Why AxS from ArtCenter – Details, episodes & analysis

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To experience one of Ann Hamilton’s installations is to be transported into a world of invention unlike any other. Recognized for her large-scale public projects and performance collaborations, Ann uses space as her canvas and fills it with a sense of mystery and drama that is as inviting as it is provocative.  Though much of her work is, by nature, transitory, its impact and ideas endure. To get a sense of the experiential texture of her work, look no further than her extraordinary 2012 installation, the event of a thread, at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. The hauntingly beautiful piece filled the large space with billowing white fabric panels and an array of swings inviting participants to experience a joy and weightlessness too often relegated to childhood.   In this timely and incisive Change Lab interview, conducted the day before the 20th anniversary of 911, Hamilton explored the ideas animating CHORUS, her public art installation at the World Trade Center Cortland subway station. The piece, visible from the platform and passing trains, consists of a field of marble mosaic weaving the texts of the Declaration of Independence and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights onto a wall beneath the spot where the towers once stood.  Change Lab listeners will recognize her ideas connecting making and exploration as core to the themes explored throughout this show. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could more artfully illuminate the creative power and exhilaration that comes from braving uncertainty and lingering in the mysterious “I-don’t-know.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To call Mike Shinoda a rock star would be technically accurate and yet incomplete. He is the lead singer and driving force behind Linkin Park (one of the best selling bands of the 21st century), Fort Minor (his hip hop project) and a thriving career as a solo artist. But that list of headlining achievements doesn’t even begin to capture the scope of his creative versatility.  He’s always been a creative omnivore since his days as an ArtCenter Illustration student when he divided his time between the painting studio and band practice. Even as Linkin Park soared to stratospheric success, he continued to multitask creatively. He continued to pursue solo endeavors (including a Grammy-winning collaboration with Jay-Z) while cultivating a diverse visual arts practice designing album covers and merchandise and assembling a series of paintings that have exhibited in major museums and galleries. But for all his myriad achievements, what stands out most about Mike is the unique quality of attention and intention that he brings to everything he does. We were only a few minutes deep into our conversation when it became clear that I was in the presence of a rare breed of artist who is uniquely curious about the mysterious forces at play in his own creative process. He gamely expanded upon his challenges and breakthroughs as a songwriter (with a vital assist from producing legend, Rick Rubin), his use of doodling to access certain parts of his creative brain and the twitch channel he’s created to make things from scratch, in real time, often in collaboration with his audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Diana Thater making art is like oxygen. It sustains and nourishes her. And when her access to it is suddenly limited -- as it was in the spring of 2020-- she figures out a way to create her art. By any means necessary.  Her latest exhibition, Yes, There Will Be Singing, is the captivating result of one such extraordinary pandemic pivot. She conceived the idea for the sound-based installation when her in-person show was cancelled. But what’s most ingenious about this immersive work is not its format but rather its remarkable subject --Whale 52, who is deaf and yet sings into a world of complete darkness and silence.  It’s hard to imagine a more perfect metaphor for resilience in the face of the isolation we’ve all just experienced than Whale 52 and, more specifically, the sensitivity with which Thater represents his plight in her work.  That kind of empathy is the lifeblood running through everything Thater creates. Best known for creating large-scale installation art exploring the tensions between the animal kingdom and mankind, Thater’s studio practice has sent her around the globe to film species in peril in their natural habitats. Her work has been widely exhibited at major institutions worldwide, including MOMA, LACMA and the Guggenheim Bilbao. In this lively and fathoms-deep Change Lab episode, Thater explores the forces animating her creative practice, the role of improvisation in her filming process and her enduring commitment to risking life and limb to transport us there alongside her. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pop quiz: Do artists and designers create to express what you know? Or do we make things to get to know ourselves and the world we inhabit?  Those are a few of the questions we’ll be grappling with throughout the next season of Change Lab, launching on September 29th, with Lorne’s revelatory interview with Mike Shinoda, artist, musician, ArtCenter alum, and rockstar in all senses of the word. This season coincides with the release of Lorne’s book, Make to Know, investigating the relationship between inspiration and improvisation, artist and artwork, maker and finished product -- themes that will resonate with anyone familiar with this podcast. The book was inspired at least in part by insights derived from Change Lab interviews revealing the many insights into the hows and whys we humans are driven to create.  This new season will take a deep dive into those ideas with a phenomenal lineup of interviews with creative luminaries designed to complement Make to Know and function as a complete guide to accessing and implementing the creative power that lives within us all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Erika Endrijonas isn’t just an advocate for the pivotal role community colleges play in providing equal access to the American Dream. She is also an alum of Cal State Northridge and direct beneficiary of California’s longstanding commitment to affordable higher education for all. As such, she has an intrinsic understanding of the system’s value to society. And in her current position as the Superintendent and President of Pasadena City College, which is consistently ranked among the best in the state, she is fiercely determined to make sure the system remains a vital engine driving social mobility for generations to come.  