May 7, 2012

Penn Museum welcomes a new director — and the Gazette Arts Blog looks back on those who preceded him

As of this summer, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology will have a new director.

Julian Siggers — “a pioneer in advancing public engagement with museums and archaeology” — will officially assume the post on July 1. He is currently the vice president for programs, education and content communication at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. In that role, he has created partnerships with government agencies, secured a weekly show on the Discovery Channel and directed a Dead Sea Scrolls project that helped the museum attract more visitors than it had in 20 years.

He’ll be joining the Penn Museum in the middle of a busy year. The museum turned 125 this year and on Saturday, its newest exhibition opened to the public. (For an in-depth look at the new show, MAYA 2012 Lords of Time, check out this feature in the May|June Gazette.)

The combination of Siggers’ appointment and the museum’s banner anniversary made us curious about the cultural institution’s past leaders. We’ll be sharing a few of their stories in the coming months, starting today with George Byron Gordon.

Born in Canada in 1870, Gordon went on to study at Harvard during the late 19th century. In 1892, he traveled to Copan, Honduras, for a Harvard-sponsored excavation led by John G. Owens. When Owens died in the field, Gordon assumed leadership and directed the next six sessions in Copan.

He became an assistant curator at the Free Museum of Science and Art (later reclassified as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology) in 1903 and led expeditions to Alaska in 1905 and 1907 with his brother, MacLaren Gordon. On a trip down the Yukon River in their canoe (named the Penn), the brothers discovered a previously unknown source of the Kuskokwim River and an equally unknown tribe of people who they called “Kuskwagamutes.”

Gordon began teaching at Penn in 1907, offering the first regular anthropology lectures for undergraduate and graduate students. Shortly after the Department of Anthropology was established, he became the museum’s director in 1910. In that role, he enhanced the museum’s reputation and its collections, purchasing artifacts from Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt and the Americas and establishing the museum’s Chinese collection.

In 1926, the University conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Science on Gordon. He died the following year after an accident at the Philadelphia Racquet Club. By then, he was supervising field work in Bet Sh’ean and Ur.

The Penn Museum’s G.B. Gordon Central America collection includes diaries, survey notes, reports and stories from his Copan Expeditions and Yucatan Expedition (1910), along with Gordon’s original stories, articles and book reviews. It also features Gordon’s introductions for speakers in the museum’s Saturday Afternoon Lecture Series, his speeches to professional organizations and his class lectures.

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April 19, 2012

Austin Kleon explains how to “steal like an artist” at the Penn Bookstore

Austin Kleon of newspaper-blackout-poem fame recently stopped by the Penn Bookstore to discuss his new book, Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. With one of his 20×200 prints hanging on my wall, I couldn’t resist hearing what he had to say.

Calling it a “picture book for adults,” Kleon said Steal Like an Artist began with a speech he gave about the things he wished he’d known when he started out. He ultimately decided to turn that advice into a book for budding artists. Here are some of the main points from his visit to Penn, including a post-talk Q&A:

  • You are a mashup of what you let into your life. In other words, artists are collectors.
  • Your inspiration shouldn’t be limited to living artists. “The great thing about dead or remote masters is they can’t refuse you as an apprentice.”
  • Keep a “swipe file,” either digitally or on paper, of works you see that are “worth stealing.” Then, when you’re in search of inspiration, simply open up your swipe file to find some.
  • “Creativity is subtraction.” Figure out what to leave out of a given work so you can concentrate on what’s most important.
  • Assigning constraints can lead to some of your best work. For instance, Dr. Seuss’s editor bet him that he couldn’t write a book that used only 50 words. The beloved children’s book author wound up creating Green Eggs and Ham.
  • For those whose jobs require creativity, it can be challenging to summon still more creativity at the end of the day for independent artistic pursuits. Become a morning person and use your greatest stores of creativity on your own art before the workday begins.

