Faculty Spotlight: Fall 2022

November 10, 2022

The creative and scholarly contributions of the UCLA Arts community mine the complexities of the human condition, ask essential questions of our time, and expand the potential of creativity. Read more for a list of recent accolades and current and upcoming exhibitions, performances, lectures, and events.

Achievements

THE BIG PICTURE: A COMIC ABOUT JUDY BACA. Illustrated by Elisia Fernandez

Judy Baca, professor emerita in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance was featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “Drawn to Art: Ten Tales of Inspiring Women Artists” series, celebrating influential women artists represented in the museum’s permanent collection. The collection of short comics aims to provide children and art lovers the opportunity to identify with the struggles and triumphs of each artist illustrated on the pages.

Image courtesy cityLAB

Dana Cuff, professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design and director of cityLAB, has been awarded a UCLA Public Impact Research Award. The award is given annually to four faculty members, and comes with a $10,000 prize, which Cuff will dedicate to new initiatives at cityLAB this summer. The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research established the award to recognize Senate faculty whose research or other creative work has had a significant beneficial public impact. Cuff will also receive an honorary doctorate at Lund University in Sweden in June.

Dr. Silvia Forni was appointed as the Shirley & Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum, one of the world’s top museums focusing on the arts and cultures of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Indigenous Americas, past and present. Forni will join the museum effective Dec. 1. 

Lauren Lee McCarthy's work examines how people are adapting to the prevalence of AI and the surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living it brings to our lives. Photo by Christine Baker.

Lauren Lee McCarthy, associate professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, is the 2022-23 Visiting Artist at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. On sabbatical from UCLA, McCarthy will explore the “technological and social systems humans simultaneously build for themselves” during her residency and anticipates hosting lectures and workshops for the Stanford community. 

Miguel Gutierrez joined the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance as an associate professor this fall. Gutierrez creates dance-based performances, music, and poetry that focus on desire, identity, and the search for meaning. 

Anuradha Vikram, lecturer in the Department of Art, was a featured curator in X-aMEN-ing Masculinities on Oct. 6 at Los Angeles State Historic Park, an event that featured performance art and installations comparing paradigms of masculinity including male bonding rituals, trans masculinity, masculine models of care, and uses of power.

Vikram moderated at Illuminate LA: Artist Reflections on Monuments and Public Space on Oct. 27. Artists whose lives and art practices intersect with downtown Los Angeles convened to discuss forgotten histories and recent transformations in downtown’s landscape.

Vikram joined Mashinka Firunts Hakopian in conversation at the MAK Center’s Mackey Apartments on Oct. 28 about Uncanny Intelligences, exploring how museum exhibitions subtly reinforce established orders and the norms embedded in quantitative systems.

Cosmo Whyte joined the Department of Art as an assistant professor, teaching graduate students across the department as well as undergraduate drawing courses while continuing his own research and creative practice, which includes drawing, painting, installation, and sculpture. 

Events, Exhibitions and Performances

Rendering of “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised.” Image courtesy of Refik Anadol Studio and the Museum of Modern Art.

Refik Anadol, visiting lecturer in the Department of Design Media Arts has teamed up with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to include digital artworks in the museum’s ground-floor Gund Lobby, continuously generating new forms based on real-time input and changes in light, movement, and the weather. Anadol has worked with MoMA this past year to collect more than 138,000 images and text materials from the museum’s archives using a machine-learning model to render them into hundreds of “machine hallucinations.”

Anadol’s A.I.-generated visualizations were also included in a performance of “Song of the Ambassadors” at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. The work-in-progress performance “fuses elements of traditional opera with artificial intelligence and neuroscience” to generate fantastical imagery of flowers of all sizes, colors, and shapes.

Karin Higa: Reverberations. Hammer Museum.

Anna Sew Hoy, associate professor and area head of ceramics in the Department of Art, helped plan a series of panel discussions in collaboration with the Hammer Museum and the Japanese American National Museum this November, exploring the legacy of the influential art historian, curator, and UCLA Art alumna Karin Higa (1966–2013). Hoy will be featured in a panel discussion at the Hammer Museum titled “Karin Higa: Reverberations” on Nov. 20 at 2 p.m.

The Glittering Cloud, 2021; Millifree Work Weary™️ Free Video (Qi Gong), 2021 – digital video, 19 min 45 sec; Seated Seer (Censer), 2020; Censer, 2021; Swamp Carcass (Alligator Candelabra), 2021; Moss Candelabra, 2021; Psalmanazar Censer, 2021, glazed ceramic, incense, candles, salt.

Candice Lin, assistant professor in the Department of Art, has work featured in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (April 23-Nov. 27, 2022), The Matter of Art Biennial, Prague (July 21-Oct. 23, 2022), and recently in the Coimbra Biennial of Contemporary Art Anozero 21’22: Meia- Noite (Apr. 9-June 26, 2022).

