says Katrin Eismann, chair of MPS Digital Photography. “Nokia understood the value of what they were asking, and they created a truly meaningful experience for our students.” [Lee Ann Norman]

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Drawing a Crowd

HEARD AT SVA

Illustrations by Jonathan Bartlett (MFA 2010 Illustration as Visual Essay) have appeared in many top-drawer publications, including Fortune, Playboy, The New York Times and Wired. But lately, his work is turning up on collectible clothing and even the facade of a building in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. And at the same time, he’s giving back to SVA.

Bartlett was selected to participate in the Art Wall project, an initiative that has turned the Denim & Supply shop at 99 University Place into a showcase for emerging artists. In February, the exterior of the shop’s building was transformed into an approximately 31- by 80-foot “canvas” for Bartlett’s site-specific illustration, A Cognitive Representation of Time and Place, which was printed on vinyl and heat-applied to the first two floors of the outside wall. Inside, shoppers can purchase limited-edition T-shirts inspired by the artist’s distinctive vintage-meets-surreal designs, with all proceeds going to an MFA Illustration as Visual Essay student scholarship fund, administered by the SVA Alumni Society.

Jonathan Bartlett, A Cognitive Representation of Time and Place, 2014. For Denim & Supply Ralph Lauren Art Wall Project.

MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Chair Marshall Arisman says he knew early on that Bartlett was one to watch: “Jonathan was still a student at SVA when his career began to take off. His distinctive artistic and conceptual approach was fully realized by the time he graduated.” Only one year after completing his degree, Bartlett received one of the most prestigious honors in the illustration world: the Young Guns Award, from the Art Directors Club of New York.

According to Denim & Supply’s parent company, Ralph Lauren Corporation, the concept behind the Art Wall is to link the Denim & Supply brand with the spirit of freewheeling self-expression often associated with New York City’s street-art scene. The project was also developed in part to honor the anniversary of MFA Illustration as Visual Essay at SVA, which turns 30 this year. As for Bartlett, it’s a chance to support his alma mater while bringing his ideas to life—and to the public—in ways he may never have imagined. [LB]

“The abolition of slavery [in the United States] put the concept of what it means to be a free person on the political agenda.”

Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian. From a talk hosted

by MA Critical Theory and the Arts.

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SVA Close Up

The Art of Living

HEARD AT SVA

Rendering by Magnum Real Estate Group/Ismael Leyva Architects.

“One of the things that’s a very common trope is this idea that the world is urbanizing, and is now more urban than it is rural. . . .

As I travel, what I notice is that the world isn’t actually urbanizing.

What it’s doing is surburbanizing.”

Vishaan Chakrabarti, architect and urban planner.

From a talk hosted by MFA Design Criticism.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

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SVA is planning a state-of-the-art residence hall, set to open in the fall of 2016, with amenities to match the College’s newest studio and screening facilities. Located at 407 First Avenue, between 23rd and 24th streets in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan—an area favored by young professionals for its plentiful dining, shopping and mass transit options—it will be the flagship for SVA student housing. The address also offers easy access to the SVA administrative offices at 209 East 23rd Street and the student center next door. At nearly 150,000 square feet, the 14-story building will house more than 500 people, which amounts to over a third of the College’s resident students.

“One of the things that sets SVA apart from liberal arts schools is the opportunity for students to be part of a community of artists,” says Laurel Christy, associate director of Residence Life. “First Avenue will set the standard for our other residences when it comes to being a place where you learn, not just live.”

The new facility is being designed by Ismael Leyva Architects, a New York City-based firm responsible for high-profile residential developments in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn.

Featuring a streamlined red brick exterior in keeping with other College residences, the design includes a landscaped roof garden with seating; dedicated exhibition spaces, both indoors and out, for digital as well as 2D and 3D art; and conference rooms for on-site classes and workshops. As with all SVA housing, 24-hour security, on-site laundry facilities, cable TV/Internet access and complimentary WiFi are planned. [Michael Grant]

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Write Now

Stretching Canvas In fall of 2013, the College’s nascent Office of Learning Technologies—which is dedicated to tech-based opportunities for enhancing and supporting students’ educational experiences—launched Canvas, a new learning management system for SVA.

Like other LMSs, Canvas provides students with 24/7 access to course materials from any device with an Internet connection. As a “next generation” LMS, however, its engineers came up with a more approachable, adaptable design, one that gives users a number of options for creating, sharing and collaborating on content.

In concert with the launch, Learning Technologies began piloting tools that can be seamlessly integrated with Canvas, and address the needs of art- or design-centered education.

“You can find many learning tools geared toward subjects like math and science,” says Carrie Atkins, a Learning Technologies instructional designer.

“It’s a challenge to find something that works well for art.”

One such need is the capability to critique work. So last August, Atkins— in conjunction with MPS Digital Photography and MFA Visual Narrative—piloted HEARD AT SVA

Last year, SVA initiated its Undergraduate Writing Program. Offered through the Humanities and Sciences Department, the program is a 15-credit non-degree concentration for undergraduate students of any major. Students develop compositional skills through transdisciplinary courses in subjects ranging from autobiography to narrative storytelling. “These special courses are open to all SVA students, whether or not they wish to commit to the writing program.

For individuals focusing on a visual art discipline, sometimes a sampling is best,” says Maryhelen Hendricks, co-chair of Humanities and Sciences at SVA.

Students who do complete the program will work one-on-one with instructors to develop a writing portfolio. Faculty member Regina Weinreich, who teaches experimental writing and creative nonfiction courses, describes her approach: “In my classes, I ask students to experiment through what I call a writing workout, which is intended to make students feel so comfortable with language that writing becomes natural. Teaching genres like the graphic novel also helps to illustrate the relationship between pictures and written narrative.”

This spring, the program launches its online journal, The Match Factory, edited by faculty member Edwin Rivera. Its premiere issue, on the topic of “Murder, Madness and Monsters,” includes work by both students and faculty. “The faculty are all marvelously accomplished,” Rivera says, “and can teach students to approach their work in the same manner John Updike said that Vladimir Nabokov did—that is, ‘ecstatically.’”

For more information about the Undergraduate Writing Program, write Hendricks at mhendricks@sva.edu.

The Match Factory will be accessible at svawriting.wordpress.com.

[Jamie Keesling]

VoiceThread, which allows students and faculty to easily manage online discussions about a piece of media.

Students can upload their work and their classmates and instructors can comment on it—via text, audio and video. They can also make annotations directly to both still images and video. Although this type of group critique happens often in on-site classes, VoiceThread greatly improves the experience for online learners; it was quickly adopted by both participating departments, as the curriculum of each contains distance-learning components. “Every two to three weeks, one of my assignments is now to create a VoiceThread,” says Katrin Eismann, chair of MPS Digital Photography. “For example, a thread comparing the ISO capabilities of your cameras, or one comparing different ways of processing the same image. It gets our online students to engage with each other. It’s a good way to share, and for them to practice teaching and presenting.”

With Canvas—and VoiceThread— now available campus-wide, Learning Technologies continues to investigate new art-related tools and develop improved training for the College’s faculty and students. [Jennifer Phillips]

“I believe that every business should have a confetti drawer.”

Tina Roth Eisenberg, a.k.a. Swiss Miss, entrepreneur, graphic designer and blogger. From an MFA Products of Design studio visit.

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What’s in Store

Ass Backwards Apparel Silvio Capoferri and Matthew Cardinali assbackwardsapparel.com T-shirts, $20 Ass Backwards Apparel was founded as a response to crushing boredom— the type felt by teenagers everywhere. Instead of turning to mischief, mayhem and other predictable adolescent pursuits, childhood friends and current SVA students Silvio Capoferri (BFA Illustration) and Matthew Cardinali (BFA Photography) of Bridgewater, New Jersey, pooled some cash they got from their parents and started a T-shirt company in 2012, at the end of their senior year. The shirts’ brightly colored designs draw upon a diverse pool of 20th-century visual references: the work of cartoonist R. Crumb, a range of vintage Coney Island and roadside signage (hey, is that Bob’s Big Boy?) and lettering inspired by old baseball jerseys and chrome automotive nameplates.

Things were a bit rocky at first. “Our website was pretty bad,” Cardinali says. “We didn’t know how to make it easy to use or even how to make it look good. We really had no idea what we were doing.” Business picked up once they started selling the shirts at local concerts and shows, setting up at merchandise tables provided by the people running the gigs. Capoferri, who does most of the artwork, enrolled in SVA’s precollege course in cartooning three times, progressively expanding and building on his work. He urged Cardinali, who was undecided about his post-high school plans but was handling the finance and tech details of the business, to take a precollege course in photography. Both were accepted to SVA and chose to room together as undergraduates.

A successful campaign the pair conducted on the SVA Kickstarter page raised money for their next line of shirts and long-overdue website improvements, and the partners plan to stay committed to their company and keep expanding in the future, no matter where their individual paths may lead after graduation. [Angela Riechers]

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

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GreyMatters Jennifer Rozbruch greymatterstous.com For six years, Jennifer Rozbruch (MFA 2013 Design) witnessed her grandmother Frieda’s heartbreaking decline into a world of complete dependence on others. A formerly sharp, strong-willed Holocaust survivor, Frieda had a condition known as advanced vascular dementia, leaving her with limited mobility, virtually no short-term memory and an inability to communicate.

But Rozbruch observed that companionship and cognitive stimulation could sometimes bring about a spark of vitality in her grandmother. “Her spirit and long-term memory came out dramatically through activities like listening to music from her youth, looking through old family photos and hearing her life story told to her,” Rozbruch says. “It was amazing to see how her mood and manner changed when she was engaged.”

That firsthand experience with the realities of dementia—and the occasional glimpses of the grandmother she had once known—inspired Rozbruch’s final thesis project. The result is GreyMatters, an interactive tablet application designed for patients and their loved ones to use together as a way to pre­serve memories and share joyful moments. Fully customizable, GreyMatters is a personalized life-story book that engages patients through music, games and photos. Rozbruch expects the app to be released and ready for download this year.

Frieda died last November, but Rozbruch remains passionate about using design to make a difference in dementia care. She hopes that GreyMatters will be only the first in a line of digital and soft-tool dementia care products.

“I firmly believe that people with dementia are ‘still here,’” she says, “and they deserve to experience joy. It’s the small moments—like seeing a song spark a memory or witnessing a glimpse of former vitality—that can have an enormous effect on the well-being of both the patient and caregiver.”

[Lisa Batchelder]

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What’s in Store Paula Greif Ceramics Paula Greif paulagreifceramics.com $75 – $340 Over the course of an enviable design career, Paula Greif (BFA 1976 Media Arts) has made some of the very first music videos for MTV, designed album covers for the likes of Madonna and Blondie, worked in Rolling Stone’s art department, served as an art director at Mademoiselle and Barneys New York, and collaborated with photographer Richard Avedon. Her latest venture, a collection of ceramics—wavy-striped bowls, pitchers, plates and serving utensils in blue, cream, rust and brown—is so popular that collectors rush to buy new work the very day it comes out of the kiln.

Greif’s recent interest in handicraft was inspired by a passage in the book Calder at Home—a lively account of the life and work of famous sculptor Alexander Calder—that tells how Calder’s wife, Louisa, made hooked rugs based on the artist’s drawings. Greif made a few rugs herself, then tried her hand at pottery and realized she’d found her next medium. “I thought, ‘My life is so bourgeois, all this stuff from IKEA and Pottery Barn!’ I wanted to have more handmade stuff in my home,” she says. “At first I didn’t know how to make cups, so we made these little bowls for drinking coffee. My daughter would say to her friends, ‘Come over and have a cup of bowled coffee.’”

Asked whether each different design discipline with which she has been involved has informed the others, Greif says, “I think I’ve always been a graphic designer at heart. Even when I was doing videos, they never had a story but were more about color and shape and form and line and space.

I just keep doing the same thing in a different medium.”

Greif’s ceramics are sold through her website and at Beautiful Dreamers in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Join her email list at paulagreifceramics.com to be alerted whenever new pieces become available. [AR]

Iron Bound Brendan Leach (MFA 2010 Illustration as Visual Essay) Secret Acres Paperback, 252 pages, $21.95

Wolf Pull Toy Keith Haring (1979 Fine Arts) Artware Editions Solid painted wood with string, $80

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

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The Glow: An Inspiring Guide to Stylish Motherhood Violet Gaynor and Kelly Stuart; foreword by Cynthia Rowley Stewart, Tabori & Chang Hardcover, 224 pages, $29.95 In 2011, friends Kelly Stuart (BFA 2001 Photography) and Violet Gaynor founded TheGlow.com, a website featuring original photo spreads and interviews with enviably hip and successful working mothers. The Glow was (and is) a moonlighting endeavor—Stuart is photo director at Hearst Digital Media, Gaynor is senior fashion editor at InStyle.com—but it soon found a sizable audience and attention from advertisers like Coach and J. Crew. This spring, the two published The Glow: An Inspiring Guide to Stylish Motherhood, a compilation of new material (including photos of homes in New York, Los Angeles, London, Nashville and Paris) and profiles from the site.

The more than 50 subjects include fitness guru Tracy Anderson, Modern Family star Julie Bowen, designers Cynthia Rowley and Rebecca Minkoff, and model and cosmetics entrepreneur Josie Maran. [Greg Herbowy]

Big Snow Jonathan Bean (MFA 2005 Illustration as Visual Essay) Farrar, Straus and Giroux Hardcover, 32 pages, $16.99

Sound of a Train Gilbert Girion (faculty, BFA Film and Video) Pleasure Boat Studio Paperback, 107 pages, $17 SPRING 2014

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What’s in Store

The New Forty-Niners

Lee Daniels’ The Butler

Sarina Finkelstein Kehrer Verlag Hardcover, 120 pages, $33.99

Directed by Lee Daniels; visual effects by numerous alumni Weinstein Company/Anchor Bay DVD/Blu-ray, $19.96/$29.96; available to stream on Amazon.com

Sarina Finkelstein (MFA 2004 Photography, Video and Related Media) not only struck gold with her latest photo project, she also managed to capture something just as valuable—the spirit of the 21st-century people who hunt for it. Shot over the span of four years, Finkelstein’s series The New FortyNiners, now available in a book of the same name, documents the new wave of gold prospectors who flocked to California more than a century and a half after the original Gold Rush of 1849.

Finkelstein started the project in 2009 after reading about people hoping to survive the recession by trying their luck at finding the precious stuff in California when its price was then at an all-time high. It was shortly after the death of her mother, a time when she was looking for a project to immerse herself in. “I felt a strange connection to this particular group that was struggling to make a go of it—often having had to sell or leave their permanent homes or having lost their jobs—and I also felt a profound respect for their passion and determination,” she says. “They really got me working again—got me interested and excited—and so I just kept going out, trip after trip.”

Although the prospectors Finkelstein photographed lived rugged, “bare bones” lives—which “allowed them to support themselves with the small amount of gold they’d find,” she says—not all were down on their luck.

“Some were just born adventurers—they gave up what most would consider perfectly stable lives or office jobs to just go off the grid. Some were loners who just wanted to live in the woods.” But Finkelstein found that many shared a common bond. “There’s a spirituality to prospecting that is shared by those in the ‘inner circle.’ It stems from this unwavering faith that one day, someday, you’ll find gold.” [Ken Switzer]

A number of SVA alumni worked on the post-production of Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013), a historical drama starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey.

The Molecule, a visual effects and motion graphics company co-run by Luke DiTommaso (BFA 2001 Computer Art), was hired to create various effects for the movie, which follows a White House butler’s life as he serves eight U.S. presidents. DiTommaso was the film’s visual effects supervisor; fellow BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects alumni Osvaldo Andreaus (2010), Henry Jean (2011), Maxim Kornev (2008), Victoria Penzes (2013), Kenneth Polonski (2007), Chad M. Sikora (2007) and Selim Yang (2011) all contributed to the project. [KS]

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

The Forest Feast: Simple Vegetarian Recipes from My Cabin in the Woods Erin Gleeson (MFA 2007 Photography, Video and Related Media) Stewart, Tabori & Chang Hardcover, 240 pages, $35

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La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus Mark Kendall lacamionetafilm.com DVD, $25; iTunes download, $12.99 In his 2012 documentary La Camioneta, Mark Kendall (MFA 2011 Social Documentary Film) explores the second life of some of the big yellow buses familiar to school kids across America. After a decade or so of ferrying U.S. children around, many of these buses are decommissioned, sold at auction and driven to Guatemala, where they undergo a startling transformation, becoming a kind of folk art with a practical purpose. They are repaired, given a healthy dose of extra chrome and repainted in blazing colors for their next act as camionetas, the vehicles that serve as the public transportation system in Guatemala. The system, unfortunately, poses considerable risks for its workers. In the last seven years, more than 1,000 of their drivers have been murdered for either refusing or being unable to pay the extortion money demanded by local gangs.

