Visual Arts Briefs

In 2011, SVA won more Type Directors Club Awards than all other institutions combined, claiming 24 out of the 36 awards given for student projects. SVA also took home more TDC Awards than all professional firms in the running. The Type Directors Club is an international organization that promotes excellence in typography and awards are given annually in recognition of outstanding typeface design.

From the MFA Design Department, the 2011 winners are alumnus Matt Luckhurst (MFA 2010 Design) and current students Elisa Bates, Michael Croxton, Sebastian Ebarb, Tim Hucklesby, Derek Munn, Cristina Vasquez, Elliott Walker and Jesse Senje Yuan. Faculty members that provided guidance on these projects are Gail Anderson, Stephen Doyle, Milton Glaser, Erik Guzman, Steven Heller, Stefan Sagmeister and Paula Scher.

From the BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department, the winners are alumni Rocco Cambareri (BFA 2010 Graphic Design), Elizabeth Chan (BFA 2010 Graphic Design), Hiu Chui (BFA 1010 Graphic Design) , Grant Gold (BFA 2010 Graphic Design), Jihwan Kim (BFA 2011 Graphic Design), Jiwon Kim (BFA 2010 Graphic Design), Seung Hee Lee (BFA 2010 Graphic Design), Yoonbin Lee (BFA 2010 Graphic Design) and Rukiye Sahin (BFA 2010 Graphic Design). The faculty members that advised on these projects are Kevin Brainard, Andrew Castrucci, Darren Cox, Kristina DiMatteo, Carin Goldberg, Julia Hoffman, Ori Kleiner, Olga Mezhibovskaya, Paul Sahre, Paula Scher and Genevieve Williams.

Stranded from elisa bates on Vimeo.

Image: Screenshot from Elisa Bates’ Stranded video, an assignment for Gail Anderson’s Just Type class.

Filmmaker and alumnus Ti West (BFA 2003 Film and Video) recently talked to The New York Times about his creative process and latest writing and directing project, The Innkeepers, which opens February 3. West, a native of Wilmington, Delaware, has attracted notice since his studies at SVA for bringing a contemporary perspective to 1906s-era horror in films like The Roost and The House of the Devil.

Horror director-producer Larry Fessenden said he’s appreciated West’s unique and subtle approach since West interned for him. “Ti is absolutely focused, completely versed in the language of film,” Fessenden said. “He comes from the same school that I come from, which is where you make your film soup to nuts…It’s a real passion for the whole experience.”

The Inkeepers is about a pair of hotel clerks confronted with strange occurrences as they attempt to prove that the hotel is haunted. In the future, West said he hopes to venture into films with bigger budgets while maintaining his personal artistic vision.

To read the complete article, which accompanied by a video interview with the filmmaker and slideshow of his work, visit The New York Times.

Filmmaker, alumnus and MFA Fine Arts Department faculty member Johan Grimonprez’s (MFA 1992 Fine Arts) most recent project, The Shadow World, has been selected for a development grant from the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program. Based on a book of the same name by Andrew Feinstein, a former African National Congress member of parliament in South Africa, the documentary focuses on corruption in the international arms trade, those who profit financially from it, and the costs in human lives.

In addition to the grant, Grimonprez will also receive support from the Sundance Institute that includes work-in-progress screenings, access to creative labs, and special events and activities at the Sundance Creative Producing Summit and Sundance Film Festival. For updates about The Shadow World, which is scheduled for release in 2014, visit Louverture Films.

In the video below, Feinstein discusses his book.

More than 500 photographs from the personal collection of curator and BFA Photography Department faculty member W.M. Hunt are on display through February 19 at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, 900 East Avenue, Rochester, New York. As the name of the exhibition suggests, “The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the W.M. Hunt Collection” is focused on not looking—the eyes of the subjects in each image are never directly fixed upon the viewer, whether due to an averted gaze, positioning of the head or blurring.

Among the photographers featured in the exhibit are SVA faculty members Bill Armstrong, Elinor Carucci and Carrie Levy (BFA 2000 Photography); Stephen Frailey (chair, BFA Photography and MPS Fashion Photography departments); and alumni Maya Barkai (BFA 2005 Photography), Anthony Fuller (BFA 2003 Photography, MAT 2011 Art Education), Simen Johan (BFA 1996 Photography) and Joseph Sywenkyj (BFA 2002 Photography).

“The collection and exhibition represent a very personal journey for me,” says Hunt. “It is my conscious made manifest. These are all photos of me. But they’re all of you, too. They are evocative, whimsical, representational, many things. I love the mystery of it. You have to react, to come to the image, to make up your own story.”

For more information, visit the George Eastman House Web site.

Image: Carrie Levy, Untitled from the series “Domestic Stages.”

Unconventional Advertising instructor Frank Anselmo (BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department) has come up with a fitting tribute to one of the greatest innovators off all time. Through his company KNARF®, Anselmo has created The Steve Jobs Moment of Silence, a music track that offers eight seconds of silence in memory of the late co-founder and CEO of Apple. The track is available through iTunes for $0.99, and all proceeds go toward the research of pancreatic cancer, the disease that took Jobs’ life a few months ago.

Anselmo created the The Steve Jobs Moment of Silence with current BFA Advertising and Graphic Design student Hyui Yong Kim and former SVA exchange student Bryan Wolff Schoemaker. “It’s rare to produce an idea you love—dedicated to someone you admire—designed to help people,” said Anselmo. “This idea is more rewarding than anything I’ve ever produced since it was produced entirely by my company KNARF® by just a few pair of hands doing everything.”

For more information about the track and a demonstration of how it works, watch the video below. To download it to your iTunes library, click here.

In an effort to support suicide prevention, the Office of Student Health and Counseling Services has a new project underway called “Messages of Hope.” All SVA students, faculty and staff members are invited to create an original, postcard-sized (5-by-7-inch) artwork with the theme of “hope” in mind. The pieces will be exhibited anonymously and then sold from February 10 – 17 at the Westside Gallery, 133/141 West 21 Street. All proceeds will go to Samaritans of New York, a non-profit organization that operates a 24-hour suicide prevention hot line and provides other resources and support for those at risk.

To submit artwork, download a form online at the Samaritans of New York Web site. Pieces can be hand-delivered or sent via messenger to the George Washington Residence, 23 Lexington Avenue, Room 302 up until Friday, January 20 at 4p. For more information, visit the Samaritans of New York.

Image: Gift, submission for “Messages of Hope.” Provided by the Office of Student Health and Counseling Services.

SVA’s “Art in the First Person” lecture series hits the ground running again in 2012 with a talk by photographer Steve Winter on January 16 at 7pm at 136 West 21 Street, room 418F. On assignments for National Geographic, Winter has traveled all over the world, including Brazil, where he was stalked by jaguars; Myanmar, where he was trapped in quicksand in the world’s largest tiger reserve; and the Himalayas, where he was camped for six weeks at 30 degrees below photographing snow leopards. For AIFP, he will discuss the strategies, skills and technology required to photograph the most elusive subjects in the toughest environments.

On February 16 at 7pm at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street, curator Christopher Phillips, art historian and attorney Virginia Rutledge, critic and curator Robert Storr, and artist Oliver Wasow will gather for “The Case for Appropriation: A Panel Moderated by Joy Garnett.” Artist and NEWSgrist blogger Garnett will lead a conversation about the creative methods and ideas associated with appropriation art today, why appropriation and other forms of visual referencing are important elements in art making, and how to defend these practices in and beyond the courtroom.

Photographer, educator, blogger and SVA faculty member Amy Stein turns the focus on her work on February 27 at 7pm at 136 West 21 Street, room 418F. She will present an overview of her critically acclaimed monograph, Domesticated (Photolucida, 2008), and discuss her most recent work in progress, Stranded.

Coinciding with the exhibition “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde” on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, historian and SVA faculty member Michele C. Cone presents “The Gertrude Stein Paradox” on April 2 at 7pm at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street. For this roundtable discussion on the sometimes problematic and mercurial figure of Gertrude Stein as a writer, thinker and patron of the arts, Dr. Cone will be joined by Mary Ann Caws, distinguished professor of English, French and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Catharine Stimpson, university professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University; and Barbara Will, professor of English at Dartmouth College.

On April 3 at 7pm at 209 East 23 Street, 3rd-floor Ampitheater, painter and writer Carrie Moyer offers insight into her life as both an artist and activist. With photographer Sue Schaffner, she co-founded one of the first queer interventionist projects, Dyke Action Machine!, a public art project which ran from 1991-2008. In addition, Moyer’s paintings have been exhibited extensively both in the US and Europe in such venues as MoMA PS1; the Tang Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum and the American University Museum, and her first solo museum show, “Carrie Moyer: Interstellar,” opens at the Worcester Museum in February.

