College of Fine Arts blog

CMU Night at the Symphony

2010-11-11T10:54:00.000-08:00

CMU Night at the Symphony
Location: Heinz Hall
Date: Friday, Nov. 19
Time: 8 p.m.
Cost: Gallery: $12, Family Circle: $17, Orchestra: $25
College of Fine Arts Students: Gallery: $7, Family Circle: $12, Orchestra: $20
Carnegie Mellon University's School of Music and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) invite Carnegie Mellon alumni, students, faculty and staff to enjoy "Carnegie Mellon Night at the Symphony."

Principal Guest Conductor Leonard Slatkin will conduct a program of vivid American music. The performance will feature Bernstein's Oscar-nominated score for the film On the Waterfront, a classic example of music illustrating a story. Principal Clarinet for the PSO and School of Music Artist Lecturer Michael Rusinek will perform Joan Tower's Clarinet Concerto. The program closes with Copland's, Appalachian Spring, including variations on the familiar Shaker theme, "Simple Gifts."

The price includes a post-concert dessert reception sponsored by the office of the President. Tickets can be purchased at the Information Desk at Carnegie Mellon's University Center or online at http://www.pittsburghsymphony.org/cmunight

Win Tickets to CMU Night at the Symphony!

Name three faculty members in the School of Music that are musicians in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. The first to do so wins a pair of tickets to CMU Night at the Symphony!

E-mail your answer to sharench@andrew.cmu.edu.

Five School of Drama Students Design Installation for Pittsburgh Festival of Lights

2010-10-07T09:58:00.001-07:00

This year, five Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama students are involved in the fourth annual Pittsburgh Festival of Lights. Lighting design students Michael Berger, Matt Bialek, Bart Cortright, Russell Gilbert and Milim Sung have been working on the project for the past few weeks under the mentorship of Professor Cindy Limauro.

The students will create a lighting installation at 911 Penn Avenue. Using the facade windows as pages in a book, light will transform short stories into a visual experience using abstract imagery and lighting effects. Students will incorporate color changing LED lights as well as video projection.

Presented by The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, the Festival of Lights takes place throughout the Cultural District from dusk to midnight Friday, October 1 through Sunday Oct. 17, 2010. The festival is powered by Duquesne Light and is free and open to the public.

The festival kicks off on Friday, October 1 during the Trust’s Gallery Crawl in the Cultural District and features a mixture of large outdoor lighting installations by UK-based artist Ross Ashton, a series of storefront projects by local artists and designers and a variety of temporary lighting enhancements to the streetscape of Penn Avenue. Traveling down Penn Avenue, visitors will find smaller light installations by local artists in storefronts, including those by the students in the School of Drama.

The Pittsburgh Festival of Lights is designed to bring people to the Cultural District to enjoy the lights and much more, including great restaurants, hotels, theaters, and galleries. Visit pgharts.org for more information or for a map of all the locations. .

STUDIO for Creative Inquiry to Host Punto y Raya Film Festival at CMU Oct. 12

2010-10-07T09:57:00.001-07:00

The STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University will bring the Punto y Raya (Dot and Line) film festival to campus on Tuesday, Oct. 12 at 8p.m. in McConomy Auditorium. Admission is free. This festival, which has toured more than 30 cities and is considered "the most abstract film festival in the world,” explores the creative possibilities of dots and lines in various spheres of science, art and thought. Punto y Raya features no figuration – just dots and lines as ends in themselves.

Presented by its organizer and curator, Nöel Palazzo of the Barcelona-based artist collective, Moviment d’Alliberament Digital (MAD), Punto y Raya goes back to basics in our representation of space and time to gain an insight into the world beyond perception. Palazzo is a feature film, TV, movie, animation and science fiction writer. Her films have been internationally awarded and she occasionally lectures and writes as a film critic. Palazzo will be present at the screening to introduce and discuss the festival.

Larry Cuba, a featured animator in the Punto y Raya festival, will also be present at the screening. Cuba is a pioneering and well-known computer animator; he worked as John Whitney's assistant in the early 1970s and later produced the well-known "star field" animations for George Lucas's "Star Wars". Cuba currently directs the Iota Center, a Los Angeles based archive and distribution center for computer animation and 20th-century abstract animation.

