School’s Walls Are Worth a Notice

Graphic design instructor Shelley Stepp sifts through a stack of posters that have graced the hallways of the California Institute of the Arts over the years, until she finds a personal favorite: a bold, three-color silk-screen with snatches of orange and black against a Rothko-esque field of mustard yellow.

Upon closer inspection, it becomes evident that the artwork is actually a reward notice for a lost dog belonging to a CalArts student.

“Look,” said Stepp, pointing to a scribbled line on one corner of the poster, dating from the mid-1990s. “He actually signed it.”

At most colleges, hallways and bulletin boards are plastered with informational posters and fliers announcing everything from Spanish Club meetings to concerts or plays. They’re usually mundane and unimaginative.

Not so at CalArts, Southern California’s premiere school for graphic and commercial design. It is a campus known for embracing the tenets of conceptual art, which holds that an upturned urinal -- or a lost-dog flier -- may ultimately be as significant as the Venus de Milo.

As a result, student creations are not always confined to gallery space. Indeed, the hallways and bulletin boards in the school’s five-story main building also serve as an artistic testing ground as well as a social and political sounding board, providing a glimpse into the soul of the revered Valencia arts school.

On one wall, a series of posters serves up oblique critiques of the war on terror, with quotes from Kenneth M. Pollack, former national security staffer, superimposed over photos of wolves hunting wild boar. Elsewhere, another poster series approximates the style of guerrilla artist Shepherd Fairey, endlessly reproducing a stylized portrait of a popular teaching assistant.

For the last few years, Stepp and other faculty members have been saving the best of CalArts’ hallway art, recognizing it as an important record of the campus’ history and the evolution of graphic design.

Administrators have given Stepp and Kary Arimoto-Mercer, the assistant dean of the art school, a small grant that will allow them to properly catalog the posters and fliers by establishing a digital record for posterity.

“The students are putting in all of this effort for something that’s very disposable, very ephemeral,” said Stepp, who will begin organizing the archive next year. “But we think it’s worthy of saving and protecting. It creates this really great history of the design program here at CalArts.”

On a recent day, visitors to the main-floor lobby would have noticed a 15-foot mural lamenting the demise of the campus bookstore, a victim of declining profits. But students Gabi Mendoza and Jorge Gonzalez treated the store more like a victim of a drive-by shooting: their ghetto-style memorial, with its gangster-like gothic lettering, was adorned with votive candles and marigolds, the traditional grave decoration on the Mexican Day of the Dead.

These days, much of the mundane communication among administrators, faculty and students takes place over the Internet. But CalArts students also use the wall to communicate with one another, in some cases even carrying on a running dialogue.

Near the front entrance, drama major Brian Santa Maria posted a lengthy “open letter” complaining about the school’s rehearsal policy and calling for the formation of a union for theater students. Within hours, one of his colleagues had tacked up copies of an equally lengthy rebuttal.

Instructor Michael Worthington said one reason the hallways of CalArts are rich with artistic and social commentary is that the campus is self-contained.

The result, Worthington said, is an intimate environment where inhabitants can interact with graphic arts on a more personal level.

“It takes the place of what we think of as a pedestrian street culture,” said Worthington, co-director of CalArts’ graphic design program. “There’s nothing else to do here in Valencia. We’re trapped.”

Even the school’s last newspaper, which surfaced from time to time between 1999 and 2001, was printed as a large poster and tacked in strategic locations around campus. Former editor Marc Herbst recalls watching students gather around the paper when it was posted in the halls.

“From my point of view, it just seemed like a newspaper would work best on the walls,” said Herbst, who now publishes the Los Angeles-based Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. “Since it’s an experimental school, I thought we might as well experiment with form.”

The most visually arresting posters are produced by students in the school’s graphic design program. Sometimes they are pure experiments meant to show off a newly designed typeface or test a visual concept.

CalArts administrators also let students design and produce most of the official posters for campus events, such as concerts and visiting-artist lectures.

More often than not, the student-designed posters are big hits -- creating another set of problems.

“The graphic design program is so strong here and the posters they make are so gorgeous that they get [stolen] as soon as they’re put up,” said Terence McFarland, CalArts’ student council president.