A Spring Message from Dean Brett Steele

Announcing 2018 commencement speaker, Helen Molewsworth, and a new schoolwide course

April 12, 2018

Spring is upon us.

It is hard to believe that we are closing in on the final stretch of the 2017–18 academic year.

If you have not yet had the chance, I encourage you to take a moment to watch Leaning Forward, the newest short film in the school’s An Imaginative Offer series. The film spotlights the vital role that our three internationally acclaimed public arts institutions—The Center for the Arts of Performance, the Fowler Museum, and the Hammer Museum at UCLA—play in creating vibrant cultural commons within the school, across campus, and for the broader community. We are very fortunate to have these three venues as an integral part of the School of the Arts and Architecture. Share the film with your friends and family, and encourage everyone to take in all that these three venues have to offer this spring.

Last Friday, I was delighted to confirm that Helen Molesworth accepted my invitation to be our keynote speaker at this year’s commencement ceremony on Saturday, June 16. Molesworth is a remarkable curator who, throughout her career, has demonstrated great passion, clarity, and forward-thinking vision. She is known for presenting thoughtful, bold exhibitions that shine a light on cross-disciplinary work and a diverse range of important artists and movements. I look forward to her remarks and know that hers will be an insightful and inspiring voice for our graduating class as they embark on the next chapter of their creative lives.

Looking forward, I am very pleased to let you know that I will be offering my first course at UCLA in the fall, which will be open to both students and the public alike. In each session of the ten-week course, which I am calling “10 Questions,” I will moderate a conversation around a single question designed to elicit interdisciplinary discussion amongst a curated panel that will include four UCLA scholars, artists, scientists, and researchers from different fields of study—within and beyond the arts. Questions will be deliberately big and broad, including such prompts as: What is space? What is time? What is freedom? What is memory? to name a few. Designed to be highly interactive and interdisciplinary, “10 Questions” will be open to upper division undergraduates, and will also invite the public to attend as one of the feature programs of our fall public events series.

My hope is that this course creates vibrant conversations that engage multiple disciplinary viewpoints, seeding greater understanding of the profoundly interdisciplinary nature of knowledge and knowledge production across campus and beyond. Stay tuned for additional information. Registration opens June 18.

If the previous two quarters are any indication, I am quite sure that the spring is going to fly by. In the blink of an eye, students will be presenting their final projects for the year—these will take shape in paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, books, dances, films, games, scholarly papers, interactive media immersions, designs for buildings and cities, and everything in between. They will enliven our classrooms, our exhibition spaces, and our performance halls with creativity that promises to guide us into the future.

To our students, take joy in your work, venture beyond your comfort zone, take some risks, believe in your vision, and don’t forget to breathe . . . and be sure to join us on June 7 when we celebrate the end of the academic year with our quarterly all-school festivity in the Broad Art Center Plaza.

Warmly,

Brett

Brett Steele will be lecturing in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design's This, Not That lecture series on May 21.