2018–19 In Review
A year-end message from Dean Brett Steele
As the 2018–19 academic year draws to a close, we are just beginning our yearlong celebration of UCLA’s centennial. At our June 15 commencement ceremony, alongside our esteemed keynote speaker and Chancellor, Gene Block, we celebrated the achievements of the 371 students who earned their degrees as part of UCLA’s first centennial class.
Milestones like this provide the opportunity to reflect on where we’ve been and chart the course for what comes next. As we turn our attention to the summer months, I would like to thank you for all the incredible work, dedication, and commitment you have exhibited throughout the year and take a moment to reflect on everything that we've accomplished together.
What follows are some broad markers and simple figures alongside a few highlights from the year. 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.
On the occasion of UCLA’s Centennial, we created 100 for 100—a collection of stories that celebrate the rich history of the arts at UCLA over the past century. Each monthly newsletter throughout the yearlong celebration will feature a new story that reflects on our past and imagines what’s possible for our future. We invite our community to explore these stories and contribute their own to the collection. I encourage you all to share your UCLA stories and look forward to reading about your experiences.
The Andrea and Joe Straus Conservation Scholarship and hands-on internship at the Sculpture Conservation Studio introduces UCLA undergraduates to the field of art conservation. Read more...
Over the past year, 274 students were awarded UCLA Arts scholarships and fellowships thanks to generous donations for student support.
The school was recognized by two new university-level education initiatives from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation (HFF): The Department of Art received $500,000 to create an endowment that will support scholarships for M.F.A. students in painting; and the UCLA Chancellor's Centennial Scholars Match contributed an additional $250,000 to support these new scholarships.
In addition, the HFF announced the Frankenthaler Prints initiative, which benefits art museums at universities, including the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts/Hammer Museum, UCLA. We are proud that UCLA is the only institution recognized for both its museum and its academic program.
A recent $2 million gift from Lynda and Stewart Resnick, co-owners of The Wonderful Company, established the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair in Art at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. The new endowed chair will be held by a distinguished faculty member in the department of art who is also a respected practitioner in their field and will strengthen the school’s ability to recruit, retain, and support the work of renowned faculty.
10 Questions: What is Knowledge?
We launched 10 Questions, an exciting addition to our curricular offerings. This hybrid academic course/public event series generated an enthusiastic response from students, the broader campus community, and the public and gave community members a special opportunity to experience the almost alchemic conversations that drive innovation at the university. The inaugural offering of 10 Questions featured conversations with 40 leading scholars from across the university across 10 weeks during the fall quarter. This innovative educational/public engagement platform gave us an opportunity to build bridges rather than reinforce walls between the university and the public whom we serve, making our state-of-the-art education not only more visible, but literally more available in the world around us. In total, 10 Questions engaged 1200 attendees throughout the quarter and reached many thousands more through social media and other digital platforms. I’m pleased to announce that we will continue this initiative this fall with 10 Questions: Centennial Edition as one of the campus’s marquee events during UCLA’s yearlong Centennial Celebration. Student enrollment is now open; register here. I hope to see many of you there.
Left to right: Night of 100 Solos, Meredith Monk, Processing Community Day
Collectively, we produced more than 650 public events—lectures, programs, exhibitions, performances, screenings, readings, symposia, and more—that celebrated the work of our talented students, alumni, and faculty and brought some of the most exciting and influential thinkers, makers, and performers to our campus community. Highlights from the year included an artist lecture by Theaster Gates, the Los Angeles production of the Night of 100 Solos in celebration of Merce Cunningham’s 100th birthday, the design media arts department hosted Processing Community Day, and the presentation of new work by Meredith Monk. The arts at UCLA are alive and well: we remain one of the largest presenters of the arts on the West Coast.
Our community engagement programs including the Visual and Performing Arts Education Program, 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.
Left to right: Rebeca Méndez at the Cooper Hewitt; Wu Tsang photographed by fellow alum Paul Mpagi Sepuya for Cultured Magazine; Black Panther Marvel 2018: Costume Design Ruth E. Carter, 3D printed Crown and Shoulder Mantel by Julia Koerner
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. For example, Department of Art alumna Wu Tsang’s work was recognized with the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Following her year as part of the Gropius Bau’s In House: Artist in Residence program, Tsang created work for a solo exhibition that will open at the Berlin museum in September. In response to the museum’s collection, Design Media Arts Professor Rebeca Méndez curated Rebeca Méndez Selects, an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. The exhibition garnered much acclaim from publications like the New Yorker and Vogue. Department of Architecture and Urban Design Assistant Adjunct Professor Julia Koerner was on the costume team for the film Black Panther, which recently won an Oscar for costume design. Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Distinguished Professor Susan Leigh Foster published a new book, Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion, which explores commodity and gift theories, brief histories of hip-hop, Native American powwows, and competitive dance in private studios.
Left to right: Crest Theater, Striking Iron, Made in L.A.
