2017–18 in Review
A year end message from Dean Brett Steele
Exams are over. Final projects have been submitted, presented, and performed. We have celebrated the achievements of the 308 students who earned their degrees at our June 16 commencement ceremony. As we all turn our attention to the summer months, I would like to take a moment to reflect on everything that we've accomplished together this year.
While we must constantly strive—as artists, teachers, students, administrators, alumni, and community members—to create what comes next, it’s also important that we take a moment to remember and recognize not only our successes, but the successes of our colleagues and collaborators. I find myself at the end of this year, my first as dean, dazzled by everything that has happened and by the impact we have had as a school.
What I offer here are broad markers and simple figures. Please think of these as an invitation and a starting point to appreciate the work you are proud to have been part of in this last year. The strength of our school—and ultimately our art, our creative lives—lives not in a single moment, or classroom, or particular form, or specific piece. It lives and breathes when our work breaks down walls and barriers and helps us connect with the world around us.
Over the past year, 217 scholarships and fellowships were awarded thanks to generous donations for student support.
Our community engagement programs including the Visual and Performing Arts Education Program (VAPAE), FORM Academy, the Art and Global Health Center, and education initiatives at the Hammer Museum, Fowler Museum, and CAP UCLA reached more than 32,000 K–12 students this past year.
Students in VAPAE's afterschool program at the UCLA Community School.
Collectively, we produced more than 400 public events—lectures, programs, exhibitions, performances, screenings, readings, symposia, and more—that celebrated the work of our talented students, alumni, faculty, and brought some of the most exciting and influential thinkers, makers, and performers to our campus community, including designer Kenya Hara, Vice President Al Gore, artist and UCLA Arts alumnus Meleko Mokgosi, and choreographer Ann Carlson.
Left: Kenya Hara lectures at the Broad Art Center. Center: Detail of Meleko Mokgosi, Democratic Intuition, Bread, Butter, and Power, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles. On view at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Right: Ann Carlson's Doggie Hamlet, presented by CAP UCLA in February 2018.
In the arts, the outcomes of our creative output and research take on many forms including exhibitions, public artworks, new buildings, performances, lectures, and publications. Together, our faculty and alumni created, produced, and contributed to more than 200 of these projects over the past year. Distinguished Professor Thom Mayne published 100 Buildings with Rizzoli in November, UCLA Arts alumnus Refik Anadol '14 created new machine learning technology that allowed his “data sculpture” to interact in real time with an LA Phil’s performance directed by Distinguished Professor Peter Sellars, and Associate Professor Rodney McMillian presented an exhibition that weaves elements of United States social and political history, the body, and architecture into complex tapestries entrenched in myth, memory, storytelling, and historical texts for the inaugural exhibition of the Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize at the Contemporary Austin.
Left: Rodney McMillian, Untitled (neighbors), 2017. Single-channel video, color, sound. Edition of 3, 2 AP. Running time: 19:04, loop. Commissioned by The Contemporary Austin, with funds provided by the Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize. Installation view, Rodney McMillian: Against a Civic Death, The Contemporary Austin – Jones Center on Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas, 2018. Artwork © Rodney McMillian. Courtesy the artist, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, and Maccarone, New York. Image courtesy The Contemporary Austin. Photograph by Colin Doyle. Center: Das Paradies at the LA Phil, directed by Peter Sellars with data sculpture by Refik Anadol. Photo: Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging. Right: Thom Mayne, 100 Buildings, Rizzoli 2017.
CAP UCLA brought 15 of their stellar season’s performances to The Theatre at Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, extending our reach in the city and captivating new audiences with art that challenged, inspired, and brought us together including Taylor Mac’s critically acclaimed A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Our own Kristy Edmunds is currently featured in Los Angeles Magazine as one of the city’s influential arts programmers who is reshaping Los Angeles into a world-class performing arts town.
The Fowler Museum received peer-reviewed grants from two of the most prestigious national foundations: the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts for its groundbreaking exhibition, Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths, which is on view throughout the summer and will travel internationally after its debut at UCLA.
The Hammer Museum announced a $180 million campaign to transform its building and expand its endowment with a lead gift of $30 million—the largest in the museum’s history—from Lynda and Stewart Resnick. The museum’s new building will feature 60% more exhibition space and 20,000 square feet of enhanced public spaces to support the museum’s exceptional public programming. In case you missed it, the Los Angeles Times recently published a terrific feature on Ann Philbin, noting how she has transformed the Hammer into “one of [the] nation’s most enticing and risk-taking,” institutions over her nearly two decades as director.
To celebrate the important role that our three public arts institutions (CAP UCLA, the Fowler Museum, and the Hammer Museum) play in creating a cultural commons for the university and for Los Angeles, we created Leaning Forward, the latest film in our An Imaginative Offer series. I encourage you to take a moment to watch.
