In this week’s ‘The Five,’ SVA’s talented community members are seen in such publications as ‘New York,’ ‘Fast Company’ and ‘Animation’ magazine.
Across a diverse array of press coverage this week, SVA alumni and faculty are featured doing heroic things, utilizing their design expertise and gaining momentum in the New York City art gallery scene.
1. ArtNet News writes this week about the growing prominence of “Asia Week,” a celebration of Asian art across galleries and museums in New York City, noting the increasing number of Asian-owned and -managed galleries popping up in NYC, as well as the growing art markets of China and South Korea. The piece mentions SVA’s significant enrollment of Chinese students, saying, “the past decade yielded a new generation of graduates ready to make their mark on the gallery scene.” SVA, the art world is ready for you!
2. In a piece about the “tapback” icons that debuted in text message exchanges with iOS 10, Fast Company looks to design aficionado and MFA Design Co-Chair Steven Heller for his straightforward take on how they stack up against the more detailed collection of emoji reactions: “Frankly, despite not ‘loving’ ha-ha, I thought it a nice respite from the yellow smiling faces, which I think are reducing our emotional state to a backwater town,” he says. MPS Branding Chair Debbie Millman also weighs in, saying, “In a time when every nuance in a text can be analyzed to death in order to determine the context, these whimsical acknowledgments offer a crystal-clear, telegraphic response.”
3. Speaking of design, in New York Magazine’s shopping off-shoot The Strategist, alumnus Sydney Colburn recalls the root of a growing obsession with decks of playing cards that began with a senior thesis project at SVA—a deck of cards made from photographs. “In the midst of this process, I started noticing playing cards everywhere, and my friends started to buy them for me when they’d travel. A hobby turned into a proper collection, and now I have over 70 decks, some neatly displayed on picture ledges in my living room,” Colburn writes. “When I see a deck I like, I just get a gut feeling and go for it.” Recommendations for Colburn’s current favorite decks follow.
4. For their annual Education Issue, Animation Magazine turned to BFA 3D Animation and Visual Effects faculty Joseph Mulvanerty for a piece about some of the most popular college courses for animation students around the country. Mulvanerty highlights his Production Resources course, co-taught with Richard Hagen, which welcomes a new guest speaker each week from the wide-ranging professional world of VFX. With a focus on the ever-growing set of tools for visual effects, the virtual class operates as a laid-back conversation between students and field experts. The influx of new technology in the industry is never-ending, Mulvanerty says, “even for professional people working in studios which are adopting new processes they’ll have to learn. And that’s OK.”
5. And finally, in a bit of harrowing but uplifting news, SVA alumnus William Chan (MFA 2017 Photography, Video and Related Media) courageously stepped in to help a woman who had been pushed onto the subway tracks in Lower Manhattan. A veteran of the Iraq War and now the co-director of galleries Transmitter in Bushwick and Field Projects in Chelsea, Chan tapped into his army survival experience to keep the woman calm before the paramedics arrived at the scene. “I told her, ‘Hey, I’ve done this a lot. You are actually in a good place.’ I told her that I’ve been deployed, that I’ve been in Iraq three times, just to give her as much reassurance as I could,” Chan told Hyperallergic. “To me, she seemed very strong.”
