Shepard Fairey ‘92 IL is one of a dozen or so artists profiled in Beautiful Losers, a new film that celebrates a loose-knit group that came together in the early 1990s and made art that reflected the subcultures of skateboarding, surf, punk, hip hop and graffiti. The movie focuses on telling the artists’ personal stories and “speaks to themes of what happens when the outside becomes ‘in’ as it explores the creative ethos connecting these artists and today’s youth.”

The creators of Beautiful Losers hope the movie will inspire people to go out and make something (”Make Something from Nothing” is the film’s tagline). They want to see the art you’ve been creating, so if you want to participate, just click here!

Richard Haining, Jr. ‘05 FD and his fellow carpenters at ReadySet Inc. were featured in an article in the New York Observer about an unlikely band of can-do guys who build sets for everything from a photo shoot with Annie Liebovitz to Victoria Secrets.  Currently, they’re busy building staging for Fashion Week in New York.

Congratulations to Nick Hollibaugh and Joshua Enck (both MFA ‘03 FD), who have won a competition for a sculpture they hope will be erected outside the Blackstone Valley [RI] Visitors Center. The Providence Journal reported this week that Nick and Josh won for a design they call Canter and Shed. Inspired by the architecture of Pawtucket’s sprawling mill buildings, Canter and Shed is intended as a pair of painted metal structures that would rise 16 and 18 feet above street level at Roosevelt Avenue and Main Street in Pawtucket. Nick and Josh’s design was selected from a group of finalists that included Kenn Speiser ‘68 SC.

Canter and Shed was selected because of “the contribution it would make to the streetscape, and the shadows that would elongate from it,” according to Martha L. Werenfels, an architect who sat on the selection panel.

As part of the process, Nick and Josh received grants totalling around $6,000, but the “real money,” as the Journal called it — the roughly $50,000 it will cost to build and install the sculpture — hasn’t been raised yet. An official from Pawtucket said the city plans to raise the money from private sources now that the winning design has been picked. Here’s hoping they do.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 follows up on the original hit movie that was based on Anne Brashares’ best-selling series of novels about “four young women who share an unbreakable bond through the unpredictable events of their lives.” In this installment, Lena, the character played by Alexis Bledel (above; photo: SMPSP/Phil Caruso) has immersed herself in her studies at RISD, where — in a figure drawing class — she meets a fellow student, Leo (Jesse Williams), who causes her to examine her life with a fresh perspective. Director Sanaa Hamri calls the scene of Lena and Leo’s RISD meeting one of her favorites and one of the movie’s funniest.

Sounds like another reason to go to the movies this summer!

When I lived in Japan, one of my friends would take me to the nearby village of Mashiko where I would steep in some incredible ceramics. I’m heartened that by walking only a few hundred feet from my office I can experience the gorgeous ceramics in RISD’s department which cover the range of purely conceptual objects that mystify … to purely practical items that might save me from cupping my hands to drink from the faucet (i.e. “a cup”). I invite you to take a journey through Prof. Linda Sormin’s new website. I certainly had a nice visit.

Pat Thornton of RISD’s Parents Relations Program sent in this tale of one student’s path to RISD.

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Every now and then one wonders how a student decides to come to RISD. For Jamie Goldstein ‘11 PT the journey from Los Angeles to RISD involves Cranston and a RISD|Continuing Education connection that goes back to the 1950s.

Parents’ Council Co-Chair Erica Di Bona and her husband, Vincent Di Bona, Executive Producer and creator of America’s Funniest Home Videos and 2007 recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, are very happy with Jamie’s decision to attend RISD, even though it meant she attended school across the country. At the end of Jamie’s freshman year, she enthusiastically told her parents how much she had benefited from having the best teachers in her life, and that she had definitely made the right decision to come to RISD.

Jamie, her father Josh Goldstein, Erica and Vin reside in Los Angeles; the Cranston-RISD connection came through Vin. When Vin grew up in Cranston, RI, in the late 1950s, he took Continuing Education art classes at RISD with his best friend Alfred DeCredico ’66 PT. Vin went on to study film and radio at Emerson and UCLA, and eventually became a television producer. Alfred is a well-known painter and RISD professor. When Jamie knew she wanted to pursue an education in the arts, Vin, Alfred and David Schoffmann ’78 PT, Jamie’s mentor at Brentwood Art Center, pointed her to RISD.

After Jamie completed the Pre-College program her mind was made up. Jamie is now entering the sophomore year as a Painting major and her parents are on the RISD Parents’ Council, with Erica serving as one of the Co-chairs.

From Cranston to L.A. to Providence - many roads connect to RISD!

Kudos to Jeremy Lasky ‘93 IL, director of photography for Pixar’s summer hit WALL-E. Jeremy was featured in an article in his home town newspaper in St. Louis earlier this summer, in which he talks about how one directs the filming of virtual characters. Check it out!

RISD remains a frequent focus of The New York Times, having been featured as part of articles the past two Sundays: in the “Education Life” section (July 27) and in yesterday’s “Travel” section (”36 Hours in Providence”). In addition to naming Providence among the “Towns They Don’t Want to Leave” (see this earlier post), the “Education Life” editors sent Laura Buckman ‘10 PH out to capture the colors and vibrancy of the RISD campus. The RISD students featured in the slideshow of Laura’s work are Matt Leifheit ‘11, Scott Stevenson ‘10 AP, Allison Wucher ‘09 PT and Elizabeth Englander ‘11.

Yesterday’s travel feature on Providence dubbed the RISD Museum’s collection as “up-to-date and comprehensive” and made special mention of work by RISD alumni on view in the galleries. The piece also singled out Al Forno, the famed restaurant run by alumni George Germon ‘69 CR and Johanne Killeen ‘71 PH, as having “put Providence on the culinary map three decades ago”.

You can see the Times‘ visual take on Providence in this slideshow.

Work by Kim DeMarco ‘88 IL — “Night Cap,” on the August 4 issue — is once again the cover illustration of The New Yorker. Between freelance commissions that include work for The New York Times and others, Kim also manages to keep up a fun visual blog, which includes her design work and photographs, among other items of interest.

Today RISD Trustee Dick Haining sent me this link from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I have personally observed Daniel Pink’s message from his popular book A Whole New Mind have had a resounding din in a variety of sectors for the past few years. We know that right-brainedness is important, and yet our traditional K-12 educational system is gradually shifting society towards more left-brainedness due to the way that national and other standardized testing systems like the SAT grade younger people. It’s easy to measure how many math problems a child will get right; it’s not as easy to measure how well they understand or can emulate Caravaggio.

I now increasingly feel that it isn’t a matter of a preference for the left- or right-brained approach to an issue. Instead it’s a matter more of how well and how nimbly one can shift between their two hemispheres and come to a set of possible solutions that lean left (logic), right (feeling), and smack dab in the middle.

I’m certainly not alone in my comfort for the middle-brain approach. In the book Governance and Leadership by Richard Chait et al he names an extremely constructive mode of collaboration called “generative thinking.” Relatedly Roger Martin at the Rotman School refers to a mode of thought where “ambiguity is okay” as integrative thinking; David Kelley at Stanford refers to a kind of experiment-provoking line of breadth-first problem-solving as design thinking. Essentially the world is converging towards a divergent mode of thought — today we can do both. We can be an artist and an engineer; we can be an accountant and a graphic designer; we can be a computer programmer and a CEO; we can be one thing and another even when we’re using diametrically opposed thinking styles.

Given that I grew up in a large family where I often had to sit in the back seat squished in the middle “on the bump,” I am now glad that I was pre-conditioned to being a middle-ish kind of guy.