During his lecture, Chris Cole discussed what it was like to work with early Macintosh computers.

Advertising & Graphic Design alumnus Christopher Cole (CCAD 1989) returned to campus to share his advertising expertise with CCAD students Monday, February 28 in Canzani Center Auditorium. Through the telling of his story—from graduation to his current position as senior vice president and creative director at global advertising powerhouse BBDO—Cole shared his advice for success.

Enjoy “stepping stone” jobs. These jobs are meant to build experience, to serve as a chance to fail (which means, they are chances to learn).

Don’t be a jack of all trades. During interviews, focus on what you want to do and what your interviewer wants you to do. Tailor your portfolio to your interviews.

Be smarter. Something CCAD grads have going for them is the ability to be smarter, to apply their work to the real world.

Be a “go to” person. Be the person in the office who the company can’t afford to get rid of. Win awards, solve problems, bring in and relate to clients. When you start a job, ask yourself, “What do I have to do to make myself invaluable?”

Cole has worked on advertising campaigns for Duracell Batteries, Pespi, General Electic, Mountain Dew, Mitsubishi, AOL, Cingular Wireless, and Hyatt—among others. He was nominated for an Emmy for the commercial, Cingular Wireless, Raising the Bar.

His lecture was presented as part of the Visiting Artists Series, which is sponsored in part by the Skestos Endowment Fund for Visiting Artists & Lecturers, the Ohio Arts Council, and Downtown Columbus’s Renaissance Hotel.

For more information about upcoming presentations in the Visiting Artist Series, visit the CCAD Event Listings.

View Cole’s work on his website.

The Venerable Geshe Kalsang Damdul (Gesha la) blesses CCAD's MFA space

The Venerable Geshe Kalsang Damdul (Gesha la) completed a two-day visit to Columbus College of Art & Design, speaking to students and blessing the new Master’s of Fine Arts (MFA) space.

On Monday, Oct. 25, students, faculty, and community members came together for an event that filled Canzani Auditorium to capacity. In his presentation, Enjoying the Path, Geshe La focused on learning through reasoning and logic and drew analogies to modern day dilemmas.

“Growth comes in three stages of wisdom: studying, contemplation, and experience. This sequence is engaged in the present moment. If your mind wanders to the past or future, you have lost focus and mindfulness.”

He continued, “If you have [so much] homework, take a breath and sit silently for a moment. Don’t spoil the end result with overexertion and rigidness. Casually open your heart and mind; this allows peace and happiness to dawn inside you.”

At the conclusion of the program, Geshe la invited audience members to place their art-making tools on stage for a personal blessing. Participants watched quietly as the rhythmic prayer was directed toward an array of SLR cameras, graphite pencils, sketch pads, and glass blowing instruments.

“We believe that the deities are here to witness,” said Geshe la. “[During the blessing], we request that they protect the objects, that they serve as their guardians. We also say a series of auspicious prayers for the auspiciousness of them.”

Geshe la’s visit to CCAD continued Tuesday, Oct. 26, during a luncheon and blessing at the new MFA space on the third floor of Design Studios on Broad.

The Rev. Tim Ahrens, First Congregational Church, joined Geshe la in his blessing of the MFA space. “My blessing is that all that happens here is blessed, combines the best of the human spirit, and gives back to all of us,” said Ahrens after the traditional Buddhist blessing.

“You’ve done a remarkable thing for us,” said CCAD President Denny Griffith. “It’s an unusual moment for an art school to have a world religious leader on campus, and we appreciate your presence, wisdom, and humor.”

Working directly under his Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama, Geshe la is the assistant director of the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala, India. He has traveled throughout Europe and the US and has taught at Portland (Oregon) State University as a visiting Tibetan Scholar.

Geshe La is teaching Tibetan Culture and Buddhism at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio through Nov. 3.

Image from Jon Rubin's Waffle Shop Project

The New Administration of a Fine Arts Education is a series of four public conversations at CCAD featuring leading individuals in contemporary art, culture, and education who engage in multiple and overlapping artistic and pedagogic practices. Their exhibitions, writing, artworks, and teaching are innovative integrations of cultural production, lifestyle, studio, and teaching.

The New Administration of a Fine Arts Education seeks to contribute to both art and education by generating questions about how we educate artists and what it means to be a practicing artist today. An accompanying publication will be available in March 2011.

