Tony Tasset & Charley Harper Named the 2019 Distinguished Alumnus

The Alumni Council of the Art Academy of Cincinnati is proud to confer upon Charley Harper and Tony Tasset the 2019 Distinguished Alumnus Award. Tasset will also join as the Academy’s Commencement speaker.

About Charley Harper

Charley Harper (August 4, 1922-June 10, 2007) was a Cincinnati-based American Modernist artist. He was best known for his highly stylized wildlife prints, posters and book illustrations.
Born in Frenchtown, West Virginia in 1922, Harper’s upbringing on his family farm influenced his work to his last days. He left his farm home to study art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and won the Academy’s first Stephen H. Wilder Traveling Scholarship. While at the Academy, and supposedly on the first day, Charley met fellow artist and fellow Distinguished alumnus, Edie McKee, whom he would marry shortly after graduation in 1947.

About Tony Tasset

Tony Tasset fuses unstinting candor, dizzying scale shifts, and precise prismatic rendering of familiar objects and forms to create towering sculptures, paintings, and installations that transfix, startle, prickle, and captivate viewers around the globe. These massive spectacles provoke spontaneous dialogue among persons encountering each other as they come upon Tasset’s outdoor sculptures, characterized by luminous color and unimaginable depth, weight, height, width, and impact.
Tony Tasset’s works are anything but “tacit.” Rather, they are astounding, radical, commanding, and arresting. The artist’s own uncurbed, seemingly boundless, and momentous art has held innumerable people around the globe spellbound for 35 years.

Q&A with Wilder Winner Noel Maghathe

Artists draw inspiration from many places including the environment that surrounds them. The opportunity for a change of scenery can prove especially valuable. At the Art Academy of Cincinnati the Stephen H. Wilder Traveling Scholarship provides just that, affording art students of all disciplines the chance to explore the world around them as fuel for their creative expression.

Noel Maghathe is a Mixed Palestinian American artist and graduate of the Art Academy. Dedicated to radical gender and identity politics, Maghathe uses performance, photography, sculpture, and installation to advance socially conscious dialogues centering queer voices.

Check out a Q&A with Maghathe below to learn more about Noel’s experience traveling on the Wilder Scholarship.

Q: You were one of last year’s recipients of the Wilder Traveling Scholarship. Where did you go and how did you use this award to continue your practice and research?

I was lucky enough to travel with my father to his home in Halhul, West Bank, Palestine.

I decided to use Wilder Traveling Scholarship to experience being a queer person/femme in Palestine first hand, but to also reconnect as an adult with this whole side of my life. Using several social media outlets, I connected with other queer Palestinians to listen to their experiences and collaborate.

Q: Can you share with us your experience in Palestine?

I spent the majority of my time in the small town of Halhul, where my grandmother lives. My father was born and raised in this rural town.

It was a wild experience full of ups and downs; two men asked for my hand, conversations of marriage, conversations of equality. I gained and lost feelings of wonder, revisiting a home after seven years brings comfort but distortion.

It became so much more than me being queer, but re-birthing the home in my heart for this place. When creating with my new friends, I felt happy and strong finally being here after all of this hard work.

I sat and spoke with my friend Rawand from Ramallah for an hour as we did each other’s hair after we’d just met. I thought back to my childhood where I spent hours sitting with my sisters straightening our hair for school the next day, we spent so much time laughing and intertwining. After our hair, we did our makeup and she took me to the old city of Birzeit, where we interacting with the space using my cellophane forms I had been making in Halhul.

It was an enduring experience with a lifetime friendship, I plan on coming back and studying at Birzeit for gender studies in the next couple years.

Q: How did your experience in  Palestine change your work?

It changed the way I thought of art making and what it can impact.

Q: After returning, you went on to become an Agent of Change delegate to this year’s UN Commission on the Status of Womxn. Was this a continuation of your work during your time in Palestine?

This was a continuation of my path as an artist. I was shown and recommended this opportunity by a new friend, Mitchell Sutika Sipus.

He spoke at graduation last May and we connected after hearing about the work he has done overseas. I was encouraged to apply after he expressed that we need more artists outside of this form to be involved in global conversations.

Q: Could you tell us more about your experience as an Agent of Change?

It was an overwhelming time!

I loved being in NYC and to be at the United Nations HQ every day was hair-raising. I spent every morning taking a train and bus over to Manhattan then heading to a conference room full of people from all over the world. I’m just sitting here two seats from the minister of women of New Zealand, speaking of the economic empowerment of rural women in NZ.

I’m in awe that I am here and able to be a part of the conversation. Speaking and hearing views of these gender issues and the lack of universal conversation of the trans and gender non-conforming community really pushed me to my choice of gender studies for masters.

I hope to connect more with ILGA (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association ) in the future for this matter, they were the only group to truly address these issues within the whole commission. Shout out to Zhan Chiam! I met so many people that were doing amazing things to help further the gender equality from Fiji to Indonesia to Estonia.

I am so thankful for the time I spent not only at the United Nations, but the people I met in New York. What a beautiful time I had.

Q: Where do you see your work going from here and how do you feel your art/design will make an impact on the world?

I see myself going in a completely new direction after this conference, I was very torn on whether to continue fine arts in grad school, but I have decided to dive into gender studies as well as Arab studies.

I will always make work and perform, but I need to be involved in these issues and use my art and performances in those environments as one. Especially with what is happening this moment with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with the Land Day peaceful protests, I can’t just bury my head.

Q: How do you view yourself as a change maker?

