Faculty Spotlight: Spring 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.
Achievements
Anurima Banerji, Associate Professor, Vice-Chair of Graduate Affairs, in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, is a fellow at the Center for Ballet and the Arts, NYU and is working on a monograph titled The Impossibility of Indian Classical Dance. As part of the fellowship activities, with Prof. Brooke Holmes (Princeton University), Banerji recently co-organized a public talk, "Unsettling Classical Bodies," and seminar "Body of Spirals," with the contemporary choreographer Padmini Chettur, who is based in India and traveled to New York for these special events.
Andrea Fraser, professor in the Department of Art, is being honored by Triple Canopy at their spring benefit, which will take place on May 25, in New York City.
Exhibitions, Events, and Performances
Dan Froot & Company. Arms Around America.
Dan Froot, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, and his company will present a live podcast recording of Arms Around America on June 22 at 8 p.m. Dan Froot & Company will perform several scenes based on stories of real families whose lives have been shaped by guns. Presented in the style of traditional radio theater, four actors voice dozens of characters and create “foley” sound effects with an eclectic collection of everyday objects. You’ll get to participate in the podcast recording, which also includes dynamic discussions with special guests and live music from Julio Montero of the band Cuñao. You will be immersed in lively debates and get insight into Dan Froot & Company’s development process. Dan Froot & Company also recently performed Pang!, a triptych of short audio dramas based on the oral histories of families living below the poverty level and hungering for change, at the University of Albany Performing Arts Center on Apr. 20 to 22, 2023.
Cela Concerne Nous Tous, photo by Laurent Philippe.
Miguel Guiterrez, associate professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, will present three pieces of work at New York City theaters: Cela Nous Concerne Tous (This Concerns All of Us) (2017), for 25 dancers of Ballet de Lorraine, April 21 and 22 at N.Y.U. Skirball; I as another (2022), a new duet with the dancer Laila J. Franklin, May 4–7 at Baryshnikov Arts Center; and Variations on Themes From Lost and Found: Scenes From a Life and Other Works by John Bernd (2016), a revival of a 2016 collaboration with the choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones and the composer Nick Hallett, May 25–Jun. 3 at Danspace Project.
Hammer staff teach students about works of art. Courtesy of Hammer Museum.
Kevin Kane, director of the Visual and Performing Arts Education (VAPAE Program), worked alongside Academic Programs at the Hammer Museum to re-launch the Classroom-in-Residence at the Hammer program (CRH), a free, innovative program designed to strengthen student and teacher learning about art through a weeklong, immersive experience at the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Two teachers of 4th, 5th, or 6th grade are given the unique opportunity to take their students out of the traditional classroom setting and teach with original works of art. Surrounded by the processes and products of artistic innovation, students are inspired to reflect deeply on art’s multiple meanings and make inferences using visual evidence.
Kevin Kane and Lindsey Kunisaki (VAPAE Research & Evaluation Specialist) presented their research “Onto-epistemic Development of Culturally Sustaining Teaching Artists in a Multigenerational Learning Community” at the 2023 AERA (American Educational Research Association) in Chicago, in a paper session titled, “Learning from Within: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Diverse Learning Communities.”
Julia Koerner, adjunct professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, is a featured artist at the Schloss Hollenegg’s exhibition titled Ashes & Sand, exploring glass and the wide variety of products that can be made out of the material: windows, tableware, spectacles, lighting, mirrors, and the many decorative objects that one can find in any home and sometimes only in a castle. The exhibition will be on view until May 28.
Tucker van Leuwen-Hall, lecturer in the Department of Architecture and urban Design, spoke at “Science: Between Literal and Metaphorical Meanings,” a joint workshop between the Champalimaud Foundation and the University of Lisbon. His talk, “We’re All Born Withdrawn and the Rest is Aesthetic,” was delivered alongside the keynote speaker Graham Harman’s talk “Duomining and Science.” The workshop took place on April 20-21 in Lisbon. van Leuwen-Hall’s talk outlined how OOO and queer theory are compatible counterpositions to correlationism and duomining.
Casey Reas. Work-in-progress image from An Empty Room. Courtesy of the artist.
