Faculty Spotlight: Fall 2020
UPDATES FROM THE UCLA SCHOOL OF THE ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE FACULTY
The creative and scholarly contributions of the UCLA Arts community continue to mine the complexities of the human condition, ask essential questions of our time, and expand the potential of creativity—in traditional and new modalities, accessible from home. Read more for a list of recent accolades and current and upcoming virtual and in-person exhibitions, performances, and lectures.
Kyle Abraham, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, choreographed the music video “Sugar” by Sufjan Stevens. Directed by Ezra Hurwitz and filmed in Brooklyn with professional dancers, the film portrays a family as they experience their world crumble around them.
“The way I approach choreography tends to blend elements of the everyday with moments of abstraction,” says Abraham. “I was compelled by the tempo and the tone of the song… especially when choreographing the duet material and solo material for Samantha Figgans and Raymond Pinto. This song and its undertones created a lot of really fun scenarios to play with choreographically.”
Refik Anadol, visiting assistant researcher in the Department of Design | Media Arts, is collaborating with the UCLA Neuroimaging Collective to build a dynamic network between neuroscience and the arts that will shed further light on the expansion and communication of the Lifespan Human Connectome Project’s (HCP) cutting-edge research into the human brain. Anadol, a media artist, and Dr. Taylor Kuhn, a clinical neuropsychologist, research neuroscientist, and coordinator for the HCPs at UCLA, will join forces and share their investigative tools to tackle one of the greatest scientific challenges of our century – mapping the human brain to connect its structure to function and behavior. The MRI data that Dr. Kuhn and colleagues are working on is collected from people between ages 0-100+ and covers structure, connectivity, and function of the brain across many modalities, including emotion, learning, musicianship, and remembering. By training machine-learning algorithms on the HCP and other human MRI data sets, Anadol will encourage artificial intelligence to make its own patterns, resulting in a free-form imagining of human neural networks. Together, Kuhn and Anadol will be able to move through the elusive brain space and neural architecture using their respective scientific, technological, and aesthetic models, opening a novel room of interdisciplinary inquiry into our mind-spaces.
Jennifer Bolande, professor in the Department of Art, has an exhibition After the Plaster Foundation, or, “Where can we live?” on display at The Queens Museum in New York City through January 17, 2021. The museum’s website includes the exhibition's online catalog and an audio interview with Bolande.
Her work will also be included in the group exhibition World Peace, on view at MoCA Westport in Westport, Conn. from October 8 - January 17, 2021. Bolande delivered a guest lecture for UCSD Visual Arts in May, which you can watch here. She will also have a two-page spread in the October issue of Artforum on politics.
Dana Cuff, professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design and the founder of cityLAB and director of the Urban Humanities Initiative (UHI), is hosting a cityLAB “Summit” event. “cityLAB Opens House: Activism in Design + Dialogue” will take place on October 20th from 12-2 pm. This three-part event about activism in design begins with a guided gallery tour of cityLAB’s most provocative current projects, exhibited in a virtual Perloff Hall. A conversation among civic leaders will be followed by a panel of architects who practice principles of spatial justice. At the close, attendees will be invited to roam independently through the exhibition.
ARID garment by Julia Koerner
Julia Koerner, assistant adjunct professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, has partnered with fellow fashion designer Ganit Goldstein and 3D printing firm Stratasys to optimize its PolyJet technology in custom design manufacturing. The works form part of Re-FREAM, a collaborative research project funded by the European Union that brings together artists, designers, engineers and scientists to explore the use of technology and 3D printing for the future of fashion.
Koerner also unveiled her latest collection ARID at the virtual ARS Electronica festival, “a collection of 38 3D-printed parts... printed directly onto sustainable fabrics in vivid colors, creating an enigmatic shimmer effect when the garment is in motion, while maintaining the comfort and wearability of fabric garments."
Department of Art faculty Barbara Kruger (Distinguished Professor, New Genres) and Catherine Opie (Professor, Photography) and former visiting faculty member Pipilotti Rist are among 10 artists who designed face masks to help raise funds for The Museum of Contemporary Art. The masks are $28 for adults and $20 for children, and are available here.
Greg Lynn, professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design and CEO of Piaggio Fast Forward (PFF), has joined the judging panel for the Lexus Design Award 2021, a global platform to support and nurture the next generation of creators.