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Filed under Heard on Campus, Visual Art

March 12, 2012

Alumna takes home her first Grammy — with a little help from The Boss

Last month Michelle Holme C’00 flew to Los Angeles, put on a sparkly black dress and proceeded to scare the hell out of Trey Parker. (Yes, the South Park, Book of Mormon Trey Parker.)

Granted, some other stuff happened in between: Holme arrived at the Grammy Awards pre-telecast and watched Dave Koz jam out on his tiny soprano saxophone; she was announced as a Grammy nominee for Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package with her co-art director Dave Bett; and the two were summoned to the stage as Grammy winners for their work on Bruce Springsteen’s The Promise: The Darkness On The Edge of Town Story.

“I was there with my friends and it was a big crowd of people,” Holme recalls. “We were sitting right behind Trey Parker, and when our names were called, I think we scared him because everyone started screaming and freaking out. I think he was like, ‘Who is this sitting behind me that’s such a big deal?’”

You can watch the entire Grammy pre-telecast here, including Michelle’s win around 20:40.

Holme has been working in the creative department at Sony Music since graduating from Penn with a dual major in communications and fine arts. She’s designed album art, logos and tour merchandise for musicians including Santana, John Legend, Jay-Z, Aerosmith, Gavin DeGraw and, since 2001, The Boss himself.

She provided these images of the Grammy-winning box set she created for Springsteen:

One might wonder how the rise of digital music affects Michelle’s work. When I asked her about it, Holme said it’s “definitely changing things. At first, they said, ‘We don’t need any graphics whatsoever.’ But now, every single piece of music needs to be branded in some way and stand out, especially in the iTunes store where there are pages and pages of music.” While much of her work was focused on CD booklets during her early days with Sony, Holme says she now spends most of her time creating graphics that are paired with a digitally downloaded song or album and designing “fancy, crazy $700 packages and high-end boxed sets.”

Oddly enough, her favorite form to design for now predates all of that: vinyl. “We’ll do a sleeve or a jacket or a label for the vinyl album,” she says. “Or sometimes, we might even get to make the vinyl itself colored or marbled. I love when I get to do vinyl.”

Here are a few other stories Michelle shared with me in our interview:

On finding out she was nominated: “I was out in a bar in New York and I got a text from someone at the label saying, ‘Congratulations!’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, no.’ I rushed home. I wanted to see it on the computer screen to make sure it was real. I went to the Grammy site, did a search for my name and it popped up. It was kind of crazy. I started calling my family and my friends and just freaking out a bit. It was a cool way to find out.”

On making her second trip to the Grammys: “I was nominated five years ago for another boxed set, but it was the same year a Johnny Cash package was up, so I knew I wasn’t going to win. This time was a little different because I knew what to expect, but it seemed like this year was bigger and there were more cameras and everything. It was a bit overwhelming. Last time, I knew there was no way in hell I could possibly win. This year, I was a bit more nervous.”

On her acceptance speech: “I wrote some kind of loose thing on my iPhone, so I had to bring my phone up there with me.”

On her shiny new award: “I didn’t get to take it home that night. Everything’s a prop. They’re engraving [my Grammy] right now. In fact, I just got an e-mail that it will come sometime in April. People at work want me to bring it in. I was just going to put it on my work desk at home, but my boyfriend has been saying stuff like, ‘We’re going to put it over there where the light’s shining on it.’”

On her favorite musician to work with: “Bruce [Springsteen] is definitely my favorite because he’s so laidback and chill. It’s always fun working with him because he’s up for trying new stuff.”

You can see more of Michelle’s design work on her website: michelleholme.com.

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Filed under Alumni, Music

March 5, 2012

Williams-Sonoma President/CEO Laura Alber C’90 inspires employees through art

“We have always had a legacy of spaces that inspire our people,” Laura Alber C’90, the president and CEO of Williams-Sonoma, Inc., told me recently. “It’s consistent with the business we’re in, which is a very visual business.”

