Faculty Spotlight: June 2020
Updates from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture faculty
On a typical day, the work of our faculty enlivens museums, galleries, performance venues, lecture halls, and public spaces across the globe. While many of those venues and institutions have temporarily shut their doors, 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—now in new modalities, accessible from home. Read more for a list of recent accolades and current and upcoming virtual exhibitions, performances, and lectures.
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), has received a three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the third time to support the UHI and a new community-based research effort through the newly established coLAB. The UHI alumni group is producing a podcast called Portal, due to be released in midsummer. Also this summer. UHI will continue design development of the Wooden Center BruinHub, an on-campus space for students to wait out traffic, rest, study, store belongings, and access critical information and resources. Meanwhile, coLAB is partnering with GRUPO Nuevo Los Angeles to reimagine public spaces surrounding the Camino Nuevo High School, by investigating pedestrian safety and resources for unhoused neighbors through an urban humanist lens. Also, cityLAB has launched a new project with the California School Boards Association (funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) to investigate new strategies and guidelines for building affordable, workforce housing on public school land and campuses. It will be working alongside research partners at the Center for Cities and Schools and the Terner Center for Housing Innovation, both based at UC Berkeley. The year-long grant builds upon cityLAB’s ongoing thinking around the 21st Century School-House.
Robertson Recreation Center, designed by Kevin Daly Architects
Kevin Daly, adjunct professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design and the founder of Kevin Daly Architects, recently completed the Robertson Recreation Center, a new neighborhood gymnasium and community center serving the South Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles. Another project, the Houston Endowment Headquarters, is nearing the end of the design development phase.
Susan Foster, distinguished professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, was awarded the 129th UCLA Faculty Research Lectureship.
Dan Froot in "Pang!" (2018). Photo by Hector David Rosales
Dan Froot, chair and professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, is finishing the last four episodes of the first season of his podcast, Pang!, a series of contemporary audio dramas based on the oral histories of families around the country who are hungering for change. In the fall, he begins work on his new project, Arms Around America, a community-based performance project. It culminates in an evening of three short plays based on the oral histories of families around the country whose lives have been shaped by guns. The goal is to foster dialogue among community members on all sides of the gun debate. Arms Around America has just received 2020-2021 grants from the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, the LA Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts Art Works program in Theater.
Julia Koerner, assistant adjunct professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, recently participated in the project "No-Place like the Future - Artists evoke a world after corona" with the aim of bringing Austrian and American artists together during the COVID-19 pandemic to jointly work on a new piece of art. Koerner collaborated with American artist and glassblower Austin Fields to create the project "Virtual Bloom" with 3D printing and glass.
Peter Lunenfeld, professor in the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, has a book coming out in August 2020 called "City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined." The book has received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly. An innovative "drive-in" reading is planned for September.
Victoria Marks, professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, has received $35,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Arts funding for the Dancing Disability Lab.
SOMEONE, an interactive installation by Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy, associate professor in the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, won the Ars Electronica Golden Nica Award, STARTS Prize Honorary Mention, and the Japan Media Arts Festival Social Impact Award for her work SOMEONE. She was also named a Sundance New Frontier Story Lab Fellow and awarded a Woman at Sundance Adobe Fellowship. This year, she also worked with a community of designers to launch the p5.js 1.0 release, which she says is a huge milestone for the project that has been seven years in the making. To celebrate the occasion the community published a 1.0 Contributors book and digital zine publication.
Janet O'Shea, professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, was awarded the 2020 UCLA Gold Shield Faculty Prize. O'Shea is the second UCLA Arts faculty member to win the award for academic excellence since it was established in 1986.
Elena Phipps, lecturer in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, teaches Textile Color Culture and has been experimenting with making color from organic products around her house, and especially from the irises in her garden. She was inspired by her class's guest speakers, Nancy Turner, Conservator at the Getty Museum, and her lecture on making Medieval pigments.
Garrett Ricciardi, lecturer in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, is co-founder of the firm Formlessfinder, which was selected as a winner of the 2020 Architecture League Prize.
Allen F. Roberts, distinguished professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures, is working on an essay first drafted in the early 1990s about a genre of agentive Congolese sculpture developed at the turn of the 20th century to revitalize societies crushed by heavy-handed colonial authorities. Roberts is also working on a book of essays—to be co-edited with Smriti Srinivas at UC Davis and Neelima Jeychandran at Penn State—that will consider visual practices associated with Indian spiritual master Shirdi Sai Baba. The book will include contributions from eight scholars from around the world, and interviews that Roberts' late wife and UCLA professor Mary “Polly" Nooter Roberts undertook with artists producing devotional works.
Peter Sellars, distinguished professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, is in rehearsals for a new production that will be broadcast in October. It’s a coproduction between Boethius and Bard College. The work, as yet untitled, is a portion of the "Vimalakirti Sutra," an early Buddhist text about illness and the frailty of the body.
Patty Wickman, Circumscribe, 2017-2019. Oil on linen. 84 x 104 inches
Patty Wickman, professor in the UCLA Department of Art, is currently in an exhibition titled "To Bough and to Bend" at Bridge Projects, Los Angeles. She'll be a featured artist in Bridge Projects’ programming series, Echo/Locate, which takes place Thursday, July 9 at noon via Zoom. Click here to register.
Header image: Elena Phipps sent us this picture of irises in her garden, which she used to dye textiles.
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