Category: news

Modeling Strong Characters in a 3D Digital Environment

Oct 16. On campus at the Digital Media Center.

Funded by a grant from the CSU Entertainment Industry Initiative, the CSU Stanislaus Art Department is hosting a series of guest workshops for CSU Art Majors around the theme of storytelling in the digital arts. The Modeling Strong Characters in a 3D Digital Environment workshop will be led by Gerardo Orioli, and will consist of five-hours of hands-on instruction in which CSU students develop an idea in a 3D digital environment.

 

Gerardo Orioli was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. He is currently Creative Director at Southern Hemisphere. He previously worked at Lucasfilm Animation and was Modeling Supervisor and Animation Director of The Tuneables, at Music Intelligence. Before that he was Modeling Supervisor for Nickelodeon’s Back at the Barnyard. He studied at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Connecticut.

This series of workshops will conclude with a public exhibition of student work in the CSU Stanislaus’ Building Imagination Center, and select students will travel to the CSU Media Arts Festival. The 2015 CSU Media Arts Festival will be held on Saturday, November 7, 2015 at CSU Los Angeles! This 25^thAnniversary of the MAF will feature a full day of interaction with media faculty and media and entertainment industry professionals, screenings, and an awards ceremony.

 

Creating 2D Characters with Digital Illustration

October 2, 2015. On campus at the Digital Media Center.

Funded by a grant from the CSU Entertainment Industry Initiative, the Art Department is hosting a series of guest workshops for CSU Art majors around the theme of storytelling in the digital arts.

The Creating 2D Characters with Digital Illustration workshop will be led by industry professional Christian Hali, and will consist of five-hours of hands-on instruction in which CSU students develop an idea in a digital medium.

Christian Hali an award-winning artist, art director, illustrator, and creative executive with ten years of production experience for MTV, Disney, Nickelodeon, and Daniel Ostroff Productions. As an UX Designer and Strategist in the Bay Area he has contributed to enterprise solutions for the hospitality, medical and legal services industries. Hali is a published illustrator with Simon & Schuster and Landoll Books, and his illustration is in the University California Santa Cruz library archives.

This series of workshops will conclude with a public exhibition of student work in the CSU Stanislaus’ Building Imagination Center, and select students will travel to the CSU Media Arts Festival. The 2015 CSU Media Arts Festival will be held on Saturday, November 7, 2015 at CSU Los Angeles! This 25^th Anniversary of the MAF will feature a full day of interaction with media faculty and media and entertainment industry professionals, screenings, and an awards ceremony.

Visions of Central Valley Culture: How Local Arts & Films Portray Valley Life

Modesto Junior College has recently been awarded a “Humanities Initiatives Grant” from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) that is bringing together MJC faculty as well as regional scholars, artists and leadership from the University of California at Merced, the University of California at Berkeley, California State University Stanislaus, Fresno State University, The National Steinbeck Center, El Teatro Campesino, the State Theatre and the Modesto Junior College Foundation to study the culture of California’s Central Valley, to develop collegial networks for future scholarly work and to create thematic curricular modules for use in a wide-variety of post-secondary classrooms.

The grant for “The Search for Common Ground: Culture in California’s Central Valley” will provide two years of professional development for dozens of MJC faculty across divisions as well as fund interdisciplinary curricular development.   Most importantly, the subject of the grant is our Central Valley itself and the diverse cultural heritages in our community.  We believe that when faculty craft classes which reflect the cultural traditions of our own geography that students “see themselves” in their classes and are more engaged and successful; so this grant opportunity also has an important student success component in addition to the plethora of faculty professional development opportunities.

Topic 3: Visions of Central Valley Culture: How Local Arts & Films Portray Valley Life

Description: This discussion centers around the way cultural identity is represented and enhanced through works of art, film, and other expressions. Key Questions: Who has the authority to decide what constitutes a primary work of cultural production that aids in the formation of collective identity? What is the relationship between a need for community identity and the creation of traditions? How does the interaction of multiple ethnic population centers merge, create, and establish historic traditions? In identifying cultural representation in the performing arts, what preconceptions do we incorporate regarding performance space and modes of performance?

Events

LECTURE: September 9, 2015 from 3-5pm at Modesto Junior College, Performing and Media Arts Center (PAC), East Campus, Room 243

Lecture with Jessica Gomula-Kruzic, Professor of Video and Time-based Media at California State University, Stanislaus, works with local filmmakers to produce films about the Central Valley. She will discuss a creative place-making project known as the Building Imagination Center in the contemporary arts gallery, Art Space on Main, an extension of the CSU Art Gallery. Lecture with Jack Souza, Artistic Director, of the Prospect Theater Project, Modesto, received an M.A. in Modern Drama (Honors) from University College, Dublin. He will introduce ways that cultural identity is represented through works of art, film and other expressions, including the valley’s unique and diverse cultural make-up expressed through modes of cultural transmission which thrive outside orthodox Western forms of theater, music and dance.

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SEMINAR: September 23rd, 2015 from 3-5pm Modesto Junior College, Performing and Media Arts Center (PAC), East Campus, Room 243

Seminar discussion with required and recommended readings including: “Creative Place-making” by Ann Markusen; A White Paper for The Mayors’ Institute on City Design; Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism; Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

Bee in Turlock: California State University, Stanislaus, brings art space to downtown

TURLOCK — A new art gallery and studio set to open downtown is a project involving a lot of partnerships: between the university and the community, between public and private agencies, and between students and faculty. Even the restrooms are shared with a new restaurant next door.

The “Art Space on Main,” as it’s been named, is set to open in early September. The building will be part gallery, part laboratory.

It follows on the success of the Building Imagination Center, a joint effort between the university and the Modesto Art Museum that operated under a grant in downtown Modesto.

But even before the Building Imagination Center opened in 2012, university officials had been looking for space in downtown Turlock, said Roxanne Robbin, chairwoman of the California State University, Stanislaus, art department.

“Our (department of fine arts) program has grown so much,” she said. The university is required to have working areas for each student, and it ran out of space on the campus across town at Geer Road and Monte Vista avenues.

The new space also is more visible to Turlock and other Valley residents who find themselves downtown. The university has a gallery on campus, but it can be difficult to find, and people never know whether they need to pay for parking, Robbin said.

At the Art Space, students will get to work on projects. Community members can take part in workshops on everything from watercolor painting to video production. And students can get practical experience running a gallery.

Robbin said she is hoping to expand the services available there even more. “It would be great if people in the community could come in to get help with a logo,” she said as one example.

The building itself is an art project of sorts, with workers removing layers of improvements over the decades to bring back the original charm and elegance of the structure. Previously, the building was best known to Turlock residents as the longtime home of the JC Penney department store before it moved to Fulkerth Road.

Workers pulled up plenty of carpet and tile, said Eric Gonsalves, vice president of Brownstone Equities, the building’s property manager. Underneath, they found hardwood floors that date back 102 years. The store had a mezzanine in the back; the flooring and supporting structure for that were dismantled and some of that wood was used to make doors for the building and tables for Memo’s Cucina & Tequila Bar, which recently opened next door.

“It’s a lot of recycling, which is exciting,” Robbin said.

All told, Gonsalves said, the property owner contributed about $300,000 in remodeling work. The university, using a combination of public and private funds, has leased the space for three years. Hopefully, Robbin said, the gallery will stay open long after that.

Bee Breaking News Editor Patty Guerra can be reached at pguerra@modbee.com or (209) 578-2343. Follow her on Twitter @PattyGuerra.