Faculty Spotlight: Fall 2023
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.
Exhibitions, Events, and Performances
Walls, Windows and Blood installation view. (Thomas Dane Gallery)
Catherine Opie, professor in the UCLA Department of Art, debuts a new body of work initiated during the artist’s American Academy in Rome Residency in summer 2021 and conceived especially for Thomas Dane Gallery’s Naples location. During her six-week residency, Opie was, due to the pandemic, granted unparalleled access to the Vatican, four days a week, to explore the architecture and ideologies by photographing, as her title suggests, Walls, Windows and Blood. The exhibition is on view through Saturday, Nov. 18.
UCLA Department of Art Associate Professor Candice Lin’s Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory (2023) is on display now through Saturday, Dec. 16, at Canal Projects in New York. Its narrative traverses six ceramic work stations connected by tubing to ceramic fermentation urns. It derives from a story Lin wrote about a sex-demon's quest from beyond the grave to find a lost lover in a lithium battery factory.
Julia Koerner, associate adjunct professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, will be exhibiting work at the Centre de design de l'UQAM’s exhibition Design textile actuel | Textile Design Now from Thursday, Nov. 30, 2023, through Sunday, Feb. 11, 2024. The exhibition offers a selection of works created by roughly twenty contemporary designers from four continents.
Rebecca Morris, Untitled (#09-05), 2005. (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago)
Rebecca Morris, professor in the UCLA Department of Art, currently has a survey show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through Sunday, April 7, 2024. Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022 presents a 21-year survey of Morris' work, an artist best known for her large-scale paintings and inventive approach to composition, color, and gesture. This exhibition, which originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, marks the artist’s first major museum survey since 2005.
UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design Professor Greg Lynn spoke at the Swarovski Foundation’s Creatives for Our Future event. The Swarovski Foundation brought its global community together in New York to mark its decade of philanthropy and honor the six newest Creatives for Our Future cohort members. The evening included special remarks from Lynn, Founder of Greg Lynn FORM and longstanding program advocate.
Dana Cuff, professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design and UCLA’s cityLAB director, concludes Kent State University’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design Fall 2023 Lecture Series. On Thursday, Nov. 16, Cuff will present her lecture "Architectures of Spatial Justice." The lecture shares the same title as Cuff’s latest book, where she draws from decades of project-based research — some from cityLAB and some from around the world — to examine ethically driven architecture and design efforts that buck conventions to correct long-standing inequities in the built environment.
Nikita Gale, CCCIRCCCE, 2022. Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2022. (Andy Keate)
Nikita Gale '16, who graduated from UCLA Arts with an M.F.A. in New Genres and is a lecturer in the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, will debut her first live performance, OTHER SEASONS, at Performa Biennial 2023 in New York on Saturday, Nov. 4, and Sunday, Nov. 5. The performance will feature an ensemble of classical musicians and a light installation. Gale will reimagine Vivaldi’s iconic work The Four Seasons as a compositional root, chosen as the classical equivalent to contemporary pop music.
Rebeca Méndez, professor in the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, is featured in the group show Mala Muerte curated by Hope Escurra, at the Torrance Art Museum, part of SUR Biennial 2023. The exhibition is now open and will be on view through Saturday, Dec. 2. Méndez will be showing Ascent of Weavers / Ascenso de Tejedoras, 2018, a three channel video installation. The video’s cinematographer, Gabriel Noguez, is also the Senior Media Producer at the Hammer Museum at UCLA and a UCLA Arts alumnus.
Refik Anadol’s Machine Hallucinations: Sphere in Las Vegas. (Sphere Entertainment)
The latest canvas for UCLA Department of Design Media Arts Lecturer and UCLA Arts alumnus Refik Anadol’s AI-generated art is the new Sphere in Las Vegas. Anadol’s piece, an artificial intelligence data sculpture called Machine Hallucinations: Sphere, is now live and will run for four months.
