Let It All Go- Dominic Erich from Connor Bailey on Vimeo.

Activity: Your Turn

We’ve been saying a bit about this last activity in class for a few weeks now, so hopefully you’ve started thinking a little about it. The best way to learn anything is to teach it to someone else. After doing activities for the past 11 weeks, now it’s your turn to teach! Full details on the Teach One activity page!

I give a bunch of examples of Art Ideas and Art Techniques that you could teach on that page. And remember, it’d also be really cool if you taught something about one of the SOA artists you really liked from the galleries this semester.

EC: Post #4

As I’m sure you know, this week, week 12, is our last week of Activities and our last week of 3 posts. Starting next week you’ll still have 2 conversation posts due, but that’s it, just 2 posts a week for the last3 weeks. So since it’s the last week of 3 posts, why don’t you do 4 posts!?

Extra Credit: Activity Feedback!
Now that you’ve done, or will have done, all 12 activities, I’d really like to get your feedback on them. If you’d be willing to do a 4th post this week, Week 12 – Activity Feedback and tell me:

• Your 3 favorite activities this semester, and a few words about why
• Your 3 least favorite activities this semester, and a few words about why
• Any other feedback on the class – fun? boring? easy? hard? relevant? irrelevant? useful? useless? etc
• What could make the class better?

I’ll be grateful for your feedback, you’ll help design a better class for next semester, and I’ll give you 12 points of EC for the extra post.

Scaffold Thingy, SOA Gallery Courtyard

Jack & Corinne!

OMG how awesome is this! You know that scaffoldy thing in the SOA Gallery Courtyard? Jack & Corinne have volunteered to do a dance piece on or around it for us next Thursday, Nov 20, at 11:30am! And they need your help too! They might be able to use a few more cast members. If you have dance experience that’d be cool, but they might be able to work with a few “pedestrian” movers or extras also.

And documentation of course. Photography. Video. Maybe a writer? Illustrator? Zineographer? Oh, and probably some audio too. (talk to me about volume level!)

Not only can you help them create this awesome piece, but you can even get paid for participating! I’ve given Jack & Corinne a “budget” of 200 points for their production. They can “pay” themselves, and anyone they take on to participate out of that. After the performance they’ll give me a list of how they’d like the 200 points distributed.

Interested? Chat them up!

Points

All points through Week 11 are now up on BeachBoard. We’ve had 638 points posted so far, and here’s what you should have to be on track for each grade level:

574 points = A pace = 98 peeps
510 points = B pace = 18 peeps
446 points = C pace = 10 peeps
382 points = D pace = 8 peeps
381 points = F pace = 7 peeps

In spite of the enormous number of “A’s”, the class GPA is “only” 3.3 – those D’s & F’s can really drag the GPA down. BTW the A’s, B’s & C’s are almost identical to last week, but unfortunately 3 peeps have slid from D pace to F pace this week. It’s really the home stretch now and I urge you to turn work in and maintain or improve your grade. For a few of you with extremely low points it’s probably too late now. If the SOA will still let you, you might be better served by dropping at this point. For all of you at the top of the grading alphabet – congratulations! Awesome work!

Top 10

Project 757: A Modern Haiku Adventure from Anna Joy on Vimeo.

Everyone who’s doing their best in Art110 is a “superstar,” but in terms of points, it seems fair to say that Anna & Diana are our “points superstars.” Last week our superstars both made very personal videos that expressed a range of feelings. They were both complex, but you might say that Anna’s tended a bit more to the light, and Diana’s tended a bit more toward darkness. And hmm… aren’t those the colors they each mostly wear?

PARADOXICAL SENTIMENTS from Diana Martinez on Vimeo.

1. Anna Joy Floresca – 827
2. Diana Martinez – 822
3. Evan Huang – 795
4. Marlyn Castillo – 774
5. Allison Wendell – 736
6. Bowas Yang – 726
7. Celine Phan – 716
8. Nicole Ilagan – 715
9. Antonio Lavermon – 706
10. Connor Bailey – 698

Being Generous?

Some of you were kind of nervous about asking classmates or artists for conversations the first week or two. A few of you might still be, but I think after all these weeks many of you have gotten past that initial fear. The great thing about asking classmates to have a conversation is that everyone’s in the same boat – they already know what your needs are, and they also have that need themselves – so I think we’re pretty sympathetic to each other. The artists too, know you’re coming and actually they really look forward to conversations with you. So the good news is, it’s mostly easy to startup these conversations.

