Otis College of Art and Design
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Otis College of Art and Design is an art and design college located in Los Angeles, California. It is generally referred to as simply Otis.
Otis began in 1918, when Los Angeles Times founder Harrison Gray Otis bequeathed his MacArthur Park property to start the first public, independent professional school of art in Southern California. The main campus, located in the Westchester, Los Angeles, California, close to the Los Angeles International Airport, is anchored by the 1963 IBM building (famous for its computer "punchcard" style windows) and a contemporary fine arts facility.
Otis has been long considered one of the major art institutions in California, constantly vying with Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, California) and California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, California) for number one ranking statewide. All three schools are generally considered to be in the top ten nationwide, often falling somewhere in the top five. Otis is also considered the top fashion institution on the West Coast, with a separate campus in the California Market Center in downtown Los Angeles. The school was originally named Otis Art Institute. From 1978 until 1991, it was affiliated with New York's Parsons School of Design and known as Otis-Parsons (full name: Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design). This affiliation allowed students to spend a semester or more at the Parsons schools in New York and Paris. In 1991, it became independent and known as Otis College of Art and Design. Today it is the most culturally diverse school of art and design in the country.
The school's programs include four-year degrees in the typical art school fare: fine arts, graphic design, architecture, landscape design, interior design, and fashion design as well as newer fields such as digital media, toy design, and interactive product design. It also offers MFA degrees in fine arts and writing. Undergraduate students choose a major in their second year, after completing a battery of traditional drawing, painting, composition, and construction classes in their first year. This initial program is called "Foundation", and is modeled after the Foundation Year art program (most likely pioneered at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn). In addition to studio work, standard liberal arts courses are required, although traditional history courses are replaced by art history.
The movie Art School Confidential was partially filmed at Otis. Otis Foundation Professor Gary Garaths worked as a consultant on the film.
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