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Behind the Ballot

Art & Design

Behind the Ballot Oct 29 2018

The Behind the Ballot panel discussion “Campaigns by Design: A Look at the Creative Elements That Influence Voter Behavior” was held Monday, October 29th at 9:30 a.m. in the Design Building.

Panelists Lynne Baggett, professor of graphic design, Andrew Kuo, associate professor of marketing, John C. Hamilton Family Developing Scholar & V. Price LeBlanc Professor, and Bob Mann, professor of mass communication, spoke about different aspects of creative elements that influence voter behavior. School of Art director Rod parker moderated the discussion.

Professor Baggett discussed the graphic design elements of recent political campaigns, showing poster designs of various campaign advertising to illustrate the various ways graphic design can influence voter behavior. Topics discussed included recent presidential campaign slogans that appealed to young adult voters, posters designed to remind underrepresented groups to vote, and the process of selecting political logos.

“Design plays an important role in political campaigns, both explicitly and in ways the average voter might not be aware,” she said.

Professor Mann spoke about the evolution of political ads since the 1950s, showing various televised commercials from over the decades. Professor Kuo discussed how marketing research can measure voters’ responses to political campaigns, and help politicans to better target their advertising strategies.

Over the course of the two-day Behind the Ballot symposium, LSU hosted 24 events in 10 different buildings across campus involving over 70 panelists, at least 6 of whom flew in for the event, and welcomed more than 800 participants, who were supported by more than 40 volunteers. More importantly, our students, faculty and staff had the opportunity to come together and appreciate the importance of civic engagement while learning about the value every vote holds.

LSU Art & Design Visits France

Art & Design, Academic Programs Abroad, Architecture, Faculty, ,

Alkis Tsolakis, Dean of the College of Art & Design, and School of Architecture Director Marwan Ghandour visited France in the fall of 2018, touring the new Design Paris study abroad program.

In their visit to the new LSU Design Paris program, Tsolakis and Ghandour visited the Paris Studio, attended reviews at the Paris Center, and accompanied students on active learning field excursions around the city.

design paris studio discussion

Design Paris Studio

While in France, Dean Tsolakis and Director Ghandour had the occasion to explore future teaching and research opportunities with the École Spéciale des Travaux Publics, a French engineering and research graduate school, in Paris and the École Nationale Supérieure d’architecture in Grenoble.

People in hardhats

Tsolakis and Ghandour tour the design build studio project site with Professors Marie and Keith Zawistowski

construction site

Student workshop

During their visit to Grenoble they had the extraordinary opportunity to ascend the Tour Perret, a structure that has been closed to the public since the 1960s. It was a media sensation!

French newspaper article

French newspaper article announcing the tower visit

“It was a wonderful visit to our partners in France,” Dean Tsolakis commented.

 

Professor Ursula Emery McClure Receives Design Awards

Art & Design, Honors & Awards, Architecture,

Sukkah

Ursula Emery McClure

Architecture professor Ursula Emery McClure’s firm emerymcclure architecture was named the 2018 winner of the Boutique Residential Architecture Firm of the Year by the Corporate LiveWire Architecture Awards.

The Corporate LiveWire Architecture Awards 2018 is “a celebration of construction, design, planning and completed work, recognizing firms and individuals who have shown a commitment to their sustainable sector.” Categories including building and interior designers, landscaping companies, refurbishment, urban project managers, product design services and law firms were all eligible.

“The Corporate LiveWire judging panel has highlighted some of the most ambitious heritage and redevelopment projects around the world,” Corporate LiveWire announced.

Corporate LiveWire received 12,115 nominations from 22 countries around the world over the past year. Winners were chosen for industry recognition, innovation, design, local knowledge and service excellence.

Sukkah constructionThe project “31” by Emery McClure, with the architecture collaborative firm emc&young, was selected as a finalist for The Sukkah Project Dwell in Design competition in Dallas, Texas in September 2018.

The Sukkah Project: Dwell in Design competition invited architects, artists and builders nationally to submit their most creative and exciting sukkah designs. Ten finalists were selected to receive a $1,800 construction stipend and were tasked with building a life size, modern, artistic sukkah to be displayed at the Dallas Museum of Biblical Art during the weeklong festival. (A Sukkah is a temporary structure constructed for annual use during the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot.)

The nominated project “31” is a design evocative of palm huts, with profound inspirations.

“31 is inspired by two frail and transient occupancies,” the architects state. “The first is the woven basket that provided shelter for Moses as a baby, protecting him from the Pharaoh’s decree. The second is the Gulf Coast Choctaw Indians who dwelled along the beaches in palm frond huts.”

These palm huts were composed of local raw materials to meet basic needs of shelter, protection, and storage. “31” harnesses both the natural materials and structural systems these inspirations employed: the palm fronds for skin, the weaving to create a surface, and the light, linear frame to create space and place.

Palm hut skylight.

