Community, Clay, Cuisine: UCLA Arts' Yummy Bowl Benefit Raises Over $11K for On-campus Food Closet
On Wednesday, May 15, over 175 people gathered at Broad Art Center Plaza to select from roughly 350 handmade bowls and enjoy a delicious meal.
This was the 3rd annual Yummy Bowl Benefit, hosted by the Department of Art and its Ceramics Area.
The Yummy Bowl Benefit was created by Department of Art professors Candice Lin and Anna Sew Hoy. In 2021, the two artists launched the inaugural fundraiser after learning that over 40% of UC students reported being food insecure.
Art professors Anna Sew Hoy, left, and Candice Lin, right, founded the Yummy Bowl Benefit in 2021. (Lucza Brewer / UCLA Arts)
“Our mission is to expand on the communal nature of clay-making, where people work together to load kilns and share building techniques, towards its overlap with social justice and community-engaged work,” Lin and Sew Hoy wrote on their Spark campaign page.
The fundraiser invited the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture (UCLA Arts) community to make ceramic bowls to raise money for UCLA’s Community Programs Office (CPO) Food Closet. The CPO Food Closet, established in 2009, is the first food pantry in the UC System and has been instrumental in bringing national attention to basic needs on university campuses.
With a donation, Yummy Bowl attendees were able to select any bowl, which was then filled with a lunch provided by Lulu, the restaurant at the Hammer Museum.
The benefit requires months of preparation. Last January, the UCLA Arts community gathered for a bowl-making marathon in the Ceramics Area. Participants, which included alumni, students, staff, and faculty, used throwing wheels, slab and coil building techniques, and a selection of glazes to make the one-of-a-kind bowls.
All the hard work paid off as this year’s benefit raised $11,047, both exceeding its goal and besting previous Yummy Bowls.
The UCLA Arts community gathered last January to produce the hundreds of bowls required for the benefit. (Lucza Brewer / UCLA Arts)
The day of the benefit attendees gathered to select their bowl(s) and enjoy a meal provided by Lulu, the restaurant at the Hammer Museum. (Lucza Brewer / UCLA Arts)
By Sean Arenas
Header image: Yummy Bowl attendees selected from a bevy of handemade bowls. (Lucza Brewer / UCLA Arts)
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