If you walk through GA’s Art Center, you may pass by artwork made by current students in the Visual Arts program. Maybe you enter one of the classrooms and see students working on creative projects. Some of these students may eventually take their creative ambitions beyond GA’s Visual Arts classrooms and pursue art or design.
Among GA’s creative alumni include Chanda Patel ‘11, Cooper Hall ‘14 and Daniel Lipschutz ‘08. Their diverse journeys showcase the wide range of paths in the art and design direction.
Patel, for instance, took classes with Mr. Love and at colleges like Moore College of Art and Design and Temple’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She then studied Industrial Design at Carnegie Mellon.
Based in Chicago, Patel works for Accenture Song, the creative extension of the global professional consulting company Accenture.
Accenture works with clients across industries to address their business strategy, technology or organizational transformation needs. Under Accenture Song, work can also include marketing design and digital product development.
“The offerings are so broad,” Patel said. “I’ve had an airline client who wanted to reimagine their gate area experience. We did research at different airports, had workshops with agents, and came up with some concepts for a future vision. There’s work we do that is just working on improvements to websites or apps.”
Although her current work is different from her visual arts and design background, she joins other people with design backgrounds, like architects, industrial designers, service designers, and graphic designers, working in a field they didn’t necessarily study.
“Because they all have creative backgrounds and ended up in this space of the corporate design world, everyone has some kind of cool side project or hobby they’re working on,” Patel said. “It’s nice to build a connection with everyone who shares a creative background, even though we’re not necessarily practicing it today.”
Patel credits her background at GA and in college with developing her creative thinking and problem-solving, applying it to her current work.
“It’s just about finding ways to bring [creativity] out in the right places,” Patel said.
She encourages current GA students interested in the visual arts or design to talk to people, shadow artists and explore what a career in the applied arts looks and feels like.
“The possibilities are a lot bigger than you think,” Patel said.
Like Patel, Hall went down the design path. She is an architect currently based in New York City, and her work primarily focuses on designing high-end homes in Montauk, the Hamptons, the Caribbean and Southern California.
While at GA, she took classes with Mr. Love and was a part of the small metals club where she made jewelry.
She discovered her interest in architecture at Yale when she took an introductory class where she analyzed the architecture of New Haven and its impact on the community.
“That intro class is about looking at the world around you and engaging with it before you even get to the design part of the curriculum,” Hall said.
Hall works intimately with her clients to understand what they want in their homes. The architectural design process involves multiple phases of design and culminates as a set of construction documents that are given to a contractor.
“A client will bring a picture but it has 20 different things going on, and it’s about trying to understand exactly what those client preferences are, even when they might not know themselves, and then using visual thinking and iteration to work through ideas,” Hall said. “I think a lot of this ties back to my background in the visual arts, a lot of it is about communicating.”
Hall’s iterative process can also be traced back to her days in Mr. Love’s art classes, where she allowed herself to put something on the page and then refine it, rather than being rigid about her choices.
She advises GA students to let go of that rigidity, like what she does in her current work.
“For anybody going to college, just keep an open mind,” Hall said. “I wouldn’t have guessed that I would have ended up in architecture, but obviously looking back it makes so much sense, so I think let yourself explore and be creative.”
Daniel Lipschutz ‘08 is a Philadelphia-based muralist, teaching artist and designer, working with various communities and organizations, including Mural Arts Philadelphia.
When he was at GA, he didn’t identify closely as an artist or a creative. He took more interest in sports and academics and eventually pursued engineering and football at the University of Pennsylvania.
He now understands that his interests back then were formative for what he does now.
“I really didn’t know when I was at GA how much of a visual person I was,” Lipschutz said. “A lot of the work that I make now, from a visual perspective, is very geometric and rooted in a mathematical and scientific approach. In some sense murals kind of lend themselves to that, and there’s an engineering problem-solving approach to the work that I do.”
Lipschutz also enjoys the social aspect of his work, such as teaching and facilitating community murals with children at a recreation center and designing murals with people who are post-incarceration in a restorative justice program.
“I tie this back to GA, where I spent a lot of time on group projects, working for The Edition, or playing sports, and so much of that has taught me about how to be an individual and how to express my own stories,” Lipschutz said. “That is what excites me the most: leading collective stories through sharing time together and playing with the wonderful world of colors.”
One of the murals he has worked on, among a group of artists, is titled “Cloud In Your Tea Cup” (2022), which spans a whole block from 20th to 21st St. and Cuthbert St. in Philadelphia.
“It’s kind of like a meditation in movement about the synergy of the universe, about the collective experience of being a living being,” Lipschutz said.
Lipschutz came to GA on Oct. 18 to design a community mural for the Health and Wellness Center, and worked with Honors Art students on Oct. 21.
He encourages students to be well-rounded, explore different interests, and allow themselves to change so they can discover what they really like.