But I’ve also heard that some of you are less generous with your classmates. Maybe you already did a conversation and someone else wants to talk to you. It’s already 11:30, and really, how much time are you supposed to put in on one class!

Oh, wait, this isn’t even “homework,” it’s class time! When-how-why did leaving class at least 30 – 45 minutes before it’s over become a requirement? Here’s the crazy thing: you are paying a lot of money to be there… I’m not paying anything, I’m getting paid to be there. So, shouldn’t it me me who wants to leave and you who wants to get every minute of you’re money’s worth?

Of course I know life is busy and the demands on your time are many, but with a courtyard filled with artists, art, and 100+ classmates, it should be a really engaging place. And it is, BTW! This isn’t meant to be a big rant, just a small request to remember to be generous with your classmates. You don’t have to talk for half hour, but give them 10 real minutes. Be there. Be invested in the conversation. Look at some of the art together and discuss is. And if this is your 2nd or 3rd classmate conversation of the day – lucky you! – you get to have a richer CSULB experience with your peers. You can get facts from online courses and online resources, but you can only meet the people you’ll share the future of California and the world with by showing up and being engaged.

Thanks for your generosity to each other everyone!

Minyon Spencer & Shannon Choi

Whisper Challenge from minyon spencer on Vimeo.

Conny Ramirez

Galleries This Week

Timothy Cooper, BFA Ceramics – Gatov West
Timothy Cooper presents large-scale slip cast ceramic objects juxtaposed with multiple cast concrete objects in his BFA exhibition.

Michelle Thompkins, MFA Illustration – Gatov East
Michelle Thompkins’s MFA exhibition features a progression of images that express the evolution of one girl’s perceptions of the world throughout the course of a day.

Kiyomi Fukui, Printmaking – Merlino Gallery
Kiyomi Fukui exhibits an installation depicting the process of decomposition in the greater life cycle.

Lacy McCune & Angie Samblotte, Illustration – Dutzi Gallery
Lacy McCune and Angie Samblotte display drawings informed by subtle visual events of everyday routines as well as the undeniable significance of banality.

Cynthia Herrera, MFA Photography – Werby Gallery
Cynthia Herrera’s MFA exhibition features a sculptural installation and archived media from a project that had engaged the community of Riverside, CA.

Gallery Tags

I know I keep bugging you guys to tag your artists. It’s really important. It’s the only way we have to thank them for sharing months and years of their work with us. PLEASE TAG YOUR ARTIST POSTS!!!

I also know it can be a little confusing keeping track of which tag to use, so starting this week, Wk12, and for the rest of the semester let’s try a new tagging scheme for your artist conversations. Instead of tagging a different artist each week, let’s just tag the gallery it was in. This way you can already know the 6 tags to cover all the work you’ll look at:

• gatov-west
• gatov-east
• merlino-gallery
• werby-gallery
• dutzi-gallery
• soa-courtyard

Talk To The Artists!

Some of you are not bothering to have a conversation with the artist. It’s true we have had a lot of group shows and shows where the artist is unfortunately not there this semester. But I’m also seeing posts where you didn’t talk to the artist even though s/he was sitting right there. Seeing the art is great, but I’ve asked you to take advantage of this special opportunity and have a conversation with the artist. These artists are mostly about your age, live in your city, and go to your school – it’s a priceless chance to learn about the many ways your peers are perceiving your world. TALK TO THE ARTISTS!

Yesenia Chavez

Evan Huang

Corinne Sampson

Tony Lavermon

Sims 2 Demo – My Body, Your Body from Antonio Lavermon on Vimeo.

Steven Lozano

David Aceves

Connor & Dominic

Landscapes with a Corpse, Izima Kaoru.
Koike Kiko wears Gianni Versace, 2004.

Week 10 Activity: Landscapes with a Corpse

This is the last week that Glenn picks the activities. Starting next week, You pick what you’re going to do. For our last “Glenn” project we return to photography. We looked at Photography in Week 2 with our Instagram Activity. That was Social Photography or Relational Aesthetics. This week we’ll try somewhat more traditional photography. But there’s still a twist. We’re imagining our own demise. Landscapes with a Corpse is Izima Kaoru’s twenty-year-long photography project. This week we’ll try a photograph of our own earthly departure in his style. Full detail on the Landscapes with a Corpse page

Galleries, Wk 10

See our Gallery Page!

