Why AxS from ArtCenter

Welcome to the Why AxS, ArtCenter’s podcast featuring brilliant scientific and artistic minds ponder the big why's that come with being a tiny part of this universe. 

Our first episode, How to Land on a Comet, takes you aboard JPL’s Rosetta Mission, as we’re joined by mission planner Art Chmielewski + alum/illustrator Liz de la Torre (BFA 13), who mapped the surface of speeding comet for a first-of-a-kind rendezvous with a spacecraft — from a single pixel.

Rosetta remains one of the world’s most ambitious — and arduous — space exploration missions. Landing on a comet as it zips and twists through space poses seemingly limitless degrees of difficulty and danger.

Seeking an artistic solution to a scientific problem — how to map the comet’s surface — Chmielewski recruited de la Torre while she was a student at ArtCenter. 

Now working as a Creative Strategist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, de la Torre acts as an artistic interpreter of scientific theories, using the illustration skills she honed at the College.

For the Rosetta Mission, de la Torre listened to some of the world's leading experts on comets, and based on their  ideas and projections, created multiple approximations of the comet’s terrain. 

These beautifully detailed visuals, capturing the comet’s potential tiny pores and bubbling gas, allowed scientists to better visualize the best approach — and helped secure the mission’s success.

They are truly brilliant works of art and science.

Join ArtCenter’s Lauren Mahoney and Ethan Stockwell for an episode full of behind-the-scenes insights into everything from the search for life in the universe to the hidden impact of space research on our everyday lives as we embark on an extraordinary and otherworldly ride.

Join us for ArtCenter’s new mini-series investigating the powers of art and science–and the extraordinary, unexpected outcomes when the two fields intersect.

The four-part series, launching September 12, features prominent artists–often with connections to ArtCenter–and scientists tackling big ideas about dark matter and transcendence from right- and left-brain points of view.

At ArtCenter, science and art often cross paths–after all, CalTech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are in our backyard, allowing for unique collaborations through programs, exhibitions, internships and more.

With Why AxS, we invite you into insightful conversations with some of the brilliant minds in our orbit as they explore the many big why's that come with being a tiny part of this universe.

To many of our listeners, this guest needs no introduction. She is someone who has burst through seemingly impenetrable ceilings – glass and otherwise – to claim leadership roles historically held by men. She rose through the ranks as a strategic industrial designer before returning to ArtCenter, her alma mater, for a transformative stint as Chair of our Product Design department. She was also a driving force behind ArtCenter’s innovative DesignStorm program, through which major brands engage our students in developing new products and ideas. 

The force of nature I’m describing here is none other than ArtCenter Provost and President-elect, Karen Hofmann, who is the first woman to serve in either of those roles. On a personal and professional level, I couldn’t have asked for a better partner in leading this College through the uncertainties of Covid-19 and the enormous logistical, creative, social and emotional adjustments that went along with the transition to remote learning and back. Thanks in no small part to Karen’s dedication and unflagging optimism, we’ve emerged stronger and better equipped to face the future than we’ve ever been. And, come July, Karen will be poised to build on those achievements when she takes office, upon my retirement, as ArtCenter’s first female president.

Throughout her tenure as provost, Karen tackled a set of complex challenges with an eye toward ensuring ArtCenter’s health and longevity. Karen managed to keep calm and carry on, facing each new obstacle with a solution-minded determination that is the hallmark of every great designer. In fact, it was almost as if she was making the case, in real time, that there is no better person to lead ArtCenter through the uncertainties that lie ahead.

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When we first heard from Jackie Amezquita four years ago, she was an ArtCenter Fine Art student on the cusp of graduating. In a raw and revealing interview, she traced the arduous path she’d walked to find the stability she needed to risk everything for her art. 

Her remarkable journey (captured in E14 of Change Lab) began in her native Guatemala, where surging violence and poverty had forced Jackie’s mother to migrate to the United States to provide for her family. At age seventeen, Jackie followed her mother’s footsteps to the US (quite literally), and barely survived a dangerous border crossing. After years spent working as an undocumented nanny to put herself through community college, Jackie eventually earned her Bachelor of Fine Art at ArtCenter. Her thesis project drew international media coverage when she bravely embarked on a second grueling walk from the Tijuana border all the way to Downtown Los Angeles. 

