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 …
Some of the earliest evidence of written text can be found on clay tablets from Sumer and Meso-America. The CCA Ceramics department continues this ceramic based fascination of text through writing, cataloging, interventions and interpretation of books, text, language and media. This fascination is most easily summed up in our newest form of visual language, the ideogram (aka the emoji).
An exhibit of site-specific works informed by Capp Street Project Archive, created by the undergraduate students in the UDIST course "Activate Archive: Capp Street Project": Star Barker, Can Caglayan, Austin Conrad, May Han, Elizabeth Hohimer, James E. Kennedy Jr, Rosa Novak, Tessa Shimizu, Brandon Treakle, Malaya Tuyay, and Jessica Young. "Activate Archive: Capp Street Project" was taught by CCA faculty Kari Marboe with archives collaboration from Capp Street Archives Curator Jennine Scarboro. The works were displayed at the Oliver Art Center, on California College of the Arts' Oakland campus, in December 2016. Photographed by James E. Kennedy Jr.