All four presentations will take place at CCAD Design Studios on Broad, 390 E. Broad St., at 7 p.m. on the dates indicated below. All are free and open to the public.

Oct. 14, 2010: Jon Rubin
JON RUBIN is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the social dynamics of public places and the idiosyncrasies of individual and group behavior. His solo and collaborative projects include creating a game show for ideas, opening a fake store in an indoor shopping mall, starting a restaurant that secretly operates via take-out orders from its double across the street, broadcasting an office’s telephone conversations through a talking piano, running a neighborhood truck that gives away free homemade goods and services, operating a radio station that only plays the sound of an extinct bird, and developing a free, nomadic art school. He has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico, the Rooseum in Sweden, the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in Germany, and the Nemo Film Festival in Paris. Rubin is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Nov. 17, 2010: Matthew Higgs
MATTHEW HIGGS is an artist and curator based in New York City. He is director and chief curator of White Columns, New York’s oldest alternative arts space, founded in 1970 by Jeffrey Lew and Gordon Matta-Clark. Higgs has curated numerous exhibitions of international art, served as a curator at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and has contributed to the journals ArtForum and Frieze, among many others. As an artist, he has exhibited widely with recent solo exhibitions in New York, Vancouver, and London. He has taught in the curatorial practice program at California College of the Arts.

Jan. 31, 2011: J. Morgan Puett
J. MORGAN PUETT is known for her distinctive fashion designs and installations. Her large-scale collaborative projects engage communities, local cultures, and historical sites, drawing from traditions of costume, labor, personal appearance, and adornment. Recent projects have been commissioned by the Queens Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum, MassMoCA in North Adams, MA, the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Wave Hill in the Bronx, and the Serpentine Gallery in London. Puett and the artist Mark Dion operate Mildred’s Lane, an educational and cultural institute located on their 96-acre farm in the Upper Delaware River Valley in rural Pennsylvania. Both indoors and in the landscape, Mildred’s Lane presents workshops, readings, performances, screenings, temporary exhibitions, and architectural installations. Central to the project is a connection between research, working, making, and living with art. Puett is a visiting faculty member at California College of the Arts.

Feb. 2, 2011: Michael Mercil
MICHAEL MERCIL is an artist and a professor of art at The Ohio State University (OSU). Mercil has recently exhibited at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, and Columbus Museum of Art. His practice reflects interests in the intersections of agriculture and urbanism, searching for sustainable ways of inhabiting land. As part of his ongoing investigations with the Initiative for Living Culture, Mercil’s public works “The Beanfield” and “The Virtual Pasture,” produced in partnership with the Wexner Center for the Arts, the OSU Department of Art, and the Social Responsibility Initiative in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences at OSU, consider the original history of OSU’s land as a site of agricultural production.

Curators: James Voorhies (Bureau for Open Culture & CCAD) with Lisa Dent (Columbus Museum of Art & CCAD)
Produced By: Bureau for Open Culture

Most presentations take place on Mondays from 11 a.m.–12:30 p.m. in CCAD’s Canzani Center Auditorium, downtown at Cleveland Ave. & Gay St.

Fall 2010 Schedule:

• Sept. 20: CANCELED.

• Sept. 27: John Frassanito, Industrial Designer, more …

• Oct. 4:  Richard Bargdill, Psychologist, Artist, Poet, and Songwriter, (added 9/28/10), more …

• Oct. 11: Bolivar J. Bueno, Marketing Consultant, more …

• Oct. 18: Ruth Milligan, Communicator (added 9/29/10), more …

• Oct. 25: Venerable Geshe Kalsang Damdul, Assitant Director of the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, more …

• Nov. 8: Terri Cohn, Art Historian, more …

• Nov. 15: Heather Bayless, Metalsmith & Graphic Designer (added 9/29/10), more …

• Dec. 6: Mitch O’Connell, Illustrator, more …

• Thursday,  Dec. 9 at 7 p.m.: Odili Donald Odita, fine artist, more …

Be sure to check the full schedule for updates and additions.

Ongoing support for the CCAD visiting artists series is received from the Skestos Edowment Fund for Visiting Artists & Lectures, Renaissance Columbus Downtown Hotel, and The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this program with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.