Her solo exhibition Sleeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping is currently on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (May 8-Nov. 27, 2022), including a conversation with Mel Y. Chin and Victoria Sung. Lin’s work is also featured in California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold at the Orange County Museum of Art (Oct. 8-Feb. 26), Durian On the Skin at Francois Ghebaly (Sept. 17-Oct. 29), Nightmare Bathroom and at Del Vaz Projects (Sept. 24-Nov.19). In addition, she will participate in the upcoming show Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (Oct. 21-Feb. 26).

Peter Lunenfeld, professor and vice chair in the Department of Design Media Arts, will present the talk “Null Demos: The Long Confidence Games of Crypto Currencies” at an international colloquium organized by the French Research Center in Jerusalem on Thursday, Nov. 15.

The Sea Around Us exhibition of Rebeca Méndez at the Laguna Art Museum. Credit Laguna Art Museum.

Rebeca Méndez, professor and chair in the Department of Design Media Arts, unveiled her new exhibition The Sea Around Us at the Laguna Art Museum for its 10th annual Art & Nature program. The exhibition, on view until Feb. 5, 2023, transports viewers to the Pacific Ocean and illustrates “thousands of oozing barrels of DDT on the seafloor… inspiring the courage to face environmental wrongdoing, to take restorative action, and to avoid repeating transgressions against our natural resources.”

Laure Michelon, Machinic Reflection. Images courtesy of Ian Beyers Gamber and Supercollider LA.

Laure Michelon, lecturer in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design’s IDEAS technology studio, is SciArt Ambassador with Supercollider LA, featured in three shows with the organization: Terra [Alterities] (May 6-8, 2022), FEELERS: Towards Reciprocal Sensing (Sep. 16 - Oct. 1, 2022), and a time to tear and a time to mend (Oct. 7 - Nov. 18, 2022). Her newest showcase at a time to tear and a time to mend exhibition at Wozimer Gallery in Los Angeles features her piece Machinic Reflection, confronting bias in emerging technologies.

Rebecca Morris, Untitled (#10-20), 2020. Oil on canvas 90 x 95 in (228.6 x 241.3cm)

Rebecca Morris, professor and area head of painting and drawing in the Department of Art, presented Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022, a 21-year survey of her work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibition includes 30 paintings that showcase Morris' “progression of styles and rigorous commitment to experimentation and abstraction.”

Catherine Opie, professor and chair in the Department of Art, is one of 13 featured artists at the Orange County Museum of Art’s new exhibition 13 Women, on view through August 2023. The exhibition pays tribute to the 13 women who founded the Balboa Pavilion Gallery, the earliest iteration of OCMA, which opened in 1962, through works that encapsulate their visionary qualities.

Peter Sellars, distinguished professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, has two upcoming productions at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles this fall. In collaboration with conductor Grant Gershon, Sellars will direct Los Angeles Master Chorale’s production of Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien (Music to Accompany a Departure) on Sunday, Nov. 20 at 7 p.m. Sellars will direct a new revival of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Act I with conductor Gustavo Dudamel and visual artist Bill Viola on Dec. 9 and 12 at 8 p.m. 

Wendy Sung, assistant professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, organized the Nov. 4 panel at the American Studies Association’s annual conference, “The Face as Technology: Racial Histories, Visual Logics, and Undoings,” which situates technologies of the face as central to histories of racialization and reveals how the face is a key facet of immigration and carceral histories, of our biometric pasts, and of our technological present. Sung presents work related to her second book project with the talk "The Asian Face and Its Inscrutability: Biometric Pasts and the Presents of Facial Scrutiny and Attunement."

Victoria Vesna, [Alien] Star Dust. Meteorite gallery in the Natural History Museum in Vienna.

Victoria Vesna, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, was part of the Galapagos Art & Science Journey (National Geographic Endeavour), focusing on their pioneering in policy implementation of sustainable development and environmental protection, and is working towards a major exhibition at Circulo de Bellas Artes de Madrid. 

Vesna’s latest work [Alien] Star Dust: Signal to Noise is currently part of the Changwon Sculpture Biennale in Korea. It was shortlisted for the NTU Global Digital Art prize and will be featured in an exhibition in Singapore, opening Nov. 26, and will be part of a large exhibition, Cosmological Events, at the Fosun foundation in Shanghai, China, on view from Dec. 10, 2022 - Feb. 15, 2023.

Awards

Four UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design members received 2022 AIA|LA Awards this November. Adjunct professor Kevin Daly and his practice architects won the Merit Award for Gramercy Senior Housing. AUD alumni Claus Benjamin Freyinger and Andrew Holder and their LADG practice won the Single-Family Residential Citation Award for their Dusty Mile project. Lecturer Narineh Mirzaeian and her design practice MNOffice won the Citation Award for their We and Our Mountains project. Assistant adjunct professor Mohamed Sharif and lecturer Todd M. Lynch won the Single-Family Residential Merit Award for their Infill ADU project design by their practice Sharif, Lynch: Architecture.