Our collective work as a community has enriched the cultural landscape, and the press took note. Over the course of the past year, there have been more than 400 media stories about the school and its students, alumni, and faculty. You can read selections from this news coverage here.
We forged new bonds with our broader UCLA Arts community through a series of events in cities across the country, celebrating the amazing creative output and talent of our faculty and alumni. In May, UCLA Arts alumni, parents, and friends joined me in New York for a performance with Professor Kyle Abraham, studios visits with A.UD alumni Kai-Uwe Bergmann (Bjarke Ingels Group) and Billie Tsien (Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects), a gallery walkthrough with Art alumnus Matthew Brannon, and a private tour of New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Another highlight was our UCLA Arts in San Francisco weekend in December, which featured a private walkthrough at SFMOMA, a walking tour of Virtual Depictions by DMA alumnus Refik Anadol, and an SF Opera performance and discussion with Distinguished Professor Peter Sellars. Next week, we will gather at the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA 2018 for a tour with Professor Russell Ferguson and some of the 11 UCLA Arts alumni included in the biennial exhibition. We look forward to getting on the road to connect with more of our community across the country in the coming year.
Work by 3 of the 11 alumni featured in the Hammer Museum's Made in LA 2018. Left: Ashley Hunt, taisha paggett, and Kim Zumpfe with WXPT, Demonstration Score #3 (duets), erformance during The School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, October 21–December 6, 2015. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ashley Hunt. Center: Nikita Gale, BIG BAD PICKUP, Mixed media. 82 × 42 1/2 × 31 1/2 in (208.3 × 108 × 80 cm). Installation view, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Courtesy the artist and 56 Henry, New York. Right: EJ Hill, Pillar, Wood, PVC. Dimensions variable. 57th Venice Biennale, Palazzo Contarini Polignac. May 12–August 13, 2017. Photo: Sergey Illin / PinchukArtCentre.
Our enrollment management team represented the school and furthered the worthy cause of encouraging, recruiting, and supporting young artists with presentations at numerous local and national conferences where they educated high school and community college counselors, parents, and prospective students on the value and potential of a degree in the arts, and how to make higher ed arts programs accessible to underserved and first-generation college students. We refreshed our spring recruitment event, Imagine UCLA Arts, and welcomed 300 new student applicants and parents to campus to get an inside look at our programs and meet current students and faculty. We very much look forward to welcoming 209 new students to the School of the Arts and Architecture in the fall.
In December, a group of students, faculty, alumni, and friends joined me to toast the groundbreaking of the new site for the UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios. Construction is underway on the new facilities, which were designed by Johnston Marklee and recognized by the Lafarge Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction in the world’s most significant competition for sustainable design. The transformation of the building is supported by a lead gift of $20 million from gallerist Margo Leavin. The Department of Art M.F.A. students moved into their temporary studios in Palms, where they hosted the Graduate Open Studios event in early June.
Left: Center Bay of the UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios as construction commenced. Right: Johnston Marklee, rendering of Center Bay of the UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios.
I shared my first year at UCLA Arts with Rodrigo Valenzuela and Isla Hansen, both of whom joined the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture faculty in the departments of art and design media arts respectively at the beginning of the academic year. I am eager for our new faculty member Tria Blu Wakpa to join the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance in the fall, alongside other new faculty members whose appointments will be announced soon.
With the end of the academic year, we bid farewell to three esteemed colleagues upon their retirement. I was glad to have the opportunity to work with Barbara Drucker and Adrian Saxe, who are retiring from the Department of Art, and Judy Baca, who is retiring from the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and Chicano Studies. We thank them for their contributions and decades of service to the institution.
This past year, I have also had the honor of chairing UCLA’s Arts Leadership Group, which brings together deans from all three professional arts schools and the College’s Humanities division, as well as directors from our three public arts institutions—all alongside senior campus leadership. This convening reminds us that we are part of something bigger than any one of our areas and ensures that our collective programs and activities in the arts at UCLA are recognized, coordinated, and championed across campus and to the broader community. I look forward to continuing the important work of the Arts Leadership Group as we continue to form new ideas and strategies for promoting and expanding the role of the arts in all aspects of the university.
With every end, there is a new beginning. As we remember our past we begin to dream our future.
Undergraduate senior performs at Insight, the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance senior project showcase.
I look forward to getting back in the classroom to teach my first class at UCLA in the fall. I’m calling it 10 Questions and inviting leading voices from across campus to join me in exploring ten big topics. What is space? What is time? What is failure? I’m thrilled that each class session will be open to the public, and I hope to see many of you there.
Thank you all for an unforgettable first year at UCLA Arts. Your work and dedication to the school, the university, and our shared communities inspires me to dream of the future we can create together.
I wish you all an inspiring and restorative summer.
Brett
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