Points

All points through the end of Week 9 are now up on BeachBoard. Here’s what you should have to be on track for each grade level:
A pace – 454 – 104 peeps
B pace – 403 – 17 peeps
C pace – 353 – 9 peeps
D pace – 302 – 6 peeps
F pace – 301 – 7 peeps

Wk 9 Activity: V-log/ About Me Video from Anna Joy on Vimeo.

Top 10

1. Anna Joy Floresca – 694
2. Diana Martinez – 693
3. Evan Huang – 668
4. Marlyn Castillo – 652
5. Allison Wendell – 615
6. Bowas Yang – 610
7. Nicole Ilagan – 597
8. Quynh Ong – 574
9. Conny Ramirez – 572
10. Connor Bailey – 572

Amir Kiani

Alonzo Urita

Jack Taylor

About Me ART 110 from Jack Taylor on Vimeo.

Conny Ramirez

Welcome to My Website from Conny Ramirez on Vimeo.

Aubrey Delos Reyes

Dominic Erich

Jake Mercadante

Jake Mercadante

Intro to my blog tho from jake mercadante on Vimeo.

Emily Bondoc

Welcome to the #emilystravels blog! from Emily Bondoc on Vimeo.

Diana Martinez

INTRO from Diana Martinez on Vimeo.

Amber Reyes

Angelica Camacho

Allison Wendell

Last Week: Instagram Day (Relational Aesthetics)

Above: a small, sublime moment from IG day by Kari Maehara.
Below: Jack Taylor posts the IG of the day!

Good Post Names

Almost everybody is using great post names! But a few of you are using “bad” post names that make my job really hard. For maximum points, please use good post names. There are examples in the syllabus:
• beacharts.ca/fall14-syllabus/#rubrics

Points on BeachBoard

All Wk1 & Wk2 points are now live on BeachBoard. Note that this isn’t really a “percentage” class, it’s a “points” class. Your goal is to get 900+ points and earn an “A”. There’s no way for me to turn off the percentage stuff on BeachBoard, but please don’t be confused by it. In fact, don’t even look at it! (yes, just like Nigel Tufnel’s guitar, don’t even look at it!)

After Wk2 it might say you have 100 points or 10% or something like that. That’s because it’s calculating your current points out of the entire course 1,000 possible. Mostly you should just be working your way to 900+. We had 58 points for Wk1 & 58 for Wk2 or 116 possible. 90% of 116 is 104, so if you’ve got 104 or better, then you’re on “A” pace. If you’ve got under 104 you either didn’t post some things, or if you did post everything then you probably lost a few points for bad names or missing photos or overly short / simple posts. I talk about all of these elements in the syllabus:
• beacharts.ca/fall14-syllabus/#rubrics

Diana Martinez

Diana Martinez with Conny Ramirez from Conny’s website

Velveth Alarcon

Speaking of #1 Students, after class on Thursday, like many of you, I wandered around Week of Welcome. OMG so many great groups and activities to participate in! And who should I run into Salsa Dancing in the middle of the sidewalk but Velveth Alarcon. This time last year she was a freshman psychology major on her way to finishing #1 in Art110. Like this semester it was 900 out of 1,000 for an “A,” and Velveth finished with 1,142. Now she’s on the CSULB Salsa Team! She might come visit our class some Tuesday and see if she can recruit a few of you to join the CSULB Salsa Club.

Michelle Morte

I think everyone knows that Michelle Morte was the keeper of the ID card envelope on Thursday. Great job Michelle! Thank You! Who will hold The Envelope this week? Stay tuned!

This Week: Kickstarter (Arts Funding)

From the Medici Family of Florence to America’s National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) we’ve always grappled with ways to fund The Arts. “Popular” artists like Katy Perry or Michael Bay can make bags of money, but we also like to see less “pop” work also be a part of our culture. There’s probably no Craft Beer alive that will ever do even a tiny fraction of the sales that Bud Light does (45 million barrels & 5.3 billion dollars in 2011) yet for many people, drinking a beer that not everybody else drinks is part of what they value in the experience.

What if you don’t have a rich patron like Lorenzo de Medici or Eli Broad or Charles Saatchi? Or an NEA Grant? Or a contract with Universal Studios or Sony Music or Condé Nast publishing? One solution, since April 28, 2009, has been Kickstarter. With Kickstarter you ask for enough money to do your project, say $5,000. When people pledge to your project, Kickstarter takes their credit card number, but it doesn’t charge them anything. When your campaign ends, if you made your goal, Kickstarter charges everyone’s cards and delivers your money to you. If you don’t meet your goal, say you only got $2,500 in support, then your project goes “unfunded” and no one’s credit card is charged anything.

