Anna Sew Hoy joins UCLA Department of Art
Artist Anna Sew Hoy appointed assistant professor in the ceramics area
The UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture is pleased to announce the appointment of artist Anna Sew Hoy as an assistant professor in the Department of Art.
Born in Auckland, New Zealand, she is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. In her sculptures, the slowness of the handmade collides with symbols of speedy communication and global junk, to create totemic forms. Sew Hoy is inspired by clay’s history as a material for making ritual and functional objects. When her clay “bodies” are mixed with repurposed bits of consumer culture, eras collide, so that her sculptures exist in both the past of an ancient medium and our present time. Her sculptures reflect our many encounters with things, from the wearing of one’s favorite sweater, to the contemplation of an object on a pedestal.
“It is wonderful news that Anna Sew Hoy will be joining our faculty,” said Department of Art Professor Russell Ferguson. “She is one of the most acclaimed and influential artists of her generation in Los Angeles. Our students have so much to learn from her.”
Solo presentations of Sew Hoy’s work have been mounted at the Aspen Art Museum, CO; the MOCA Storefront, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Koenig & Clinton, New York; LAXART; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; the San Jose Museum of Art; and the California Biennial 2008 at the Orange County Museum of Art. Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. She was awarded a Creative Capital Grant for Visual Art in 2015 to support her public sculpture Psychic Body Grotto, her largest public sculpture to date, which opened at the Los Angeles State Historic Park in Spring 2017. In recognition of her distinctive work, Sew Hoy has also received the California Community Foundation Grant for Emerging Artists in 2013 and the United States Artists Broad Fellowship in 2006.
Prior to joining the Department of Art faculty, Sew Hoy has held teaching positions at California State University, Long Beach; University of California, Irvine, University of Southern California, Otis College of Art and Design, CalArts, and UCLA. She served as master teacher and national reviewer for Young Arts from 2013–2017, and has been a visiting artist and guest lecturer at institutions around the world. She earned her B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her M.F.A. from Bard College.
At UCLA, Sew Hoy will teach ceramics to undergraduate and graduate students and pursue her research interests which include pushing the material possibilities of ceramics and other media to create objects, installations, and public sculptures that record a transforming body as it reacts to our built environment, as well as envisioning and demarcating utopic space.
“I am thrilled to join UCLA’s Department of Art,” said Sew Hoy. “Los Angeles has long been a center for contemporary art made in clay, and I look forward to working with the ambitious students and esteemed faculty at UCLA to engage this important history in order to create new contexts for and expressions of art.”
Learn more about Anna Sew Hoy.
Anna Sew Hoy (Art in America)
Jamming Opposites Together: Anna Sew Hoy Interviewed by William J. Simmons (BOMB Magazine)
Review: Anna Sew Hoy’s sculptures are weird, funny and erotic (Los Angeles Times)