UCLA Department of Design Media Arts Professor Casey Reas has a solo exhibition, Conjured Terrain, at Vellum LA through Friday, Oct. 29. The exhibition is framed as a call-and-response with DAM Projects in Berlin. Conjured Terrain presents all-new work from the artist’s acclaimed, ongoing Untitled Film Stills project, as well as associated videos from the related body of work Compressed Cinema.
Awards and Recognitions
Rodney McMillian, left, sits on the stage with Michaela Pilar Brown, right, to discuss his art and history (Victor Johnson / The Columbia Museum of Art)
UCLA Department of Art Professor and Chair Rodney McMillian received a key to the city of Columbia, South Carolina, after The Columbia Museum of Art (CMA) acquired two of his paintings. McMillian is a prominent voice in 21st Century contemporary American art, and his works will be a permanent fixture at the museum.
UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Professor Dan Froot & Company received grants from Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture and City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs for Arms Around America (AAA), an evening of short theatrical vignettes based on oral histories of families around the country whose lives have been shaped by guns. This past June, UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance presented a live recording event of the podcast version of AAA, which launches later this fall.
Tria Blu Wakpa lecturing. (Dr. Mique’l Dangeli)
UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Assistant Professor Tria Blu Wakpa was awarded the 2023 Selma Jeanne Cohen Dance Lecture Award from the Fulbright Association. Her research and teaching combine community-based, Indigenous, and feminist methodologies with critical race theories to examine the politics and practices of dance and other movement practices.
UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Assistant Professor Wendy Sung received the Hellman Fellowship to support work on her monograph, Violent Virality: Racial Violence and the Making of New Media. The UCLA Society of Hellman Fellows supports and encourages the research of promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their research.
From Saturday, Dec. 9, through Friday, Dec. 15, UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Associate Professor Miguel Gutierrez and cohort will have a residency at Vermont's The Field Center. The residency is part of The Field Center's ongoing effort to support artists in the development of new work in the fields of contemporary performance and dance.
Interviews
Cosmo Whyte photographed with his piece 4/4 Timing (Curtains), 2023. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
UCLA Department of Art Assistant Professor Cosmo Whyte was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times regarding his solo show Hush Now, Don’t Explain at the Anat Ebgi Fountain gallery. Whyte moved to Los Angeles in 2022, having left a teaching position at Florida State University to take on an assistant professor role at UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture. He began working on pieces for the exhibit having barely settled into his new home, and with only two weeks before the start of Fall Quarter 2022.
UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Associate Professor Will Rawls was interviewed by BOMB Magazine about his latest work, [siccer] (2023), an ensemble performance and accompanying expanded cinema installation that uses stop-motion animation. [siccer] is taking shape over a series of institutional iterations and simultaneous installs, premiering this past spring at The Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago. It will continue this fall at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.
Publications
UCLA Department of Art Assistant Professor Gelare Khoshgozaran will publish an essay in the forthcoming anthology All These Liberations: Women Artists in the Eileen Harris Norton Collection. A celebration of the work of women artists of color, the book explores the ways in which struggles for freedom and equality are deeply intertwined with shared feminist practices, art techniques, and movements, and the notion of diaspora through the extraordinary collection of social activist and patron Eileen Harris Norton.
Selections from UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Assistant Professor Ayasha Guerin’s book, Making Zone A, Nature, Race and Resilience on New York’s Most Vulnerable Shores, will be published as chapters in two books: Bio/Matter/Techno/Synthetics (Actar, 2023) and a Routledge anthology on The Aquapelago and Aquapelagic Thinking.
New Faculty
From left to right, Samaa Elimam, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Ayasha Guerin, and Romi Ron Morrison.
UCLA Arts also welcomed several new faculty members this year: Samaa Elimam, assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design; Gelare Khoshgozaran, assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Art; Romi Ron Morrison, assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts; and Ayasha Guerin, assistant professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.
Read more about each new faculty member on the UCLA Arts website.
Header image: A still from Rebeca Méndez' Ascent of Weavers / Ascenso de Tejedoras, 2018. (Rebeca Méndez)
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