The power of her resilience and grit continues to stand out as an example of a purpose-driven artist whose message brilliantly aligns with her chosen medium. We’ve held her story close to our hearts, and the hardships she’s transmuted into art resonated all the more this season as we explore the alchemy of creativity and adversity.

It’s for those reasons that We’ve asked Jackie to join us as Change Lab’s first returning guest, even as she puts the finishing touches on her MFA thesis at UCLA. We waned to know more about her investigation into grief and displacement, and we were fascinated by the bravery and creative energy it took to revisit her trauma and to give depth and dimension to a painful story that needed to be told.

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Aimee Mullins is a true polymath. Her passions and professional pursuits are as varied and boundless as the awards and groundbreaking strides she’s achieved within her many chosen fields. She broke new ground in athletics as the first amputee in history to compete against able-bodied athletes in the NCAA’s Division 1 track and field events. She went on to set records in the 100 and 200 meter races and the long jump.

Her poise and athleticism led to a career in fashion as a runway model for Alexander McQueen and as a global ambassador for L’Oreal. She then added acting to her portfolio with roles in wildly varied projects ranging from artist Matthew Barney’s Cremaster series to Netflix’s Stranger Things. Through it all, Aimee has continued to make sense of the many trails she’s blazed in a series of influential TED talks that have been viewed by millions and translated into 42 languages. 

It was her paradigm-shifting talk on the “opportunity of adversity” that offered a veritable proof of concept for the ideas we're exploring in this season of Change Lab. Her powerful argument for the creative leaps that result only from the hurdles we face resonated deeply with the idea that the human imagination feeds on challenge and uncertainty – a familiar concept to regular listeners of this podcast. 

Aimee contends that we meet and exceed our goals because of—not despite—each obstacle we encounter. An insight she’s earned the hard way navigating the world as a double amputee. Her insistence that “good enough” isn’t good enough has led to advances in prosthetic design that would never exist without her. In fact, Aimee contends that disability itself is a misnomer better attributed to a broken piece of machinery than a human being whose differences are the source of their strength. We all have much to learn from Aimee’s self-determination, curiosity and wonder.

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We’re lucky as artists that we can recover much faster because we can express. Nature recovers and we recover. 

Lita Albuquerque is an artist whose body of work has often defied the strictures of convention and, ultimately, canvas. Over the course of her celebrated career, her paintings and sculptures outgrew the traditional materials contained within her studio and expanded to inhabit the land and people around her. 

To experience Lita’s large-scale installations (often tinged in an ultramarine blue pigment all her own) is to dance with dichotomies. At once grounded and transcendent, intimate and epic, earthly and celestial – Lita’s work, above all, is a celebration of how we connect to our environment. 

It’s a creative worldview that was put to test in November of 2018 when the Woolsey Fire engulfed the hills around Malibu and destroyed her home and studio. Suddenly, the place in which she spent decades raising her kids and making her art was gone, along with a vast archive of completed works and works-in-progress. 

It was a monumental loss that would have been devastating to any artist—and particularly so for Lita, whose creative imagination has always been intrinsically connected to her environment. But Lita could not let her grief paralyze her because she had to get to work on the long list of pieces previously commissioned by collectors. That backlog turned out to be her saving grace. Eventually she found that the process of creative expression had resurrected the parts of her she feared the fire had claimed forever. 

Over the course of a Change Lab conversation alternately stirring and sublime, Lita generously retraces the harrowing path she’s walked to a place of recovery and renewal she simply describes as “back.”

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Client hypothetical. This is the term pioneering architect and designer Eileen Gray used to classify the many Modernist masterpieces she designed in the absence of actual paid commissions. She was simply making things because that was what she was made to do. 

Gray now stands alongside other towering talents whose under-recognized body of work were later exalted by their artworld peers. First among Gray’s admirers is artist Kim Schoenstadt who spent the past two years creating an entire exhibition inspired by the way Gray essentially designed her way through the many challenges laid in her path. 

