• FEATURE •
Yves Béhar is a Swiss designer and winner of the Distinguished Midcareer
Bruce Heavin is co-founder of lynda.com and winner of the Outstanding Service Award.
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Tokyo-born artist and winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Mariana Prieto is the founder of Design for Wildlife and winner of the Young Innovator Award.
Pasadena’s ArtCenter College honors 4 pioneers By Luke Netzley
T
he ArtCenter College of Design has named four new recipients for their 15th annual Alumni Awards: Hiroshi Sugimoto for the Lifetime Achievement Award, Yves Béhar for the Distinguished Midcareer Award, Bruce Heavin for the Outstanding Service Award, and Mariana Prieto for the Young Innovator Award. “Hiroshi, Yves, Bruce and Mariana exemplify dedicated alumni who throughout their lives continue to give back to the college on many levels,” said Lorne M. Buchman, president of the ArtCenter College of Design. “They are significant figures in shaping culture, and they inspire future generations of ArtCenter students to influence change.” The ArtCenter College of Design was founded in 1930 and has become a global leader in art and design education. The college offers 11 undergraduate and 10 graduate degrees in a wide variety of industrial design disciplines as well as visual and applied arts and has hosted iconic visionaries such as legendary photographer Ansel Adams, modern artist Keith Haring, and science fiction author Bruce Sterling, who was the school’s first “Visionary in Residence.” ArtCenter was also the first design school to receive the United Nations’ Non-Governmental Organization status in recognition of its commitment to social impact design through their educational platform Designmatters. Throughout the college’s history, ArtCenter alumni have had a profound impact on popular culture and societal issues, and this year’s winners are no different. Sugimoto, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award, was born in Tokyo in 1948 and moved to the United States in 1970 to study photography, though has also works in sculpture, installation and architecture. In 2009, he established the Odawara Art Foundation, a charitable nonprofit organization to promote traditional Japanese performing arts and culture. Sugimoto’s own works have been exhibited around the world in numerous public collections, including the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London; and the National Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. His art seeks to bridge Eastern and Western ideologies while examining the nature of time, perception, and the origins of consciousness. Béhar, winner of the Distinguished Midcareer Award, is a Swiss designer and entrepreneur who believes that integrated product, brand, and experience design are the cornerstones of any business. Béhar has pioneered design as a force for positive social and environmental
change and received the INDEX Award for his humanitarian work with the One Laptop Per Child and See Better to Learn Better projects, the latter distributed 6 million free corrective eyeglasses to schoolchildren in Mexico over the last 10 years. He is the only designer to have received the award twice. In 1999, Béhar founded Fuseproject, an industry-leading design and innovation firm that focuses on using design to change people’s lives for better. He has also been at the forefront of entrepreneurial venture design, co-founding FORME Life, August, and Canopy, as well as partnering with numerous start-ups such as the Happiest Baby Snoo, Uber, Cobalt, Desktop Metal and Sweetgreen. Heavin, winner of the Outstanding Service Award, is an American artist, strategist, and entrepreneur who co-founded online software training website lynda.com with his wife Lynda Weinman. As the chief creative officer, Heavin was integral to the company’s success as a pioneering leader in online training. He created the company’s logo, designed many of the distinctive illustrations on the website and course DVD covers, and authored some of the site’s first video tutorials in Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and ImageReady. As an illustrator with an extensive background in photography and motion graphics, Heavin has created works for national publications as well as clients like Adobe, MSNBC, and E! Entertainment Television. As a distinguished and committed alumnus, he has been an active and generous donor as well as a proponent of philanthropy in the ArtCenter community. Heaven was elected to the ArtCenter Board of Trustees in June 2014 and served as a founding board member of FullCircle, the school’s giving society. Mariana Prieto, winner of the Young Innovator Award, is the founder of Design for Wildlife, a collective that works with wildlife conservation organizations to achieve large scale, economically sustainable solutions for wildlife-related challenges. She was named TED Resident in 2018 and 2019 for her work in wildlife conservation and won the Emerging Scholar Award by Common Ground in 2020. Prior to her career in wildlife conservation, Prieto worked as Innovation Lead for the International Rescue Committee and as a Global Design Fellow for IDEO.org, where she worked on numerous projects across East Africa and Asia before becoming an adjunct professor at ArtCenter. The Alumni Awards will take place in 2022.
Photos courtesy of the ArtCenter College of Design
Pasadena Weekly Deputy Editor
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