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2018 School of Art Selective Admissions
Every student who has finished their foundations courses and are prepared to progress to a major in the School of Art must submit an application through Slideroom as part of the Selective Admissions process. The Spring 2018 deadline to apply is Friday, April 13, 2018.
Alumni Spotlight: Greg Dahlke, BLA 2015
Anyone can live abroad, according to Greg Dahlke (BLA ’15).
As a junior landscape associate based in Rwanda, he works to manage and educate about environmental impacts. Greg works for Mass Design Group, a nonprofit architecture firm based out of Boston and Kigali, Rwanda. He has spent much of the past few years living in Africa.
“After finishing my fourth year internship in the landscape architecture program, I made the decision that I would only work as a landscape architect if I could work with communities to produce solutions to environmental, health, or educational needs,” Greg said.
Greg’s interest in working with international communities grew while he was a student at LSU. “I believe my degree did not prepare me for my profession in the typical, ‘I received this amount of hours so now I am ready to work’ mentality,” he shared. “My time studying at the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture taught me that the world is out there. I thought, ‘my home has problems and so does everywhere else’ – so let’s use analysis, design, mapping, community engagement, and beauty to make environmental, policy, and economic impacts.”
“My time studying at the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture taught me that the world is out there.”
Greg studied with professors of all with different specialties, ranging from information analysis, horticulture, hand drawing, mixed media graphics, literature, diagramming, and more. All these skills are needed to be a professional landscape architect, an environmental engineer, a national park ranger, an ecologist, a professor, and many other roles.
Greg Dahlke (BLA ’15)
“I knew after leaving school I did not have to be a landscape architect,” Greg said. “I had the skills to start a career in a dozen different fields. That is when I realized how versatile and great my program was.”
During his fifth year at LSU, Greg was accepted into the Peace Corps Senegal program as an Agroforestry Extension Agent. The September after he graduated, he left for Senegal, West Africa.
In his twenty-seven months as a volunteer in Senegal he focused and taught about environment education, garden establishment, and women’s group empowerment and business making opportunists. The biggest challenge for the first six months was learning the language, Greg said; then the next six months was understanding his role in the community. Then he was able to work with others to “achieve goals that everyone wanted and could understand enough to teach others,” he said. “As my time there increased and I became more comfortable, I could start to address issues that were more complex.”
“My time in Senegal gave me the chance to be a community member and leader, to tackle challenges within and outside my knowledge, in the end my experience with local communities taught me to be open and flexible – both with my current projects and my life moving forward.”
Though he spent much of his life in Louisiana – he grew up in Kenner and went to high school in New Orleans before studying at LSU – Greg said he was able to adjust to living abroad in Africa.
“Anyone can live abroad,” he said. “The location does not matter as much as you would think, as long as you have an understanding that things will be difficult for a certain amount of time – and then one day they are not.”
In Rwanda now Greg is working on construction administration for one of MASS Design Group’s projects. He is on site daily working with surveyors, contractors, and local organizations; Greg manages the environmental impact of each contractor’s work.
“For example, in order to do a soil test, the surveyors have to set up a machine to drill, so I make sure that every move made on site does not disturb the landscape, soil, and water in the areas we intend to work,” he explained. “Also, my role includes spreading knowledge to contractors about best practices around their environmental impacts in order to insure better practices and standards.”
Landscape architecture is a field where one can work on a regional master plan, mapping and analysis to understanding micro ecosystems, so the field enables a variety of specialties. “I enjoy big ideas and system design,” Greg said. “As environments around the world change, landscape architects have the chance to work on projects that can influence an individual’s perspective of the landscape as well as a whole region.”
He looks to the future of the field with optimism. “In the same way that architects started significantly influencing the design of cities (away from engineers) in the last 20 years, I think landscape architects will have the same effects in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas globally.”
For now Greg is working to help improve communities in Africa, but he is open to international opportunities elsewhere. He says he would like to learn a third language and live in Japan someday. “I’ve got a few things to do by the time I am thirty.”
School of Interior Design Hosted Evidence-Based Design Faculty Workshop
The College of Art + Design and the School of Interior Design sponsored an Evidence-Based Design Faculty Workshop, facilitated by the Center for Health Design, on February 26, 2018 at the Hilltop Arboretum.
Workshop experts/coaches included Donna Deckard (Center for Health Design), Frank Zilm (University of Kansas), Margaret Calkins (Mayer-Rothschild Foundation), and Rosalyn Cama (CAMA Design). Workshop participants included: Alkis Tsolakis, dean of the College of Art + Design; Marsha Cuddeback, director of the School of Interior Design; interior design faculty members John Campbell, Matthew Dunn, Dru Lamb, TL Ritchie, Phillip Tebbutt, and Jun Zou; School or Architecture assistant professor Robert Holton; School of Landscape Architecture professional in residence Kathleen Bogaski and graduate student Claremai Nguyen; School of Art graduate student Meghan Saas; and E.J. Ourso College of Business instructor Thomas Karam.
“The workshop brought together faculty members from different disciplines to explore the process of evidence-based design,” said Cuddeback.
EBD is defined as “a process for the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence from research and practice in making critical decisions, together with an informed client, about the design of each individual and unique project” (Stichler & Hamilton, 2008). This process is an informed approach to design where decisions are based on quantitative and qualitative research (Nussbaumer, 2009).
The workshop explored the question: Why Does Evidence-Based Design Make a Difference?
The interdisciplinary workshop featured multiple presentations about the history and theory of EBD. Participants had the opportunity to work with EBD experts/coaches to address specific questions about the EBD process and how to apply it to coursework, curriculum and/or research. They also reviewed the tools and resources available from the Center for Health Design that can be utilized to teach students about the EBD process.