Dan Froot, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, was awarded the prestigious National Theater Project grant by New England Foundation for the Arts, for his company’s upcoming work, Arms Around America (AAA). AAA iterates as 1) a collection of six book-length oral histories of families around the country whose lives have been shaped by guns, 2) a season of podcast episodes exploring ways in which we enact fear, power, identity, loss, and love through our relationships with guns, and 3) a collection of short plays staged as a radio theater company performing a live broadcast. The show will premiere at CAP UCLA’s Nimoy Theater in the fall of 2024. This fall, the company is performing in-progress readings of scenes from AAA. A reading that was held on Oct. 29 can be streamed on YouTube.

Julia Koerner, assistant adjunct professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, was awarded the department’s Charles Moore Traveling Studio prize for her research studio “Fit for the Future: 3D Printed Sustainable Building Skins.” 

Kutan Ayata, vice chair and associate professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and its architectural design practice, Young & Ayata, received First Prize in the International Competition for the (New) Agricultural Resources Management Institute in Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea.

Georgina Huljich, associate professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and her architectural practice P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S was awarded for their proposal “Wonderwall,” advancing the project from concept to development in the city’s Sunset Arts & Advertising Program competition. Huljich and her P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S co-principal, Marcelo Spina, are now producing a comprehensive collection of construction documents for the City of West Hollywood.

Projects

Robert Een, acclaimed composer and lecturer in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, scored the Netflix documentary “Confessions from a War.” Een also performed his composition “Song of Myself section 26” at Brooklyn Bridge Park on Sep. 17 as part of the Walt Whitman Marathon. 

Greg Lynn, professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and his robotics company Piaggio Fast Forward (PFF) announced the launch of its newest addition to the gita robot family for the holiday season – an all-black limited edition of gitamini. The gitamini is “the perfect gift for healthy living enthusiasts, fashion and accessories lovers, environmentally conscious individuals, tech adopters, and those with pedestrian-first lifestyles.”

Publications

Polly Roberts and Neelima Jeychandran with the maquette of Shirdi Sai Baba’s murti “embodiment” in the Talim Sculpture Studio of Mumbai, December 2009.

Allen F. Roberts, distinguished professor emeritus in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, co-edited the Routledge publication Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint: Shirdi Sai Baba’s Presence, dedicated to the memory of Mary "Polly" Nooter Roberts (d. 2018), professor of World Arts and Cultures and former Fowler Museum deputy director. A chapter entitled “Baba’s Guiding Hand: Artists and Acheiropoiesis” is composed from Polly’s unpublished research with artists in Mauritius, India, and Germany. The book is available in hardcover and paperback.

Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn and Patrick O'Hare. Taking Form, Making Worlds. 360pp, June 2022, 6.00 x 9.00 x 1.30 in.

Alex Ungprateeb Flynn PhD, assistant professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, recently published his monograph Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2022). Co-written with Lucy Bell and Patrick O’Hare, the book draws on eighteen months of fieldwork across Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. The book details the publishing phenomenon and art form cartonera, with hundreds of publishers across Latin America and Europe making colorful, low-cost books out of cardboard salvaged from the street. Ungprateeb illustrates how this hands-on practice has fostered a politically-engaged network of writers, artists, and readers and fostered community and engagement through open-ended forms that are at once artistic and social. The research project has been included in an exhibition in São Paulo, Brazil, symposia in Mexico, Brazil, and London, and there are now cartonera collections at the British Library, University of Cambridge Library, and our very own UCLA Research Library. 

Interviews

David Gere, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and director of the UCLA Art & Global Health Center, was recently featured on the UNAIDS podcast “Against the Odds.” Gere discussed the experience of seeing close friends affected and dying of AIDS in 1980s San Francisco, and his growing conviction that it might be possible to use art to change behaviors and attitudes, “I really thought of art as being about expression, getting things out, having a full life,” Gere said.  “It was about beauty, but it was also about action.” The UCLA Art & Global Health Center is commemorating World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, 2022 with a panel discussion and screening to acknowledge the deep impacts of HIV/AIDS, Covid-19, and MPX (monkeypox virus) on ourselves, our communities, and the world at large.

Barbara Kruger, professor emerita in the Department of Art talked with The Drift about her iconic silkscreen “Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground).” In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Kruger reflected upon her past work and her new exhibition Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You, bringing “together large-scale collages, sound pieces, annotated texts, and video works that juxtapose kittens with right-wing political rhetoric.”

HEADER IMAGE: Rendering of “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised.” Image courtesy of Refik Anadol Studio and the Museum of Modern Art.

Stay engaged. Use #UCLAarts to stay connected.