During a six-week trip through Central America in 2009, Kendall struck up a conversation with the driver of the camioneta on which he was riding and

was astonished to learn that the bus had originally come from a school district 20 miles away from Kendall’s childhood home in Tennessee. A story took root in his imagination, and Kendall enrolled in MFA Social Documentary Film in order to be able to tell it. La Camioneta, a 2013 New York Times Critics’ Pick, follows one bus and its driver on a journey from Spotsylvania County, Virginia, to Guatemala, where it is refurbished and set off to service the route between Ciudad Quetzal and Guatemala City. The film’s narrative touches on themes of rebirth, creativity and the ability to persevere in the face of economic hardship and constant danger in the hope for a better future.

After a week’s run in New York City, La Camioneta was distributed to art houses and museums in 40 other U.S. cities. It went into wide release in Guatemala at the end of January 2014, thanks to funding provided by the cultural affairs department of the U.S. embassy in Guatemala. [AR]

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MICHELE ZACKHEIM - Last Train to Paris

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Library Journal

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Inspired by the true story of a distant cousin’s kidnapping in Paris in the 1930s, Michele Zackheim’s sweeping historical novel centers on Rose Manon, a small-town girl from the American West who spent her youth dreaming of a larger, more exciting life. When she learns of an opening for a staff reporter in New York City, she heads east to pursue her dreams.

M ICHELE Z ACKHEIM

LAST TRAIN TO PARIS “Michele Zackheim has dared to invent and actually become part of her story—the result is a thrilling mix of fact and fiction.”

—KATE MILLETT, author of Sexual Politics

As the summer of 1935 unfolds, Rose proves she has the right mixture of talent and ambition to succeed in a male-dominated newsroom. She also uncovers the truth about her Jewish heritag an identity her parents took pains to keep secret And even though New York City in the 1930s is endlessly exciting for an intrepid young journalist, Rose takes a cue from renowned correspondent Martha Gellhorn and sets her sights even further afield, this time across the Atlantic Ocean.

Over the next few years, Rose’s ambitions take her to Paris and then Berlin. Along the way, she lives a charmed existence, falling in love with an artist and rubbing shoulders with such luminarie as Colette and Janet Flammer. But as the Third Reich gains momentum and influence, critical events begin unfolding at a heart-stopping pace.

Rose quickly finds herself caught in an inescapable web of terror, and decades later she must come to terms with the consequences of a heart-wrenching decision that irreparably changes the course of her life.

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Europa FICTION

editions

Last Train to Paris Michele Zackheim Europa Editions Paperback, 320 pages, $17 Michele Zackheim, an MFA Illustration as Visual Essay faculty member, began her professional career in New York City as an artist and illustrator, though at some point, she says, she “wrote herself off the canvas and into a notebook.” Zackheim is the author of the novels Broken Colors (Europa, 2007) and Violette’s Embrace (Riverhead, 1996) and the nonfiction book Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl (Riverhead, 1999). Her third novel and latest work, Last Train to Paris, was published in January.

In her preface to Last Train, Zackheim reveals the book’s real-life origins: In 1937 in Paris, a distant cousin of hers was abducted and, eventually, killed by a serial kidnapper and his three cohorts. The event made news in both Europe and the United States. Zackheim says that she initially set out to write a nonfiction work, but in the end created a fictional story based on the embers of fact.

The protagonist of Last Train to Paris is Rose Bell Manon, an aspiring journalist from a small Nevada town who moves to New York City to pursue

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her dream of writing. Rose’s talent and ambition eventually take her to France, where she finds work as a Paris Courier correspondent and, amid the threat of war, is transferred to the newspaper’s Berlin office. Following Kristallnacht—the November 1938 night when synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses in Germany, Austria and elsewhere were destroyed— and the expulsion of Americans from Germany, Rose must choose who will accompany her on the last train to Paris.

In Last Train, Zackheim takes a personal approach in setting up the characters and settings. She uses warm descriptions, simultaneously allowing her language to breathe. The story proves to be a refreshing twist of events embedded in a dynamic plot. Zackheim says that she has already begun work on her next book. [Christopher Darling]

$17.0

TO SUBMIT A PRODUC T FOR WHAT ’ S IN S TORE , SEND INFORM ATION TO

What’s in Store

news@sva.edu Lovability Condoms Tiffany Gaines lovabilitycondoms.com $7.99 – $17.99 Dissatisfied with the alternately clinical and cartoonishly macho branding of male prophylactics, student Tiffany Gaines (MFA Design for Social Innovation) created Lovability Condoms, a line designed for and marketed to women. The product is packaged in metal tins, with each condom individually wrapped in easy-to-open foil, which makes tearing or damaging one less likely. Gaines’ goal: for those with more delicate sensibilities to feel less embarrassed about buying, carrying or, most importantly, initiating the use of condoms. In addition to being sold online, Lovability Condoms are available in such New York City stores as Azaleas, La Petite Coquette and Only Hearts. Women interested in becoming “Lovability Lady” merchandisers can apply at lovabilitycondoms.com. [GH]

The Cute Girl Network Greg Means and Joe Flood (BFA 2002 Cartooning) First Second Books Paperback, 192 pages, $17.99

Ethics in Art Therapy: Challenging Topics for a Complex Modality Lisa Furman (faculty, MPS Art Therapy) Jessica Kingsley Publishers Paperback, 128 pages, $26.95

Torture Chamber Dante Tomaselli (BFA 1992 Advertising) Gaiam Vivendi Entertainment DVD, $14.93

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Subject Matter

19 The Crab Nebula (NGC 1952), 2005. Six light-years wide, located 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. Courtesy NASA, ESA, Jeff Hester and Allison Loll, Arizona State University.

The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a massive star that exploded, causing what appeared as a bright new star—a supernova—in the night sky on July 4, 1054, when it was recorded by Chinese and Japanese astronomers.

All Together Now Lynn Gamwell on the Entwined Histories of Art and Science Lynn Gamwell teaches the history of art, mathematics and science at SVA. She is the author of Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual (Princeton University Press, 2002), and Searching for Certainty: Art, Mathematics, and the Mystical (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

The words “spiritual” and “mystical” appear in the subtitles of my books on the history of art, science and mathematics because, although we live in a secular era, we continue to ask the old questions: Where does everything come from? What does it all mean? Throughout history, thinkers like Plato and Galileo have assumed that nature has a unified structure that can be discovered by human reason. Today, there is a new manifestation of this quest for unity, despite postmodern proscriptions against universal truths. The discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in the cell nucleus, in 1953, gave us conclusive evidence that—on a molecular level—all Homo sapiens are linked not only to each other but to all earthly organisms in a tree of life. The biologist E. O. Wilson has observed that this provides mankind with a modern creation myth, “the epic of evolution.”

Astronomers now agree that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago in an explosion, in the aftermath of which the

smallest atoms, hydrogen and helium, were formed. Then the nuclei of the light elements, such as carbon and oxygen, were fused in the cores of stars. If a star had enough mass, it reached a point where it collapsed in an explosion, a supernova, which produces a stupendous amount of energy capable of fusing—in a fraction of a second—the nuclei of all the heavy elements, everything from cobalt to uranium. The presence on Earth of all of these naturally made elements is evidence that not only our planet, but our entire solar system formed from the debris of a supernova. This means that—on an atomic level—humans are linked to the cosmos. All the atoms in our bodies are literally stardust. This gives us another theme in the mythology of the scientific worldview. As Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, puts it: “We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”

Like science, art expresses a worldview. Old Kingdom architects built pyramids for eternity; Song Dynasty monks painted the Tao (“the way”) of nature in landscapes; medieval French sculptors carved statues of the Madonna. Today, artists live in an age shaped by biology, astronomy and mathematics, so I teach the sciences at SVA. ∞

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Hire Ed Designers may have talent capable of transforming the world, but they also need to know how to negotiate today’s crowded, fast-evolving marketplace. As technology continues to infiltrate our lives and as our challenges and needs as a society change, so do our concepts and requirements of design. Though this may mean designers have to recalibrate their goals and expectations, it also

The Future of Design Work

means new opportunities—new spaces in which they can work. But where are those opportunities, and what skills does one need to take advantage of them?

Allan Chochinov, chair and co-founder of MFA

Products of Design at SVA, is a partner of the New Yorkbased design network Core77 and editor in chief of its website, core77.com, as well as coroflot.com, a career and portfolio site, and designdirectory.com, a design firm database. Angela Yeh—president and founder of Yeh IDeology LLC, a design and strategy recruitment firm— has matched designers with employers for nearly 20 years, and has lectured and taught widely on career strategies in the field. Chochinov and Yeh recently sat down with Angie Wojak (BFA 1990 Media Arts), director of career development at SVA, to discuss forward-looking career options for designers of all stripes. The following is an edited, condensed version of their conversation.

Where do you see professional opportunities in design, both today and in the near future?

ANG IE WO JAK:

There has been such massive growth in the need for design strategy and design thinking—the more conceptual, big picture parts of the design process—among businesses today. While we are seeing more and more businesses investing in industrial and product design, that growth looks incremental by comparison.

And that’s because there are more businesses out there offering services and product platforms than there are physical products.

It gets to the point where, in one instance, we’re finding excellent industrial designers giving up their industrial design abilities to focus on the hot new category of design strategy. I was just talking to someone at Apple who was saying that it’s harder and harder to find people who can conceive and draw graceful forms while still

understanding the technical, functional, mechanical aspects. That is still a rare combination of abilities that few people have and are highly sought after.

ANG E L A YE H:

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ALLAN CHOCHINOV: This is a great moment for design—and for design

makers and design thinkers in particular. And although finding a combination of form-giver and strategist in the same person may be desirable, we are seeing a need for new competencies in stewardship and sustainability, decision making, business modeling and systems thinking—skills that have tremendous value in an increasingly service-based world. At the same time, we’re fortifying our students for a more contemporary kind of “making”—one that incorporates sustainable materials, digital fabrication, coding and DIY, for example, as well as traditional formal skills such as sewing and food design.

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And of course, there’s enormous enthusiasm in the design community for socially conscious design, but it’s a frustrating chicken-or-egg challenge regarding employment. We’re preparing students to go out and create social impact, but organizations need to be prepared to employ them.

Employers often tell me that when they hire, it’s essential that candidates show that they are collaborative and good team players.

Allan, as an educator, how do you teach or encourage collaboration?

And Angela, how can job seekers demonstrate this ability?

AW:

Well, as in most schools, our students often work in groups. But we’re also trying to have more conversations and training in group dynamics and how to be effective in a team. This year, we brought in a facilitator to do a full day of Myers-Briggs personality workshops— helping students to better understand themselves, certainly, but also helping them understand the interactions they have with each other.

This gives them a new set of tools for effective team assembly and constructive behavior. They can also look back at problematic team projects from a previous semester and perhaps understand why they didn’t work.

There is a dichotomy in design right now. There is this unbelievable pressure to “be your own brand”—to be entrepreneurial and have projects on Kickstarter and be selling on Etsy. But at the same time, it’s understood that design is—more so now than ever—a team effort, that complex problems require many voices and methodologies. We’re trying to navigate how to equip students to be both collaborative and self-starting.

AC:

Yes, we still haven’t seen that many companies really invest in things like sustainability. But it’s great to see all these schools and programs that care about it, because it’s something the design community has to bring to every company that they work at. In the end, the designers have to become stewards of this charge, because sustainability, from a company’s point of view, has to be profitable.

If a company does not see it as profitable in some respect, they’re not going to invest in it.

AY:

I agree. But not everything has to be part of a traditional business economy, right? Designers have capabilities—and perhaps responsibilities—to engage in work that isn’t just about the paycheck. I meet so many people in NGOs or nonprofits or in nontraditional sectors who are increasingly realizing that they need design, that design can move them to new, prosperous places. And creative people are desperate to do meaningful work and they understand that there are lots of different ways to spend one’s creative life, aside from just selling more toaster ovens. We need to find more ways for these groups to meet.

AC:

AW:

How would you suggest someone navigate today’s job market?

The design field is extremely competitive, more so now than ever.

On the other hand, it is so multifaceted. The majority of the job-seekers are rushing to be hired at Apple or Google or IDEO, but for every A-tier company there are hundreds of B-tier and C-tier companies dying to be the next Apple. I always tell people: Look for the opportunities in your own backyard.

Designers should find out what’s in their neighborhood, who they could help. What business is their uncle or best friend or neighbor in that they could be supporting? How many of these small businesses don’t have the time to understand the value of design strategy, but could greatly benefit from it? This is another way to cut your teeth and prove your skills.

AY:

So true, and to build on that, we’re living in this entrepreneurial moment where people are finding it more gratifying to work for something small rather than for something large. You may not get the same starting salary, but you get something else: being in the story. And being a part of something that is growing can have satisfactions beyond being part of something that is just churning away.

AC:

AY: You have to be committed enough to be willing to relocate. If you

find an opportunity that isn’t in the city you’ve been dying to live in, but it gives you a few years of incredible experience? That work, once it’s in your résumé, can’t ever be erased, unless you decide to take it out.

Job seekers need to be able to show emotional intelligence and self-awareness. Knowing how to diplomatically talk about challenging scenarios that you’ve been in is important, and it shouldn’t just be in a way where you portray yourself as the savior.

I don’t think I’ve ever had an employer not ask for a team player. But “team player” doesn’t necessarily mean that the job involves working side by side with other designers. Team player means knowing that design isn’t the end-all. It means knowing how to be multilingual: fluent in design-speak, business-speak, marketingspeak and so on. You still have people who go into design thinking they won’t have to deal with non-designers. But that’s never the case.

AY:

In our program we talk about “fluencies” in the same way that Angela speaks about multilingualism. The people who can understand and meaningfully address the needs and desires of multiple stakeholders are going to be the ones who thrive in their working lives. We consider MFA Products of Design to be a leadership program, because leadership is as much about the “soft” skills of navigating and negotiating as it is about making decisions. We want to help fortify creative people to be strong but empathic. Both are essential; alone, neither is sufficient. ∞ AC:

To find resources to help creative professionals in every field, visit sva.edu/student-life/career-development.

For more on MFA Products of Design, visit productsofdesign.sva.edu.

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Portfolio

By Dan Halm

Brian Adam Douglas When first approaching a work of Brian Adam Douglas (BFA 1994 Illustration), a viewer might think he or she is looking at a complex, colorful painting. However, a closer look reveals that the work does not involve paint or brushstrokes, but is actually made up of colored paper—thousands of cut and pasted slivers of it. To create such labor-intensive works—with the larger ones taking almost half a year to complete—Douglas starts with a charcoal drawing. On top of this drawing he builds layer upon layer of tiny paper shards. The process allows the creation of complex worlds, many of which deal with natural disasters that are met with hope and the rebuilding of life.

Douglas’ first step in the creation of a work is to set up his color palette. Using blank white magazine stock acquired from an offset printer, Douglas airbrushes the paper in different hues and values of the same color. “I’ll spray sheet after sheet with the same color, so I have plenty to work with,” he says. “Whatever I don’t use, I can always use down the road for another piece.” He also distresses the paper to add more movement and color variation. The process of applying the knife-cut paper is done in a painterly manner, in much the same way one would trowel or brush layers onto a canvas, with multiple hues of the same color forming the shape and dimension of the subject.

For his exhibition “How to Disappear Completely,” which showed in fall 2013 at the Andrew Edlin Gallery in Manhattan, Douglas created surreal scenes of catastrophic mayhem and climate change (with nods to hurricanes Katrina and Sandy) that are simultaneously beautiful and haunting. “If you were to look at them on just their face value, it would look like a representation of a natural disaster, but the work is really sort of about the psychological states of man’s relationship with nature,” Douglas says. “I was dealing with a lot of family tragedies that happened in the two years while creating the work and that sort of sent the work off into dealing with the end of things, and I thought that using the environment as a symbol of that worked really well.”