Her guiding principle in leading a large public institution is to ensure that PCC levels the playing field for students from all walks of life. In her view, Pasadena City College and others like it are providing singular opportunities to transcend barriers—financial, cultural and social— that might be standing between them and a college degree. Erika’s combination of passion, tenacity and acuity has fueled her remarkable self-made success story. She cleared a set of financial obstacles only to go on and earn a PhD in history culminating in a fascinating dissertation on the ways in which mid-century cookbooks prescribed gender roles to a limited set of separate but unequal stereotypes. Though the segue to college leader isn’t an obvious one, the throughline connecting those dots is Erika’s unmistakable commitment to creating a more egalitarian world and her pragmatic approach to getting there. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are many apt metaphors for Carol Christ’s achievements. Most of them have to do with breaking things like glass ceilings or barriers or new ground in Victorian literary scholarship. But none of those do justice to the sheer scope of the professional arc Carol has traversed en route to her current role as the first female Chancellor of UC Berkeley.  Carol has spent the better part of her five decades entering academic spaces and roles previously reserved for men. But she has less interest in reflecting on her own pioneering achievements than in her passion for participating in the collective march toward institutional progress. In fact, from the moment she began ascending through the leadership ranks at Berkeley, and then as President of Smith College, she’s been a vector for positive change through her first-rate mind, her warmth, humanity and passion for the transformative power of education.  She certainly had an effect on Lorne. The two met at UC Berkeley when he was a newly-minted PhD teaching in the Dramatic Art department and she was Dean of the College of Letters and Science. Though Carol might not have known it at the time, Lorne was inspired by her and viewed her as a mentor. He greatly admired her forthright and compassionate approach to leadership and marveled at how she would give equal voice to the many varied factions comprising California’s largest and most prestigious public research institution.  Carol is the rare university administrator who sees her work as an artform. Lorne relished the opportunity to reconnect with her about her trailblazing journey to the Chancellorship of UC Berkeley, her literary approach to leadership and her perspective on the road ahead for all of higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As President of Fuller Theological Seminary (with more than three decades of pastoral experience behind him), Mark Labberton is more than comfortable dwelling in uncertainty. For him, the space of the unknown is at least one way to access the kind of epiphany familiar to those of us on the creative path.  Mark is far more than just a big picture thinker and leader. He’s a prolific writer and orator with a unique gift for mining the sublime out of a secular idea. He is also someone who embodies the immersive and expansive mindset he brings to his teaching, writing and his wonderful podcast, Conversing with Mark Labberton.   Mark and Lorne first connected years ago as leaders of two important institutions of higher education in Pasadena. From the start, they were both fascinated by the connection between spirituality and creative expression. Lorne was a teacher and theater director curious about the relationship between inspiration (divine or otherwise) and creative flow. Mark was a pastor who has come to see himself as a curator of faith and experience. From there a friendship grew.  Their affinity has continued to expand and deepen. And once we decided to dedicate this season of Change Lab to explore the future of higher education, we seized the opportunity to speak with Mark, knowing all that we can learn from him.  As you’ll hear in this rich and full conversation, Mark understands something vitally important about leading with vulnerability. Perhaps even more resonant, however, is the power he’s found in what he exquisitely describes as a ‘theology of making.’ Please enjoy my conversation with Mark Labberton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dan Brodnitz didn’t set out to join a revolution in online education. He saw himself changing hearts and minds through his novels and poetry. Fate, however, had a different plan for Dan’s talents — but one no less transformative. It placed him at the helm of global content strategy at LinkedIn Learning at a time when the entire world migrated into digital classrooms. Never has his expertise in creating meaningful virtual learning experiences been more valuable than it is right now.  Dan found his way into this fertile field through his own natural inclination to understand how things work and, crucially, how to make them work better. He’s applied this iterative mindset far and wide — from his desire to improve his own creative practice as a writer, as well as to the learning process itself.  He began his career in publishing before joining the pioneering online learning site, Lynda.com, which was founded by former ArtCenter faculty member Lynda Weinman and alum and now trustee Bruce Heavin. It was there that Dan honed his skills in this emerging arena and found his passion for democratizing education by making it accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.  His role today at LinkedIn has scaled considerably to keep pace with the growing market for knowledge in today’s information economy. And his enthusiasm for the work is contagious. He sees LinkedIn’s 16,000-plus course library as a resource for nothing short of personal transformation. And his work, as he eloquently puts it, is to “orchestrate the beautiful, thoughtful whole.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices