Arts Initiative 2017–18: CAMPUS AS CANVAS
Call for Proposals
We are pleased to announce the continuation of support for the Arts Initiative program for 2017–18.
For this year’s program, the School of the Arts and Architecture, The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, the School of Theater, Film, and Television and the Humanities Division seek to activate and illuminate the UCLA campus as a resource for exchange and engagement through creative projects.
We believe that interdisciplinarity, which has been the theme of the Arts Initiative from its inception, can be addressed not only through collaboration between investigators, (think Agatha Christie meets Sherlock Holmes), and intermingling of methodologies and disciplines, but also through the positioning and collision of creative projects with new spaces and new audiences.
It is from this ethos that, this year, we invite proposals for the funding of small-scale research projects and project-based courses that utilize the campus itself as a canvas for innovative performance, installation, and/or other forms of public exhibition. We are interested in projects that invite our campus community and the public to engage with familiar spaces through new experiences and interactions that transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
In recognition of the importance of faculty research and the synergies that occur inside the classroom that make coursework a fertile and unique platform for the development of new ideas, we invite proposals from senate faculty from participating schools. Graduate students, part-time faculty, and lecturers may also apply under the sponsorship of a senate faculty member.
Each proposal may request funding up to a maximum of $15,000. Multi-year projects will not be considered. Plans should anticipate that the full budget will be expended by the end of calendar year 2018, and each school will be responsible for monitoring expenditure of funds awarded to its own faculty member(s). A faculty advisory committee will be appointed to review all proposals and to make recommendations to the deans for final approval. All applicants will be notified of the status of their proposal in early Winter Quarter.
Proposals should be clear, succinct, and address the following:
1. Name, position and CV for the project director.
2. A narrative of no more than 500 words describing the project’s artistic, intellectual, and/or practical goals, particularly its engagement with the UCLA campus.
3. Identification of project participants: this may include additional faculty, staff, and/or graduate students (if known) who will be the core participants responsible for the project as well as any undergraduate student involvement.
4. Project timeline.
5. A documentation plan. All projects receiving Arts Initiative funding must submit project reports and documentation at project completion for archival and publication purposes.
6. Detailed project budget. You should consult with financial staff in your home department to ensure that you capture benefits costs if you plan to pay visiting faculty, staff, or students as part of your project. Budgets should also include the cost of graduate fee remissions if you propose to hire graduate student researchers.
7. The proposal cover sheet should contain the signature of the department chair or unit director, noting his/her review and approval.
Funding will be transferred directly to the project director’s home unit.
Proposals must be submitted electronically as a single PDF file.
Please submit your Arts Initiative proposal to Sharon Clark in the School of the Arts and Architecture (sclark@arts.ucla.edu) no later than 5 p.m. on Friday, December 8, 2017. All proposals will be forwarded to the faculty review committee at the close of the submission period.
We look forward to receiving new ideas for ways we can enliven and engage the UCLA campus as a site for discovery and connection beyond the boundaries of our schools and programs.
Exemplary projects from last year include:
Creative Programming Across Disciplines; Cultivating Diverse Perspectives: Lauren McCarthy, Assistant Professor, Design | Media Arts
Scope Lab is a workshop series focused on exploring code as a creative medium with which to understand and represent diverse perspectives. These studies are framed by the questions: “Whose perspectives are represented?”, “Who has access to the tools to learn and express themselves?”, and “How do we design tools and projects that are more inclusive?”. There were five workshops in total. They included:
- Uncertainty and Experimental Data Visualisation, led by Miriam Posner (UCLA Digital Humanities) and Lauren McCarthy
- Experimental Language Design, led by Alessandro Warth (UCLA Computer Science)
- Data Weaving as Cultural Text for Activism: Contemporary Indigenous Weaving, led by Sarah Brady from the student-run feminist collective VoidLab
- Multiperspectival Experimental Data Visualisation, led by Miriam Posner (UCLA Digital Humanities) and Lauren McCarthy
- Designing for Accessibility and Disability, led by Claire Kearney-Volpe (Director of the NYU Ability Project)
Art & Health Initiative 2017: David Gere, Professor, World Arts and Cultures/Dance and Director, Art | Global Health Center
The UCLA Art & Global Health Center (AGHC), in partnership with the Dean of the Fielding School of Public Health (FSPH), collaborated to produce the 2017 Art & Health Initiative, including a series of art and public health lectures, workshops, classes, and public presentations. The goal of this initiative was to highlight previously unexplored interdisciplinary connections on the UCLA campus and to create a new campus interest group, specifically surrounding the intersection of art and health. The ultimate goal of this initiative is to move past the point where arts practitioners and health experts merely coexist at UCLA, and instead achieve a level of ongoing collaboration and cooperation.
Translating the Comedia, from Performance to Print: Michael Hackett, Professor of Theater
This grant works in association with the “The Comedia in Translation and Performance” working group—dedicated to translating and staging early modern Spanish theater, and to making Spain’s enormous corpus of plays from the 16th and 17th centuries more accessible to new audiences. Having already translated four plays, the working group devoted the grant period to the translation of Lope de Vega’s La viuda valenciana, polishing, editing, and annotating the translation, and writing an introduction intended for the graduate students in the M.F.A. Acting and Directing Programs in the Department of Theater.
The translation group is also preparing the work for publication with Juan de la Cuesta press (http://www.linguatextltd.com/IMPRINT_Cuesta/cuesta_contact.html). This project will culminate in a staged reading (on November 7th and 8th) performed by UCLA M.F.A. students, and a publication of the translation, which is forthcoming with Juan de la Cuesta press.
Header Image: Scope Lab's Experimental Language Design Project