Letting his unconscious make some of the decisions allowed the pieces to evolve organically and gave Douglas the freedom to not understand everything completely and not question creative decisions as they arose. “If I began to feel like I understood what was going on, I would try to pull back a little bit so that it could become more free flowing,” he says.

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“And then I tried to figure out what it was that I was trying to say after the fact and I might have tweaked it from there.” By following these unconscious directions, he created work whose meanings are open to interpretation—although as it turned out, viewers’ perceptions often jibed well with Douglas’ ultimate intentions. “Most of the time they were pretty right-on about the general themes I had in mind, but then sometimes they would come up with things that I hadn’t associated with the work,” he says. “I like for them to have a dialogue with it. Finding their own meaning in the work is more interesting to me.”

Prior to this series, Douglas had made work that was primarily dominated by the human figure. In “How to Disappear Completely,” the figures started to recede in scale and the landscapes assumed prominence. “Early on it was really about what the people were experiencing, and halfway through [creating] the work for the show I realized everything was a disaster here,” he says. “So my imagination moved more toward the actual act of the disaster rather than the human element.” This approach seems to have freed him to concentrate less on narrative and more on witnesses’ subjective experiences of cataclysmic events. “Everybody has a different sort of response to tragedy.

There is a bit of awe and fascination at the same time.”

Douglas’ work first came to the public’s attention through his street art—wheat-pasted collages and chalk drawings made under the name Elbow-Toe. The moniker came about after a night of drinking and talking about other street artists and a quick sketch of an elbow with a toe on the subway ride home. “I decided very quickly that I would try and put some little paintings out on the street, so I used contact paper and painted the Elbow-Toe character,” he says. “I would see people taking photographs of them and this turned into a way to get feedback. The work became bigger than what I made sitting in the studio.” As his street art evolved from simple character designs to more complex collages and linocuts, Douglas began to draw the attention of the gallery world, and group shows in London, Los Angeles and New York soon followed.

The impact of Douglas’ work, whether on a gallery wall or street corner, is undeniable and distinctly his own. For all the destructive forces at work in “How to Disappear Completely,” there are glimmers of hope and the resilient spirit of the human condition in each work, a reminder that, in life, disasters may occur but you need to pick yourself up and keep going. ∞

All images courtesy of the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York.

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Brian Adam Douglas, The Center Cannot Hold, 2011, cut paper on birch panel with UVA varnish.

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Brian Adam Douglas, How to Disappear Completely, 2012, cut paper on birch panel with UVA varnish.

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Brian Adam Douglas, The Last Jackalope and Other Fables of the Reconstruction, 2013, cut paper on birch panel with UVA varnish.

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Brian Adam Douglas, The Memory of You Is Never Lost Upon Me (detail), 2011, cut paper on birch panel with UVA varnish.

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Brian Adam Douglas, Say I’m the Only Bee in Your Bonnet, 2011, cut paper on paper.

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Brian Adam Douglas, No More Pouring Boiling Water Onto Ants, 2013, charcoal on paper.

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Brian Adam Douglas, The Wasteland, 2013, cut paper on birch panel with UVA varnish.

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Color Commentary

In December 2013, SVA Galleries again hosted a booth at the Miami Project, an art fair that runs in conjunction with Art Basel Miami, one of the biggest annual shows on the art world’s calendar. Eight recent SVA graduates—Anna Beeke (MFA 2013 Photography, Video and Related Media), Mark de Wilde (MFA 2013 Fine Arts), Jocelyne Gilead (BFA 2013 Fine Arts), Bradford Kessler (MFA 2013 Art Practice), Cassandra Levine (BFA 2011 Fine Arts, MFA 2013 Fine Arts), Wyatt Mills (BFA 2013 Fine Arts), Randhy Rodriguez (MPS 2013 Digital Photography) and Ilona Szwarc (BFA 2013 Photography)—and one member of the class of 2014, Frederick Paxton (BFA Fine Arts), were selected to show their work and represent the College; all proceeds from sold pieces went to the artists.

Dan Halm (BFA 1994 Illustration, MFA 2001 Illustration as Visual Essay) served as the booth’s curator. For the past 11 years, Halm has managed the College’s presence at art fairs in New York and Miami. Here, he talks about the curatorial process and, more specifically, about the decision making that went into organizing the exhibition for the 2013 Miami Project.

“Art fairs are a bit tricky,” he says. “While they’re not the same as a curated exhibition, there should be some rhyme and reason as to what work gets hung where. You want to aim for a good balance. You don’t want one artist to dominate, but you also want work that is going to draw people in.

“Creating a standout presentation takes a certain amount of preplanning, good placement, a dash of luck and work that, while not necessarily thematically tied together, works in a symbiotic manner. Also, it helps a lot to have an installer to bring your vision to life and bounce ideas off of.

Luckily I had that in Tyson Skross, senior exhibition coordinator of the SVA Galleries. I could not have been more excited to have showcased these nine talented artists at the 2013 Miami Project. It was one of the strongest selections in my 11 years of art-fair curating for the College.” ∞

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Photos by Randhy Rodriguez, courtesy of the artist.

Behind the Booth: An Inside Look at SVA’s Miami Project Installation

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“The first thing I do when hanging a booth is to find ‘anchor pieces’—works that will attract people. These are pieces that set the tone and determine where other work will be hung. Fortunately, I had two artists—Bradford Kessler and Wyatt Mills—who clearly set up the rest of the presentation. With Mills’ Dreams Do Come True, I knew I had a painting that would intrigue and ‘pop,’ even if someone was all the way at the other side of the fair.

“The problem then was finding work that wouldn’t be dominated by Mills’ frenetic energy and vitality. Ilona Szwarc’s photographs from her ‘Rodeo Girls’ series were the perfect companion pieces. Their serenity and beauty, not to mention their own power and resonance, were perfect when hung next to Mills’ painting.”

FROM LEFT: Wyatt Mills, Dreams Do Come True, 2013, mixed media on canvas. Ilona Szwarc, Lariat, Gruver, Texas, 2012, archival pigment print; Tayln, Canadian, Texas, 2012, archival pigment print.

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“To the right of Szwarc’s photographs I placed the works of Mark de Wilde and Randhy Rodriguez. The cell cast acrylic paintings of de Wilde were the perfect contrast between two very complex and different photographic series—Szwarc’s and Rodriguez’s. De Wilde’s use of materials and seemingly effortless mark-making—and the overall luminosity of each piece—more than held up against the architectural details of Rodriguez’s photographs.

“For his series ‘Sub Conscious Way,’ Rodriguez presents wondrous aspects of the New York City subway system—in this case, in images of two stations in Brooklyn. We chose to stack them on top of one another to balance out the wall for a couple of reasons. Together, they were about the same size as Mills’ painting and they still maintained their individual impact.

They also looked wonderful as a set.”

FROM LEFT: Mark de Wilde, Our Oars Became Wings, 2013, enamel and tempera on cell cast acrylic; Xiros, 2013, encaustic and tempera on cell cast acrylic; Notes on Flying III, 2013, encaustic and tempera on cell cast acrylic; Notes on Flying II, 2013, enamel and pigment on cell cast acrylic. Randhy Rodriguez, Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, 2013, inkjet pigment print (top); Myrtle-Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, 2013, inkjet pigment print (bottom).

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“Of all the artists’ studios I visited in preparation for the fair, Bradford Kessler’s was the only one I left knowing exactly where I would place the work. Once we decided on his sculptural piece Cross #9 and the mirrored pieces from his ‘Deltitnu’ series, I knew I wanted to see them tucked in the back of the booth, as both the fluorescent light and mirrors would be undeniable attractions for the crowds. And they were just that. I wanted the viewers to have to walk up to the work, interact with it and discover the eyes embedded in the mirrors. Kessler takes familiar objects and transforms them into something magical. Knowing how strong his work was, it also made sense to give it plenty of breathing room and its own wall.”

FROM LEFT: Bradford Kessler, Pet Painting (#2), 2013, dog harness, chain leash, gessoed canvas; Deltitnu (#2), 2013, mirrored glass, glass eyes; Cross #9, 2013, fluorescent daylight tubes, fixtures, flat-screen TV mount, chain necklace, laser-cut acrylic; Deltitnu (#1), 2013, mirrored glass, glass eyes.

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“To the right of Kessler’s work, on another wall, were the graphite drawings of Jocelyne Gilead and the colorful abstractions of Cassandra Levine. Since this was the only wall visitors wouldn’t be able to see before entering the space, I needed strong work that would draw people to them.

Luckily, the complex and delicate nature of Gilead’s dreamlike portraits and the cluster of Levine’s work, which ‘pops’ with color, did the job and offered the necessary balance.”

FROM LEFT: Jocelyne Gilead, The Shift, 2012, graphite on paper; Stereoscope, 2012, graphite on paper. Cassandra Levine (clockwise from left), More, 2013, mixed media on panel; Sting, Stang, Stung, 2013, mixed media on panel; Tuesday, 2013, mixed media on panel; Parade Day, 2013, mixed media on panel; Arizona Aubergine, 2013, mixed media on panel; All I Want, 2013, mixed media on panel; Pansy Flower Poppy, 2013, mixed media on panel.

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“Video is always tricky in the setting of a fair. Since the image is constantly shifting and changing, it can dominate nearby work. I’ve seen plenty of galleries give a video piece its own wall. However, in Miami, Anna Beeke’s photographs more than held their own against Frederick Paxton’s video piece The Ambition of Conformity Never Breaks Individuality. Their opposites are what made the works look so good side by side—Beeke’s earthy tones of lush green Pacific Northwest forest and wooden frames were a stark contrast to the polish of Paxton’s video’s glitz—the North Korean Arirang Mass Games, the neon-bedecked hotel from Shigatse, Tibet—and its powder-coated aluminum frame.”

FROM LEFT: Frederick Paxton, The Ambition of Conformity Never Breaks Individuality, 2013, digital cinema, LCD, powder-coated aluminum. Anna Beeke (clockwise from left), Mosses (San Jose Island, WA), 2012, archival pigment print; Mimic (near Everett, WA), 2012, archival pigment print; The Woodcutters (Quinalt, WA), 2012, archival pigment print.

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Unveiling

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the Truth

Rachel Sussman, Antarctic Moss #1202-7B33 (5,500 years old; Elephant Island, Antarctica) (detail), 2012, archival pigment print from medium format color negative film.

Using Art for Science and Science for Art

BY ALEX ANDER GELFAND

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Rachel Sussman, Welwitschia Mirabilis #0707-22411 (2,000 years old; Namib Naukluft Desert, Namibia), 2012, archival pigment print from medium format color negative film.

Art and science are often seen as separate pursuits— the former characterized as fanciful and subjective, the latter as dispassionate and objective. But artists have long been challenged and inspired by scientific advances (see Subject Matter, page 18). Sometimes, they have even contributed to them—think of Eadweard Muybridge and his famous photographic series of athletes and animals in motion. It’s no surprise, then, that a number of SVA alumni and faculty pursue work that bridges the gap between the two fields.

“There may be more that unites artists and scientists than divides them,” Rachel Sussman (BFA 1998 Photography) wrote in an essay she posted last year to the website of the science journal Nature. Sussman ought to know: The Brooklyn-based photographer has spent the past decade working with researchers and traveling the world to document the oldest living organisms on the planet.

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Sussman’s interest in nature photography began early; by the age of 8, she was running outside with her mother’s camera during thunderstorms to snap pictures of trees swaying in the wind. As a student at SVA, Sussman became entranced by the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who saw art as a means of unveiling truth—a concept that many scientists would no doubt find familiar, and which lies at the heart of Sussman’s work.

Her forthcoming book, The Oldest Living Things in the World (University of Chicago Press, 2014), contains photo­graphs of 30 different subjects, ranging from a colony of 80,000-year-old aspen trees in Utah to a clump of 500,000-year-old bacteria in Siberia. The photos have been featured in exhibitions in the United States and Europe, as well as in publications such as The New York Times and Smithsonian magazine. Together with Sussman’s accompanying

Brandon Ballengée, Love Motel for Insects: Anax Junius Variation, Central Park, New York, NY, 2013, outdoor installation and “eco-actions” (public field trips) with black ultraviolet lights, steel, fabric, native plants, invited insects. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

essays, they force viewers to confront the notion of deep time: time on a geological scale, rather than a human one. And that’s no accident.

“I can’t think of a single human problem that couldn’t benefit from long-term thinking,” Sussman says. One of those problems—climate change—directly affects her non-human subjects; it’s evident, for instance, in the shape and growth of a 9,500-year-old spruce tree in Sweden, and could ultimately endanger those Siberian bacteria, which live in permafrost that is melting as the Earth warms. Sussman, who recently joined former Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Corps, hopes that her photographs will help audiences connect to nature and the environment, inspiring them to address global climate change over the long term while prompting immediate action to protect the ancient flora and fauna she has, through her images, preserved from vanishing in the here and now.

“I think of this as a conceptual art project,” she says. “And the beauty part is that it’s inclusive.”

Getting people to care about the environment through projects that straddle art and science is also at the center of Brandon Ballengée’s work. A field biologist and visual artist who teaches in both BFA Fine Arts and Humanities and Sciences at SVA, Ballengée has a knack for getting people involved in both the art and science of what he does.

As a biologist, Ballengée studies limb deformities among frogs and toads in the wetlands of Europe and North America, exploring how these abnormalities arise (while predators can snip off their limbs, parasites can cause the animals to grow extra appendages) and how they are related to environmental factors like pollution. He has used his investigations to produce delicate, multicolored images of amphibians and other SPRING 2014

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An illustration of tunica albuginea cysts by Gwendolyn Mack. © University of Rochester.

creatures. He has a penchant for establishing open laboratories that double as art studios, inviting members of the public to participate in his research and encouraging them to make sketches and take photographs of what they see. By merging the experiential side of fieldwork with the reflective capacity of art, Ballengée aims to demystify science and get people more engaged in environmental issues.

He takes much the same attitude toward teaching and publication. Students in Ballengée’s Ecoventions course, for example, design projects like urban windmills and green corridors aimed at making New York a more sustainable city, while students in his Urban Ecology classes gather data on the nocturnal bugs that are drawn to the illuminated sculptures in his ongoing series “Love Motel for Insects.” (Shaped like enormous dragonfly wings and lit with ultraviolet light, Ballengée’s Love Motels are so good at attracting arthropods that entomologists in South Korea used one to identify three new species.) His latest book, From Scales to Feathers (Williams Center for the Arts/Shrewsbury Museum, 2014), includes a series of images in which Ballengée has taken bird prints by the great 19th-century naturalist and wildlife artist John James Audubon and deleted those species that are now extinct. It’s a fitting homage; when Ballengée describes Audubon as a hybrid artist/biologist who VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

“used art to get an environmental message out to people,” he might as well be talking about himself.

Gwendolyn Mack (BFA 2003 Illustration) falls into an even older tradition of art-meets-science—namely, that of the Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci, whose anatomical sketches shed new light on the structure of the human body.

As a medical illustrator for the Department of Imaging Sciences/Radiology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Mack creates illustrations for doctors and professors of medicine. That might mean making a poster for a medical resident who is preparing a conference presentation about a novel method of killing cancer tumors with radiation, or illustrating the visual systems of the brain for a senior faculty member who is writing a neuroanatomy textbook. “Right now, I’m drawing the visual pathways of the lateral and medial geniculate nuclei and the superior and inferior colliculi,” she says, rattling off the names of some of the very structures that make it possible for her to do her work.

Mack began drawing as soon as she could hold a pencil, and she traces her interest in anatomy back to high school, but it wasn’t until she took Andrew Gerndt and Sherry Camhy’s anatomy classes at SVA that she decided to pursue both

Rachel Sussman, La Llareta #0308-23B26 (up to 3,000 years old; Atacama Desert, Chile) (detail), 2008, archival pigment print from medium format color negative film.

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A screenshot of Aaron Oliker’s BioDigital Human iOS mobile application.

professionally. After earning an MFA in medical illustration at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Mack began doing freelance work for medical publishers like Elsevier, and since 2010 she has spent her days at the U of R, where she typically does a first round of sketches by hand before completing her illustrations with pen and tablet in Photoshop.

Though accuracy and realism are crucial to Mack’s work, she’s nonetheless able to exercise a considerable degree of artistic license when it comes to color, texture, composition, and even the direction of lighting in a given illustration.

And she is constantly absorbing new information about human anatomy. “That’s really the fun part of my job,” she says. “I get paid to learn new stuff.”

You might say that Aaron Oliker has also pursued a career in medical illustration—albeit with an added dimension or two. As a young animator, Oliker, a BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects faculty member at SVA, initially wanted to design video games. But after meeting a surgeon at New York University who specializes in correcting cleft lip and cleft palate—birth defects that can make it difficult to speak or even eat properly—Oliker changed course, producing a DVD containing animated surgical instructions that have taught doctors how to repair cleft lip and palate in thousands of children around the world. Not long afterward, Oliker created a surgically accurate, 3D animation of a beating heart—a project that laid the foundation for much of the work that he has done since.

In 2003, Oliker co-founded the company BioDigital Systems with an eye toward creating a comprehensive digital map of the human body. The end result, BioDigital Human, is VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

a 3D anatomical model that lives online, can be accessed via web browser, and is chock-full of animated components that can demonstrate healthy physiology as well as conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. (It also contains the surgical animations that Oliker originally developed for his DVD.) Its 1.3 million users include doctors, medical students, chiropractors and acupuncturists. Oliker sees big potential for growth as doctors look for new ways of educating their patients, and ordinary people increasingly turn toward the web for information about their health.

BioDigital Human is more than a standalone anatomy simulator, however. It is also a platform that others can use to create their own interactive anatomical visualizations. Programmers, for example, can borrow snippets of Oliker’s code to embed animated anatomical objects (a bone, a blood vessel, that beating heart) in their web pages—objects that can be rotated, dissected, and otherwise manipulated in various ways. And Oliker and his partners are about to launch a mobile version of BioDigital Human that will let people access the technology through their smart phones and tablets.

It’s not unusual for students in Oliker’s classes to intern at BioDigital, and a number of them have landed jobs at the company. Daisy Jeong (BFA 2013 Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) is the latest; a former intern, she’s now a full-time modeler and animator at the company.

And given the rapidly expanding nature of medical knowledge, it seems unlikely that she’ll be the last. “You can always go deeper,” Oliker says when asked if BioDigital Human will ever be complete. “We’re never done.” ∞

Brandon BallengĂŠe, DFA 155: Morpheus, 2013, unique Iris print on Arches watercolor paper.

Cleared and stained Pacific tree frog collected in Aptos, California, in scientific collaboration with Stanley K. Sessions. Courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

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Q+A: Craig Gillespie

BY JAMES GRIMALDI

Craig Gillespie (BFA 1989 Media Arts)

In 2007, Gillespie began making films, directing Billy Bob

has stacked career upon career. Raised

Thornton and Susan Sarandon in Mr. Woodcock, a slapstick

in Australia, he moved to New York in

comedy, and Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl, an oddball

the mid-1980s to attend SVA, where he studied illustration

romance about a man who falls in love with a sex doll. Lars

and graphic design before finally settling on advertising.

attracted substantial press and a number of award nomina-

After graduation, he worked as an art director for a number

tions and showcased Gillespie’s self-identified strength: dark,

of years, then began directing TV commercials. By his own

dramatic comedy. He went on to direct and produce several

count, he has made “hundreds” of them, and for his efforts

episodes of United States of Tara, Showtime’s series about a

has won such honors as the Golden Lion Award, given at the

woman with multiple personalities, and has since completed

Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, and the

two more features—the 2011 remake of the 1985 horror film

Directors Guild of America Award. Two of his spots are in The

Fright Night, starring Colin Farrell, and the forthcoming sports

Museum of Modern Art’s collection.

drama Million Dollar Arm, starring Jon Hamm—all the while continuing to shoot commercials.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Craig Gillespie, Cars.com TV commercials, film stills. DP: Wally Pfister.

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Craig Gillespie, Snickers TV commercial, film stills.

DP: Bryan Newman.

HOW DID YOU FIND YOUR FIRST JOB AFTER GRADUATING, AND HOW DID YOU GO FROM THERE TO YOUR FIRST DIRECTING JOBS?

During my third year at SVA, I had an internship at an advertising agency. When I graduated, they offered me a job. That led to TV commercial art direction for eight years.

While working as an art director, I began making a bunch of spec commercials with my own money, shooting them with 16-mm handheld cameras. I had a friend who was doing it—renting cameras, hiring student cinematographers and editing on a flatbed—and he encouraged me to do the same. Then I shot one on 35-mm, again with my own money, and even hired Woody Allen’s set designer.

After five years of funding and filming my own commercials on my off hours, I finally got signed as a director with a production company, Farenheit Films. They closed after a year and [production company] MJZ hired me immediately. I’ve now been there for 13 years and have directed hundreds of commercials. I love it.

WHAT WOULD YOU RECOMMEND FOR ADVERTISING STUDENTS WHO WANT TO GET INTO DIRECTING?

Three friends of mine and I all went down the same road, to make what’s called “a spec reel.” And we all used the same template: Make a short commercial with comic dialogue, one specific location, and it’s all about the performance. It got us all hired as commercial directors. So I recommend it.

While you’re doing that, work for other commercial directors, as I did, and saturate yourself with whatever is going on in the industry. You need to be aware of what the market is, why people are getting work and what’s currently successful.

DURING YOUR TIME DIRECTING COMMERCIALS, WHAT WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT SKILL YOU DEVELOPED?

Finding my own voice.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?

Luck. Making the most out of an opportunity. And running with it.

I was on a set, about to shoot an H&R Block commercial, but something went wrong and we couldn’t shoot as planned. Yet the client had already paid for the actors and the location. We were under the gun—we had to shoot something. So I came up with a dark comic idea, inspired by Kubrick’s The Shining, and I had the actors improvise. That commercial went on to win awards. In that instance I was lucky, because I got to bypass the whole client regimen and make an unusual commercial that would otherwise never have been made. In the end, the client loved it and I had put my own stamp on the industry.

HOW DID YOU MAKE THE TRANSITION TO DIRECTING FEATURES?

Perseverance. First, I had to establish myself in commercials. That took five years, and eventually landed me an agent for feature films.

That agent sent me on nonstop meetings with studios and got me involved in many projects. I did that for years, but nothing really took off. During that time, I fell in love with a script, Lars and the Real Girl,

by Nancy Oliver. I pitched it everywhere. Everyone loved it, but no one was interested in taking the risk.

At the time, I had many projects on the burner. That’s what you have to do in this business—juggle a lot of projects, hoping one will take off. And that’s what happened. I was attached to one project that was getting no traction, but it led to New Line offering me Mr. Woodcock to direct. I jumped at the opportunity.

While shooting Mr. Woodcock, we were getting a good buzz around town. The actors were really pleased, especially Susan Sarandon. Suddenly, I was viable to studios. So I capitalized on that to get Lars made. Months later, I was shooting the film of a script I’d fallen in love with, starring Ryan Gosling.

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AS SOMEONE WITH EXPERIENCE IN ADVERTISING, DO YOU HAVE ANY SAY IN HOW YOUR MOVIES ARE CUT FOR TRAILERS OR HOW THEY’RE MARKETED?

No. I once asked, “What kind of leverage do I have in my film’s advertising?” The answer was, “None! Not even Michael Bay gets leverage.”

DO YOU HAVE A DIFFERENT APPROACH WHEN YOU’RE DIRECTING TV FROM WHEN YOU’RE DIRECTING A FILM?

The thing about TV is that you’re always under a time crunch. Oddly, I find that liberating, because it limits me to what absolutely needs to be covered in a scene. When shooting United States of Tara, there were times when we were shooting nine scenes in one day. In film, it’s usually three a day.

For instance, at the end of Season 1, Toni Collete, who played Tara, meets her rapist in a psych ward. In that scene, she goes through all of her personalities. This all happens in five pages of script. And we had only half a day to shoot it! So I limited myself to two setups with two handheld cameras. Toni pulled it off in one take, because she’s an amazing actress. But that situation is normal in TV. So you approach shooting in an incredibly economical way and it teaches you to shoot more with less.

YOU WERE ALSO A CONSULTING PRODUCER ON TARA. WHAT DID THAT INVOLVE?

A lot of work! You’re involved in the whole process: giving story notes, then giving shooting notes, then giving notes in editing, even in tele-correcting and mixing. You supervise everything. So it was a full-time job in itself, in addition to directing. I got no sleep that year.

YOU’VE WORKED WITH SOME OF THE TOP YOUNG WRITERS IN HOLLYWOOD: NANCY OLIVER [LARS], TOM MCCARTHY [MILLION DOLLAR ARM] AND DIABLO CODY [TARA]. HOW DO YOU

If a script is effortless to read, my life as a director becomes much easier. I have a specific sense of humor. Writers like Oliver, McCarthy and Cody all share that same humor. So when they write, it’s easy for me to visualize their words. In film, tone is everything. The writer sets the tone from the start. As a director, I come in and continue with that tone—by pacing, blocking and performance. It all boils down to being on the same page, tonally, with the writer, and finding great writers who share your sensibilities.

SPEAKING OF TONE, COMEDY MIXED WITH DRAMA SEEMS TO BE PREVALENT IN ALL FACETS OF YOUR DIRECTORIAL CAREER, FROM ADVERTISING TO FILM TO SCRIPTED TV.

I like juggling humor and drama—that challenge is exciting to me.

What’s key is finding the emotional core in a script, digging into the characters. If there’s humor, it’s going to be inherent. It can’t be a spoof, but there can be comic relief—humor becomes a nice byproduct. It’s more important that the story show a plausible, emotional journey. So when directing, my actors approach a situation from a real place. From there, comedy can be mined.

One thing I will mention: It all comes down to casting.

That’s where I’ll be the most dogmatic and fight for what I want.

You can see the same dialogue performed by different actors. You’ll have a generic actor play it and it won’t have one ounce of comedy.

Then another actor, who doesn’t even realize that they’re humorous, will make you smile and empathize. That’s the trick—finding that person with that humor and empathy. For instance, Emily Mortimer is incredibly empathetic and can also be funny, while still giving a grounded performance. It’s in the nuances of her DNA.

When I’m directing a film, I’m involved in all the casting sessions. And I stand by my guns to get who I want. There may be other, more established, more economically viable actors that the studio wants, but I’ll say, “No, it’s got to stay true to the script.” ∞

CHOOSE YOUR PROJECTS?

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asteaker

52

BY GREG HERBOW Y

photo by Lucy Schaeffer (for Grace Parisi)

54 Do as I say, not as I do: Jim Lahey kneads at Sullivan St. Bakery.

Photo by Squire Fox.

“The real artists today are probably, you know, the hackers.”

Jim Lahey (1986 Fine Arts) is sitting in the back of Sullivan St. Bakery, the business he started in 1994 at its eponymous address in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, and which now operates out of a building on West 47th Street, in Hell’s Kitchen. He is talking, in a roundabout way, about his famous no-knead bread. The award-winning Sullivan St. Bakery turns out, among other items, some 8,000 loaves a day for restaurants, grocers and its own two retail outlets—one in the front of the bakery and another about a mile downtown in Chelsea, next door to Lahey’s acclaimed pizza restaurant, Co. But outside of the city, if the man is known for anything, it is for his recipe for no-knead bread.

Lahey’s no-knead bread was introduced in a 2006 New York Times article by the paper’s Minimalist food VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

columnist, cookbook author Mark Bittman, who called it a “rare” innovation in baking. It was—inasmuch as something as low-tech as a bread recipe could be—a hack, a deciphering and rewriting of standard procedure to create a different, and maybe superior, outcome.

Amateur bakers are typically stymied by two obsta­cles: imperfect kneading and imperfect baking equipment. To get around the first problem, Lahey did away with kneading alto­ gether and instead let the dough rise for up to 18 hours, allowing the glutens—the proteins that give bread its body—to form on their own. To mimic the humid interior of a professional oven, which keeps the crust thin, he called for baking the bread in a covered pot, trapping the steam generated by the cooking dough, and removing the lid only at the end, to brown and crisp the crust. Neither workaround, Bittman wrote, was wholly uncommon, but used together, they were “revolutionary.”

The preparation was so foolproof and the results so reliably good that, ever since its initial publication, Lahey’s recipe has been shared, and praised, far and wide—online, from person to person and in other media outlets. Vogue’s restaurant critic Jeffrey Steingarten called it “miraculous.” Martha Stewart invited Lahey to bake the bread on her television show. When Bittman retired the Minimalist column in 2011, he singled out no-knead bread as “my most popular recipe, and it isn’t even mine.”

“It seemed to rekindle, or kindle, this huge bread-baking boom,” Bittman says now, a reaction that bemuses him still.

In his own bread recipes, he had long advocated using a food processor for kneading—an effective, simple solution that takes far less time than Lahey’s method. “None of it had the traction that Jim’s [recipe] did,” he says.

Eight years on, its dissemination continues. This January, it was reposted or referenced in no fewer than 50 blog posts and message boards; in early February, an adaptation appeared in an Associated Press article. And that’s not counting all the places where it showed up without proper attribution—a toocommon occurrence that “drives me absolutely nuts,” Bittman

Fresh loaves at Sullivan St. Bakery.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Melissa Hamilton, Hard-Cooked Eggs, 2013, acrylic and pencil on paper; Artichoke, 2013, acrylic and pencil on paper; Baby Zucchini, 2013, acrylic and pencil on paper; Canned Anchovies, 2013, acrylic and pencil on paper.

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Melissa Hamilton’s acrylic and pencil on paper illustrations can be found throughout Canal House’s cookbooks and web pages.

says. “[Lahey] didn’t ‘invent’ anything, but this form, with that technique—it’s his bread. Credit where it’s due.”

Looking back, Lahey admits he could have better capitalized on the opportunity, but going public with his noknead bread was, in his telling, a gesture as egalitarian as it was egotistical—a way to make great bread accessible to almost anyone, almost anywhere. “I wanted to make myself bigger than my business, but I also wanted to make myself obsolete,” he says, watching loaves roll out of Sullivan St.’s oven.

He smiles. “I consider myself a culinary folk hero.”

For all the fault to be found with America’s ever-growing enthusiasm for everything edible—for all the attendant gluttony and pretensions—it has at least made popular the idea that the production and preparation of food, when done with imagination and purpose, are creative acts, as old and transformative as any other art or craft. As Melissa Hamilton (BFA 1983 Fine Arts) remembers it, cooking has not always been recognized as such.

In her early post-college years, when she worked in kitchens to support herself, a restaurant career wasn’t seen as a worthy profession for “an ‘educated’ person,” she says. “And it was particularly challenging as a woman working in a male-dominated kitchen.” In 1988, when she decided to open a restaurant with her father in Lambertville, New Jersey, rather than pursue an art career, one former high-school classmate was particularly dismayed. “‘What are you doing in this business?,’” Hamilton remembers her asking.

The restaurant, Hamilton’s Grill Room, is still open today, though Hamilton left it in the early ’90s to work in food styling—prettifying everything from cocktails to yogurt for commercial and editorial photography. This led to staff positions with magazines, including a seven-year tenure at food and travel title Saveur, where she was hired by one of the founding editors, Christopher Hirsheimer, to run the test kitchen.

Hirsheimer, who had eaten at and “loved” the Grill Room when Hamilton was there, knew Hamilton’s tastes—“She’s a classicist,” she says, “but sensual and earthy and not afraid of it at all”—would mesh well with hers, and they did. The two became effective co-workers and close friends and, in 2007, decided to go into business together, starting Canal House, a cookbook and food photography production studio.

Operating out of an old brick building alongside the Delaware and Raritan Canal, not far from the Grill Room, the pair photograph and design cookbooks for publishers like Chronicle and W. W. Norton, write a column for Bon Appétit and turn out three of their own self-published volumes each year. Each Canal House release is made up of seasonal recipes, and illustrated with Hirsheimer’s photography and Hamilton’s art. In 2012, the two published Canal House Cooks Every Day, a collection largely drawn from lunch.thecanalhouse.com, their blog. The site—and its email newsletter, which has a growing list of 5,000-plus subscribers—consist of photos and captions documenting Hamilton and Hirsheimer’s midday meals.

