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California College of the Arts Commencement, May 13 2017.
Sasha Duerr’s Soil to Studio course introduces ideas of Slow Textiles, Slow Fashion, and plant-based color using the Oakland Campus’ Community Garden as its source of materials and inspiration. Her work combines a celebration of culture, ethnobotany, creative reuse, sustainability, and an innate sense of place. The garden, founded in 2009 by Susanne Cockrell (Community Arts) and Sasha Duerr (Textiles), grows an abundance of plants for community and curriculum uses; Including edible, medicinal, and pollinator plants on the Oakland Campus. Many of these plants grown have dye and fiber producing byproducts. Students from Soil to Studio helped to harvest the plants and dye the materials for this display, and for the Material Library’s collection. Additional colors were obtained from plants growing throughout the Oakland Campus. A Dye & Fiber Seed Library, initially started in a collaboration between Permacouture Institute and Soil to Studio in 2010- was given a finished home in 2016 in a project created by CCA O…
A drawing of Henry Ford (CCAC President from 1958-1984) by Ralph Borge (BFA '49, MFA '50, Faculty 1950-1988) made on the occasion of Ford's retirement as CCA president in 1984.
The CCA Fall 2016 Library Exhibition program presents the work of Prima Sakuntabhai (MFA '17) at the Meyer Library on Oakland's campus. The work on view combines image, text, and ephemera collected during the artist’s time at the SOMA SUMMER 2016 artist residency in Mexico City. Prima spent two months this past summer in residence at SOMA SUMMER in dialogue with a community of international artists and contemporary art practitioners from Mexico City. The conceptual foundations of architecture and ruin are critical to the narratives Prima constructs. Layering of image, text, and oration are fused in the artist's practice with auto-topographic storytelling, while simultaneously making visible the erasure of cultural histories in Mexico City through the construction of site. The re-framing of 70's vernacular architecture, by visualizing the stylistic appropriation of Mayan Aztec motifs by European Art Deco in (Site) Specificity II, reveals a transparency in cultural boundaries that are open and closed. The shif…
The CCA Library Exhibitions Program presents Advent of a Form, by CCA graduate student Carolina Magis Weinberg, which proposes a reconsideration of space in terms of its geometrical potential. In a play of scale, the two walls, floor, and ceiling of the library’s store front become the axis of a Euclidean space, making the X, Y, and Z dimensions visible. The image operates then as a map of itself. In this way, the temporal quality, elemental in the understanding of Euclidean space, will be considered literally as the form morphs throughout the number of days of the exhibit. Explained succinctly with homophones in French, the form will go from début to debout, from its origin to its standing position. Additionally, display vitrines extend this form into the space of the library. The project will be morphing and changing week after week, until it arrives at its final form on December 12th.
The CCA Libraries Exhibition Program presents a digital exhibition by Erik Scollon’s undergraduate course, Craft as Social Justice. Exhibiting students include Maha Almadhi, Kelsey Bowen, Faye Dennis, Laila Espinoza, Maya Gulassa, Christine Juon, Angela Seon, Rosa Novak, Tracy Ren, Tenzin Tsomo, and Mai Utsumiya. For their final project, the students of Craft as Social Justice created an online exhibition of objects that focus on the intersection of craft practices and a social justice issue of their choosing. The collected exhibitions seek to make visible the connections between skilled making and materiality to the lived experiences of the makers and users. The curators sought to tie the issues and the makers to the current political moment. Viewers are invited to view the student projects on display in the digital space of exhibition by powering on the iPad display and following the links and videos embedded on the Craft as Social Justice homepage. Digital exhibitions on view include Break the Injustice A…
On November 2nd we celebrate Day of the Dead. A tradition originally practiced in Mexico, Day of the Dead is now recognized widely as an important holiday in the U.S. as well. In California especially, this ritual has become a bridge that brings together members of diverse communities in order to remember and honor our loved ones who have passed away. The altar will be up through Friday, November 14th, and we welcome your leaving of offerings, images, notes, mementos, etc. to commemorate your loved ones. Remembrances can be left at any time this week and are not restricted to the main build today. If including photographs/images, we recommend using photocopies rather than originals.
In honor of the Sculpture program’s 80th Anniversary, the Libraries/CCA/C Archives presents the exhibit History Lessons: Sculpture at CCA/C, revealing sculpture’s central place in CCA’s history. From the 1913 image of Life Modeling students creating crucifixion pieces for the Competition for an Altar Crucifix, to the 2016 image of future grads installing the spatio-temporal works of The Immediate Archive, these images of student and faculty makers, their workshops, and the works of art they created give us a glimpse of sculpture through the decades and of the continued passionate pursuit of sculpture practices at CCA. “Like I hope all of the stories told in this little ‘history lesson’ might suggest, sculpture is and always has been, quite literally, something to rally around. So next time you are “casting about for an occupation,” consider building a life in and on and around it.”
Lange explores notions of comfort, safety, identity and home through textiles. For this exhibition, four large-scale fabric sculptures are suspended from the Simpson Library wall alongside an artist intervention with the Science Library. Shelters operate as wearables and have been utilized in performances by Lange in previous iterations of the work, one such performance will be hosted during the opening reception.