With CAP UCLA, we announced the acquisition of the Crest Theater in Westwood. The landmark venue, which will be renamed the UCLA Nimoy Theater, will be transformed into a much-needed public platform for emerging contemporary performing artists across all disciplines including extraordinary UCLA students and recent alumni, independent practitioners throughout Los Angeles, and national and international visiting artists. CAP UCLA presented an exceptional season at venues across campus and at The Theatre at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, featuring 41 events and 58 performances with highlights including Joan Baez, Barber Shop Chronicles, Bill T. Jones, Emmylou Harris, The Great Tamer, Zakir Hussain, Pat Metheny, Taylor Mac, Nico Muhly, and Rebecca Solnit.
The Fowler Museum received much acclaim for its exhibition Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths. Called a best Los Angeles exhibition of 2018 by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, the exhibition received a 2019 Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) and the AAMC Foundation and is now travelling to museums internationally, including in Washington D.C. and Paris. In addition to Striking Iron, the museum presented 11 exhibitions on topics from contemporary video art in Africa, to second lines in New Orleans, to radical independent publishing in Mexico.
The Hammer Museum had a momentous year for exhibitions both in L.A. and around the world. Its fourth edition of Made in L.A. was critically acclaimed and well attended. Audiences similarly enjoyed exhibitions on artists Victor Hugo, Adrian Piper, and Allen Ruppersberg. Reaching beyond Los Angeles, more than a million people saw Hammer-organized exhibitions that traveled around the world, from Salzburg to Sao Paolo to Saskatoon. The museum’s new restaurant, Audrey at the Hammer, opened and has been a welcome addition to the neighborhood. And just last month, thanks to nearly 40 artists who donated works for auction at Sotheby’s New York, The Hammer raised more than $12 million in support of a newly created Artists Fund, which will directly support the museum’s pioneering exhibition program and work with emerging artists.
This past year, I have had the honor of extending my tenure as chair of UCLA’s Arts Leadership Group. Working alongside my stellar peers from the School of Theater, Film, and Television, the Herb Alpert School of Music, the College of Letters and Science’s Humanities division, our three public arts institution’s directors and senior campus leadership, we are reminded that we are part of something bigger than any one of our areas, and are poised with the unique opportunity to formulate new ideas and strategies for expanding the role of the arts in all aspects of the university. I look forward to sharing updates from our work in the coming year.
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 600 media stories about the school and its students, alumni, and faculty. You can read selections from this news coverage here.
UCLA Arts community members at the walkthrough of Rodney McMillian's installation at SFMOMA
We continued to cultivate a vibrant UCLA Arts community in the Bay Area. In February, Professor Rodney McMillian guided a group of parents and alumni through his exhibition, New Work: Rodney McMillian, at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The group was also treated to a walkthrough of the work of UCLA Arts alumna Vija Celmins ’65 (M.F.A., Department of Art), Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory, by SFMOMA Assistant Curator Nancy Lim.
Our enrollment management team represented the school and furthered the worthy cause of encouraging, recruiting, and supporting young artists with presentations at more than 20 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 education arts programs accessible to underserved and first-generation college students. Over the course of the year, the office of enrollment management hosted over 40 UCLA Arts prospective student campus tours—serving close to 1,000 visitors. We hosted our spring undergraduate recruitment event, Imagine UCLA Arts, in April at which we welcomed 254 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 190 new undergraduate students and 150 new graduate students (for a total of 340 new students) to the School of the Arts and Architecture in the fall.
Left to right: Vishal Jugdeo, Candice Lin, Bryonn Bain
This year, we welcomed Bryonn Bain, Vishal Jugdeo, and Candice Lin to the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture faculty. Each of these three talented artists have already enriched our community and begun sharing their passions, perspectives, and expertise with UCLA Arts students.
With the end of the academic year, we bid farewell to four esteemed colleagues upon their retirement. I was glad to have the opportunity to work with Rebecca Allen from the Department of Design Media Arts and Craig Hodgetts, Mark Mack, and Thom Mayne from the Department of Architecture and Urban Design. We thank them for their remarkable contributions and years of service to the institution.
And here in the dean’s office, we celebrate the careers of Jose Marroquin, Sharon Clark, and Guy Custis who will all retire after more than 60 combined years of service to UCLA. Their presence in our office will certainly be missed, and we offer them our tremendous gratitude for all they have done for UCLA Arts.
With every end, there is a new beginning. Earlier this month, we welcomed Michael Chung, who will follow in the footsteps of Guy Custis as our new assistant dean for administration. An alumnus of UCLA, Michael returns to his alma mater with much to offer. His depth of experience and energetic and ambitious outlook will help the School of the Arts and Architecture grow and thrive into its next century. I am very much looking forward to working with him as we shape the future of the arts at UCLA and continue cultivate an exceptional community of academic and cultural leaders in the arts and architecture.
Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance students performing in the Glorya Kaufman Dance Theater in Kaufman Hall
It has been an incredibly inspiring and productive year. This note just scratches the surface. As we celebrate these accomplishments, I invite you to join me in imagining what’s possible for the next 100 years at UCLA Arts.
I wish you all a joyful and restorative summer.
Brett
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