Faculty Spotlight: Spring 2024
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, interviews, and current and upcoming exhibitions, publications, performances, lectures, and events.
Exhibitions, Events, and Performances
A still from Andrea Fraser’s film Orchard Document: May I Help You? (Andrea Fraser / Marian Goodman Gallery)
Andrea Fraser, professor in the Department of Art, has a solo exhibition at the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare in Bolzano, Italy. Scheduled to open on Saturday, April 13, “I just don’t like eggs!”: Andrea Fraser on collectors, collecting, collections is the first survey solely dedicated to Fraser’s works investigating collectors, collecting, the art market, and the intersections between private and public collections. The project includes works spanning the artist’s overall research, from the late '80s to her recent productions, including a new artwork especially conceived for this exhibition.
Anna Sew Hoy, associate professor in the Department of Art, co-curated the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles exhibition Scratching at the Moon. Billed as “the first focused survey of Asian American artists in a major Los Angeles contemporary art museum,” the exhibition celebrates the work of an intergenerational group of thirteen leading artists in the Asian American community. Scratching at the Moon is on view through Sunday, July 28. Sew Hoy will also give a free artist talk on Tuesday, May 7 at the Hammer Museum at UCLA about her work, which has been at the forefront of a re-engagement with clay in contemporary art, and is identified with a critical rethinking of the relationship between art and craft.
UCLA PEP Founder and Associate Professor Bryonn Bain performs at Literary Liberation. (Patrick Shao / UCLA Arts)
Bryonn Bain, associate professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and co-founder of the UCLA Prison Education Program (PEP), hosted Literary Liberation, a concert featuring poetry from 12 UCLA students and 12 women from the Victorville Federal Correctional Institution, on Friday, March 15. Since 2015, PEP has been teaching inside women and juvenile prisons. With live instrumental accompaniment, a DJ, and one another for support, that night’s poetry traversed themes of personal trauma, the battle for reproductive rights, political conflicts and the war in Gaza, motherhood and sisterhood, and even a bit of comedy about what it’s like to be in prison.
Cauleen Smith, professor in the Department of Art, had multiple exhibitions this year and has an upcoming exhibition in Norway. Mines to Caves at the Aspen Art Museum closed this past weekend. It highlighted the social, economic, and environmental legacies of mining in Colorado and beyond. The Wanda Coleman Songbook at 52 Walker in New York was an immersive video installation that explored the poetry of Wanda Coleman. Coleman was widely considered the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles, and her work guided Smith’s reacquaintance with the city after a sixteen-year absence. The Deep West opens on Friday, June 14 at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art with a multi-room exhibition where Smith will be premiering a new film.
Installation view of Professor Lauren Lee McCarthy's Bodily Autonomy. (Mandeville Art Gallery)
Lauren Lee McCarthy, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, currently has a solo show, Bodily Autonomy, at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery. Bodily Autonomy — the largest presentation of McCarthy’s work to date in the United States — marks the premiere of Surrogate and Saliva, two Creative Capital-funded projects that examine the current state of bio-surveillance and the effects of algorithms on social life. Through performance, video, and installation, visitors are invited to consider the implications and future path of genetic development, reproductive technologies, and data privacy in a world where individual agency is rapidly diminishing. Bodily Autonomy is open through Saturday, May 25.
Lionel Popkin, interim dean of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, premiered Reorient the Orient at REDCAT on March 9 and 10. Reorient the Orient is Popkin’s response to the dubious history of interculturalism. Seeking to expand the discourse on how brown South Asian bodies inhabit contemporary art and performance spaces, Popkin drew from his nearly 30-year archive of dance-making. At REDCAT’s theater and gallery, dancers, videos, sculptures, neon yellow wiffle balls, and the headpiece from an elephant costume invited audiences to make their way, choosing where to be and what to see.
For the Whitney Biennial, Lecturer Nikita Gale created a player piano whose hammers don’t strike the keys. (Charlie Rubin / New York Times)
Nikita Gale, lecturer in the Department of Design Media Arts, contributed a modified baby grand player piano to the Whitney Biennial, New York’s most prominent showcase of new American art. Centered in a carpeted gallery, the player piano’s hammers don’t strike the strings. The keys, stripped of ivory, jerk up and down with rhythmic thumps and taps, plonking out the jaunty rhythms. Spotlights in the room dim and brighten out of sync with the song. It’s a somber instrument — coy and elegiac, an eerie portrait of the musician or artist, conspicuous because of their absence. The Whitney Biennial is on view through Sunday, Aug. 11.
