Faculty Spotlight: Spring 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 virtual and in-person exhibitions, performances, lectures, and events.
Judith Baca, professor emeritus in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, unveiled her mural La Memoria de la Tierra: UCLA in Ackerman Union. The nearly 80-foot artwork depicts the history, present and future of UCLA and the land where it resides.
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.
Andrea Fraser, This meeting is being recorded (still), 2021. Single-channel HD video installation, 99 minutes. Courtesy the artist.
Andrea Fraser, professor in the Department of Art, will have the U.S. premiere of This meeting is being recorded (2021) at the Hammer Museum. The performance-based video explores the processes and formation of race, gender, and age within an intergenerational group of seven self-identified white women. Specially commissioned by the Hammer Museum and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, the 99-minute video will be on view for a limited time from May 22 to June 19, 2022.
Dan Froot, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, and his Company's Pang! will be featured on PSi#27 - Hunger 2022 (The 27th Annual Performance Studies International Conference) on July 8 at 7 pm. Pang! is a triptych of short plays based on the oral histories of families around the country who are living with food insecurity.
The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA has commissioned Dan Froot & Company’s Arms Around America to premiere at the Nimoy Theater in Westwood in late 2024. Arms Around America is a collection of short plays based on oral histories of families around the country whose lives have been shaped by guns. This May, Dan Froot & Company will be in residence at Miami Light Project (Miami FL) and the Myrna Loy Center (Helena MT) for the development of Arms Around America.
Anna Sew Hoy, associate professor in the Department of Art and area head of ceramics, was awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. Sew Hoy is inspired by clay’s history as a material for making ritual and functional objects. Her sculptures reflect people’s encounters with things, such as wearing one's favorite sweater, to the contemplation of an object on a pedestal.
MAK-Ausstellungsansicht, 2022. (Con)temporary Fashion Showcase: Julia Koerner. MAK Geymüllerschlössel. © MAK/Georg Mayer
Julia Koerner, assistant adjunct professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, gave talks on March 3 at SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Architects); April 6 at Istituto Marangoni in Florence, Italy; and May 3 at The University of Sydney in Australia. She will give a talk on May 21 entitled “The Future is Now” at The Textile Arts Council of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which will be in-person and virtual via Zoom. Koerner was also interviewed on the Vienna Business Agency’s podcast.
Koerner’s work is on view at the S+T+ARTS exhibition NEAR + FUTURES + QUASI + WORLDS in Bologna, Italy through May 29; and at the Contemporary Fashion ShowCase at the MAK (Museum of Applied Arts) in Vienna, Austria through Dec. 4.
Barbara Kruger, professor emerita in the Department of Art, is the subject of a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., on view through July 17. Spanning four decades, the exhibition is the largest and most comprehensive presentation of Kruger’s work in 20 years; it spans her single-channel videos from the 1980s to digital productions of the last two decades, and includes large-scale vinyl room wraps, multichannel video installations, and audio soundscapes throughout LACMA’s campus.
Ayala Levin, associate professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, is the author of “Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination, 1958-1973” (Duke University Press, February 2022). The book offers new ways of understanding the role of architecture as a vehicle of postcolonial development and in the mobilization of development resources. A book launch will be held at UCLA’s Perloff Hall on Thursday, May 19 at 6:30 pm.
Levin is also co-editor of “Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South” (Routledge, April 2022). This collection of essays investigates how architects, planners, and other related experts responded to the contexts and discourses of “development” after World War II.
Candice Lin, assistant professor in the Department of Art, will participate in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (April 23 to November 27) and The Matter of Art Biennial, Prague (Jul 21-October 23). Lin’s solo exhibition Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, previously on view at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University from Feb. 4 to Apr. 10, opens at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on May 7th. Her exhibition Pigs and Poison is currently on view at Spike Island in Bristol, United Kingdom until May 8. In tandem with this exhibition, Lin presented “A History of Future Contagion,” an online discussion with scholar Neel Ahuja on March 14, organized by The Courtauld Institute. Other works by Lin will be exhibited in upcoming shows including Botanical Madness at the Kröller-Müller Museum from May 21 to September 11, and MYR Millions of Years at the McEvoy Center for the Arts from May 27-August 27. In the summer, Lin will co-lead Material Transformations, a thematic residency at Banff Arts Center.
Rebeca Méndez, still from El Norte
Rebeca Méndez, professor and chair of the Department of Design Media Arts, is showing the video El Norte at the El Paso Museum of Art through June 19. A critique on the colonization of the Arctic, the work depicts the artist’s own conquest to stake a claim on the North Pole during a snowstorm. Her struggle compares reality with idealized views of the migration experience. An immigrant herself, Méndez highlights seasonal migrations and patterns with a nod to ecological issues affecting the Anthropocene.
Méndez is also the artist-in-residence at the Laguna Art Museum, where she will work on her project The Sea Around Us. The work is conceived of as a spatial, immersive, cinematic experience that will focus on expressing the complexity and multiple voices of the eastern Pacific Ocean. The finished video installation will be on view from November 3, 2022 through February 5, 2023.
Yogan Muller, visiting lecturer in the Department of Design Media Arts, will be showing his latest body of work at Rotterdam Photo 2022. Responding to the theme “The Human Blue Print,” Muller will exhibit Telotypes, a collection of pictures he started to make when he moved to Los Angeles in October 2019. With a conscious nod to Lewis Baltz's Prototype Works, Muller's Telotypes draw attention to the impact L.A. has on the landscape while forging aesthetics attuned to mounting environmental pressures. The festival runs May 18-22 in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Peter Sellars, distinguished professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, will direct the San Francisco Symphony’s production of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex/Symphony of Psalms from June 10-12, 2022.
Sellars will direct composer and conductor Tyshawn Sorey’s new musical commission Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) from Sept. 27–Oct. 8. The work was commissioned by Park Avenue Armory, DaCamera, and Rothko Chapel in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Houston’s iconic Rothko Chapel. Sellars and Sorey will participate in an artist talk about the work on Thursday, Sept. 29 at 6 p.m.
Sellars will direct Los Angeles Master Chorale’s production of Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien (Funeral Music) on Sunday, Nov. 20. Twenty-four singers breathe life and movement into this meditation on death. This concert is an homage to those who have left us and the bond we share with them.
David Delgado Shorter, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, published an essay, “On the Frontier of Redefining ‘Intelligent Life’ in Settler Science” in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal in a January 2022 special issue co-edited with Dr. Kim TallBear (University of Alberta). In response to that essay, Shorter was interviewed on the podcast Conspiracies, Inc. and by George Noory on Coast to Coast AM, the widely popular radio call-in show. Subsequently, he has been invited to give talks at UCSC and the Astrobiology Scientific Conference annual meeting on the search for life in outer space. Shorter was recently invited onto the board of Clockshop as well as named a humanities advisor for the El Segundo Museum of Art’s “Futurisms of SPACE Travel'' symposium. In February, Shorter convened a gathering of artists, researchers, and museum staff to learn about Indigenous Tongva collaboration protocols. This event featured Craig Torres and Leah Garza and was funded by The Armory Center for the Arts as part of their “From the Ground Up'' research, funded by The Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time “Art x Science'' initiative.
Victoria Vesna, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, has her work Noise Aquarium included in Our Time on Earth at the Barbican in London, a new immersive and interactive exhibition exploring radical ideas from around the world that address how we live, on view through Aug. 29, 2022.
HEADER IMAGE: Victoria Vesna, Noise Aquarium.
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