Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Mike Mosher came to Saginaw Valley State University in 2000 from California's Silicon Valley, where he had designed application icons, screen graphics, animation and instructional interfaces for Apple Computer, IBM Almaden Research Center, Metatec, Adaptec, and Cisco Systems.
Mike also painted or organized nearly two dozen community murals in San Francisco and the Bay area. In 2002 he organized a workshop with Andrea Ondish of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum that helped Saginaw youth ages 7 to 17 produce a 7' x 50' mural "Expect Me to Do My Best" at the Trinity St. John Cultural Center. In 2008, Mike's Art 433 class painted the 7' x 50' "Pride, Respect, Success" there with the Trinity youth. His students worked with youth to produce digital murals for Saginaw High School and the SVSU Library in 2006, 2007 and 2008, and for Good Neighbors Mission in Saginaw in 2004.
Mike has taught in San Francisco State University's Multimedia Studies Program, Inter-Arts Center and Art Department Conceptual Information Arts program, as well as University of San Francisco's Information Systems Management program. He has given conference presentations on his and others' murals, hypertexts, virtual and Web artworks at the Michigan Academy, in England, South Africa and Spain, the Franklin Institute (Philadelphia). the Exploratorium (San Francisco) and NASA Ames Research Center (Mountain View, CA).
Mike is the author, with Roger P. Shepard, of Creating Web Graphics, Audio and Video (Prentice Hall Publishers, Saddle River NJ, 2002) and the illustrator of Orwell for Beginners, text by David Smith (Writers & Readers, New York NY, 1998). He has chapters in Humor in Children's Lives (Praeger, 2003), Collective Action: A Bad Subjects Anthology (Pluto Press, 2004) and Bad Subjects (NYU Press, 1997).
He has an M.F.A. (Conceptual Design) and an M.A. (Art, Painting Concentration) from San Francisco State University, and a B.A. from Dartmouth College.
Mike taught at Shikoku University, Tokushima-shi, Japan in S.V.S.U.'s Exchange Faculty program in Spring, 2002. His lectures there have been developed into the illustrated books The Lyrics and Background of 15 Hit Songs by Mike and Noriko Uosaki (2005) and World Popular Songs from Chuck Berry to Eminem (2008, both from Shohakusha Publishers, Tokyo). In 2004 he taught a workshop in Comics to prisoners at Saginaw Correctional Facility.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE AT SVSU
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES:
Art 100 - Art Appreciation
Art 111 - Introduction to Two-Dimensional Design
Art 121 - Introduction to Drawing
Art 226 - Beginning Watercolor
Art 316 - Intermediate/Advanced Watercolor
Art 433 - Community Mural Painting
GRADUATE COURSES:
CM 550 - Multimedia Interface Design
(renamed CDM 550 - Experience Design)
CM 560 - Applied Graphic Design
(renamed CDM 560 - Advanced Graphic Design)
CM 690 - Capstone Project
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
We live in a complex and subtle multicultural, multi-media, imagery-rich era. In order to fully participate, communicate, convince and lead others the educated individual must master skills in the manipulation of visual as well as verbal and written content, in technological, traditional and other forms.
Let me show you some. mosher(at)svsu.edu