For more information about the Punto y Raya festival please visit
http://studioforcreativeinquiry.org/events/punto-y-raya-festival.

WRCT here we come

2010-08-19T11:28:00.001-07:00

Looking to syndicate LabA6 on 88.3 WRCT Pittsburgh. Stay tuned.

Podcast about Design

2010-08-19T11:27:00.000-07:00

Take a moment to think about your daily routine and the things you interact with on your typical day, from when you wake up, to when you go to sleep. There is one type of person you come in contact with, even if it’s second-hand, that you may not know about. This person thought about the handle on the cup from which you drink your morning coffee, they contemplated how to make the chair you sit in at work more comfortable, they chose the fonts you look at and read in your lunchtime magazine, and they made you turn left instead of right by the sign you noticed on your way home. You may think these people are superheroes. How could a group of people have such an influence on one’s daily routine? They are called DESIGNERS.

They design products, posters, signs, fonts, experiences and our clothes. Designers create things we come in contact with all the time and they have a distinct sense of the way the world works and the way use things.

Define-Design is a podcast + radio program about design, featuring designers and consumers talking about common items we see or use in our every day lives.

Please suggest a product for Define-Design to discuss, suggest a topic, or recommend a designer to be interviewed.

Send design story ideas to ecs@andrew.cmu.edu or visit the wordpress www.define-design.com

Multidisciplinary Black Designers Launch Professional Hub

2009-06-17T13:12:00.000-07:00

"Designers for the Twenty First Century" (D421), a network for black designers, will launch its virtual hub and network on June 17 at NeoCon in Chicago's Merchandise Mart. Co-founder Eric Anderson, president of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and associate professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon will be the featured speaker. This event and the following reception are free to the public.

Within the United States, black Americans are significantly underrepresented in the design field; consequently, those in the field are often isolated and lack social support. D421 is a virtual design hub that uses current and emerging models of social networking and media tools to initiate, facilitate and celebrate the past and current work of black designers and support the development of future design practitioners and leaders. D421 is intended to help close gaps in design education and practice, increase the diversity of the global talent pipeline, and serve as an asset to design and business communities. In the future, members of D421 hope to establish and connect to parallel professional networks in order to continue providing increased knowledge, services and opportunities to underrepresented design communities. Visit http://www.designers421.org for more information.

Bagpipes Blare the Sounds of Carnegie Mellon Tradition

2009-06-15T11:06:00.000-07:00

To honor Andrew Carnegie’s Scottish heritage, Carnegie Mellon created a bagpipe performance degree program. Only six students have graduated from this prestigious program that has the rigor of a conservatory music training and the world class one-on-one teaching that is characteristic of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Music. Nick Hudson, the most recent graduate of the bagpipe performance program had the opportunity to share his expertise teaching Hoda and Kathie Lee on the NBC’s Today Show how to play the bagpipes. Watch the lesson.

While in school, Hudson also has been featured in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Wall Street Journal and CBS News' "Assignment America." Check Hudson out on YouTube as he explains the basics of bagpipes.

Notably, during the same Today Show show on which Hudson appeared, Kathie Lee and Hoda interviewed Carnegie Mellon School of Drama alumna Tamara Tunie. Tunie talked about her role as Dr. Melinda Warner in the season finale of “Law & Order.”

Carnegie Mellon Artists Working Across Disciplines And In The Community

2009-02-25T08:16:00.000-08:00

The idea of an “interdisciplinary” arts education seems like a contradiction. Classical arts education comes from a tradition of intense conservatory study that explores creative production within a closed studio setting. However, today’s artists are challenging themselves more than ever, crossing disciplinary boundaries and influencing other sectors and industries with their creative skills.

Holland Cotter, the New York Times visual arts critic recently wrote that art can survive hard economic times, but higher education arts institutions must educate their students to work and think across disciplines if they want to ensure its continued prosperity in our nation.

Historically the College of Fine Arts has urged and supported cross-disciplinary education. In the School of Art, classes like “Concept Studio; Eco-Art” taught by Bob Bingham, “Making Connections: Individual Projects in the Community” taught by Joe Mannino, “Wanderlust - Artistic Perspectives on Mobility Still Time - Poetry and the Pictograph” and “Electronic and Time Based Art” connect artists with students, professionals and faculty working in other disciplines.