The design build competition was a great experience, according to Professor Emery McClure.

Ursula Emery McClure, FAAR, AIA, LEED AP BD+C is a founding partner of emerymcclure architecture and in addition to the firm, she also serves as the A. Hays Town Professor in the School of Architecture at Louisiana State University. Presently, she teaches studios in the Masters of Architecture program and seminar courses that focus on Louisiana culture and architecture. Before starting emerymcclure architecture with Michael A. McClure, Ursula worked in New York for both Wendy Evans Joseph and Mitchell Giurgola Architects. She was a project manager and construction administrator for Mitchell Giurgola Architects on two large-scale urban schools on Staten Island, NY and the Manhattan Family Courts Building. Most recently, Ursula was selected as ArchDaily‘s Most Innovative Practitioners (April 2018.)

CoAD CxC Studio Coordinator Anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing 2018

Art & Design, Communication across the Curriculum, Doctor of Design,

Vincent CellucciAs studio coordinator for the College of Art & Design’s Communication across the Curriculum (CxC) program, Vincent Cellucci conducts writing feedback consultations for students, guiding more than their use of grammar. In addition to his position at CxC and pursuing the Doctorate of Design, Cellucci pens and publishes poetry. This fall his work was anthologized in Wesleyan University Press’ Best American Experimental Writing 2018.

“Writing tutoring is my absolute favorite type of teaching because of the personal scale and it is devoid of grades,” said Cellucci. “Essentially I get to challenge student concepts in the effort to help them strengthen their ideas and refine their articulations.”

Best Experimental Writing 2018According to their website, “the Best American Experimental Writing anthology series annually collects the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction in a exciting and necessary anthology.”

Cellucci’s poem, “Diamonds in Dystopia,” was a seed text he created for an interdisciplinary collaboration undertook with LSU professors Jesse Allison (School of Music and LSU Center of Computation & Technology) and Derick Ostrenko (School of Art and CCT) to create a poetry performance web application capable of mining large databases of text for interactivity with large audiences to trigger improvisation. With generous support from CCT and their Colleges, the trio performed this piece at TEDxLSU in 2016 and South By Southwest in 2017. They also published a peer-reviewed article detailing the web application’s technology and new media context in a recent article in Media-N, the Journal of the New Media Caucus.

While happy the work and collaboration received recognition within the literary community, Cellucci credits his position for his ability to pursue creative collaborations and poetry publications, and he sees these experiences directly related to his teaching writing to students saying, “We are all peers in the arduous struggle to create meaning and new perspectives.”

 

Photography Books by Art Professors Thompson & Warwick Released

Art, Photography, , ,
Kristine Thompson

Professor Kristine Thompson

Associate professor of photography Kristine Thompson recently released the book Images Seen to Images Felt, a collection of work that she has made over the past three years. She was the winner for Antenna’s Louisiana Open Call Award last year, selected by art historian, critic, and writer Anna Mecugni. The open call resulted in a $1500 award, a solo exhibition, and the publication.

Images Seen to Images Felt examines how images of death, violence, and mourning circulate publicly. The works featured engage photographic imagery in a tactile manner in order to question when and how pictures might elicit empathy. The book has an accompanying poetic essay by Muriel Leung.

 

The book engages issues of circulation and consumption of news photographs depicting tragic, violent events. Thompson salvages news images from the Internet and turns them into photograms by pressing light-sensitive photographic paper onto her laptop screen in the darkroom.

“The resulting ghostly prints seem to be asking our eyes to feel again,” Mecugni asserted. “If the watching eye is the underlying subject of Thompson’s work, it is also literalized in a striking series of photographs, ‘Difficult Things Cannot Be Unseen,’ rendering a single eye, its reflective surface allowing a glimpse into the news image looked at and any emotional resonance that might or might not have generated. With these works Thompson challenges the image saturated culture in which we live, reminding us of our ability to connect, share, and care.”

Thompson also has a recently released collaborative project with Johanna Warwick, assistant professor of photography, called Past & Present Tense.

johanna warwick

Johanna Warwick

Past & Present Tense is a collaboration between Thompson and Warwick. The limited edition risograph book is a reflection on loss and memorialization as experienced on a personal, cultural, and global scale. The photographs, which include those made by the artists to those sourced from personal and public archives, suggest how the past continues to be felt in the present. The book’s structure is based on a call and response between the artists and weaves together images of death, family members, the southern United States, natural and man-made disasters, and the materials we use to collect and remember.

Thompson and Warwick made Past & Present Tense at the University of Missouri with artist and expert printer Travis Shaffer. The print atelier theretherenow recently released and featured the book at the recent BOUND Art Book Fair in Cleveland. It is also be available at the NY Art Book Fair and online.