Enter Slowly, The Legacy of an Idea, which opened last fall in ArtCenter’s Mullin Gallery, paid homage to Eileen Gray as heroine of Twentieth Century Modernist design despite the fact that her work was often misattributed to her male collaborators and counterparts. Indeed, for much of her life, E-1027, the house she designed in the South of France, was credited to superstar designer, Le Corbusier, who did little to correct the record. 

Shining a light on Gray’s legacy was a task tailor made for Kim, an artist best known for her “mash-up drawings” layering elements of architecture and history. She’s also demonstrated an equally steadfast commitment to moving the needle toward gender parity in today’s art world through her Now Be Here project.  

We were particularly fascinated by the idea of an artist who creates a body of work based on the struggles she shares with an artist from another era. It’s an act of deep empathy and bravery and a perfect example of how adversity and creativity often coexist on the path toward redemption.

Please enjoy this conversation with Kim Schoenstadt

Selections of music in this episode were provided by Paco Casanova and J.C. Furmanski.

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James Meraz joined the faculty of ArtCenter’s Environmental Design department in September of 2001, shortly before 9/11. In the wake of that tragedy he wavered about how to proceed with his planned curriculum. How would it all be relevant? In the end, he resolved to lean into the uncertainty of that “cataclysmic moment,” realizing that the only way out of the pain, chaos and confusion was to go through it. 

Above all he discovered the value in staying present and connecting with others when things fall apart. Of course, he had no way of knowing how much he’d come to rely on those same skills when another catastrophe struck much closer to home. 

In June of 2019, James’ twenty year-old son, Luke, died. James and his wife were immediately thrust into every parent’s worst nightmare. But as they were pummeled with wave after wave of agonizing grief, James eventually felt called to move toward the pain in order to understand the lessons that might benefit him and others – all of which we cover in our Change Lab interview that cycled through tears to moments of transcendence.

James’ journey has been an arduous one. The pain of loss remains an ever-present burden he’s dubbed “the backpack.” But by bringing his creativity to bear on an unbearable situation, James has discovered opportunities for reinvention and even a kind of rebirth in the projects he’s undertaken to support young artists and vulnerable communities in Luke’s honor. 

Like the skilled designer he is, James has continued to ask himself the hard questions and has found renewed meaning in the simple act of showing up, even when part of him wants to give up.

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The next season of Change Lab debuts on March 23. We’re calling it Forged in Fire: Make to Heal and we’re looking at the ways in which adversity can be a conduit for creativity and, more importantly, how creativity can offer solace during the hardest of times. 

You’re not going to want to miss a single episode of a season that explores the connection between heartbreak and hope on the path toward resilience and reinvention. 

Please join us for a raw and revelatory season of Change Lab created in response to these extraordinary times to nourish, heal and inspire.

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As Google’s vice president of hardware design, Ivy Ross is breaking new ground in the physical world for a trillion-dollar company synonymous with building tools for navigating the virtual one. Since assuming the role in 2014, she’s been tasked with translating a corporate identity consisting of a primary colored logo and blinking cursor into three-dimensional products and environments that are inviting, accessible and add value to people’s lives in ways big and small. 

Ivy oversees the team responsible for Google’s entire eye-catching suite of curvy, pastel-hued devices including the Pixel phone and Nest home safety system. And she’s also the creative visionary behind Google’s first retail store which debuted this past summer in New York City. It takes a special kind of moxie to forge ahead with a plan to open up to the public during a time when many stores were still shuttered. But Ivy is a true iconoclast who understands the value in bringing unconventional thinking to bear on high stakes challenges.  

Lorne had the great pleasure of getting to know Ivy through her role as an ArtCenter Trustee. During their time together, they quickly discovered a kinship around a shared interest in the role the imagination plays as a catalyst for change, particularly when combined with the physical act of making and doing. 

Transcendent might be the word to best describe the expansive conversation they have in this episode. The two explore the opportunities the pandemic has presented to improve our connection to each other and to the planet. They also explore their shared interest in the work of Carl Jung and how creativity can be a portal to accessing the life we’re meant to be living even when it’s not the one society has laid out for us.

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