Casey Reas, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, presented a two-part digital work Casey Reas: METAVASARELY and An Empty Room in collaboration with LACMA's Art + Technology Lab. The works are a simulation of and homage to Victor Vasarely's unrealized proposal for LACMA's Art and Technology Program (1967–1971). Envisioned during a period in which Vasarely was interested in cybernetics and permutation, the proposal defined a machine composed of lights arranged in a grid that would generate millions of different visual patterns related to his paintings. METAVASARELY—the first component—explores and simulates Vasarely's proposed machine, while the second, An Empty Room, consists of a software art homage to Vasarely, beginning with his ideas of a "binary plastic language" and continuing into unknown territory. An Empty Room will be available for viewing at LACMA until July 2.
Awards
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.
Assistant professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Alex Ungprateeb Flynn’s book Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2022) has won a prestigious award from the Latin American Studies Association. Co-authored with Lucy Bell and Patrick O’Hare, “Taking Form, Making Worlds” won the 2023 LASA Best Book in Latin American Visual Culture Studies. The book tells the story of “cartonera”, an artistic movement and publishing project that has exploded in popularity across Latin America since 2003. Drawing on four years of research, the project included creating cartonera collections at the British Library, making a film, and curating an exhibition. A recent review details cartonera’s transformative gesture as an invitation “to exit the ivory tower and head for the street” and the book explores cartonera's autonomy as part of the creativity of Latin American community networks.
Adjunct professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design Julia Koerner’s 3D-printed crown and neckpiece for Queen Ramonda in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever were a featured part of Ruth E. Carter’s costume design which won the Oscar For Best Costume Design. The Wakanda Forever 3D-printed pieces—as well as Koerner’s HY MINI sustainable and innovative 3D-printed handbag—were selected as finalists in the 2023 3D Pioneers Challenge. Koerner’s brand JK3D also received 3 design nominations by the TCT Award to be announced in June 2023.
Wendy Sung, assistant professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, was awarded the UC Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (UCMRPI) Pilot/Planning Award as a Co-Investigator alongside other faculty across the UC system to examine, historicize, and interrogate the responses to Asian hate.
Interviews
Andrea Fraser, professor in the Department of Art, and American poet Claudia Rankine discussed the intersections between their recent works, This meeting is being recorded (2021) and Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), and their shared interests in subjects such as re-performing conversations, complicating notions of authority, the complex intersections of white privilege and antiracism work, and the emotional and psychological structures within these dynamics. The video interview is available on Youtube.
Alex Chew, Danielle Wagner, Max Kuo. Courtesy ALLTHATISSOLID.
Max Kuo, lecturer in and alumni of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and his firm ALLTHATISSOLID with alumni Alex Chew and Danielle Wagner, were featured in Architect Magazine’s “Next Progressives” series. The firm "pursues an architecture of alternative world-making that is less interested in exceptionalism but is instead focused on formal strategies of mischief, paradox, and idiosyncrasy."
Publications
Anurima Banerji, associate Professor, Vice-Chair of Graduate Affairs, in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, is a featured contributor in Performance Cultures as Epistemic Cultures, Volume II (Routledge 2023), in Chapter 8 “The Epistemic Politics of Indian Classical Dance.” Banerji also wrote “The Award-Wapsi Controversy in India and the Politics of Dance” in the special issue of The Dancing Body: labour, livelihood and leisure (South Asian History and Culture, Volume 14, Issue 2 (2023).
Wendy Sung, assistant professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, recently published an article in Feminist Media Histories titled “More Than Just a Memory: American Artist’s ‘Sandy Speaks,’ Black Digitalities of Care, and the Politics of Technological Refusal” (2023). The article examines American Artist’s installation “Sandy Speaks,” a chatbot inspired by Sandra Bland’s media activism, as an analytical connective point to pathways of Black technological critique and histories of Black digitality and care. First connecting the work to its predigital antecedent The Negro Green Book, the article then argues that the typical aspirations of chatbot to approximate the human is disavowed in “Sandy Speaks,” enacting a Black technological critique of the human itself. This article asks what might happen when we seek potentialities of Black praxis in the slow, broken, old, technological forms, not as remedy, but as theory, critique, and an undoing of the recuperation of technological innovation as the most legible mode of recognition.
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