Some—like clam and sausage stew—are indulgent; others, like pasta with olive oil, canned tuna and parsley, are basic. Winner of a James Beard Award, one of the food world’s highest honors, Every Day is representative of the Canal House mission, and of Hamilton’s career M.O.: promoting an unfussy but unhurried enjoyment in food and drink, whether “it’s milky coffee with burnt toast, Irish butter and apricot jam or spit-roasted beef with artichokes and beans,” she says.

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59 Images from Cal Peternell’s Twelve Recipes cookbook, due out this fall from William Morrow. Left: Grilled polenta with peperonata and fried sage. Photos by Ed Anderson.

The Canal House approach resonates with Cal Peternell (BFA 1987 Fine Arts), who for the past 14 years has been one of two head chefs at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, California, restaurant started by Alice Waters in 1971, influenced by French country cuisine and widely credited for popularizing simple, attentive cooking using the best available ingredients. Peternell cites Hamilton as “one of my cookbook heroes” and an inspiration for his Twelve Recipes (William Morrow, 2014). Due out this October, the book—Peternell’s first—is based on the adaptable, building-block cooking lessons he gave to his two sons before they left home for college. “There’s a chapter on beans,” he says. “There’s a chapter on eggs.”

Such a modest sounding project might seem an odd choice for the longtime chef at one of America’s most famous restaurants, one whom Waters calls “extraordinary . . . his talent and execution in the kitchen seem to be so completely effortless.” But, she says, “what makes Cal a great chef is his natural ability to teach—he has been a mentor and inspiration to so many cooks who have been lucky enough to work with him.”

For his own part, Peternell—who began cooking as just one of many odd post-college jobs—says he doesn’t care about food-celebrity status. “I’m not interested in restaurants where the focus is on the chefs and the tricks in their bag. What I love is what happens around the table—the conviviality, and how delicious food can be a part of that.”

This focus, he says, is exemplified by Waters’ philosophy and Chez Panisse’s operations. Each night, the restaurant serves a set three- or four-course menu, based on the best meat, fish, dairy and produce that can be found for that day—a determination made through conversations with trusted butchers, fishmongers and suppliers, most of whom have worked

“What I love is what happens around the table–the conviviality, and how delicious food can be a part of that.” with Waters for years. To develop the menus, Peternell selects a focal point, whether meat or vegetable, and builds out from there: “‘What would I want before that? What would I want after?’ I’m looking for a balance of textures, flavors, colors, temperatures.” (Lately, he has been including more “luxe” Italian items—like lasagna with nettles, sorrel, artichokes and black truffles—dishes drawn partly from memories of a long stay in Tuscany after graduating from SVA.) There are just two dinner sittings of 50 people each, at 6:00 and 8:30pm. All diners have reservations; all begin their meal at more or less the same time.

Throughout the night, Peternell samples what the guests will be served, making any alterations as needed.

It’s an uncommon model for America’s restaurant culture, but Peternell believes it works well. The kitchen staff, relieved of the unpredictable pace of incoming orders and the variety of an á la carte menu, can better concentrate on the determined courses. And the guests, relieved of an endless flow of diners and servers, can better settle in to enjoy their food and their companions. “It’s very civilized,” he says. “I’m the luckiest chef I know.”

Like Melissa Hamilton, Grace Parisi (BFA 1986 Fine Arts) supported herself for years in commercial food design. Her experiences in the field called more on her art education than her background growing up in a family of cooks and restaurateurs. “I would wind up doing really weird things,” she says, SPRING 2014

photo by Lucy Schaeffer (for Grace Parisi)

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“like shellacking French fries or painting half-cooked turkeys with dish soap and Kitchen Master. I was making these perfect, fake-looking things that you couldn’t eat but that—in the fleeting moment that they would appear on TV—would be instantly recognizable as food.”

Also like Hamilton, Parisi ultimately moved into editorial work, eventually logging 17 years as a writer and editor at Food & Wine and authoring books like Summer Winter Pasta (William Morrow, 1997) and the James Beard Award-nominated Get Saucy (Harvard Common Press, 2005). (She’s also just finished developing recipes for a cookbook tied to the IFC comedy series Portlandia, due out in 2015.) This year, she joined Birmingham, Alabama-based publisher Oxmoor House as its executive food director, a newly created position.

Each month, Parisi commutes from her Brooklyn home to Oxmoor’s offices to oversee production of all of the company’s forthcoming food titles, which include companion books for Time Inc. magazines like Real Simple and Travel and Leisure. She estimates she will work on more than 100 books in 2014 alone.

As she did at her career’s start, Parisi has found herself relying on her skills as an artist—this time, to communicate her ideas about composition and gesture to Oxmoor’s stylists and photographers. “You can always tell when a brushstroke is deliberate, as opposed to a brushstroke that’s made with the brush VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

as an extension of the body or the arm,” she says. “The same goes for food styling. You look at an advertorial and everything is posed and sterile—they’ve taken tweezers to place a piece of parsley just so. The lesson I try to teach is that chance trumps intention. Rather than using tweezers, sprinkle the parsley onto the plate from up high,” she says, letting it fall where it will.

When writing recipes, she aims for accessibility, making what can be daunting preparations involving hard-to-find ingredients within the reach of home cooks practically anywhere. A few years back, when pork belly buns were a foodworld obsession, thanks to chef David Chang and his popular Momofuku restaurants in Manhattan, Parisi retro-engineered them for Food & Wine. Instead of pork belly she called for thickcut bacon, braised in hoisin sauce, brown sugar, soy sauce and ginger. Instead of instructing readers to make their own buns (which Chang himself buys from a supplier), she called for them to steam, rather than bake, Pillsbury biscuits, for a soft, crustless bread.

“Using really good ingredients is a great thing,” she says, “but it can be a trap. It gets expensive, and those items aren’t always available. And you don’t need to rely on specialty market things to put together an amazing meal. You can use easily found ingredients, put them together in unexpected ways and make something awesome and satisfying. It’s about being adventurous and creative with what you can find.” ∞

Grace Parisi in her Brooklyn kitchen. Parisi splits her time between New York and Birmingham, Alabama, where she works as executive food director for Oxmoor House.

Photo by Michael Turek.

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Designing a Creative Community

Alumni Affairs

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

In the world of work, contacts are everything—and SVA graduates are lucky in this respect. Fostered by a faculty of some of the most influential creative professionals in the world, the 35,000-plus alumni of SVA make up an international community of artists that teems with cross-pollination and innovation.

In an ever-changing world, SVA Alumni Affairs is continually on the lookout for effective ways to support and grow this unsurpassed network. Our goal is to better connect our alumni with one another and add value to their postgraduation lives and careers. To this end, we conduct regular surveys to find out which services and benefits they most value and would like to see more of.

As a result, we have consistently heard from alumni looking for professional development and networking opportunities. In response, we have taken a number of steps, including: • Live-streaming career development workshops and lectures and posting them on our iTunesU and YouTube channels (find the links at sva.edu).

• Offering discounts on career-related sites and services, such as Behance and Indiegogo.

• Creating networking groups by region on our LinkedIn group (Alumni of the School of Visual Arts).

• Devoting more resources to our Facebook page, facebook.com/schoolofvisualartsalumni.

We hope that you have utilized these resources and found them valuable.

This spring, Alumni Affairs is conducting its latest alumni survey, and asks that you join in and turn your creative know-how toward the question of how to make your community even stronger. Look for your invitation to participate in the near future—and help us help you.

connect share create

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Connect with more than 35,000 fellow SVA alumni through these online resources: LinkedIn

alumni.sva.edu/networking and click on the LinkedIn icon Facebook

facebook.com/schoolofvisualartsalumni Twitter

twitter.com/SVAalumni The SVA Online Alumni Community

alumni.sva.edu

As an SVA alumnus, a variety of valuable programs and benefits are available to you, including: • Educational programs, networking mixers and special events (alumni.sva.edu/events) • Career Development services, including workshops and the online job board • Continuing Education discounts • Weekly model drawing sessions during the fall and spring semesters • Access to the College’s library • A subscription to Visual Arts Journal • Monthly alumni newsletter and special departmental invitations via email • Discounts on health, auto, home, dental and renters insurance • Discounts to performing arts venues, arts organizations and retailers • Free membership to SVA Portfolios/Behance • Access to SVA’s Kickstarter and Indiegogo pages

For complete details on your alumni benefits go to sva.edu/after-sva/alumni-affairs.

Comments? Questions? Contact SVA Alumni Affairs at 212.592.2300 or alumni@sva.edu.

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Alumni Society Scholarship Awards 2014 Alumni Scholarship Awards Damon Ahola, MFA Products of Design Melanie Aronson, MFA Social Documentary Film Katherine Bayard, BFA Photography Natalie de Segonzac, BFA Photography Bridget Dearborn, MFA Design Angela DeVito, BFA Animation Juniper Fleming, BFA Photography Caterina Francisca, MFA Design Criticism Francisco Hernandez, MFA Design

Stephanie Lin, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects with thesis partner Thomas Shek, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects Nai Wei Liu, MFA Computer Art Tyler Lyon, BFA Photography Alexandra Manikas, BFA Visual & Critical Studies Kathryn McElroy, MFA Products of Design Andrea McGinty, MFA Fine Arts

Wesley Huang, BFA Film and Video

Hector Rene Membreno-Canales, BFA Photography

Victor Ilyukhin, MFA Social Documentary Film

Rachelle Milne, MFA Interaction Design

Dae Yoon Kang, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects with thesis partner Sebastian Boulange, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects Yoon Hee Kim, BFA Design with thesis partners Joo Kong and Silver Kim, BFA Advertising Clay Kippen, MFA Products of Design Panop Koonwat, MFA Computer Art

Norihiro Mizukami, MFA Social Documentary Film Simone Rein, BFA Illustration Alcee Walker, MFA Social Documentary Film Anne Yang, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects with thesis partner Michael Altman, BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects

Thanks to generous contributions from alumni and friends of SVA, the Alumni Society was able to grant more than $60,000 in awards to students in support of their thesis projects.

You can support the next generation of artists by donating to the Alumni Society at alumni.sva.edu/give. Be assured that 100 percent of your contribution will go to a future award recipient.

OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Clay Kippen, Music Box Portrait, 2013, 3D printed ABS, acrylic, pencil, disposable camera; Ashley Fleming, Break (Resting Model), 2013, analog print and oil paint; Hector Rene Membreno-Canales, Untitled, 2013, photography; Melanie Aronson, Khalas – A Documentary Film, 2013, film still; Simone Rein, Extraterrestrial Life, 2013, ink/ digital; Francisco Hernandez, Lei! Lei!, 2013, poster.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

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Alumni Society Scholarship Awards 2014 Named Fund Awards 727 Award Renshou Zhang, BFA Illustration Amelia Geocos Memorial Award Darya Warner, BFA Fine Arts BFA Illustration and Cartooning Award Choong Yoon, BFA Illustration Bob Guglielmo Memorial Award Peter Schmidt, BFA Cartooning Edward Zutrau Memorial Award Anthony Donatelle, MFA Fine Arts Jack Endewelt Memorial Award Minah Kim, BFA Illustration James Richard Janowsky Award Micaela Silberstein, BFA Film and Video MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Award Ada Price, MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Ashley Seil Smith, MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Robert I. Blumenthal Memorial Award Daseul An, BFA Design Sylvia Lipson Allen Memorial Award Maximiliano Siñani, BFA Fine Arts Thomas Reiss Memorial Award Rehan Miskci, MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Will Eisner Sequential Art Award Amanda Scurti, BFA Illustration William C. Arkell Memorial Award Gilsub Choi, BFA Film and Video

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Renshou Zhang, Pattern Stealer, 2012, digital, watercolor; Daseul An, NYC Farmer’s Market, 2014, iOS app; Ashley Seil Smith, Clinton Fans, 2013, mixed.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

SVA ALUMNI SOCIETY gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our

CORPORATE PARTNERS FOR THE ARTS DIRECTORS

PATRONS

BENEFACTOR

Contributions from corporate partners benefit the SVA Alumni Society Housing Scholarship Fund, which provides students with financial need the opportunity to experience campus life.

For information on the Corporate Partners for the Arts program or the SVA Alumni Society, contact Miranda Pierce at 212.592.2305 or mpierce1@sva.edu, or visit sva.edu/alumni society.

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Donors List The SVA Alumni Society gratefully acknowledges these SVA alumni who gave to the society from July 1 through December 31, 2013.

Cora Cronemeyer E 1966 Fine Arts

Meghan Day Healey BFA 1993 Graphic Design

Kymm Malatesta-Zak BFA 1986 Media Arts

Theresa A. Cuddy-Cerza E 1983

Diane Dawson Hearn BFA 1975

Laura Maley BFA 1978 Fine Arts

Therese S. Curtin BFA 1980 Media Arts

Christina Herstine BFA 2003 Graphic Design

Kaili Mang BFA 1999 Interior Design

Michael Daly BFA 1985 Media Arts

Joseph Herzfeld BFA 1991 Fine Arts

John Manocherian MFA 1998 Fine Arts

Elisabeth E. Alba MFA 2008 Illustration as Visual Essay

Peter S. Deak BFA 1990 Film and Video

Joanne Honigman E 1981 Graphic Design

Samuel Martine BFA 1980 Media Arts

Juan Alfonso E 1982

Cat Del Buono MFA 2008 Photography, Video and Related Media

Lyn M. Hughes BFA 1981 Photography

Leith M. McCarroll-McLoughlin E 1974 Graphic Design

Eugene Iemola BFA 1979

Barbara Colluccio McElheny BFA 1984 Fine Arts

Gary J. Joaquin BFA 1981 Media Arts

Jeffrey M. Mednikow BFA 2005 Animation

Allen Johnston E 1966 Graphic Design

Kia M. Meredith-Caballero BFA 2003 Film and Video

Neville Johnston BFA 1976 Media Arts

Gary Messina G 1969 Advertising

Yvette Kaplan BFA 1976 Animation

Shunsuke Miyake E 1971 Advertising

S. Klein G 1970 Photography

Michael Morshuk BFA 1985 Media Arts

Alex Knowlton BFA 1987 Media Arts

India Northrop BFA 1984 Photography

Vashtie A. Kola BFA 2004 Film and Video

Renee Nyahay-Gonzalez BFA 1985 Media Arts

Jean Kooi BFA 1978 Media Arts

Nancy Boecker Oates E 1980 Media Arts

Melanie Kozol MFA 1987 Fine Arts

Stephen J. O’Brien BFA 1996 Film and Video

Abby Kreh G 1962 Illustration

Donald A. Orehek E 1951 Cartooning

Steven Langerman G 1972 Photography

Romaine B. Orthwein MFA 2003 Photography and Related Media

Kim Ablondi BFA 1984 Photography Arthur Ackermann BFA 1982 Media Arts

Olive Alpert E 1980 Illustration Michael J. Angley G 1971 Advertising Anonymous (3) Paul Basile G 1969 Advertising Wesley A. Bedrosian MFA 1996 Illustration as Visual Essay Frank Bele BFA 1987 Media Arts Susan L. Bell BFA 1982 Media Arts Cynthia Bittenfield MFA 2009 Photography, Video and Related Media Lewis R. Bloom BFA 1981 Photography James R. Bomeisl BFA 1978 Media Arts Michael Brennan BFA 1994 Graphic Design Sharon Burris-Brown BFA 1984 Media Arts Angelo Canitano G 1970 Carol Caputo G 1960 Graphic Design Frank T. Caruso BFA 1985 Media Arts Ed Cassel G 1970 Fine Arts Paul K. Caullett BFA 2000 Graphic Design Bernard Champon Jr. G 1969 Fine Arts William N. Ciaramelli G 1967 Alice E. Meyers Corjescu E 1974 Fine Arts Phil A. Coyne BFA 1986 Media Arts