It seemed only natural, then, that as the company readied a new building in San Francisco to house its IT team, Alber  thought about how to include eye-catching inspiration. Natural light and open work spaces were clear first steps, but Alber says she also realized the importance of “putting art there that would inspire them and be relevant.” But where to start?

Through her ties to the ICA — Alber is a member of the museum’s Art Council — she reconnected with fellow alum Chris D’Amelio C’88, who runs the D’Amelio Terras Gallery in New York. “We shared and brainstormed ideas about what to do in that building, and he just had fantastic suggestions,” Alber recalls. “We gave him a general sense of what we were looking for, and then we gave him carte blanche to choose the art. At one point, he brought in a manila folder of options, and I thought every piece was spectacular.”

In the end, 35 works of contemporary art were installed in the new building. Last fall, Alber invited Penn alumni to tour the new collection — an event that the ICA blog wrote up here.

When we spoke earlier this year, Alber named Wolfgang Tillmans’s paper drop (star) III (2008, pictured above) as her favorite work in the group. The 20-by-24-inch photograph — part of the artist’s “paper drop” series — celebrates Tillmans’s fascination with paper and turns photographic paper itself into the subject of a photo.

Here are a few of the other works that Alber and D’Amelio selected:

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Filed under Alumni, Visual Art

February 22, 2012

Oscar predictions in the Penn Current

The Penn Current recently ran an article on Meta Mazaj’s Oscar picks, which I can’t resist sharing. Mazaj, who lectures in the Cinema Studies Program and is currently teaching an introduction to film studies course, a class on film festivals and a graduate course on world cinema, singled out these winners:

Best Picture: The Artist or Hugo

Best Director: Martin Scorsese for Hugo

Best Actor: George Clooney in The Descendants or Jean Dujardin in The Artist

Best Actress: Viola Davis in The Help or Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn

Best Supporting Actor: Jonah Hill in Moneyball

Best Supporting Actress: Jessica Chastain in The Help

Will you watch the Oscars this weekend? Who are you rooting for?

I haven’t heard about any Penn alumni who will be up for awards this year, but you may remember last year, when I wrote about Todd Lieberman C’95 and Tom Heller C’95, both of whom had produced 2011 Oscar-nominated films. (You can also reader a longer interview with Heller here.)

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Filed under Faculty/Staff, Film

February 13, 2012

Kien Lam W’06 on his trip around the world—and the viral video it sparked

On the last day of 2011, Kien Lam W’06 logged on to his YouTube and Vimeo accounts and posted a video he’d made. He’d been trying his hand at time-lapse videos since October, but there was something special about this new one. It swiftly became an Internet sensation and in less than a week, it had almost a million views on YouTube alone.

Titled “Time Is Nothing” or “Speeding Around the World in Under 5 Minutes,” depending on which video-sharing site you visit, Lam’s video has now been viewed more than two million times on YouTube. The New Yorker listed it as a “To watch” video. The Atlantic shared it with readers, too, and Lam even appeared on CNN to discuss his work.

In addition to its stunning photography, viewers loved the video’s inspiring back story: In August 2010, Lam left his job as a financial-firm strategist and spent 343 days traveling around the world. He visited 17 countries and took more than 6,000 photos. When he got home, he established himself as a professional photographer and, by the end of 2011, had fused his travel photos into a time-lapse video. (He even squeezed in a nod to Penn. Don’t miss the Locust Walk scene at 3:05.)

Now based in San Francisco, Lam put down his camera to answer a few questions about his incredible round-the-world trip.

Can you run me through the events that transformed you from a 9-to-5 employee into the world traveler who created this video?
I used to be very envious of the people I’d meet on my travels who told me they were traveling around the world for six months or a year at time. Where we met was simply just one of many places they would see on their journey. I would return from my two-week trip wishing that I could quit my job, pack a bag and explore the world more than one country at a time.

In 2010, I felt like it was a good as time as any to take a break from my career and travel before it became too hard to leave. I wrote down all the places I had always dreamed of traveling to, packed a bag and bought a one-way ticket to London, where I’d get to visit some friends and start my journey. I had a general idea of the direction I’d be headed, but I left it pretty open-ended. I didn’t always end up where I thought I’d be going and often times found my “itinerary” was created from city to city.