Most “Art in the First Person” events are free and open to the public. For more information on all 23 events, visit sva.edu/artinthefirstperson.

Images: (from top) Susan Bee, Recalculating, 2010, oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches, from the collection of Richard Deming and Nancy Ku; Amy Stein, Peri, Route 64, Kentucky, 2005, digital C-print, courtesy of ClampArt, New York City.

Cheryl Heller, chair of the newly formed MFA Design for Social Innovation Department, is featured in a recent Huffington Post article that discusses the progressive evolution of design thinking. The pioneering program, which begins in September 2012, is identified in the article as evidence of a burgeoning demand to incorporate “positive social (and environmental) outcomes to the design process.”

“[The program] was developed by Cheryl Heller, who helped Seventh Generation [a company that pioneered the concept of product design as a proponent of social innovation] with some of its toughest design challenges and convinced me that this new discipline at SVA was one I should lend a hand to as an advisor,” writer and Seventh Generation Co-founder Jeffrey Hollender said.

He adds that design for social innovation can act as a counterforce to disheartening recent “news about Europe’s impending disintegration, poverty statistics in America…and worse than expected contamination from the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan.”

Heller is also featured in GOOD’s business blog as the second social enterprise leader to be interviewed for a new video series, One Minute Until Impact.

For an interview with Heller about MFA Design for Social Innovation, which is accepting applications for Fall 2012 until January 30, visit Pop!Tech.

SVA’s latest subway poster was created by New York designer George Tscherny, who taught the first course in graphic design at the College in the mid 1950s. Tscherny is responsible for SVA’s current logo, which he unveiled in 1996. The logo was made from brush strokes, as Tscherny “wanted to avoid the ‘hard-edge’ sameness of corporate trademarks,” he said. Fast-forward fifteen years and Tscherny has placed his original design above a new icon for the digital age—the QR code. Voila! SVA’s latest subway poster is born.

Demonstrating the power of logos, the subway poster is SVA’s first advertisement that includes no wording to indicate its affiliation with the College. Instead, viewers scanning the QR code with their smart phones or tablets are led to a video depicting artists engaged in acts of creative expression (watch below). Information about SVA appears at the end of the video.

“The School of Visual Arts balances a very broad agenda ranging from technology-based programs to painterly pursuits. In designing the school’s identity program, back in the late 90s, I sought to reflect that range with the spontaneity of a painterly mark and the icy perfection and elegance of the Bodoni typeface for its signature,” Tscherny explains. “In the QR poster, I maintained that contrast by retaining the painterly mark but by substituting the perfection of the Bodoni signature with the brutal competence of the QR icon.” Serving as creative director on the new poster was SVA Executive Vice President Anthony P. Rhodes.

The SVA subway posters can be spotted in various locations around New York City and are also for sale. For more information, click here.

Former SVA faculty member Jerry Robinson, the legendary comic book artist credited with creating Batman’s nemesis The Joker, died on December 7 at the age of 89. Born in Trenton, New Jersey on January 1, 1922, Robinson started his long career at DC Comics at the age of 17, and went on to become a renowned comics historian and editorial cartoonist as well. He was also president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and the National Cartoonists Society, and was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004.

Jerry Robinson was an incredibly “prolific” comic book artist, said Dennis Hevesi in The New York Times, and The Joker “has created havoc” ever since its debut in 1940. But Robinson was also a champion of artists’ rights, and “instrumental in mobilizing support for the writer-and-artist team of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created Superman in the 1930s and had sold their rights to the character for $130. A long legal fight resulted in a settlement with Warner Communications, DC Comics’ corporate parent, providing the pair with annual payments for the rest of their lives and provisions for their heirs.”

The world of comic books would have been “much the poorer” without Jerry Robinson, said The New York Daily News. Batman’s sidekick, Robin, and The Joker were “only the beginning of his contributions to an art form belatedly recognized as an art form.” And as a historian, Robinson’s collections were “a treasure trove that helped shape comic book history—including the major role he played right here in Gotham City.”

For more tributes to Robinson, visit NPR, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, and Comics Alliance.