Salt Lake Community College has named Ruby Chacon and Paul
Mayne as its Distinguished Alumni. They will be recognized at SLCC’s 2015
Commencement Ceremony May 7 at the Maverik Center, 3200 South Decker Lake
Drive, West Valley City.
Chicana artist Ruby Chacon was told by an advisor that she
would never finish high school and that she should just drop out. Even as she
was walking for commencement, she thought it might be a mistake that she was
being allowed to graduate. Her first college classes were in California, where
she met a Chicano counselor who gave her the confidence to pursue a higher
education. Chacon returned to Utah, attended SLCC and eventually graduated with
a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Utah.
Ruby Chacon
Chacon grew up in a small “chaotic” house in Salt Lake City
and didn’t have her own bedroom until she was a teen. She had to take turns
with her younger sister sleeping on the sofa. “Artwork just kind of help me
escape from all the chaos,” Chacon said. “Drawing was my privacy.” In a way,
she said, art “chose” her, and it would one day become a “language” for her to
give voice to and make sense of a world that, in her view, didn’t accurately
represent her family or portray her heritage.
After college Chacon began researching her family history as
a means of developing a counter narrative to the damaging one that she says
informed her identity while growing up Hispanic in a mostly homogeneous Salt
Lake City. That path led her to central and southern Utah, where she heard
about two aunts who were miners, how one of them opened her own restaurant and
how a majority of her first cousins graduated from high school and in some
cases college. Chacon learned about how her relatives were segregated in
schools, told to drink from separate fountains and were hit for speaking
Spanish in school. “I realized that the further away you are from knowing your
own story and your history, the more it gets informed by someone else and the
more of a devastating impact it has,” she said.
Chacon took that realization and a reformed identity and
poured it into her artwork, gradually making a name for herself in the Utah art
community. She and her ex-husband Terry Hurst founded Mestizo Institute of
Culture & Arts (MICA) in Salt Lake City to “enrich and celebrate” diverse
cultures through the arts. Today MICA’s partners include the University of
Utah’s University Neighborhood Partners, NeighborWorks Salt Lake, Gallery
Stroll Salt Lake, and the Mestizo Coffeehouse. Chacon now lives in California
and is working with a mentor who is teaching her the art of silk screening.
Paul Mayne is founder and CEO of Bloom Built, creator of the
hugely successful journaling application Day One, which last year earned the
“Apple Design Award” and in 2012 the Apple App Store’s “App of the Year” award
and has been downloaded more than 4 million times.
Paul Mayne
Mayne took classes at SLCC that taught 3D animation, graphic
design and how to author a CD Rom. “I had great professors who helped me
realize what is possible,” Mayne said about his experience at SLCC. By 1999 he
earned an associate of applied science degree while taking courses in SLCC’s
architectural program. But he turned his interests toward graphic design and
headed up the hill to the University of Utah, where he recalls being way ahead
of other students due to completing his general studies first at SLCC. He
eventually graduated from the U of U with a bachelor’s degree in graphic
design.
Mayne found jobs working as a visual designer, art director
for an ad agency, an interactive designer and web developer. During that time
an idea started brewing to develop a journaling app, which he pitched to people
but never got anyone to “latch on” to the project. “I really wanted to start
tracking things in my life to see if I could use that data to determine various
things,” Mayne said. In December 2010 he took a month off and went to work out
of his home, with the result being a journaling app that people can use for
everything from fly fishing and cooking to traveling and tracking a child’s
growth. In March 2011, Mayne introduced Day One.
“It just kind of took off from there,” he said. It was
featured as a “Showcase” app for the Mac and iPhone app stores. “That gets a
lot of attention,” he said. The iPhone app started out at $1 and has gone up to
$5 – for the Mac computer it costs $10. More than a million customers have paid
for Day One, while more than 3 million were able to download it for free during
a promotion. Sales these days are steady. “I thought sales would tail off,”
Mayne said. “I was hopeful it would maintain. And then I realized I could build
a business around it.” Mayne started Bloom Built with just himself and ran it
out of his home. This year Mayne is building a two-story building in Lehi split
into four areas that will also house his growing business, which is developing
updates and companion pieces for Day One. “There’s a lot more potential that we
really haven’t tapped into yet,” he said. “I love what I do.”
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