The School of Art also hosts an interdisciplinary grant awarded to students who create projects across disciplinary boundaries. Recently a project called Bus Stop Opera was awarded this grant and took students into bus terminals to perform, in libretto, conversations heard at bus stops around the region. The project combined drama, art and music while engaging the community in an innovative way- in the Bus Stop Opera, opera becomes public art.

Art students at Carnegie Mellon work with engineers, chemists and technologists on a continuous basis. The College of Fine Arts has collaborated with the Mellon College of Science, the College of Humanities of Social Sciences and most recently the School of Computer Science to create bachelor degree programs that combine disciplines.

Cotter takes this idea a step further and challenges art schools to place students in completely novel environments like hospitals and other traditionally non-arts sectors. While this call for interdisciplinary action is important, Carnegie Mellon University is proud to be on the forefront of the kind of interdisciplinary education and practice Cotter talks about.

D’oh! Carnegie Mellon Gets “The Simpsons” Treatment

2009-02-16T09:12:00.001-08:00

Carnegie Mellon’s reputation as an academically demanding university became a punchline on Sunday’s episode of “The Simpsons,” the first high-definition episode of the famous cartoon family.

In the episode, Homer travels back in time to his high school days to consider what his life would have been like if he had been elected senior class president. To head off that possibility, however, Principal Dondelinger asks “teenage” Lenny and Carl to bury a box of ballots. The Carnegie Mellon mention happens around 6 minutes, 40 seconds into the episode.

In exchange for this devious act, Lenny and Carl ask for a bad recommendation so they don't have to go to college and they can stay in high school and party. "OK,” Dondelinger responded, “but if you screw this up, it’s Carnegie Mellon University for the both of you!"

We can understand why a couple of dimwits like Lenny and Carl would shriek at such a horror, though even Carnegie Mellon students have been known to party now and then. But we can’t say we know exactly why The Simpsons chose to highlight Carnegie Mellon. We do know that Mike Reiss, one of the founding writers of “The Simpsons,” will be on campus at 7 p.m., April 2 to speak during the University Lecture Series in McConomy Auditorium.

Graffiti as Art Versus Vandalism Coverage in Media

2009-01-09T11:17:00.001-08:00

Mary Louise Schumacher, art critic for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, sent a tweet about an interesting dialogue about graffiti as art versus vandalism happening in her area. It reminds me of the Barry McGee lecture during the Carnegie Mellon School of Art Lecture Series in conjunction with the "Life on Mars" exhibition at the Carnegie Museum. Mr. McGee is known by the tag name TWIST. In an interview he said "Galleries are boring. That is why there is so much graffiti on the streets."

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Buy Outs Impact the Arts, Sadly

2009-01-07T07:35:00.000-08:00

Post-Gazette's Christopher Rawson, theater critic, Barry Paris, music critic and Jane Vranish, dance and music critic have departed as part of a companywide buyout offer. They will be truly missed. I remember attending the National Performing Arts Conference when in Pittsburgh and I remember so many art advocates astonished how Pittsburgh is one of the few major metro regions to have a critic in every artistic discipline in major newspapers.

Chris Rawson cultivated a theater scene here in Pittsburgh, as critics do. I think they have a responsiblity to cover as much as they can and Chris exhaustingly did. At times he would attend and critique three or four shows a night. In my view critics have a responsiblity to cover as much as they can and are just a part of establishing an arts scene as the artists themselves. Not to mention his unwavering support and documentation of one of Pittsburgh's (arguably America's) great playwrights August Wilson.

As much as Charles Baudelaire the 19th century French poet and critic was to make the salons of Paris famous, critics have a place in artistic movements.

They are still around part-time but the wealth of writing will truly be missed.

Read art critic Mary Thomas's goodbye.

Dallas Daily Newspapers Share Critic

2008-12-23T05:48:00.000-08:00

See this article at link about two competing papers in Dallas using the same critical review to cut costs. I wonder if the critic would have a different opinion based on the Editorial direction of the media outlet? Probably not if the same review is getting published.

Local Dailies Collaborate to Make Up for Arts Staff Cutbacks

http://www.kera.org/artandseek/content/2008/12/09/hearing-fewer-voices-local-dailies-collaborate-to-make-up-for-arts-staff-cutbacks/