California State University, Dominguez Hills President Mildred García opens the 2011-2012 academic year – her fifth as president – on Monday, August 22, with the annual Fall Convocation, a tradition among universities in which the president welcomes faculty back to campus and highlights the previous year’s accomplishments and plans for the coming year. Classes start at CSU Dominguez Hills on August 27.
The event will take place from 9 to 10:30 a.m. in the University Theatre and will be broadcast live on the university’s distance learning web site, http://dhtv.csudh.edu.
Then at 3 p.m. during the Fall Convocation reception in the Loker Student Union ballroom, Carson-based Russian-American painter Alexey Steele will unveil the fourth and final painting commemorating CSU Dominguez Hills’s 50th anniversary, which concluded this past May. The painting is part of Steele’s ongoing “My Neighbors Series.” Signed poster will be sold.
“Learners of Dominguez: Howard, Jenika, Auburn, Chris, Ronald” features the likenesses of five CSU Dominguez Hills students, from its oldest at 80, Howard Christiansen, to its youngest at 17, Auburn Hightower, and Jenika Miller, Chris Barnette and Ronald Farol.
Steele painted the 15-inch by 60-inch “Learners” in a series of intense live sessions with the students, whose emotional openness and engagement made them, in his words, “his co-authors.” None of the painting was touched up after the sittings, resulting in what Steele says is a “live painting from first stroke to last.” Through the realism of such collective participation, Steele said he wanted the painting to capture the soul of the students, and as a result, the university.
“It’s about the character and about real people. It’s about the person and truthfulness of representation. It’s about that internal uniqueness that each person carries and about the expressiveness it conveys,” Steele said. “It gives that personal look at Dominguez Hills today that I hope will inspire the viewer many years from now.”
