Kickstart
My Art

Dawn Schwartz, still from Stings: A Yo-Yo Documentary, 2011.

SVA is one of a handful of organizations to be part of a special feature on Kickstarter, the popular fund-raising Web site that brings together creative entrepreneurs and donors online. Earlier this year, the College was invited to become part of a pilot program that Kickstarter launched called Curated Pages, a showcase for projects that are hand selected by organizations like Creative Time, the New Museum and the Sundance Institute. Current students, faculty and staff at the College were invited to submit projects to appear on SVA's page, kickstarter.com/sva, with the aim of funding film productions and other creative ventures. Jeff Kirsch, former systems administrator for the MFA Interaction Design Department and the page's curator, sent out a call to the SVA community, saying, "Projects can be big or small, serious or whimsical, traditional or avant-garde, and come from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields."

One of the first SVA projects to appear on Curated Pages came from then-student Dawn Schwartz (MFA 2011 Social Documentary Film), who raised money to fund her thesis film, Strings: A Yo-Yo Documentary, via the page. Likewise, two of Schwartz's classmates—Mark Kendall and Jenni Morello—also made appeals on the SVA page, raising more than $30,000 between them to produce their thesis films. The SVA page has since been used by students in the BFA Advertising and Graphic Design Department to fund projects about social networks and storyte lling, which are the very basis for Kickstarter's success.

While the Kickstarter platform is open to the general public, Curated Pages allows the College to shine extra light on innovative projects created by its students, faculty and staff members.
[Michael Grant]

Small Talk

Photo by: Harry Zernike

In September 2012, the College will open the doors of its first-ever Master of Arts program, the MA in Critical Theory and the Arts. Chaired by philosopher Robert Hullot-Kentor, the rigorous threesemester program is an interdisciplinary curriculum of lectures and seminars that focuses on the contemporary situation of art. Hullot-Kentor recently discussed launching the new department.

Can you give us an overall look at the department?

The program has a dynamic structure. There is a central group of courses concerned with art theory and aesthetics, social theory, and social history and the history of art. These courses are built around a seminar and a lecture series whose topics will change from year to year: In 2012–2013, what we are calling the Proseminar will be devoted to the subject Convergence of the Arts in the 21st Century, and, in an election year, the Serious Times Lecture Series will focus on issues of social progress.

What kind of students do you think will apply?

I expect people who have a whole lot on their minds and who very much want to have a whole lot more on their minds. Works of art present problems, and today these problems demand considerable reflection. Those who want to engage these problems will certainly be thoughtful individuals. The students in the program are likely to come from many disciplines, because philosophy, social history, political science and many other fields of inquiry now turn to the arts in wanting to solve their most central concerns. Many of our students will also be studio artists who are looking for ways to better understand and deepen their own work.

This is SVA's only MA program. How does it fit into the College's 'ecosystem'?

What especially shapes this program, and what makes it different from most graduate programs in critical theory, is that the program's focus—first and last—is art. This is not a theory program only about theory. It's about art—not only< what we can learn about art but also, and most of all, what we have to learn from art. Works of art ask us to think about them; they are waiting to be understood. It is essential that we comprehend them, though doing so involves recognizing that comprehending art is different from comprehending statistics or objects of scientific inquiry. So it makes sense that a program in critical theory and the arts that is most of all involved in understanding art should be located at an art school, surrounded by students who are up all night making things in their studios. We want to be right down the hall from the print room, upstairs from animation and around the corner from video, photography and painting.
[Brian Glaser, Keri Murawski]

Photo by: Baden Copeland

MFA Design Department Co-chair Steven Heller was named a recipient of a 2011 National Design Award by the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Heller earned the Design Mind Award, which honors "a visionary who has affected a paradigm shift in design thinking or practice through writing, research and scholarship." The author or editor of more than 130 books on subjects such as graphic design, satiric art and popular culture, Heller has focused on building foundations for exploring and preserving design as a social and cultural force.

His Creative Excellency

Photo by: Dan Wagner

Live...
from the MPS Branding Studios

Since 2003, MPS Branding Department Chair Debbie Millman has hosted Design Matters, an audio podcast that features one-on-one conversations with some of the biggest names in design. More recently, Millman began to record the podcast at SVA, using a specially built glass-walled booth in the MPS Branding studios. Some guests from the spring season included faculty member Gail Anderson; New York Times Magazine contributor and faculty member Rob Walker; Eddie Opara, a partner at the design firm Pentagram; and Editor-in-Chief Grace Bonney from the design blog Design*Sponge. This fall, behind-the-scenes photos, interesting quotes and favorite moments from the podcast will be highlighted on the MPS Branding Web site.