Peter Lunenfeld, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, is co-organizing "The Neo-Synthetic: A Dialogue on Art, A.I., and Emergent Aesthetics,” during the Venice Biennale’s opening. The discussion takes place on Friday, April 19th at The Home of The Human Safety Net, a foundation working in 26 countries to unlock the potential of those living in vulnerable conditions. Refik Anadol, UCLA Arts alumnus and lecturer, is participating in the discussion. The intent is to offer a preliminary mapping of the neo-synthetic future that has already arrived.
Professor Rebecca Morris’ Untitled (#10-20), 2020. (Flying Studio / Rebecca Morris)
Rebecca Morris, professor and vice chair of the Department of Art, whose large-scale paintings demonstrate a rigorous commitment to abstraction, will give a free artist talk at the Hammer Museum at UCLA on Tuesday, April 9 at 7:30 p.m. Over her thirty-year career, Morris has explored fundamental elements of artmaking — brush marks, grids, surfaces — to make a singular body of work.
Wendy Sung, assistant professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, delivered a lecture entitled “Indistinguishability/Inscrutability: Facial Recognition Technologies and the Logics of Asian American Faciality” at University of Michigan's Digital Studies Institute in January. Based on Sung’s second book project, the talk examined the ways that the Asian face, in its racialized logics of non-recognition — indistinguishability and inscrutability — functions as an unacknowledged foundational subject for facial recognition technologies.
Awards and Recognitions
High Line Art has shortlisted 12 proposals for further consideration for the fifth and sixth High Line Plinth commissions including Associate Professor Candice Lin's Cat-Demon Protector. (Candice Lin / High Line Art)
Candice Lin, associate professor in the Department of Art, is one of the 12 shortlisted artists in consideration for the High Line Plinth, a landmark destination for public art. Their proposals will be presented as sculptural maquettes on the High Line for visitors to view and share feedback. Two artists will be commissioned to create full-scale works that will be showcased for 18 months each, in 2026 and 2027 respectively. Lin designed Cat-Demon Protector, a 13-foot-tall, colorfully painted aluminum sculpture of a “cat-demon” in a traditional pose from qigong. Lin is also among the inaugural winners of the Ruth Awards, an artist prize launched by the Milwaukee-based Ruth Foundation for the Arts. Lin will receive $100,000 of unrestricted funds.
Dana Cuff, professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, served as UCLA’s 135th Faculty Research Lecturer to discuss the challenges surrounding architecture's ability to design more equitable futures. The annual Faculty Research Lectures recognize two UCLA Academic Senate members with records of exceptional achievement in research and/or creative activities. She was profiled by UCLA Newsroom ahead of the lecture.
Dan Froot, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, was recently awarded an ORCA Acceleration Grant (OAG) for his podcast and performance project, Arms Around America (AAA), which will premiere at the UCLA Nimoy Theater in November 2024. AAA is a series of short audio dramas based on oral histories of families around the country whose lives have been shaped in some way by guns. OAGs are intended to support research and creative activities that expand our knowledge in meaningful ways and drive positive change in society.
David Roussève, distinguished professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, received a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant towards a new dance theater work to be created with the Department of Dance in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), Diverse & Resilient, and UWM’s LGBTQ+ Resource Center. Roussève will serve as the artistic lead for the project, which culminates in Care: Illuminating Milwaukee’s Queer and Trans Vogue Dance Community, made with and for the Milwaukee BIPOC LGBTQ+ community. The project will interact with the aging HIV community, among others, and especially with Milwaukee vogue dancers, a group that long ago redefined the nature of community, support, and “family.” The grant was one of the largest dance grants awarded this year by the NEA.
A Nasca-Wari tunic fragment from Peru’s South Coast, circa 600-800 C.E. (The Textile Museum)
Elena Phipps, lecturer in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, received a Unit 18 Professional Development Grant. The grant is for travel to Washington, D.C., to the George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum to research a set of special Pre-Columbian textiles from approx 500 B.C.E. to 1500 C.E. This research is for an upcoming article for the Textile Museum Journal on Peruvian discontinuous warp and weft textiles. The astonishingly skilled weavers of the Andes incorporated this special method of producing designs through an elaborate method of what is referred to as scaffold weaving. The article will trace the development of this special weaving method, which is extremely rare and — with few exceptions — not found anywhere else in the world.
Julia Koerner, associate adjunct professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, received Honorable Mention in Phase One of ICON’s Initiative 99 project, a global architecture competition to reimagine affordable housing through the nexus of architecture and 3D printing. ICON announced its honorees at its official SXSW 2024 showcase event on March 12 in Austin. Koerner entered the competition through her practice JK3D, which is focused on sustainable and innovative 3D-printed installations, fashion, and home decor products. More than 60 countries were represented in the submissions with six winners and 10 honorable mentions being awarded prize money from the $1 million prize purse.