Along the way, I wanted to capture my journey in a way that could both preserve the spirit of the trip and what I experienced. I didn’t want to only capture beautiful landscapes devoid of people. How do you show the busy maze-like city of Fez without showing the people? How do you capture locals and visitors hurrying about in Taksim Square? Wherever I was, if there was some form of movement in the scenery and I happened to have my camera, I would set it down and take about 40 to 60 photographs timed a few seconds apart. As the pages of my passport filled up with stamps, so did my portable hard-drive with thousands of images that would eventually be put together to form this video a few months after I finished my travels.

Did you have regrets about leaving your job at any point on your trip?
It was a little unusual at first to think that I’d no longer be receiving a bi-weekly paycheck or that I had to wake up a certain time to get into the office, but that disappeared pretty early on. On a few occasions, I would miss the sense of accomplishment you get after delivering on a big project and grabbing celebratory drinks afterwards.

Tell me about some of the most memorable moments from your travels.
I am a big fan of scuba diving and I could go on and on about how amazing it feels to be underwater and watch as a school of barracudas dart about perfectly synchronized or swim ever closer to massive sharks or a baby turtles. Above land, I think about celebrating Christmas in 80-degree weather on a tropical island in Thailand, riding a motorbike through heavy Bali rush-hour traffic and returning the rental in one piece, and sleeping under the stars in the Sahara with nothing but miles and miles of sand in every direction.

Which places are at the top of your list to re-visit?
I would love to go back to relax on the beaches of Lagos, Portugal, dive around the islands in Thailand and Indonesia, and explore the landscapes of Bolivia and Peru.

What are you up to now?
Somewhere along the way, I made the decision to pursue photography as a full time professional and it is something I am dedicating my time to for the foreseeable future. Beyond just taking images, I like to tell stories and capture moments whether it’s with a camera, on film or with a brush on canvas. At the moment, I am splitting my time between portrait and wedding photography.

What about travel? Where are you hoping to go next?
I’d love to explore Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, take the Trans-Siberian train between Russia, Mongolia and China, and somehow get to Antarctica to get to that seventh continent.

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Filed under Alumni, Film, Visual Art

January 30, 2012

An evening with the puzzlemaster

Last week, a diverse group of puzzle lovers gathered in Irvine Auditorium to hear from Will Shortz, the New York Times’ crossword puzzle editor. He’s held that post since 1993, but even if you’re not a crossword fan specifically, you’ve probably encountered Will’s work at some point. He’s been the puzzlemaster on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday since 1987, and he’s the man behind several best-selling Sudoku books. He’s also the only person in the world with a college degree in “enigmatology”—that is, the study of puzzles.

Shortz came to Penn as part of the academic Year of Games. (You can read more about that theme year here, and even print out a few ancient games to try.) As part of his presentation, Shortz discussed the main requirements for a crossword puzzle (symmetrical design; words of three or more letters; lively language), his favorite puzzles, and the psychology behind our attraction to puzzles.

Here, Shortz explains his all-time favorite crossword puzzle: an Election Day edition that appeared November 5, 1996 and offered two possible solutions to the clue “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper (!).”

And here, Shortz shares his thoughts on why we’re drawn to puzzles in the first place:

Following his presentation and a brief Q&A, Shortz split the audience into two teams and quizzed volunteer participants, NPR puzzlemaster-style. Wondering how you would have done? Here’s an example of one of the games Shortz led that evening:

Given two words, anagram the letters of one of them to get a slang synonym of the other one (i.e. DRUNK and MOBBED ==> BOMBED — an anagram of MOBBED that is also a slang synonym of DRUNK).
-COOL and CRAZY ==> ?
-DEBUTS and BANKRUPT ==> ?
-GENIUS and NINETIES ==> ?

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Filed under Heard on Campus, Written Word