Meet your senators: Mr. Arts, Jace Goodwin
Talking with Jace Goodwin is like conversing to a retired billionaire rock star who now spends his time skating and noticing good graffiti.
“I have loved graffiti since I was a kid,” Goodwin said with a squinty smile. “One thing that has continued my interest in art has been grafitti.”
In reality, Goodwin is not a billionaire. He’s a junior serving his first term as arts senator for the Utah State University Student Association. For breakfast he eats cold cereal, “the really unhealthy stuff,” he said. He also regularly buys “old people” cereal. “You know, three-grain granola, with only three ingredients, picked from the mountains.”
Goodwin is like a pinboard of living opposites. An old mind in a young body. A street artist in an office chair. A colorblind painter. And in spite of his underground swagger, Goodwin is a leader and he’s always known what he wants to be.
“Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to be an artist,” he said. He’s putting both leadership and artistic skills to use these days as art senator. After coming into his office, frazzled from a busy day planning Artoberfest, he enthusiastically described the changes he wants to see happen at Utah State University.
“People now, more than ever, are interested in relevance,” he said. “A lot of the other colleges have set-in-stone real internship programs where they’ve made partnerships with companies who have committed to take some hired interns from USU.” When he talks he uses his hands like he’s finger-painting every word. “One of the things we’re working on is seeking out those connections for the Caine College of the Arts.”
Goodwin said he hopes to make connections with places where USU professors and grad students have worked and use those connections to create valuable opportunities for art students. He said art students have to be more proactive about selling their skills and abilities than other students.
“I do think it’s more difficult for arts majors,” he said. “I think that a lot of people look at art majors just as artists. I think you need to sell yourself more. Show people what you’ve learned in your college has been useful, like creative problem solving.”
Goodwin usually sports a cheap gold watch on one wrist and a couple bracelets with black beads or leather strip tassels on the other. One finger has a tight, black rubber ring and another has a smudged hair-tie doubled-up around it. His crossed legs are covered in navy capri-length pants, no socks and tan Vans that look like old beach shoes. His smile bares his large front teeth and fits near a point on a triangular face. With hair short on the sides, poofy on top, blond and wavy, he looks like an 80s motorcycle ad in the flesh. His worst date was in high school. His date couldn’t stop laughing and finally told him “You look just like my dad.” Goodwin took her home as quickly as he politely could.
Goodwin said his goals as arts senator are to make it easier for students to seek out and apply to internships, to find new and better ways to give art students job experience and to help them foster that into career.
Though he’s learning how to live off Cinnamon Toast Crunch and three hours of sleep, someday he hopes to be branding for a big company. “In design, branding means the logo, the typeface, the letter head, the memo header, the packaging, your trucks, your business cards, the website, all the aesthetics” he said.
His dream is to hitch his wagon to a large company like Nike. “I love being that guy that gives somebody a design that represents why they started a business,” he laughed. “I think most businesses out there have a passionate person underneath them,”
Goodwin said his first branding goal is here, with the Caine College of the Arts. “We don’t have any publicity. We need to change the Caine College’s image.”
Full of aphorisms and charisma, Goodwin gives the feeling that success is imminent, and this year he hopes to use Artoberfest as a first step to change the image of the CCA.
“I’m really excited for Artoberfest this year because I feel like it’s been underappreciated in the past,” he said. “It provides art students opportunities to sell their art or perform. It’s just kind of had low attendance in the past.” He said he’s been making efforts to reach out to all students for the event. Goodwin thinks the problem art students face in networking comes from a lack of intermingling at events. He said he wishes people would look to art students when they need logos, or posters, or photos or anything artistic.
“I feel like a lot of the limitations the art school faces is the stigma,” he said.
The artistic achievement he is most proud of is the reaction his campaign posters received. “Not only is it my fav because I won,”he laughed sarcastically, , “but because it has to do with my career. It was intimidating to put up a poster in the arts building. Design students and art students came up and said they remembered the posters, saying they were clean and had good contrast.”
His worst artistic endeavor happened in high school. “When I was in my senior year of high school I didn’t understand how to draw faces,” he said. “I also don’t really like rules at all, in art or in anything,” Goodwin said he attempted an impressionistic version of Steven Tyler’s face. “I smeared it everywhere to make it look striking. I used oranges on the face. The background was, like, colorblind blue,” He laughed. “It looked like if you tried to make a face out of rotten cuts of meat. It was big enough that blending should have been an important part of it. It was so bad. I hid it in the back room because I didn’t want anyone to see it.”
If that Nike gig works out and he becomes that billionaire, he’ll probably still wear the smudged hair tie ring and ripped jeans. He said he hopes whoever takes his place as arts senator shares his vision of rebranding the Caine College of the Arts and the stigma of art students in general. Someday hopefully he’ll look back and see the success his persona exudes. And by then maybe the cheap gold watch will be real.
@mikeburnham31