Installation view of Lecturer Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive at Serpentine North. (Hugo Glendinning / Refik Anadol Studio and Serpentine)
Refik Anadol, lecturer in the Department of Design Media Arts, was recently named the artist of the moment by the Economist. Last year Anadol projected luminous images of coral onto a wall at the World Economic Forum in Davos and covered the exterior screen of the Sphere, a new concert venue in Las Vegas, with animated, tumbling blue blocks. In October, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquired Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations, in which a machine-learning model generates artworks based on those in the museum’s collection. On February 16th, Echoes of the Earth, his largest-ever show in Britain, opened at the Serpentine North Gallery in London. All of this demonstrates he is in high demand.
Rodney McMillian, professor and chair of the Department of Art, was appointed as an artist trustee for the Museum of Contemporary Art. MOCA’s board of trustees champions the museum’s mission to deliver a program of contemporary art and cultural resources. McMillian joins UCLA Department of Art Faculty Emerita Barbara Kruger and Christina Quarles on the board of trustees, underscoring the museum’s commitment to fostering a collaborative dialogue with artists. Since its inception in 1979, MOCA has dedicated itself to involving artists as key stakeholders in the museum’s larger cultural dialogue, and artists have served as an integral part of MOCA’s board.
An interior photograph of the book collectively created for the DMA class “Drones and LA Water Narratives.”(Yogan Muller)
Yogan Muller, lecturer in the Department of Design Media Arts (DMA), received a Unit 18 Professional Development Grant in March for his pioneering use of drones to enrich our empathetic connection to the natural world. In Winter Quarter 2024, he taught the class “Drones and LA Water Narratives” using drones to obtain vital insights into what brings life to our homes, campus, and city: water. The class culminated in a 132-page book students co-designed, printed, and bound by hand at the DMA Print Lab with the expert support of Israel Gutierrez. The publication poetically considers the narratives embedded in the water we consume and that surrounds us. You can watch the flip-through video here.
Interviews
Georgina Huljich, associate professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and Marcelo Spina co-founded the Los Angeles-based architectural practice Patterns. They recently joined the DESIGN:ED podcast to discuss the adaptive reuse–based Victory Wellness Center project in North Hollywood, the influence of technology on their firm, and how the practice of architecture is evolving. Every other week, the podcast features guests from top firms all over the world, working at every scale, and sharing their professional highs and lows, as well as lessons learned throughout their careers.
Inaba Williams created mirrored stucco-clad residences in Santa Monica, Calif. (Brandon Shigeta)
Jeffrey Inaba, adjunct professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design and co-founder of U.S. studio Inaba Williams Architects, has created two mirrored houses with courtyards in Santa Monica, California, that are clad in white stucco and have net-zero energy use. Completed in 2023, the twin five-bedroom houses measure 3,900 square feet each and are divided by a privacy wall and rectangular lap pools. "Having far fewer windows, the buildings reduce heat gain and energy use, while allowing residents to enjoy indoor outdoor living," the studio told Dezeen. "With less need for air conditioning and generous access to landscaped areas, they offer a more natural, less tempered experience with the environment."
Richard Hawkins, visiting professor in the Department of Art, collaborated with Loewe on their Autumn/Winter 2024 menswear collection in January. The clothing and runway presentation incorporated Hawkins’s paintings and videos of diabolically pretty young men — a signature subject for this artist whose celebrated career has spanned decades. On the afternoon before the show, Frieze sat down with Hawkins to speak about how his work with Loewe challenged and changed him.
Projects
Stills from Professor Steve Anderson's documentary Reality Frictions (Steve Anderson)
Steve Anderson, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts and associate dean of academic affairs for the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, recently completed a feature documentary, Reality Frictions, which will have its world premiere in 2024. Reality Frictions explores the intersection of fact and fiction on the screens of Hollywood, highlighting moments when images, people, or events from the real world intrude on the cinematic one.
Victoria Marks, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, and UCLA will host the Disability and Ecology Performance Exchange (DEPE) running July 8-16, 2024, in celebration of the new Disability Studies Interdepartmental major at UCLA. DEPE is a week-long convening of dance artists and artists/writers/scholars with disabilities focusing on shared inquiry and creative conversation. At the heart of this week-long exchange is the belief that artists and scholars with diverse corporeal experience bring essential perspectives to reimagine the relationship between bodies and our ecological futures.
Header image: Installation view of Scratching at the Moon, an exhibition co-curated by Associate Professor Anna Sew Hoy at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. (Jeff McLane / ICA LA)
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