Thompson’s work is currently on display at the Baton Rouge Gallery exhibition “An Archive of Feelings.” Warwick’s solo exhibition “Monuments to Strangers” is on display at the Holy Family Gallery in Philadelphia, and her new series “The Bottom” debuts at the Glassell Gallery (with Professor Leslie Friedman’s series “There’s Got to be More”,) October 30, 2018.

The professors also coordinated the Society for Photographic Education 2018 South Central Regional Conference “Material + Meaning,” held October 4-6, 2018 at the LSU School of Art.

Alumni Spotlight: Kangeun Lee, BLA 2013

Art & Design, Landscape Architecture,
Kangeun Lee

Kangeun Lee

Kangeun Lee (BLA ‘13), ASLA, is a landscape architect whose childhood in South Korea influenced his worldview today.

Lee is a project designer at Site design group ltd in Chicago. He is a ANOVA National Grant Competition for Emerging Professionals in Landscape Architecture 2018 grant winner. His winning grant entry to “describe a space that influences your career in landscape architecture” centered around themes from his childhood.

Lee was born and raised on an island on the west coast of South Korea where 60% of residents depended upon rice farming for their living while Lee was growing up.

“Since I was a child, I hoped to see our environments kept green and sanitary to provide for good health for the people,” he said. “I think that landscape architects can support and explore ideas that can contribute to society with our stewardship of the land.”

The farmland where he grew up was a beautiful and culture-rich place that has influenced his interests in landscape architecture, he said. “With its four seasonal changes it offered different experiences for me.”

“Our family, like the many others, had about four acres of a rice farm and also grew vegetables for many years,” he explained. “Our house was in the middle of the farmland and the mountains. Since eighth grade, my childhood was as an assistant farmer under my father’s supervision through my early 20s, until I moved to Louisiana to attend university.”

The island’s culture largely revolved around rice farming. In spring, rice farmers set fires along the banks of the farm edges to get rid of weeds and insects, and then farmers sow rice seeds. The rice plants are maintained with irrigation throughout the summer, until they become mature and are harvested. The rice is served at most meals.

“After the harvest season ends, the farmlands are vacant, but for kids in the neighborhood, it is a great playground. At night, I recall spinning fire cans of flames with pine cones in them (a traditional Korean game),” he remembered. “Winter in the farmlands provides more activities. My father filled the land with water and waited until the weather got colder. The farmland then become an ice-skating or ice hockey rink. My childhood in the farmlands was full of joy most of the time.”

Drawing of rice fields

Drawing by Kangeun Lee

“The memories that I gained from the rice farm during childhood brought me my own cultural space that influenced my choice of the profession of landscape architecture,” he said. “The process of growing rice plants provides aesthetic value from the plants with their seasonal changes as the plants turn different colors during the seasons.”

He learned that a space that we create can change its use by season and day and night in order to provide different uses, a theme that later informed his designs.

“I also believe that as a landscape architect we have the ability to create a space that brings one’s childhood memories back,” Lee said. “Different atmospheres can be created with different materials, topography, light, water and choice of plants.”

“As a landscape architect we have the ability to create a space that brings one’s childhood memories back.”

In 2008, Lee had to witness his family’s house being demolished, because of a new government policy taking effect. “When it took effect in my hometown, civilians had to forcefully accept that policy and most of the residents had to move to other places. Of course we had to stop farming and live with the grant in exchange for losing our land.”

Currently commercial and residential apartment buildings have taken over the family’s former farmlands. The City planned a new layout of roads throughout the town. The existing mountains had thousands of native trees that were cut down and regraded to accommodate more residential buildings.

He decided to leave South Korea and study in the United States. “The island was rapidly changed and industrialized in one decade and it does not feel like my hometown anymore.”

It’s important to respect people around you and be kind to them, he learned.

“In a project, I am strongly inspired by the history of the site and by the people nearby,” he said. “Landscape architects can utilize our ability to diagnosis big issues by studying and listening to come up with good ideas. I like to know what it was like in the past, what it is like now, and what it could be in the future.”

He said as a student at LSU, he was influenced by the RRSLA faculty members, who “believe that landscape architecture can make positive changes to the environment and society, and they encourage students be a part of it.”

“The faculty believe that landscape architecture can make positive changes to the environment and society, and they encourage students be a part of it.”

Choosing the landscape architecture program at LSU was a great choice, Lee said; it forced him to rethink his future. “I didn’t think I would be a designer, nor working in U.S. But at LSU Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture I learned the foundations of how to be a designer and survive as a professional in America.”

And he had “a wonderful school experience. In the school of landscape architecture you’re in a network with your classmates for five years and become a best friend each other.” Those lasting relationships continue throughout professional careers.

He joined Site as a Project Designer in 2017. Since graduating from LSU, Lee has worked on a wide range of projects – including residential, commercial, and rooftop amenities throughout the east coast.

In the future, Lee hopes to continue to design as a landscape architect, and perhaps one day have the opportunity to provide mentorship to students and young professionals. “I want to contribute my knowledge to the profession and society in a good way.”