I’m still learning how I can make a change. Thus far I’ve been advocating as much as possible and my performances are becoming more political and facing these issues head-on.

To view the original post by Mitchell Sipus, Art Academy alumnus, click here.

I was deeply honored to give the commencement speech to the graduating class of 2017 at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. These last few days, I am now continually reflecting upon the unique and powerful proposition this school makes to the world. There is no other school like it.

The only other college to which I can compare it is the mythical Black Mountain College of the 1960s that produced revolutionary minds such as John Cage. To plagiarize someone else’s story, the Art Academy (AAC) doesn’t merely graduate artists or designers, it graduates the critical but hard to find team member of every successful business:

“there are three kinds of people you want to launch a business: the person with the idea, the person with the financial sense, and the person who makes you say ‘what the fuck?’ The last is the person who can rip ideas apart, remix them, and flip everything upside down to generate breakthroughs that no one else can see.” 

The last kind of person is particularly hard to find. Many schools can teach people to become accountants or to be entrepreneurs but no school teaches students to be intellectually rebellious and operationally radical. Except for the Art Academy of Cincinnati. No joke. It is even in their mission statement.

Everyday books about Innovation, Design, and Economic Disruption churn through billions of dollars in annual publishing sales. Parallel to the publishing industry, countless institutions argue they offer an education that will transform students into innovators who will change our world. But do these industries actually generate the change-makers we seek?

In the last ten years, I’ve been fortunate to spend time at the world’s best universities as a speaker, student, or instructor including Oxford University, MIT, Harvard, Cornell, and Carnegie Mellon University – and these are indeed great schools. Their students are brilliant and the faculty are more than competent. The programs are well funded and the students are nearly guaranteed the security of a well-paying job upon graduation. These schools also attract people who already have a history of success – when Elon Musk attended Stanford, he had already earned degrees in Physics and Economics. Yet I have never encountered another school that transforms unknown students into true innovators. In fact, when I recently taught Design Thinking at an East Coast top-tier MBA program, my students complained the entire time about the lack of clear directions and the constantly shifting parameters within the course requirements. I have since learned that this complaint is exceedingly common within MBA Design degrees. These programs are forcing square people through intellectual circles and many graduates come out very little changed.

Do all art schools impact students to think so differently? I’m not sure… there are many art schools in the world. My sister is a student at SCAD. I have friends as RISD. When I was a teenager, I lusted for the attention of the San Francisco Institute of Art (SFAI) and the School of the Chicago Institute of Art (SCIA). Unfortunately, in 1999, I had so little money for college, I did not even have the 50 dollars to apply to any of those programs let alone all of them. With little hope to attend any college, I drove my broken-down ‘91 Geo Prism to the Art Academy of Cincinnati for a Portfolio Review Day in mid-October, to present my high school artwork to various colleges. San Francisco was there, as was Chicago, and at least a dozen others. Chicago offered a partial scholarship on the spot, which was incredible… yet, as I did not have the money to apply, let alone to live in Chicago, it held more symbolic meaning than opportunity. I was nonetheless motivated at that moment to find a way to go to art school.

Weeks later I happened to cross paths with some artists, Aaron Butler and Christopher Daniel. Aaron worked at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and pioneered the experimental music group, Dark Audio Project, while Chris was a metal sculptor who went on to found the extraordinary and thriving Blue Hell Studio. They both held Art Academy ties, and with their encouragement, I decided to do everything possible to earn a scholarship. I applied only minutes before the deadline, in person, submitting my application in a massive wooden box crafted from an old PA system pulled from a dumpster in Kentucky (at Aaron’s suggestion that I make the physical application somehow stand out). As a mediocre student in high school, I had only applied to one other school at the time – the globally exceptional design school of the University of Cincinnati, DAAP – and I was not accepted. The Art Academy took a chance on me, offered a scholarship to cover more than half of tuition, and I will be forever grateful. Notably, after later graduating from the Art Academy, I received a full scholarship to DAAP for graduate school.

Visiting AAC this (in May) was not only nostalgic – it was inspirational. The Art Academy is a weird place. It consistently takes chances on people like me. It is a community of outsiders. It pushes them to build expertise on the ability to make something new – which is not typical, considering most degree programs demand students acquire knowledge on a longstanding subject or methodology. It pushes students to invent new models of production, new identities as artists, and to take life to the frontier of possibility. Graduates of the Art Academy of Cincinnati do not need books on creative problem solving, they need wicked problems where all others have failed. If the Art Academy has a flaw, it is a simple fact that they do little marketing or high-profile partnering, and consequently, the world knows little about this school amid an insatiable demand. The Art Academy of Cincinnati is not a diamond in the rough – it is a silent A-bomb in the exosphere.

My life has changed much since I attended the Art Academy. I am writing this blog entry while on a flight to San Francisco. Tomorrow morning, I will run a series of design strategy workshops for a Venture Capital firm in Silicon Valley to explore new investment models for Artificial Intelligence. Since attending the Art Academy, I have lived in multiple countries, built companies, and am fortunate that my abilities to tackle entrenched problems in new ways are continually in demand. When I think of the year I started college, 2000, my life is now very different from the future that was most likely ahead. Though I have my fair share of life challenges, I have a wonderfully creative and satisfying life. It has been a hard journey, but I credit the faculty and students of the Art Academy of Cincinnati. While most colleges chart a path for your future, the Art Academy provided a compass to guide me through the deep woods of the unknown.

Mitchell Sipus
Class of 2004