Shoot for the stars! Never say never! More is better! Too much is never enough! These are words to live by for Kevin O'Callaghan, mad scientist at the School of Visual Arts. As well as heading up his own design studio, this maverick exhibition designer and artist is chair of the 3-D program at SVA. These words have also become a mantra for his students, who have created some of the most amazing transformations of stuff - and junk - as they saw, weld, and vacu-form their way through O'Callaghan's course. Some of the results of this process are now collected in Monumental: The Reimagined World of Kevin O Callaghan (Abrams 2010).

Jacket cover and two solutions to the Yugo Next design project. Cover photo by Lauren Duque and Robert Gill; center and right by Tia Magallon; courtesy SVA.

Steven Heller, historian, critic, and chair of SVA's MFA Design program, says in his Introduction that O'Callaghan's students were the kids who on Christmas morning played with the boxes, not the toys. When they join his world, they join a society of builders in which monster-scale objects are the norm. Case in point: the Yugo Next project. The challenge: take a Yugo, the failed Yugoslavian compact car and give it a new life other than the one it was meant to have.

In a mere six weeks, his students transformed 28 of these autos into a shower, a toaster, a barbeque grill, a fireplace, and more. But where did the cars come from, I wondered on my first skim through the book. In the text, by Deborah Hussey, I found out that O'Callaghan placed a classified ad for "Yugos Wanted: Dead or Alive", which harvested 39 lemons that were purchased and delivered for under $4,000 in total. One owner donated his, asking only for a ride home -  in anything except a Yugo.

Like many of his class projects, Yugo Next was envisioned as an exhibition; this one opened at Grand Central Terminal's soaring Vanderbilt Hall, whose curator needed a replacement for a show that had been canceled. At the outset of the program, each of his 32 students were required to submit sketches for 5 different schemes. O'Callaghan expected to receive about 100 drawings, but he was inundated with more than 2,000.

As the students worked through cold weather, in backyards and garages scattered around the tri-state, no one knew that this was just the beginning of what became a two and a half year road trip. The Yugo Next exhibition at Grand Central made the news, and was picked up by media outlets from coast to coast. The show traveled across the U.S. and Canada, and was featured in publications in Europe and Asia.

The School of Visual Arts invites you to see Kevin O'Callaghan in conversation with Steve Heller. Thursday, November 18, 7:00 pm, SVA Theatre, 333 West 23 Street, NY, NY. A book signing follows. Free and open to the public. Information.

16nov10