For each interview, Millman does meticulous research on her subject (which often requires reading and annotating one or more books written by the interviewee) and prepares a list of questions about the designer's life and work. On the day of the event, the department's students, faculty and staff are invited to watch the recording in the program's main classroom space; the booth where the interviews are held looks out onto the classroom, and the audio is fed into large mounted speakers.

Design Matters currently has about 200,000 listeners and is aired exclusively on the design blog Design Observer. The podcast is also available on iTunes, where more than 50,000 people download the show every month. The show is also regularly in the Top 10 audio design podcasts on iTunes as well as a featured podcast on the site.
[John Wyszniewski]

UNCF (The United Negro College Fund) is the nation's largest and most effective minority education organization, serving more than 60,000 students across the country through scholarships and other programs. This year, UNCF launched a new fund-raising initiative, The Art of Giving Back; this is the organization's first program to specifically benefit visual arts students enrolled at its 38 member colleges and universities. As a supporter, SVA hosted a late-September kickoff reception and public art sale—of works by several African-American artists, including the late artist and NFL player Ernie Barnes—in the Visual Arts Gallery. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of works will be used to establish the Ernie Barnes Memorial Art Scholarship.

The SVA community now has access to a powerful new way to showcase work and connect online. The College has teamed up with Behance, the leading online platform for creative professionals, to offer SVA Portfolios, an exclusive network for alumni, degree-seeking students and faculty members. Through SVA Portfolios, members of the SVA community can, at no cost, upload digital files to create an online profile and a multimedia gallery of projects for others in the network to view. SVA Portfolios projects are also viewable on the public Behance site, Behance.net, which attracts millions of visitors every month. "SVA Portfolios will not only connect members of our community, but also provide a venue through which potential clients, recruiters and creative enthusiasts can discover the work produced by SVA alumni, faculty members and students," says Jennifer Phillips, director of the College's Office of Career Development. Many major companies, including Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nike and Sony, have turned to Behance when looking to hire new talent. SVA Portfolios can be built with various media, from text and images to audio and video. Members can share media and tips, collaborate on projects, and get feedback from peers or mentors. They can publish their work to their Facebook and Twitter pages from SVA Portfolios, and sync their SVA Portfolios and LinkedIn profiles. As the first college to launch a network with Behance, SVA joins organizations such as the AIGA, the professional association for design, and the Art Directors Club, whose Behance gallery showcases the work by winners of the prestigious Young Guns Award, the club's annual honor for creative professionals under age 30. SVA Portfolios is online at portfolios.sva.edu
[Michael Grant]

This past summer, SVA hosted a group of 30 students from Design Architecture Senior High (DASH) in Miami. The students traveled to New York to participate in SVA's Pre-College Program under a new initiative called the Young Designers Scholarship Program, which combined a week of museum hopping and gallery-going with three weeks of hands-on workshops and studio time at SVA.

The project is the brainchild of Dr. Stacey Mancuso, DASH's principal, and Miami art collector and philanthropist Rosa de la Cruz. Although many DASH students attend precollege programs around the country, the Young Designers ScholarshipProgram is aimed primarily at economically disadvantaged students; the participating students earned scholarships for tuition and expenses through a competitive, meritbasedselection process.

"SVA is a very nurturing environment," says Mancuso of the decision for thehigh school to partner with the College. "It's a place where students would get not only a top-notch learning experience, but also be comfortable and well tended to."
According to Mancuso, many of the students had never left Miami before.

"We need them to see there's another world out there," says de la Cruz of her intention of providing a life-altering opportunity. "In New York, even walking the city is an enrichment."

Rosa de la Cruz is an ardent supporter of early arts education. This year alone she expects to welcome 11,000 schoolchildren to the de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space, and she and her husband recently gave $70,000 in cash awards directly to students to encourage the study of art. For the Young DesignersScholarship Program, de la Cruz enlisted support from the James L. Knight Foundation, the Braman Family Foundation, Craig Robins and the Key Biscayne Women's Giving Circle. [Michael Grant]