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Theresa DeSalvio BFA 1976 Fine Arts Haydee Diaz BFA 1986 Media Arts Vincent A. DiFabritus BFA 1985 Media Arts Deborah E. Dixler E 1977 Graphic Design Rachel June Donovan BFA 2003 Graphic Design Alice D. Engelmore BFA 1988 Media Arts Carol Fabricatore MFA 1992 Illustration as Visual Essay Manuela F. Filiaci BFA 1979 Fine Arts Jeanne Finneran-Millett BFA 1985 Media Arts Lawrence Flood BFA 1980 Fine Arts Neil M. Gallo BFA 1977 Media Arts Joanna Garland BFA 1977 Film and Video Jeremy George BFA 1983 Photography

John Paul Lavin BFA 2012 Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects

Andrew Gerndt G 1971 Fine Arts

Jisun Lee BFA 2013 Design

Gary Petrini E 1979 Media Arts

Isolina Gerona BFA 1991 Fine Arts

Irina T. Lee MFA 2010 Design

Elizabeth Peyton BFA 1987 Fine Arts

Catherine Gilmore-Barnes BFA 1986 Media Arts

J. P. Lee MFA 1991 Computer Art

Craig J. Plestis BFA 1987 Film and Video

Randy Globus BFA 1978 Fine Arts

Alexander D. Lezhen BFA 1990 Media Arts

Jennifer Pouech BFA 2002 Photography

Andrea M. Golden E 1985

Kimberly C. Lockrem BFA 1996 Fine Arts

Steve Pullara BFA 1979 Fine Arts

Jelani Gould-Bailey MFA 2009 Computer Art

Missy Longo-Lewis BFA 1984 Media Arts

Todd L. Radom BFA 1986 Media Arts

Dustin Grella MFA 2009 Computer Art

Roxanne Lorch E 1984

Sabrina Hall BFA 2005 Graphic Design

David Lubarsky BFA 1979 Photography

Robert and Lucy Reitzfeld BFA 1976 Media Arts G 1961 Advertising

Kevin Petrilak (alumnus) and Jill Petrilak BFA 1976 Animation

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Lisa E. Rettig-Falcone BFA 1983 Media Arts

Rena Anderson Sokolow BFA 1986 Media Arts

Vernon C. Riddick G 1973

Skip Sorvino BFA 1994 Graphic Design

Barbara Rietschel BFA 1976 Media Arts

Art G. Stiefel BFA 1987 Media Arts

Jorge L. Rodriguez BFA 1976 Fine Arts

Kevin Sweeney (alumnus) and Danielle Sweeney MFA 1999 Computer Art

Margene Milling Rubin BFA 1987 Media Arts Bob Supina and Darlene Ruess BFA 1984 Media Arts Michael Ruffo BFA 1991 Fine Arts Carlos H. Saldanha MFA 1993 Computer Art Gini Santos MFA 1996 Computer Art Gae Savannah MFA 1995 Fine Arts Herbert K. Savran BFA 1977 Film and Video Jean A. Schapowal BFA 1987 Media Arts Joel Scharf BFA 1983 Media Arts Mark Schruntek BFA 1993 Advertising Eileen Hedy Schultz BFA 1977 Media Arts Joseph M. Schwartz BFA 1988 Media Arts JoAnne Seador BFA 1977 Photography Jim Seidel G 1971 Advertising Anthony Seminara BFA 1974 Media Arts Charles Sforza and Mary Moran BFA 1982 Media Arts BFA 1976 Media Arts Janet E. Silkes-Pike BFA 1979 Media Arts Mimi Silverman BFA 1989 Fine Arts Anita Herzog Simes BFA 1974 Media Arts Cindy Simon BFA 1979 Media Arts Joseph Sinnott BFA 1988 Photography Robert Sinram G 1971 Ellen Small MFA 1997 Photography and Related Media

Kimberley Thomas MPS 2013 Branding Robert Todd E 1965 Alli Truch 1989 Graphic Design David Tung and Claudia Tung (alumnus) BFA 1985 Media Arts Joanne S. Ungar BFA 1984 Fine Arts Barbara C. Vasquez BFA 1998 Graphic Design Wynter Wagner-Carnevale E 1980 BFA 2001 Illustration Kevin “Gig” Wailgum MFA 1991 Illustration as Visual Essay Tom Wai-Shek G 1970 Advertising Dennis W. Wierl BFA 1996 Photography Mark Willis BFA 1998 Illustration Angelia Wojak BFA 1990 Media Arts Karen S. Wolf E 1972 Unknown Gary Zaccaria BFA 1981 Media Arts (E) denotes an evening program student.

(G) denotes a graduate of the certificate program.

The SVA Alumni Society also thanks these parents and friends of SVA who supported the society.

19th Street Company Fund Frank Adamick Lisa Addeo A.D.S. Harold P. Allen Anonymous (7) Sandra and Francis Archer

Bank of America Neil Berman Margaret Bernstein Beucler Family Jeffrey Bishop Michelle Bonime Karen Brown Richard Buntzen Nada Camali Donald M. Cannavale Georgeann and Thomas Carnevali Marion E. Cassese Susan and Sebastian Caudo Ivan Chermayeff The Christoffers Family Laura E. Colbert Roy Cotignola Joseph A. Cozza Gregory A. Crane Mary Jean Cutler Findley Davidson DaVinci Artist Supply Vincent J. D’Oria James Farek Stephen and Eileen Finkelman Gayle Fischer Fleetwood Student Sales, Inc. Peter Garfield Marie and James Geocos Susan Ginsburg Milton Glaser Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Greene Jr. Helen Guglielmo Chris Gurski Junichi Hamatsuka Mark Helo Maryhelen Hendricks and Robert Lewis L. Gaye Hirz Francisco E. Homs Intermarket Agency Network The Ironwood Foundation, Inc. Jeremy Isenberg Raja Jaber Glenn Jacobson Deirdre Jowers Michael Kahn / Benefits Unlimited, Inc. Doug Krieger Ming-Dai Kuo Susan and David Lee Edward Lefferman Yooncheol Lim

William J. Locher Niki Madias Theodore Marks Sandra and Edward Marsallo McGladrey Lynn McNulty Jayalakshmi Menon Rajeshwari C. Menon Kathleen and Edward Miller Karen and Stephen Mills Lori Minasi David and Paula Mininni S. A. Modenstein Patricia and Patrick Morahan George Morrison Dennis Mulligan Christina Nannarone Harriet H. Nicol Coleman and Elizabeth O’Donoghue Walter T. Oerlemans Ralph A. Ottaiano Michael Papale Proskauer Rose LLP Ned and Ellin Purdom Mary C. Quinlan William Rednour Abby Robinson James Rudnick The Ruth and Jerome A. Siegel Foundation Barbara Salander William Shirar Jeanne Siegel James Silberstein and Sarah McGill Helena Soares Andrew Stanton William and Louise Taylor Jeffrey Teets Sr. Vivian Tolentino Riva Touger-Decker and Brian Decker Charles B. Unger Irra Verbitsky Charles R. Vermilyea Jr. Patricia Ann Vigh Lynton Wells Wells Fargo Hilda Werschkul Peggy Whitlock Sophia J. Wien Michele Zackheim

SPRING 2014

70

Alumni Notes

TO SUBMIT ITEMS FOR CONSIDERATION FOR ALUMNI NOTES AND EXHIBITIONS, EMAIL

alumni@sva.edu GROUP EFFORTS Mika Rottenberg (BFA 2001 Fine Arts) and Kate Gilmore (MFA 2002 Fine Arts) were featured in “10 Women Artists of the New Millennium You Should Know,” Arts & Culture, Huffington Post, 11/4/13.

James Kuczynski (BFA 2011 Advertising) and Paul Tuller (BFA 2013 Illustration) collaborated on “Owning Stereotypes: A Poster Series Geared Toward Reclaiming Queer Stereotypes and Educating the Masses,” Cool Hunting, 6/26/13.

BFA alumni Eric Fernandez (2012 Fine Arts), Andrew Lee (1992 Photography), Joachim Sjoberg (2012 Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) and Lightning Yumeku (2012 Animation) participated in “The Art of 3 Degrees Films,” a screening event, NYC, 7/25/13.

BFA Animation alumni Ian Jones-Quartey (2006), Kat Morris (2008) and Aleth Romanillos (2008) worked on Season 1 of Steven Universe, Cartoon Network, created by Rebecca Sugar (2009).

BFA 2010 Film and Video alumni Robert Kolodny and Bennett Elliott’s Fly on Out premiered at the HBO/BET Urbanworld Film Festival, NYC, 9/20/13.

Kevin Romond (BFA 1991 Fine Arts) was a conference speaker and presented a master class and Brian Austin (MPS 2006 Art Therapy) and Joseph Herman (BFA 1987 Fine Arts) were conference speakers at Collider, Digital Production Conference, NYC, 6/9-6/11/13.

MFA Photography alumni Lisa Fairstein (2012), Janelle Lynch (1999), Joni Sternbach (BFA 1977) and Shen Wei (2006) were finalists for the first annual Cord Prize, 7/15/13.

Rachel Loube (MFA 2011 Social Documentary) and John Mattiuzzi (MFA 2012 Computer Art) were highlighted in “Student Academy Awards: Future Filmmakers Honored — See the List of Winners,” Huffington Post, 6/9/13.

Lorna Simpson (BFA 1982 Photography) and Sarah Sze (MFA 1997 Fine Arts) were inducted into the National Academy’s class of 2013, NYC, 7/16/13.

Matthew Akers (BFA 1998 Fine Arts), Michael Simmonds (BFA 2000 Film and Video) and Bryan Singer (1986 Film and Video) were nominated for 2013 Emmy Awards by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NYC, 7/11/13.

Andrew Dayton (BFA 1998 Computer Art) was on the visual effects team and Michael Giacchino (BFA 1990 Film and Video) composed the soundtrack for Toy Story of Terror, ABC, 10/16/13.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Mary O’Malley, Double Moth Mandala #1, 2013, gold metallic ink and gouache on black paper.

1964 Bob Callahan (Advertising) was artist-in-residence at Ocean House, Watch Hill, RI, 8/15-8/19/13.

1973 Marilyn Church (Illustration) made a portrait of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor for the 14th Annual Burton Awards, Coolidge Auditorium, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 6/3/13.

1977 Laurence Gartel (BFA Graphic Design) participated in “Dream Cars” at Walt Disney World, Orlando, FL, 9/2/13.

1978 Susan Newman (BFA Graphic Design) celebrated the 20th anniversary of her business Susan Newman Design, Inc., Jersey City, NJ, 10/19/13.

1979 M. Henry Jones (BFA Film and Video). “Collected Film Works of M. Henry Jones,” Microscope Gallery, NYC, 6/15/13.

Amy Sillman’s (BFA Fine Arts) work was covered in “Blobs and Slashes, Interrupted by Forms,” The New York Times, 9/26/13.

1980 Robert Pizzo (BFA Cartooning) published The Amazing Animal Alphabet of Twenty-Six Tongue Twisters (Pomegranate, 2013).

1982 Adrienne Austermann (BFA Graphic Design) wrote “A Promise 20 Years Later with the Launch of The Sleepy Star,” Huffington Post, 10/25/13.

Lorna Simpson (BFA Photography) was interviewed for the Aperture blog, 6/25/13.

1983 Michele Carlo (BFA Advertising) was interviewed for Latino Americans of NY & NJ, NJTV, WNET, WLIW, 9/17-10/11/13.

1984 Jerry Craft (BFA Cartooning) discussed his book The Offenders: Saving the world while serving detention! (Mama’s Boyz, 2013) on Connecticut Style, WTNH, 11/7/13.

Benita Raphan (BFA Graphic Design) screened her film The Critical Path (2013), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 10/1-10/27/13.

1986 Eileen Bellacosa Panepinto (BFA Fine Arts). Permanent installation, The Miracle of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, St. John’s Bread and Life, NYC. 1987 Aleathia Brown (BFA Media Arts) participated in Harlem Art Factory Fest, NYC, 10/12-10/13/13.

Mark Hill’s (BFA Photography) photography was featured in “Steven Universe creator Rebecca Sugar is a Cartoon Network trailblazer,” The Washington Post, 11/1/13.

5

Great Reasons to visit the SVA Campus Store

We Have Your SVA Gear The SVA Campus Store is the premier retail location for all SVA-branded merchandise– sweatshirts, hats, T-shirts, mugs, notebooks, totes and more are available for sale.

SVA Subway Posters Browse our poster archive and find your favorite subway poster from your tenure at SVA or pick up the latest edition.

We Offer Local Repairs Repairs are quick and convenient at our in-store drop-off service and typically completed within a week.

Apple Authorized Campus Store The SVA Campus Store offers professional guidance and advice to assist you in making the right Apple choice for your needs.

Alumni Discounts Upon presentation of their SVA ID card, graduates may receive a 10% discount on all SVA-branded products. The SVA Campus Store also offers great in-store pricing on select hardware and design peripherals.

Location: 207 East 23rd Street Next door to the offices of the Registrar and Continuing Education Phone: 212.592.2900 Email: campusstore@sva.edu Store Hours: Monday – Friday, 10:00am – 6:00pm sva.edu/svacampusstore

Apple and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

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Distinctive auto insurance— just because you belong.

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To the extent permitted by law, applicants are individually underwritten; not all applicants may qualify. 2For qualifying customers only. Subject to terms and conditions of Liberty Mutual’s underwriting guidelines. Not available in CA and may vary by state. 3Applies to a covered total loss. Your car must be less than one year old, have fewer than 15,000 miles and have had no previous owner. Does not apply to leased vehicles or motorcycles. Subject to applicable deductible. Not available in NC or WY. 4Loss must be covered by your policy. Not available in AK. Coverage provided and underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and its affiliates, 175 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA. ©2013 Liberty Mutual Insurance 1

36 USC 220506

Elizabeth Peyton’s (BFA Fine Arts) painting Isa (Isa Genzken 1980), 2010, was on the cover of Art in America, November 2013.

1988 Catya Plate’s (Fine Arts) film Hanging by a Thread (2013) was screened at the St. Louis International Film Festival, St. Louis, MO, 11/16/13.

Gary Simmons (BFA Fine Arts) won the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Prize, 10/25/13.

1989 James Gallagher (BFA Illustration) launched his magazine Secret Behavior at the NY Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1, NYC, 9/20-9/22/13.

Al Nickerson (BFA Cartooning) was interviewed on Internet radio show The Cosmic Portal, 10/19/13.

Erica Wides (BFA Photography) is co-creator and host of Let’s Get Real, airing Tuesdays on the Heritage Radio Network.

1990 David Kiehm (BFA Media Arts) won the BBC 2013 Wildlife Artist of the Year / International Artists / Birds award for his painting Foundation Wall, and was featured in BBC Wildlife magazine, September 2013.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

Patricia Spergel (MFA Fine Arts) was the featured artist in The Southern Review, Summer 2013.

1991 Gary Silberman (BFA Film and Video) screened his video for the children’s song “I Like Apples,” DC Shorts Film Festival, Washington, DC, 9/21, 28, 29/13.

John Stapleton (BFA Film and Video) wrote and co-produced a new web series, In Transition, starring comedian Margaret Cho. 1992 David Bleich (BFA Illustration) artdirected Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013), Sony Pictures Animation.

Christopher Martin (BFA Fine Arts) published Chris Martin: Drawings (PictureBox, 2013).

Hanoch Piven (BFA Graphic Design) published Let’s Make Faces (Atheneum Books, 2013).

1993 Scott Bakal (BFA Illustration) illustrated the ad campaign for the Vancouver Opera’s 2013-14 season.

Jamie Dolinko (MFA Photography and Related Media) won the Capture Photography Festival’s Capture

In Transit Competition, Vancouver, 9/24/13.

Miles Ladin’s (MFA Photography and Related Media) work was featured in “Pop Shots by Miles Ladin,” Women’s Wear Daily, 9/6, 9/9, 9/12/13.

1994 Kandia Holloway (BFA Film and Video) was the subject of “She’s Country Strong and She Is Black!”

Black.com, 8/26/13.

Jason Rand’s (BFA Graphic Design) company HarrisonRand was the subject of “Hudson County advertising agency receives 31 awards,” NJ.com, 6/7/13.

Riad Miah (BFA Fine Arts). Group exhibition, “Scale,” Life on Mars, NYC, 10/4-11/2/13.

1996 Eduardo Rabel (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) wrote “TV: Devious Maids Delivers Progress in Disguise,” MiamiSunPost.com, 6/27/13.

Stephen Savage (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) published Ten Orange Pumpkins (Dial, 2013).

Marianne Vitale’s (BFA Film and Video) performance piece The Missing Book of Spurs was part of Performa 13, NYC, 11/20-11/23/13.

1997 Murray Hill (MFA Photography and Related Media) was featured “Vintage Photos of Drag Kings,” DangerousMinds.net, 11/5/13.

Sarah Sze (MFA Fine Arts) was featured in “Has the Art Market Finally Found Its Feminine Side? 5 Experts on the Rising Clout of Women Artists,” BlouinArtInfo.com, 7/31/13.

Ash Thayer’s (BFA Photography) photographs were featured in “Squatter’s Paradise Lost,” The New York Times, 10/4/13.

1998 Malin Abrahamsson-Alves (BFA Fine Arts) presented her installation Solar Cycle 24 for “Digital Art and the Urban Environment,” Pace University, NYC, 10/4/13.

1999 Janelle Lynch (MFA Photography and Related Media) published Barcelona (Radius Books, 2013).

Daniel Zalkus (BFA Cartooning) self-published Charcoal & Whisky (2013).

2000 Gustave Blache’s (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) Self Portrait with Checkered Scarf was acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum

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of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, for their permanent collection.

Gonzalo Fuenmayor (BFA Fine Arts) was one of the winners of the 6th Bidimensional Art Salon, Gilberto Alzate Avendaño Foundation, Bogotá, 10/13/13.

David Needleman’s (BFA Photography) photographs of film director Paul Schrader were featured in L’Uomo Vogue, September 2013.

2001 José Carlos Casado (MFA Computer Art) designed OFF, a limited-edition watch for Swatch, which was sold at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Shih Chieh Huang (MFA Fine Arts) is a 2014 TED Fellow.

Lauren Pisano (BFA Photography) won the 2013 Artspace/Aperture Instagram Contest, IAC Headquarters, NYC, 10/28/13.

David Spaltro’s (BFA Film and Video) film Things I Don’t Understand (2012) was released online, 10/31/13.

2007 Anita Cruz-Eberhard (BFA Photography) was featured in “Digital Ikebanas,” Else, Issue 5, 6/13.

Amy Elkins’ (BFA Photography) photography was featured in “Whilst I Am Drawing Breath,” Fraction, #54, 9/13.

Tatsuro Nishimura (BFA Photography) designed the cover for the “Cheap Eats” issue of TimeOut New York, 6/13.

Grace Kim’s (BFA Graphic Design) interior design was featured in “Chloe’s Clementine-Accented Play Room,” Apartment Therapy, 11/1/13.

2008 Jesse Averna (BFA Film and Video) won a 2013 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Multiple Camera Editing for his work on Sesame Street, 6/16/13.

2002 Nathan Fox (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) illustrated Dogs of War (Graphix, 2013), which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, 10/1/13.

Jade Doskow (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) was featured in “One to Watch: Jade Doskow Finds Balance in the Frame,” AmericanPhotoMag.com, 10/17/13.

Mariam Ghani (MFA Photography and Related Media) participated in the talk “2013-2014 A/P/A Institute Artists-in-Residence Welcome: Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani” at New York University’s Silver Center, NYC, 10/10/13.

Benjamin Handzo (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) memorialized SVA faculty member Sarah Charlesworth in “In Memoriam: Sarah Charlesworth, 19472013,” Bomblog, 7/17/13.

Kate Neckel (MFA Computer Art) launched the Kate Neckel Collection for the Bassetti bedding company, fall 2013.

2003 Fernanda Cohen (BFA Illustration) designed murals for American Express’s online ad campaign in Argentina, 2013.

Adam Lister’s (BFA Fine Arts) work was featured in “What if Art’s Greatest Masterpieces Were Repainted in 8-Bit?,” BuzzFeed, 9/11/13.

2004 Matthew Pillsbury’s (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) photographs were featured in “The Blur of Life,” The New York Times, 8/31/13.

2005 Carolyn Agis (BFA Fine Arts) taught the class Introduction to the Tarot, Mahala Rose, NYC, 11/10/13.

Lauren Castillo (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) illustrated City Cat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).

Cathryne Czubek’s (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media) documentary A Girl and a Gun (2012) screened at Quad Cinema, NYC, 7/5/13.

In Memoriam Tom Cardamone (1957 Illustration) died on January 2, 2013. Cardamone attended SVA when it was known as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, and taught advertising at the College in the 1960s and ’70s, during which time he wrote five technical advertising production books. A native of Brooklyn, he grew up on Long Island. At the time of his death, Cardamone was living in Naples, Florida. Over the years, his trompe l’oeil paintings won numerous awards and were exhibited nationally. He is survived by his wife, Ann Kahaner-Cardamone (G 1967 Fine Arts); daughters Diane, Debra and Doreen; and three grandchildren, Danielle, Thomas and Steven.

Eric Arctander (1965 Fine Arts) died on October 11, 2013. A resident of Putnam Valley, New York, Arctander was a visual artist who held undergraduate degrees from SVA, the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a master’s degree from Pratt Institute. Arctander taught at SVA for more than 30 years and was involved with a number of arts organizations, including the Garrison Art Center, the Putnam Arts Center and Collaborative Concepts. He is survived by his wife, Dell Jones.

Lynn Herring (BFA Fine Arts) showed her videos and prints at the Kingston Festival of the Arts, Kingston, NY, 8/24/13.

Martin Wittfooth’s (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) work was featured in “Martin Wittfooth’s Tooth and Claw,” Juxtapoz.com, 7/8/13.

2009 Steven Hannigan (BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) launched his online creative community TheCreatery. com, 7/31/13.

Robert Herman’s (MPS Digital Photography) work was featured in “A View from Inner Turmoil,” Lens blog, The New York Times, 6/14/13.

Joanna Neborsky’s (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) animation accompanied the online version of “A Husband Lost, a Daughter Found,” The New York Times, 10/10/13.

Jaime Permuth (MPS Digital Photography) received a 2013 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Fund for the Arts Grant, San Antonio, TX, 6/15/13.

Stacy Scibelli (MFA Fine Arts) produced and created costume designs for Paradiso, The Slipper Room, NYC, 10/20/13 and 11/3/13.

Riad Miah, PD IV No 4, 2013, oil on canvas over panel.

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alumni@sva.edu SPRING 2014

74

Joanna Neborsky, Still from Lost + Found, 2013, mixed media.

Rebecca Sugar’s (BFA Animation) show Steven Universe was reviewed in “‘Steven Universe’ is a gem,” Los Angeles Times, 11/4/13; Sugar was also recognized in “Rising Animators Spring Into Motion,” The New York Times, 7/28/13.

Rich Tumang (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) gave a talk at Apple Store Regent Street in London, for an Art Directors Club Young Guns event, 7/23/13.

2010 Miho Aikawa’s (MPS Digital Photography) photographs were featured in “Dinner in New York,” BurnMagazine.org, 11/5/13.

Sophia Dawson (BFA Fine Arts) was honored at Dancegiving: Dance Party Fundraiser, Picture the Homeless, NYC, 11/21/13.

Anthony Iacono (BFA Illustration) attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, 2013.

Cameron Lewis (BFA Illustration) was the featured artist in MacUser (UK), September 2013.

2011 Michelle Czajkowski (BFA Computer Art, Computer Animation and Visual Effects) raised more than

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

$217,000 via Kickstarter to support her first book and web comic, Ava’s Demon, 6/29/13.

Kareem Estefan (MFA Art Criticism and Writing) wrote “Deep Code,” Art in America, September 2013.

Daniel Fishel (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) created the cover art for Nick Hornby’s Ten Years in the Tub (Believer Books, 2013) and Songbook (Believer Books, 2013).

Michelle Lamb (BFA Fine Arts) was promoted to director of the s.h.e.

Gallery, Boonton, NJ, 8/23/13.

Amanda Lanzone (BFA Illustration) illustrated “Native Alaska, Under Threat,” The New York Times, 6/28/13.

Sangin Lee (BFA Graphic Design) received a 2013 Cannes Silver Mobile Lion award for helping develop the MasterCard Miyamo mobile app, 6/19/13.

2012 Joana Avillez’s (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay) work was featured in “Sketchbook by Joana Avillez,” The New Yorker, 6/11/13.

Andrew Brischler (MFA Fine Arts) received the 2013 Visual Art Grant Award, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Taymour Grahne Gallery, NYC, 10/25/13.

Claire Ensslin’s (BFA Film and Video) short Pedestrian (2013) screened at the Coney Island Film Festival, NYC, 9/21/13.

Tracy Toscano’s (MFA Computer Art) film My Friend Jodie (2012) won the Audience Choice, Program B award at the NYC Shorts Film Festival, 9/21/13.

An Rong Xu (BFA Photography) was featured in “Finding Legacy with Camera,” China Daily USA, 7/19/13.

2013 Shubhashish Bhutiani’s (BFA Film and Video) Kush won Best Short Film at the 2013 Venice Film Festival, Venice, Italy, 9/7/13.

Robert Campbell (MFA Fine Arts) received a 2013 AAF Fine Arts Fellowship Award to study at the Salzburg International Academy of Fine Arts, Salzburg, Austria, 6/3/13.

Supranav Dash’s (BFA Photography) photographs were featured in “Disappearing Trades: Portraits of India’s Obsolete Professions,” LightBox blog, Time, 8/20/13.

Randy Gregory’s (MPS Branding) work was featured in “22 Ingenious

Ways to Improve the Subway,” New York, 8/1/13.

Samuel Gursky (BFA Film and Video) screened his documentary Brooklyn Rocksteady (2013), IndieScreen, NYC, 7/18/13.

Reza Iman (BFA Animation) was featured in “Artist of the Day: Reza Iman,” Cartoon Brew, 7/5/13.

2013 Won Kim (BFA Photography) won third place at the 2013 International Photography Awards, in the Architecture: Interior Non-Professional category.

Ruo Bing Li (MPS Digital Photography) won third place in the Fashion category of the 2013 APA Awards.

Randhy Rodriguez (MPS Digital Photography) was featured in “Architectural Photographer Friday: Randhy Rodriguez,” Photography & Architecture, 11/1/13.

Alex Rupert (BFA Illustration) was featured in “Huron grad takes art to the extreme,” Sandusky Register, 11/16/13.

Denise Treizman Goren (MFA Fine Arts) participated the APT Institute Open Studios, NYC, 11/16-11/17/13.

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Alumni Exhibitions

James Brendan Williams, Behind the Mountain, Another Mountain, 2013, insulation foam board, paint, pallet (foreground); Tomorrow’s Wound, 2013, paper mounted to board, wood, pearlescent gesso.

GROUP EFFORTS “Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial,” held at various locations in NYC, featured many SVA alumni. At Americas Art Gallery, 6/24-9/20/13: Ok Hyun Ahn (MFA 2003 Photography and Related Media). At Bronx Museum of the Arts, 6/20-9/8/13: MFA Fine Arts alumni Katie Cercone (2011), Alejandro Guzman (2009), Wade Schaming (2010) and Diana Shpungin (2002); MFA Photography, Video and Related Media alumni Pacifico Silano (2012) and Raul Gomez Valverde (2011); and Lisa Elmaleh (BFA 2007 Photography).

At Wave Hill, 6/22–9/8/13: Naoko Ito (MFA 2010 Fine Arts).

MFA Fine Arts alumni Adehla Lee (2011), Eric Mistretta (2012) and Peter Neu (2012) showed in “Off the Wall,” Affordable Art Fair, NYC, 10/2-10/6/13, cur­ ated by Dan Halm (BFA 1994 Illustration, MFA 2001 Illustration as Visual Essay).

“Come Together: Surviving Sandy,” Industry City, NYC, 10/20-12/15/13, included work by MFA Photography, Video and Related Media alumni Adam Bell (2004), Lisa Fairstein (2012), Jeremy Haik (2012), Katarina Jerinic (2002) and Phoebe Streblow (2012); BFA Fine Arts alumni Nils Karsten (1999), Noah Landfield (2001), Gabriel Rizzotti (2012), Alexis Rockman (1985); MFA Fine Arts alumni Amelia Miller (2012) and Augustus Nazzaro (2012); and Kara Rooney (MFA 2008 Art Criticism and Writing).

“The New Berlin Painters Exhibition 3,” Forum Factory, Berlin, 10/810/13/13, featured work by 2009 BFA Fine Arts alumni Moritz Hoffmann and Paul Vogeler.

“Endless Summer,” Brian Morris Gallery, NYC, 8/1-9/7/13, curated by Gary Petersen (MFA 1987 Fine Arts), included work by Liz Markus (BFA 1989 Fine Arts).

“La Bienal 2013: Here Is Where We Jump,” El Museo del Barrio, NYC, 6/12/13-1/4/14, included work by Alejandro Guzman (MFA 2009 Fine Arts) and Elan Jurado (MFA 2012 Fine Arts).

Kate Greenberg (MFA 2010 Photography, Video and Related Media) curated “Lightplay,” Gallery 21, Moscow, 11/14-12/9/13, which included work by Lorne Blythe (MFA 2010 Photography, Video and Related Media).

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

“Revolution: Spunk No. 9,” Leslie/Lohman Basement Annex, NYC, 8/98/11/13, featured work by MFA Illustration as Visual Essay alumni Dan Halm (2001) and George Towne (1997); BFA Fine Arts alumni Colleen Longo (2001) and Emma Tapley (1990); and Simen Johan (BFA 1996 Photography).

“Hearts of Palm,” Acumen Project Space, NYC, 7/12-9/6/13, featured work

by MFA Fine Arts alumni Matthew Craven (2010), Matthew Stone (2010) and Trish Tillman (2009), and Michelle Matson (BFA 2005 Fine Arts).

Samantha Levin (BFA 2001 Fine Arts) curated “Ontological,” Skylight Gallery, NYC, 7/25-8/24/13, which included work by Yuri Leonov (BFA 2011 Illustration).

Christopher Bors (MFA 1998 Illustration as Visual Essay) curated “If 6 was 9,” Projekt722, NYC, 11/2-12/8/13, which featured work by Karlos Carcamo (BFA 1997 Fine Arts), Giovanni Garcia-Fenech (MFA 1995 Fine Arts), Kira Greene (MFA 2004 Fine Arts) and Ketta Ioannidou (MFA 1999 Illustration as Visual Essay).

77

1975 Richard Krieger (E Fine Arts).

Curator, “Momentum: 8 Women 8 Singular Voices,” Hudson Guild Gallery, NYC, 9/19-11/5/13.

1976 Theresa DeSalvio (BFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “Renacimiento,” St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, NYC, 9/18-9/26/13.

1977 Tim Rollins (BFA Fine Arts). Group exhibition, “On the Origin,” Lehmann Maupin, NYC, 11/7-12/28/13.

1979 Amy Sillman (BFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “Amy Sillman: one lump or two,” ICA, Boston, 10/3/131/5/14.

1983 John Dugdale (BFA Photography).

Solo exhibition, “John Dugdale,” Milne’s at Home Antiques, Kingston, NY, 9/7-9/30/13.

1984 Andrew Nash (BFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “Reef,” Totem Creative, NYC, 6/27-7/3/13.

Donna Sharrett (BFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “Remix: Selections from the International Collage Center,” Katonah Museum of Art, NY, 6/30-10/13/13.

Wendy Small (BFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “The Project Room: Wendy Small,” Morgan Lehman, NYC, 10/24-12/7/13.

1985 Alexis Rockman (BFA Fine Arts).

Solo exhibition, “Drawings from Life of Pi,” The Drawing Center, NYC, 9/27-11/3/13.

1986 Robert Gilmer (BFA Photography).

Group exhibition, “People pleasing People pleasing People like you,” RNG Gallery, Council Bluffs, IA, 6/8-7/7/13.

1987 Gary Petersen (MFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “OptikNerve,” Curatorial Research Lab, Winkleman Gallery, NYC, 6/27-8/2/13.

1988 Mary Salvante (BFA Illustration).

Curator, “Dialogic,” Rowan University Art Gallery, Glassboro, NJ, 9/3-10/8/13.

