Lauren Rabaino
Cal Poly alumni will reflect back on the years spent at their alma mater and showcase their post-graduation creativity in the Retrospective art exhibit held at the Kennedy Library Nov. 2 to Jan. 6.
The exhibit will feature works by six different Cal Poly alumni in a variety of media and will take a contemplative look at the influential experiences each alumni had at Cal Poly.
“These alumni will look back on their undergraduate years and exhibit work that signifies the teaching philosophies of Cal Poly and the professors and experiences that most influenced them,” said Catherine Trujillo, special collections curator. “The exhibition features work in a variety of media in keeping with the diverse range of interests taken by Cal Poly’s alumni since their undergraduate days and, for some, demonstrating the positive impact they have made on the local community.”
The Retrospective gallery will be open during normal library hours and also during Homecoming Weekend Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.
Jim Dee
As a student at Cal Poly in the ’70s, journalism graduate Jim Dee was already beginning the enterprise that has made his independent movie theatre on Palm Street such a success.
While he was a student at Cal Poly from 1970 to 1975, Dee and friend Paul Karlen began what they called the Cinema Zoo, projecting short Hollywood films, horrors and features in the building that was then the San Luis Obispo Little Theatre to anyone willing to pay a few bucks to get in.
“It was always sporadic when we decided to show these movies,” Dee said, although on average they had about a hundred people at each showing.
His display at the Retrospective exhibit will feature a selection of the movie posters that Dee and Karlen created to promote their Cinema Zoo.
Dee was a DJ at Cal Poly’s KCPR radio station during his college years and said he knew then that there were two options for his career goals. “Cinema was one of the two things I wanted to do, along with possibly a radio career.”
But as he graduated from Cal Poly, Dee saw a need for more movie theaters in San Luis Obispo and chose that path. “In the ’70s there were very few movie theaters in SLO,” he explained. “Between the Fremont and the drive-in and maybe a few others there were probably five screens or so. A lot of times I wouldn’t even be able to see some of the big Hollywood premiers that came out.”
In 1979 he opened the Rainbow Theatre on Osos Street, which ran successfully for 10 years.
Then, in August 1988, he opened San Luis Obispo’s small Palm Theatre.
Having just hit the 20-year mark, Dee’s Palm Theatre is now a staple among the movie buffs of this college generation.
Donna Kandel
When Donna Kandel came to Cal Poly to earn her bachelor’s degree in math, she already had a lot of life experience under her belt. The former freelance artist graduated with her math degree in 2001.
“I had a great experience at Cal Poly … I was able to merge my artistic and mathematical abilities and come away with a really holistic experience.”
Kandel’s exhibit in the Retrospective feature will showcase her unique merger of complex geometric and artistic concepts through hyperbolic geometry. “Math and art are both about visual and spatial relationships,” she said. “I’m committed to presenting math in an aesthetically appealing way.”
She first explored the math and art combination with her senior project at Cal Poly. “A couple of the professors weren’t really sure about the idea when I told them about it,” she said. “I had to explain to them that my goal was to create something that could stand alone as math and stand alone as art.”
With the support of her academic adviser and with a little inspiration from the famous Dutch optical illusionist and graphic artist M.C. Escher, Kandel completed her first hyperbolic geometry exhibit.
Now a math teacher at Nipomo High School, Kandel received her teaching credential from Cal Poly in 2002.
“I see that impulse for creativity in what I do now as a teacher,” she said. “Teaching is a creative function.”
Sumaya Agha
Sumaya Agha got some of her first big breaks as a photographer when she was a college DJ for Cal Poly’s KCPR radio station in the ’90s. There the art and design major had access to bands, including singer Bj”rk’s former band, The Sugarcubes, that gave her a flair for capturing people on film.
In the decade since she graduated, Agha has blossomed into a successful freelance photographer and photojournalist. At first glance, her portfolio seems to contain almost polar opposites; musicians clad in fishnet stockings on one print, Syrian women in burkas on another. But it’s Agha’s life experiences that tie all these themes altogether.
As a young girl, she first became aware of the power of photojournalism as she took trips back and forth between her family’s native country of Syria during the heart of the social movements there.
Her passion for photography carried on into high school and then led to her art degree in 1997 from Cal Poly. Agha remembers being inspired by her professors, particulary Mark Kauffman, a former LIFE Magazine photographer who she said was “really successful, inspirational and down-to-earth, yet he still expected a lot from us students.”
Agha began her career photographing emerging musicians – including not only Bj”rk, but also M. Ward and Vic Chestnut – just as they were in the early stages of their own fame.
One of the photographs on display at the Retrospective display will be a portrait of Academy Award-winning film director Errol Morris, whom Agha did photography work for in the documentary “The Fog of War.”
With a need to be at the center of the art world, Agha moved to the big cities of the East Coast, apprenticing in New York with news media organization Democracy Now.
Agha currently has a studio in Carmel, which she says is quiet and peaceful after her big-city stint, but something she is willing to give up to move to Demascus, Syria in January to continue freelancing and to study Arabic.
The recent political atmosphere in the Middle East has prompted Agha to turn the majority of her attention back to her father’s home country of Syria.
“The goal with my photos is to present the public with the humanity, the culture, the everyday life,” she said.
At the Retrospective exhibit in the Cal Poly library, a photograph entitled “Three generations of women” depicts a table of Syrian women of varying ages. Another is an aerial view of a watermelon vendor selling his treats in the middle of the blistering Middle East summer.
“I feel that the Middle East is villanized in the media so often, and as a photographer, I’d like to show a different angle,” she said.