Faculty Spotlight: Summer 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.
Image © Matt Dunham/APl source: www.britannica.com
Hitoshi Abe, professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design and director of xLAB, has been working on ArcDR3 (Architecture and Urban Design for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience), a collaborative global research studio that pursues new strategies for enhancing resilient environments across the Pacific Rim. The studio was established in 2019 by xLAB in partnership with IRIDeS at Tohoku University in Japan; Miraikan, The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Japan; and other universities from regions with recurring risks of natural disasters.
On June 26, ArcDR3 held its first forum on the theme of "regenerative urbanism," which can be streamed here, and has more research, symposia, and exhibitions being planned.
Kyle Abraham, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, and his dance company A.I.M completed a successful summer workshop online via Zoom, its first virtual educational offering. A.I.M has previously held successful summer and winter intensives in New York and Los Angeles; this year's intensive switched to a virtual format after COVID-19 impacted the potential for in-person gatherings.
Abraham has been featured and recognized in various publications over the past months. Abraham's Pavement (2012) was named one of Dance Magazine's "20 Top Works of the Last 20 Years"; Abraham was featured in The New York Times' "The African-American Art Shaping the 21st Century"; and he was featured in Document Journal's "What It Means To Be A Man Today."
Abraham collaborated with New York City Ballet Principal Dancer Taylor Stanley to premiere Ces noms que nous portons, commissioned by Lincoln Center and New York City Ballet. Ces noms que nous portons was recognized by Vogue as one of the "best ballets to come out of quarantine."
A.I.M performances have appeared in virtual events such as the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival Dance We Must gala and Virtual Fire Island Dance Festival, and streamed by presenting platforms such as the Joyce Theater JoyceStream and New York Live Arts (Re)Live Stream. Abraham has appeared in virtual talks with companies/venues such as American Dance Festival, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, Gallim, Jacob's Pillow, Seattle Theater Group, and SUNY Purchase.
A.I.M was recently awarded a New Music USA award for Abraham's upcoming commissioned project. A.I.M will appear in a Digital Connections talk with ASU Gammage in September 2020.
WDCH Dreams. Image courtesy Refik Anadol Studio.
Refik Anadol, visiting assistant researcher in the Department of Design Media Arts, gave a virtual mainstage talk at this year’s TED convention which also included talks from Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Russell Wilson, Malala Yousafzai, among many others. The theme of TED2020 was UNCHARTED. Refik’s talk addressed the question, “What does it mean to be an AI in the 21st Century?” The talk is available here.
Anadol is also among the winners in a competition held by The City of West Hollywood to revitalize the Sunset Strip with new billboard designs. He partnered with design studio Hodgetts + Fung and advertising firm Orange Barrel Media.
In addition, Refik Anadol Studio received a Gold Award in this year’s iF Design Award competition – a first for the studio. Organized by iF International Forum Design GmbH, the jury singled out WDCH Dreams, a collaboration with the LA Philharmonic to project imagery created with archival materials onto the exterior of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. According to the award statement, "the WDCH Dreams performance shows machine learning at its best. Frank Gehry's architecture is brilliantly set in motion, creating access to the orchestra's visual and acoustic DNA. A simply mind-blowing project."
Katy Barkan, lecturer in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design, received a Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. Her proposed project, "Obelisks: A History of Uncertainty," will examine "the unprecedented collection of obelisks that network Rome as sites of unstable architectural classification and as a point of departure for an alternative intellectual history of equivocation and uncertainty in architecture."
Installation view: Jennifer Bolande: The Composition of Decomposition, Magenta Plains, New York, 2020. Courtesy Magenta Plains.
Jennifer Bolande, professor in the Department of Art, will screen her video The Composition of Decomposition at The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisc. on Friday, July 31, 2020 at 9 pm. The Composition of Decomposition (2018) is a film montage composed of fragments of The New York Times cut from the center of a stack of newspapers, forming by chance the diptychs that are the basis of the film. The period of the film, 2012-2015, precedes the election cycle of 2016 and is a trip through the recent past freed from directed, remembered, or expected narratives. The Composition of Decomposition will be preceded by a recently completed short landscape film titled Visible Distance, 2019 (2 minutes). The exhibition The Composition of Decomposition is also on view through August 15, 2020 at Magenta Plains, a contemporary art gallery in New York.