1989 Seth Michael Forman (MFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “Over the Hills,” Frosch & Portman, NYC, 10/17-11/24/13.

Suzanne McClelland (MFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “Every Inch of my Love,” Team Gallery, NYC, 10/10-11/17/13.

Laura Gurton (BFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “Personal Structures,” Palazzo Bembo, Venice Biennale, 6/1-11/24/13.

Joe Simko (BFA Cartooning). Solo exhibition, “Joe Simko’s Neon Graveyard,” TT Underground, NYC, 6/7-6/14/13.

John F. Simon, Jr. (MFA Computer Art). Solo exhibition, “Points, Lines, and Colors in Succession,” The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, 10/17/13-2/9/14.

Chika Iijima (BFA Photography).

Solo exhibition, “Shikaku 07,” Eyebeam, NYC, 10/24-11/16/13.

2000 Katherine Bernhardt (MFA Fine Arts). Group exhibition, “Holiday Services,” The Hole, NYC, 11/1312/28/13.

Penelope Umbrico (MFA Fine Arts).

Solo exhibition, “Slide Show,” LMAK Projects, NYC, 9/8-9/20/13.

1990 Marianne McCarthy (BFA Photography). Solo exhibition, “Looking Back: The Art of Nostalgia,” PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury, VT, 8/16-9/6/13.

Sandy Smith-Garces (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay). Group exhibition, “Women’s Caucus for Art– Stories We Tell,” Phoenix Gallery, NYC, 9/4-9/28/13.

Patricia Spergel (MFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “Texas National 2013 Exhibition,” Cole Art Center, Nacogdoches, TX, 4/13-6/8/13.

1991 Gwendolyn Chambers (BFA Illustration). Solo exhibition, “Tailgater: Classic Car Paintings by Gwendolyn Chambers,” Ossining Public Library, Ossining, NY, 7/1-7/30/13.

1992 Carol Fabricatore (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay). Solo exhibition, “Carol Fabricatore: Kykuit, My Secret Garden,” National Arts Club, NYC, 6/11-6/28/13.

Viktor Koen (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay). Solo exhibition, “Artphabet,” Fifth Annual International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication, Nicosia, Cyprus, 6/3-6/15/13.

Aleksandra Mir (BFA Media Arts).

Group exhibition, “The Meaning of Flowers,” Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL, 10/12-11/12/13.

1993 Miles Ladin (MFA Photography and Related Media). Group exhibition, “Summer Break,” Station Independent Projects, NYC, 6/28-8/4/13.

Russell Ritell (BFA Illustration).

Group exhibition, “The Work of Russ Ritell and Gamble Staempfli,” Bau Gallery, Beacon, NY, 10/1211/3/13.

1994 John Ferry (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay). Solo exhibition, “Paintings by John Ferry,” Gladstone Community Center, Gladstone, MO, 9/27-11/18/13.

Stephen Mumford (MFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “The Snow Leopard,” Postmasters, NYC, 10/1911/23/13.

1995 Michael De Feo (BFA Graphic Design). Group exhibition, “10 Years of Wooster Collective: 2003-2013,” Jonathan Levine Gallery, NYC, 8/78/24/13.

Jane Marsching (MFA Photography and Related Media). Installation, Field Station Concordia, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, 6/15-10/06/13.

1996 Brian “KAWS” Donnelly (BFA Illustration). Solo exhibition, “KAWS,” Mary Boone Gallery, NYC, 11/212/21/13.

Daniel Hill (MFA Fine Arts). Group exhibition, “Reticulate,” McKenzie Fine Art Inc., NYC, 6/21-8/17/13.

Simen Johan (BFA Photography).

Solo exhibition, “Simen Johan,” Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC, 10/2412/7/13.

Katherine Miller (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay). Solo exhibition, “Works of Katherine D. Miller,” Sherborn Library, Sherborn, MA, 6/1-6/30/13.

1997 Susannah Ray (MFA Photography and Related Media). Group exhibition, “What Are the Wild Waves Saying: Susannah Ray and Jen Poyant,” Bonni Benrubi Gallery, NYC, 7/18-9/7/13.

Stephen Sollins (MFA Photography and Related Media). Group exhibition, “alt_quilts: Sabrina Gschwandtner, Luke Haynes, Stephen Sollins,” American Folk Art Museum, NYC, 10/1/13-1/5/14.

1998 Christopher Bors (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay). Solo exhibition, “The Youth are Getting Restless,” Randall Scott Projects, Washington, DC, 8/24-9/21/13.

Miho Suzuki (MFA Photography and Related Media). Solo exhibition, “Our Children Today,” Open Source, NYC, 10/12-11/6/13.

1999 Janelle Lynch (MFA Photography and Related Media). Solo exhibition, “Los Jardines de Mexico,” Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin, 9/14-12/6/13.

Gonzalo Fuenmayor (BFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “They Say I Came Back Americanized,” Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, 7/6-8/31/13.

Todd Kelly (MFA Fine Arts). Group exhibition, “A.G.G. W.O.P.,” Asya Geisberg Gallery, NYC, 7/178/16/13.

Mark Kessell (MFA Photography and Related Media). Solo exhibition, “Perfect Specimens,” Last Rites Gallery, NYC, 8/17-9/21/13.

Alexander Lee (BFA Fine Arts).

Group Exhibition, “Manava,” Musée de Tahiti et des Îles, Nuuroa, Punaauia, Tahiti, 6/7-9/28/13.

Carrie Levy (BFA Photography).

Solo exhibition, “Reveal: Portraits

by Carrie Levy,” North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC, 7/21/13-1/26/14.

Eric Rhein (MFA Fine Arts). Group exhibition, “Tweet,” Children’s Museum of the Arts, NYC, 9/261/26/13. Group exhibition, “Not Over: 25 Years of Visual AIDS,” La MaMa Galleria, NYC, 6/1-6/30/13.

2001 Shih Chieh Huang (MFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “Glasstress 2013,” a collateral event to the Venice Biennale, 6/1-11/24/13.

2002 Michelle Cheikin (MFA Photography and Related Media). Solo exhibition, “Queens Surface,” Flushing Library, NYC, 8/9-8/28/13.

2003 Sigrid Jakob (MFA Photography and Related Media). Group exhibition, “All the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal,” Fordham University Center Gallery, NYC, 6/10-7/19/13.

Jade “MUMBOT” Kuei (BFA Animation). Solo exhibition, “A Night of Monsters + Mischief,” Kanibal Home, Jersey City, NJ, 10/2011/3/13.

Adam Lister (BFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “Adam Lister,” Heurich Gallery, Washington, DC, 6/59/4/13.

SPRING 2014

78

Leif Parsons (BFA Graphic Design).

Solo exhibition, “Leif Low–beer: First Conference of the International Network of Personal Relationships,” Buffalo Arts Studio, Buffalo, NY, 9/14-11/9/13.

TO SUBMIT ITEMS FOR CONSIDERATION FOR ALUMNI NOTES AND EXHIBITIONS, EMAIL

alumni@sva.edu

Miles Ladin, Kanye West at the Alexander Wang Spring 2014 Fashion Show, Pier 94, 2013, photograph.

2004 Jeremy Blakeslee (BFA Graphic Design). Group exhibition, “Adapt/ Transform/Reuse,” Spur Urban Center Gallery, San Francisco, 7/158/30/13.

Alana Bograd (BFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “VOX IX,” Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia, 7/57/28/13.

Jeff Hoppa (MFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “Ultima Thule: An Opening for Jeff Hoppa,” Lawton Mull, NYC, 9/27-10/4/13.

Joel Naprstek (BFA Illustration).

Solo exhibition, “Joel F. Naprstek,” Short Walls Gallery, Beacon, NY, 9/14-10/10/13.

2005 Maya Barkai (BFA Photography).

Installation, “Walking Men Worldwide,” Art & About Festival, Sydney, Australia, 9/20-10/20/13.

Paul Hoppe (MFA Illustration as Visual Essay). Solo exhibition, “The Art of Paul Hoppe – 10 Years of New York Illustration,” German Consulate General, NYC, 11/511/29/13.

UuDam Nguyen (MFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “Singapore Biennale,” National Museum of Singapore, Singapore, 10/26/13-2/16/14.

Mary O’Malley (MFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “Exquisite Beasts and Radiant Creatures,” Walker Contemporary, Waitsfield, VT, 8/9-8/31/13.

2006 Negar Ahkami (MFA Fine Arts).

Solo exhibition, “The Consumption,” Leila Heller Gallery, NYC, 6/6-7/6/13.

John Dessereau (BFA Illustration).

Solo exhibition, “John Dessereau,” Williamsburg SoulCycle, NYC, 10/10-10/31/13.

Joseph Grazi (BFA Animation). Solo exhibition, “Happy Place,” ArtNow NY, NYC, 11/7-11/30/13.

Christine Sun Kim (MFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 8/10-11/3/13.

Shen Wei (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media). Solo exhibition, “Chinese Sentiment,” La Gallerie, Frankfurt, Germany, 11/9-12/28/13.

2007 Amy Elkins (BFA Photography).

Group exhibition, “Present Memory,” Christopher Henry Gallery, NYC, 9/5-10/6/13.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

79

Sara Mejia Kriendler, From Stones to Stories, 2013, Styrofoam, sand, plaster, acrylic, spray paint, marker, pen and ink.

Lisa Elmaleh (BFA Photography).

Group exhibition, “The Mythology of Florida,” Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, 10/5/13-1/5/14.

Raheem Nelson (BFA Cartooning).

Group exhibition, “Creatives Rising,” See Me, NYC, 10/2013.

2008 Clayton Cotterell (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media).

Solo exhibition, “Arrangements,” Ampersand Gallery & Fine Books, Portland, OR, 9/25-10/24/13.

Lynn Herring (BFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “Works on Paper,” The Storefront Gallery, Kingston, NY, 8/3-8/31/13.

Matthew Lifson (BFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “5 New Artists on the Map,” California Heritage Museum, Santa Monica, CA, 10/262/23/14.

Avery McCarthy (BFA Photography). Solo exhibition, “Destination: Unknown,” Orchard Windows Gallery, NYC, 8/27-9/2/13.

Sean McGiver (MPS Digital Photography). Solo exhibition, “Works

by Sean Basil McGiver,” 163 Charles Street Gallery, NYC, 6/6/13.

Jenny Morgan (MFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “How to Find a Ghost,” Driscoll Babcock Galleries, NYC, 10/17-11/23/13.

2009 Ayala Gazit (BFA Photography).

Group exhibition, “Ballarat International Foto Biennale,” Ballarat, Australia, 8/17-9/15/13.

2010 Judy Aiello (MAT Art Education).

Solo exhibition, “Judy Aiello,” Exhibit: A Salon, NYC, 7/15-9/15/13.

Matthew Craven (MFA Fine Arts).

Solo exhibition, “Oblivious Path,” DCKT Contemporary Gallery, NYC, 9/7-10/20/13.

Jason Yarmosky (BFA Illustration).

Solo exhibition, “Dream of the Soft Look,” Bertrand Delacroix Gallery, NYC, 10/3-11/9/13.

2011 Alysha Colangeli (BFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “Earthward,” Skylight Gallery, NYC, 10/24-11/30/13.

Gudmundur Thoroddsen (MFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “Hobby and Work,” Asya Geisberg Gallery, NYC, 10/24-12/21/13.

2012 Fadi Asmar (MPS Digital Photography). Solo exhibition, “Beirut – In

Between,” Graduate Center, CUNY, NYC, September 2013-May 2014.

Lauren Caldarola (BFA Illustration). Group exhibition, “Reality and Metaphor,” Six Summit Gallery, Ivoryton, CT, 8/9-9/9/13.

Roger Generazzo (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media).

Group exhibition, “Musings: 18th Annual Photo Competition,” Photo Center NW, Seattle, 8/2-9/15/13.

May Lin Le Goff (BFA Photography).

Group exhibition, “This Order/ Disorder,” Chelsea Market, NYC, 6/6-8/15/13.

Laura Murray (BFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “Laura Murray,” Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, NYC, 10/13-11/17/13.

Jonny Ruzzo (BFA Illustration). Solo exhibition, “Norns,” Bunnycutlet Gallery, NYC, 8/2-8/16/13.

James Brendan Williams (MFA Fine Arts). Solo exhibition, “Everything Left to Chant,” Redux Contemporary Art Center, Charleston, SC, 11/22/13-1/11/14.

Elektra KB (BFA Visual and Critical Studies). Solo exhibition, “Catalytic Confessional Noise Ceremony,” Allegra LaViola Gallery, NYC, 6/5 and 6/15/13.

2013 Anna Beeke (MFA Photography, Video and Related Media). Group exhibition, “Plumb Line,” Uprise Art, NYC, 7/15-7/31/13.

Stephanie Guttenplan (MPS Digital Photography). Group exhibition, “RAW: Atlanta presents En Masse,” Terminal West, Atlanta, 8/29/13.

Renyi Hu (MFA Art Practice). Solo exhibition, “The War of the Worlds,” V Art Center, Shanghai, 11/1612/14/13.

Sara Kriendler (MFA Fine Arts).

Group exhibition, “Six Memos for the Next, Vol. 4, In Arbeit,” Magazin 4, Bregenz, Austria, 9/13-2/23/14.

Jinwoo Lee (BFA Illustration).

Group exhibition, “Global Projects: Artists at Home & Abroad,” Broadway Gallery NYC, NYC, 7/3-7/23/13.

Aston LeMelle-Thomas (BFA Illustration). Solo exhibition, “The Amazing Original Art & Music of Aston Lemelle Thomas,” Backstreet Gallery, New Rochelle, NY, 5/16-6/15/13.

Ilona Szwarc (BFA Photography).

Solo exhibition, “American Girls,” Foley Gallery, NYC, 6/5-7/3/13.

SPRING 2014

80 The SVA Archives serves as the repository for the historical records of the College; collections include posters, announcements, departmental and student publications, and other printed ephemera and artifacts dating back to SVA’s founding in 1947. To learn more, visit svaarchives.org.

From the SVA Archives This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Dusty Film & Animation Festival, created by BFA Film and Video and BFA Animation Chair Reeves Lehmann to showcase exceptional films by the departments’ graduating students. Named for SVA founder Silas H. Rhodes—who was called Dusty by his fellow World War II soldiers—the first awards were handed out in May of 1990, at an event held at the then Cineplex Odeon Worldwide Cinemas, located on West 50th Street in Manhattan.

Since its founding, the Dustys have served not just as a celebration of thesis projects, but as a way for new graduates to introduce themselves and their work to film and animation professionals. Industry representatives are in the seats and on the stage, and past awards presenters have included such actors, animators, directors and writers as Patricia Clarkson, John Dilworth (BFA 1985 Animation), James Gandolfini, Harvey Keitel, Kevin Kline, Melissa Leo, Dan Minahan (BFA 1987 Film and Video), Mira Nair, Arthur Penn, Bill Plympton (1969 Cartooning), Richard Price, Bryan Singer, Tom Sito (BFA 1977 Animation) and John Turturro.

VISUAL ARTS JOURNAL

To celebrate its anniversary, the 2014 festival—which takes place May 10 through 13 at the SVA Theatre—will present the first-ever Dusty Alumni Awards to Randall Emmett (BFA 1994 Film and Video), producer of such films as Lone Survivor (2013) and End of Watch (2012), and Yvette Kaplan (BFA 1976 Animation), a director who has worked on such TV shows as MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head and Nickelodeon’s Doug.

The Alumni Awards will hereafter be a regular feature of the ceremony, as there is no shortage of deserving candidates for them. The inaugural program alone (the cover of which is pictured here) includes several noteworthy names, all from the class of 1990. Among them: Oscar- and Emmy-winning composer Michael Giacchino (Ratatouille, Up, Lost) and the late Kelly Gleason, who received a Primetime Emmy for her makeup work on HBO’s Angels in America miniseries.

Who are the future stars to be honored this year?

For more information, visit dusty.sva.edu. [Greg Herbowy]

Brian Adam Douglas, How the End Always Ends...(detail), 2013, charcoal and pastel on paper.

See “Portfolio,” page 22.

External Relations 209 East 23 Street, New York, NY 10010-3994 sva.edu