This can make for a little stress on the artist, but it also encourages you to be serious & realistic. Kickstarter doesn’t want to take donor money, give you half of what you need, and then have a half finished project that doesn’t deliver what it promised. Sometimes the deliverables are physical things like an ice chest, or an iPhone accessory. The “deliverables” might also by intangible, like a dance performance. Overall, about 60% Kickstarter projects fail. Of the 40% that do reach their goal and get funded, a few get many times more than they asked for.

Lucky you, we’re not doing full Kickstarter projects for real, so you can skip the stress of meeting your goal. But it’d be pretty cool if sometime before you graduate from CSULB, you did. This week we’re just making hypothetical Kickstarter pitch videos. Even though this one is “only a rehearsal,” I urge you to take it seriously. If you do a “late night infomercial” you might get a couple of laughs out of it, but it’ll pretty much be pointless. If you use this as an opportunity to be in front of a camera and express yourself to people who might be interested in your work, you’ll gain something really valuable.

Full details for this Activity are on our Kickstarter Activity Page. There’s also a few sample Kickstarter Pitch Videos there, as well as many thousands more on the Kickstarter website. I’ll just post 1 here in our Art110 Weekly post to get you rolling. Since we’re all using WordPress, you might find it interesting to hear this pitch from John O’Nolan. He was a WordPress developer for a couple of years and then decided to launch a new blogging platform, Ghost. Here’s how he pitched it:

Kickstarter Film Festival

If you recall, we have 4 Extra Credit opportunities this semester, and the Kickstarter Film Festival this Friday is Opportunity #2. The event is in Griffith Park in LA. It runs from 6-11pm and is free. If you’d like the EC, just:
1. Go to the event
2. Take some pix
3. Do an extra (4th) post this week with a couple of pix and a few paragraphs about your experience

Do a nice job and I’ll add up to +30 of EC on top of your up to 30 points of Regular Activity for this week. 30+30=60!

Group or Solo

You’re welcome to do this project solo if you like. But what a great project to do with someone else in the class! It’d probably be more fun and you might wind up with a more compelling project.

SOA Galleries on Thursday

After 2 weeks of the giant GLAMFA exhibition, this week we begin the “standard” gallery program with 4 or 5 different CSULB SOA student artists showing work in the galleries every week. You’ll see 4 different categories of exhibitions:
1. MFA Thesis Exhibitions
2. BFA Thesis Exhibitions
3. Non-Degree Exhibitions
4. Group Exhibitions, Curatorial Projects & other special Exhibitions

Wk 3 – Sep 7 – 11

• Vav Vavrek, MFA Sculpture – WPcom Tag: vavrek
• Jesse Lubben, Photography – WPcom Tag: lubben
• Chelsea McIntyre, Sculpture – WPcom Tag: mcintyre
• Patricia Rangel, Metals – WPcom Tag: rangel

Vav Vavrek’s MFA Thesis exhibition will consist of an installation utilizing an overlapping of video processes across the spectrum of display technologies to create an experience of an alternate present.

Jesse Lubben will display a series of photographic prints that play with relationships between three-dimensional sculpture and the two-dimensionality of photography.

Chelsea McIntyre presents a performance piece featuring two actors engaged in a heated discourse. Visitors are welcome to engage the situation however they please.

Patricia Rangel integrates dirt, cement, metal, and silk in a series of sculptural works that range in dimension and configuration.

Precision is key.
— Duckliife

Is it just me, or did Duckliife just quote that Jaguar commercial?

Alison Meets Anna

It seems like everyone who talks to future nurse & drawing lover Anna Joy Floresca has a great conversation. Last week it was Diana Martinez, and this week it was Alison Wendell‘s turn!

Ally snapped this cool IG with Anna. Unfortunately then this old creeper swooped in and made her take one with him too! (eww)
BTW, Ally’s really rockin that Giant Eyeball T, isn’t she!?

Psst, check out Anna’s cool website at ajfloresca.wordpress.com

Check out David Ngo’s website – what a great way to draw people in!

Jose Cruz site.com

I love the way Maeghan McBee’s website has her photo and brief bio right up front.