Candice Lin, assistant professor in the Department of Art, has several upcoming exhibitions. Her postponed solo exhibition Pigs and Poison will open on August 8, 2020 at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Plymouth, New Zealand) and will travel to Spike Island (Bristol, UK) in early 2021, and then to Times Museum (Guangzhou, China) in the summer of 2021.
Lin is also showing a new configuration of collaborative work with artist Patrick Staff, Hormonal Fog, in a two-person exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai from September 24-December 19, 2020.
Lin's work is also included in the following current and upcoming group exhibitions: The Word for World is Forest (CCA Wattis Institute, May 14-September 14, 2020), Visionary New England (deCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, October 8- 2020-May 14, 2021), Excerpts (Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, March 27-July 25, 2020), To Thomas (La Box, École national supérieure d’art de Bourges, France, February 13-March 21, 2020; Ygrec, Aubervilliers, France, and Mind’s Rising, Spirits Tuning (Gwanju Biennale, Gwanju, Korea) which is postponed to open February 26-May 9, 2021.
Peter Lunenfeld, vice chair and professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, will hold a drive-in reading for City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined, his new book from Viking Press (August 2020). The reading will take place Saturday night, August 22nd in the iconic Tower Records lot in the heart of the Sunset Strip directly across from Book Soup, the event's sponsor. Tickets can be purchased here.
Greg Lynn, professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design and CEO of Piaggio Fast Forward (PFF), the Boston-based robotics and future mobility company of the Piaggio Group, is pleased to announce that Gita — the unique follow-me robot carrier that PFF designed, developed, and produced — has won recognition in two important categories of the Red Dot Awards for product design and innovation.
The international jury awarded the Gita robot for “the extraordinary level of innovative design and exceptional creativity” as well as “the quality and specific features of the robot, a true personal assistant that represents light mobility of the future."
Image by Rebeca Méndez: Ny Ålesund Arctic Research Station 1, 2013.
Rebeca Méndez, professor in the Department of Design Media Arts, was invited to participate in the Anchorage Museum’s SEED Lab 'Shelter’ initiative. SEED Lab supports creative responses to climate change and envisions sustainable futures for Anchorage and the globe. With COVID-19, SEED Lab is focusing on the outdoors and the virtual. In conjunction with the Museum’s North x North Reimagined Festival (August 22 – November 22, 2020), the Shelter initiative activates Anchorage outdoor spaces while we all try to cope with the indoor dangers of COVID-19. The series of “shelters” will be installed throughout Anchorage in late August and will serve as meeting places and conversation portals—places to have small conversations around climate and climate justice. SEED Lab is working with artist Marek Ranis on the shelters’ structure and 12 artists whose images will transform them physically as a way of introducing issues around climate, as well as convey ideas of shelter from and in nature, and broader ideas of the arctic landscape.
Méndez was also invited to participate in the Get Out The Vote: Empowering the Women’s Vote poster campaign and exhibitions. 2020 marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote in 1920. The poster campaign, in partnership with the League of Women Voters, invited a diverse list of 100 American female graphic designers to design non-partisan posters to commemorate 100 years of women’s voting rights, and to motivate the American public to register and turn out to vote in the 2020 election. To see the poster collection visit AIGA Get Out The Vote 2020. Posters are available for download and printing for use in exhibitions, events, and rallies.
Lari Pittman, distinguished professor of painting and drawing in the Department of Art, has several upcoming exhibitions. A solo exhibition of new paintings will open at Galerie Gerhardsen-Gerner, Oslo, Norway in September 2020. Pittman has 40-year retrospective exhibitions opening at the Long Museum in Shanghai, China in December 2020; at the Kistefos Museet in Oslo, Norway in April 2021; and at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Mexico in October 2021.
Lionel Popkin, Six Positions on Uncertainty, 2020. Video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Lionel Popkin, professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, has a video work called "Six Positions on Uncertainty" screening at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, as part of a group exhibition called "Facing Darkness."
Header image: Candice Lin, Spice (detail), 2019, multimedia installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; photograph: Carter Seddon, © Goethe-Institut New York
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