In February, CalArts launched 50+50: A Creative Century from Chouinard to CalArts, an unprecedented alumni artist-led scholarship endowment initiative. In partnership with publisher Lisa Ivorian-Jones, CalArts commissioned and is selling editions and limited series artwork by a prominent group of 50 alumni artists from the Chouinard Art Institute and the School of Art. Representing a broad range of cross-generational, cross-disciplinary art-making, the new editioned works and limited series will continue to be released in curated groupings….

How can we collaborate creatively when we’re all locked up in our own little worlds? When the coronavirus pandemic hit earlier this year, the world—and CalArts—pressed the “pause” button. Students dispersed across time zones as campus cleared out. No one knew with any certainty when they might return. The faculty took a moment to regroup…

I began CalArts just when the Valencia campus opened in the fall of 1971. On the first day of class, School of Art students assembled in a large room with clerestory windows. Dean Paul Brach stood at a podium and brought the gathering to order with these memorable words, “Summerhill is over.” Summerhill, the radically…

The island of trash floating upon the sapphire seas between California’s coastline and Hawaii has swelled to perhaps twice the size of Texas, and that’s a conservative estimate. This garbage-strewn oceanic gyre is a symbol of our fraught relationship with the environment, and its constant growth seems inevitable. At current pollution rates, plastic will outweigh…