After drawing the head on a sheet of paper, a high school student from Ranch Dominguez Preparatory School (RDPS) folds the paper to hide his drawing then passes to a classmate who draws the torso, who folds the piece again and then passes on to another who draws the legs. After repeating the process four times, a unique piece of “surprise art” is unveiled. The students were being taught an art technique called "exquisite corpse" to learn how to create collaboratively. Prominent Los Angeles visual and performing artist Mario Ybarra, Jr. was teaching the technique to the nearly 50 CSUDH, high school, and college students during Praxis Studio's first Youth Community Forum at California ... Read More
College of Arts and Humanities
Hermosa Beach Resident Awarded Rotary Peace Fellowship
Hermosa Beach's Scott Martin is heading to Thailand in January after being awarded the 2017 Rotary Peace Fellowship. He will be studying in the Rotary Peace Centers program at Chulalongkorn University, where he will receive training in peace and conflict resolution. The Rotary Foundation's goal is to “advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace through the improvement of health, the support of education, and the alleviation of poverty.” Martin already has extensive peace and conflict resolution training and has been a member of Mediators Beyond Borders International, which focuses on building local skills for peace and meditation, for years and has traveled to numerous countries to ... Read More
CSU Dominguez Hills Alumna Arleene Valdez Takes on Big Events for the LA Times
“Baptism by rain” is what Cal State Dominguez Hills alumna Arleene Valdez ('11, B.A., communications, minor in marketing) calls her first assignment as a planner of consumer events at the Los Angeles Times after it rained on the newspaper's annual Festival of Books for the first time in its 20-year history. Fortunately, the festival is so popular that it still had its largest turnout to date in April 2016 as its long-time fans and newcomers–more than 100,000s attendees–broke out umbrellas or just got wet as they strolled the entire USC campus to find books, and enjoy literary speakers, performers, and food. All the while, Valdez and her colleagues in the Times' events department were ... Read More
CSU Dominguez Hills Professor Gilah Hirsch’s Documents Archived in Smithsonian
In the early 1970s, Gilah Yelin Hirsch was an artist whose paintings were widely recognized, but it was a time when art by women was rarely in major museums and exhibits around the world. In 1971, to draw attention to the sexism in the art scene, particularly in Los Angeles, Hirsch collaborated with a small group of women to found the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists (LACWA), which helped “pave the way to equality for women artists” everywhere, according to Hirsch. Hirsch has been invited to house her archive of original documents on the creation of LACWA at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington D.C. “It's really a tremendous honor, and I'm very pleased to ... Read More
CSUDH Receives $40k California Arts Council Grant to Develop Arts Program on Campus
California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) has received a $40,000 grant from the California Arts Council (CAC) as part of its 2016 Creative California Communities (CCC) program to establish the Big City Forum: Praxis Studio at CSUDH, a one-year extracurricular, cross-disciplinary arts and design program. The university is one of only 41 grantees this year that received a total of $1,953,707 in grants from the council. With the CAC's support, CSUDH's Art and Design Department will implement the community engagement art program in partnership with the Los Angeles-based arts organization Big City Forum (BCF). The grant will be matched by CSUDH, Big City Forum, and grant partner ... Read More