Stanley Lewis Lecture March 14
Stanley Lewis, painter, presented a Paula G. Manship Endowed Lecture at the LSU College of Art & Design at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 14, 2018, in the LSU Design Building Auditorium (room 103).
4th Statewide Juried High School Exhibition
Artist Joanna Powell Visits LSU School of Art
Artist Joanna Powell visited the LSU School of Art February 21-22, 2018 to give ceramics workshops and present a lecture to art students titled “Impossible Beauty.” Powell also curated the 8 Fluid Ounces Ceramic Cup Show at the LSU Glassell Gallery.
Powell is a sculptor and painter from Dallas, Texas. Through installation she contextualizes common objects with personal meaning. Her work is the result of thinking about longing, privacy, history and sexuality. She draws inspiration from Etruscan and pre-Columbian pottery, Sèvres porcelain, folk art and painting. Her forms are excavated out of blocks of clay and pinched.
“My work lives in this twilight zone between painting and sculpture,” Powell explains in her artist statement. “The paintings and objects have become married into installations, re-contextualizing them to function as three-dimensional paintings.”
Joanna Powell ceramics workshop
In her studio arts workshops with students, Powell demonstrated ceramics techniques and discussed the artistic process. “What I find beautiful tends to be awkward and irregular and at times the opposite of what is considered the social norm of beauty,” Powell states. “The work allows me a place of asylum, a fictional culture where everything and everyone is okay to exist. I want the viewer forget about an object’s function and call attention to its possibilities as pure matter with its own intentions and encourage questions about what is happening with the objects.”
Powell curated Eight Fluid Ounces 2018, A National Invitational Ceramic Cup Exhibition at the Alfred C. Glassell Jr. Exhibition Gallery through March 4. The ceramic cup show features artists that Powell selected to display a variety of artistic styles; participating artists include: Jordan McDonald, Lydia Johnson, Kala Stein, Nick Weddell, Samantha Briegel, Joe Pintz, Ashley Bevington, Nick Danielson, Birdie Boone, Steven Colby, Ginny Sims, Kurt Anderson, Adam Gruetzmacher, Brian Giniewski, Melissa Mytty, Tom Jaszczak, and Joanna Powell’s own work.
Powell also gave a lecture, in conjunction with the Ceramic Artists Student Association, at the LSU College of Art & Design on February 21, 2018. She discussed her work and the nature of beauty, challenging artists to expand their thinking.
Fulbright Fellow Richard Doubleday Researches Graphic Design in China
Richard B. Doubleday, associate professor of graphic design at LSU School of Art, holds a 2017–18 Fulbright Fellowship where he is a Senior Scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. During his first 3 month-long visit to China he conducted research on contemporary graphic design at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University, the Academy of Arts & Design, and the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA).
“My first Fulbright segment was both extremely challenging given the political climate in Beijing, but also a very rewarding experience,” Doubleday said.
Doubleday’s research on Chinese graphic design has an emphasis on modern design that has flourished since the opening of the economy in 1979. His research interest lies in charting and exploring the dramatic change in graphic design that occurred when China adopted a free market economy.
His current research project, entitled ‘The Genesis of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Graphic Design’, traces the development of modern Chinese graphic design beginning in the Republic of China to The Cultural Revolution to reveal modern Chinese graphic design activities’ “profound effect on the developing contemporary visual language of design in China in an aesthetic, cultural, and design historical context.”
Despite encountering many challenges and obstacles in acquiring literature and material objects in China, he said he was able to assemble a decent amount of data and artwork from the end of the Qing dynasty and Republic of China up to the Chinese Communist Revolution and post-1979, for his research. Additionally, he was invited as an Honorary Adjunct Professor at the Gengdan Academy of Design, Beijing University of Technology, and CAFA.
Since September, Doubleday led two workshops at Tsinghua University and China Women’s University. With the support of the Institute of International Education (IIE), he gave several lectures at the Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication; Baidu.com (the Google equivalent in China) headquarters in Beijing; Beijing Union University College; Soochow University in Suzhou; Qiujia University; and Sichuan University in Chengdu, China.
While in China, Doubleday worked closely with Jian Zhao, PhD, Dean, Visual Communication Design Department, Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University. Zhao authored the book The Beginning of Chinese Modern Book Design Paradigm (1862-1937), which charts the course of Chinese book design and its transformation from traditional to modern style, from the late Qing Dynasty to the early stage of the Republic of China.
Professor Doubleday and Dean Jian Zhao, Tsinghua University.
Upon his return to China in May 2018 to fulfill his Fulbright obligations, Doubleday will work as a graphic design practitioner at Beijing design studio Jiang Hua. He plans to give a lecture at the New York Institute of Technology Nanjing Campus in Nanjing, and, with the support of East Asia-Pacific Regional Travel Program of the American Indonesian Exchange Foundation (AMINEF), will be delivering lectures at RMIT University, Văn Lang University, and the University of Architecture, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Doubleday was featured in the accolades section of LSU Research 2017-18.
Joanna Powell Lecture
Joanna Powell, sculptor and painter, presented a School of Art lecture titled “Impossible Beauty”, in conjunction with the Ceramic Artists Student Association, at the LSU College of Art & Design on Wednesday, February 21, 2018.
Career Networking Day 2018
Art & Design Networking Day is an open networking session for students and employers. Art & Design Career Networking Day took place on Thursday, March 1, 2018, from 8:30–11:30 a.m., in the LSU Student Union – Royal Cotillion Ballroom.