Lauren Lee McCarthy, associate professor in the Department of Design | Media Arts, is among the 11 artists selected for the first-ever Women at Sundance | Adobe Fellowship, “designed to meaningfully support women artists creating bold new work in film and media, with a priority on filmmakers from historically underrepresented communities.” Fellows were selected by Adobe from Sundance Institute’s community of supported artists across program disciplines.
McCarthy will also serve as interim associate dean of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. McCarthy, who received her MFA from Design | Media Arts in 2011, was nominated by her peers based on her commitment to EDI principles in her work and in the classroom.
Rodney McMillian, “Untitled (weighted),” 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo: Jeff McLane
Rodney McMillian, professor of sculpture in the Department of Art, has an exhibition of new work on view at Vielmetter Los Angeles through Dec. 5, 2020. Rodney McMillian: Body Politic is his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery and continues “his investigation of the social and political factors that inform our understanding of the body’s symbolic meanings." Body Politic will include a new monumental work in vinyl, The White House Painting, II, 2018-2020 made from the remnants of The White House Painting made for his Booth Prize exhibition in Austin, TX.
In addition to the exhibition, McMillian’s work will be on view in several museums this fall. His 2010 work in black vinyl, Succulent, is currently prominently installed in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby at The Museum of Modern Art, NY. A selection of McMillian’s video works that address the political histories of the United States was recently on view in the solo exhibition Historically Hostile at the Blaffer Art Museum. Also in Houston, Untitled (The Supreme Court Painting), 2004 – 2006 and Untitled (Flag IV), 2012 are on view in States of Mind: Art and American Democracy at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University.
Judy Mitoma, Professor Emerita in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and Director of Center for Intercultural Performance (CIP), was awarded a lifetime honorary membership to the Society for Ethnomusicology in their fall 2019 meeting “for extraordinary service to the Society or to the field of ethnomusicology."
Mitoma is also spearheading a Covid-19 fundraiser for Çudamani, a Balinese Gamelan group. Learn more here. She is currently working on a fall 2021 mid-Atlantic tour for the Indonesian group.
Elena Phipps, lecturer in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, teaches Textile Color Culture and has been looking at natural dye sources close to home. A recent find was a type of Galium that grows wild in her garden. Related to the madder plant, it yielded a nice pumpkin orange dye from its roots.
Peter Sellars, distinguished professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, will premiere a section of his latest opera – a production of prolific composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Idomeneo – at AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles on Oct. 10. The critically acclaimed production of Mozart’s opera opened the 2019 Salzburg Festival in Austria, and AltaSea’s first-ever drive-in experience, The Blue Hour, will serve as the U.S. debut of Sellars’ production. The Los Angeles Times recently praised Sellars’ “new progressive approach to opera as an agent for societal transformation and environmental activism that goes far beyond the usual directorial updating of opera beloved in Europe, too often for little more than show-business pizzazz.”
Jennifer Steinkamp, Blind Eye, 4, 2019. Video installation.
Jennifer Steinkamp, professor in the Department of Design | Media Arts, has a multi-gallery exhibition in Seoul, South Korea, at Leeahn Gallery and Lehmann Maupin, through Oct. 31. She also opened an installation called EON at the University of Texas at Austin on September 10. Watch a conversation with Steinkamp about the installation here.
Emma Thomas, Professor Emerita in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, retired in 2015 but is happy to share this 1986 recording of Dances and Songs from Boccaccio's Decameron, made with UCLA students on campus as part of Judy Mitoma’s “Evening of the Courtly Arts.” The performance subsequently toured Southern Germany & Toscana that spring, and was put online by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies earlier this summer. Watch it here.
Victoria Vesna, professor in the Department of Design | Media Arts and director of the Art|Sci Center, recently co-organized the Los Angeles hub of the Ars Electronica Festival. Telluric Vibrations was a festival with an exhibition and symposium held at the UCLA Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Gardens and in virtual venues from Sept. 9-13. Each activity and artwork was generated around the Ecology of Earth and Ether, considering how we tend to both the ground and the sky and looking closely at their imbrications. The exhibition featured work by the UCLA ArtSci Collective, an intergenerational group of current students, recent graduates and practicing artists, with keynote lectures and panels that provoked dialogue about this time of inherent uncertainty. Videos of the entire festival are archived here.
Header Image: Jennifer Steinkamp, detail of EON, 2020
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