Faculty Spotlight: Winter 2017
Awards, Publications, Exhibitions, and Performances from our acclaimed faculty
cityLAB, led by Department of Architecture and Urban Design Professor Dana Cuff, presents cityLAB Times Ten, an exhibition and panel series at the Architecture + Design Museum, Los Angeles.
For the past ten years, cityLAB - UCLA has been at the center of innovative thought about the architecture of the city, particularly in Los Angeles. The cityLAb, Times Ten exhibition showcases the lab’s research on some of the critical challenges facing the 21st century metropolis ranging from housing to density and transportation. A series of evening panels called “Lab Talks” will bring people together to debate design’s role in the city. Collaborative, experimental projects serve as prototypes of progressive architecture that has the potential to impact the urban fabric of Southern California and beyond.
Department of Architecture and Urban Design Faculty Steven Christensen receives The Architect's Newspaper's 2016 Young Architects Award
The award, part of The Architect's Newspaper's Best of Design Awards, honors one practice nation wide, and was awarded by jury members Erik Verboon, Claire Weisz, Karen Stonely, Christopher Leong, Adrianne Weremchuk, and AN's Matt Shaw who based their judgements on evidence of innovation, creative use of new technology, sustainability, strength of presentation, and, most importantly, great design.
Associate Dean for Community Engagement and Arts Education and Department of Art Professor Barbara Drucker’s exhibition Inside Out is on view at JTAG in Joshua Tree through Feb. 4.
Joshua Tree Art Gallery (JTAG) presents Barbara Drucker’s Inside Out, an installation of recent paintings and sculptural pieces in which the inner (surface) becomes the outer,” often referencing “a state of disarray in which drastic reorganization is required. Using paint, charcoal, thread, fabric and wire, Drucker’s symbolic works continue to circle around and through personal memory and lived experience, and refer to recent events.
Department of Art Professor Andrea Fraser receives Foundation of Contemporary Arts 2017 Grant in Visual Art
Since 1963, from its roots in an emergency fundraising drive for the fledgling dancer Merce Cunningham (led by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts has endured as an artist-led enterprise to support other artists, with the awarding of unrestricted $40,000 grants among its primary pursuits.
Department of Art Professor Roger Herman has a solo exhibition, Keramik, at Feuer/Mesler gallery in New York and will lecture at the Hammer Museum on Tuesday, Mar. 7.
Department of Art Professor Roger Herman’s paintings, large-scale woodcuts, and ceramics have exhibited nationally and internationally and are included in many private and public collections. This winter New York gallery Feuer/Mesler presents an exhibition of Herman’s ceramic works, which rejects traditional ideas of pottery by embracing a duality of forces and employing opposing ideas in each piece: intention & chance, painting & sculpture, figuration & abstraction. The show is on view through February 11. Herman will also give a lecture at the Hammer Museum on Tuesday, Mar. 7.
Department of Architecture and Urban Design Assistant Adjunct Professor Georgina Huljich’s architecture firm, PATTERNS, unveils plans for Olympia Towers, a mixed-use development that will alter the skyline of Downtown Los Angeles.
Department of Architecture and Urban Design Assistant Adjunct Professor Georgina Huljich, principal of architectural firm P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, has unveiled skyline-transforming plans for the Olympia Towers in Downtown Los Angeles in collaboration with Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill.
Department of Architecture and Urban Design Lecturer Jiminez Lai is a finalist for MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program
Tthe MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) is an annual series of competitions that gives emerging architects the opportunity to build projects conceived for MoMA PS1's facility in Long Island City, Queens. To choose an architect for this project, deans of architecture schools and the editors of architecture publications nominate some twenty students, recent architectural school graduates, and established architects experimenting with new styles or techniques. The group is asked to submit portfolios of their work for review by a panel comprised of Mr. Lowry, MoMA PS1 Director Klaus Biesenbach, and a host of experts in the art and architecture community. Lai is one of five finalists who are invited to make preliminary proposals for the designated site; the chosen winner will be announced in February.
Department of Design Media Arts Professor and Vice Chair Peter Lunenfeld received an International Award of Art Criticism (IAAC).
Peter Lunenfeld has been recognized by the International Awards of Art Criticism (IAAC). Their 2000 euro award for English language criticism is chosen by an international jury, and organized by the Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum (M21), in partnership with the Royal College of Art (RCA), London. Jurors Ute Meta Bauer, Cao Yiqiang, Brian Dillon, David Elliott, and Philip Tinari recognized Lunenfeld's review essay, "Cal Tech," originally published in the September, 2015 issue of Artforum, about the legacy of the famed 1960s LACMA Art & Technology show on contemporary art and techno-culture.
Distinguished Professor Thom Mayne publishes new research with The Now Institute at UCLA and Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design at the University of Houston, erects new buildings with firm, Morphosis.
The Now Institute, led by Department of Architecture and Urban Design Professor Thom Mayne, published new research that posits a plan to handle population growth sustainably in Los Angeles between now and 2050.
Thom Mayne collaborated with the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design at the University of Houston to research the unique problems Houston will face in the future, including the reinvention of the current energy infrastructure, changing real estate and density, and the ways in which the city’s lack of zoning can generate new ideas.
Thom Mayne’s architectural firm, Morphosis, completed the Taubman Complex, an academic building at Lawrence Tech in Michigan and its Shenzhen tower has topped out, becoming the tallest steel building in China.
Department of Art Associate Professor Rodney McMillian won first $100,000 Suzanne Deal Booth Prize and has a solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
In November, Department of Art Associate Professor Rodney McMillian was awarded the inaugural Suzanne Deal Booth Art Prize from The Contemporary Austin. With the award, McMillian receives an unrestricted award of $100,000, alongside a solo exhibition and scholarly publication.
His exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum, New Media Series: Rodney McMillian, presents a recent work titled A Migration Tale, 2014-15, which features a dominant character: a masked "super hero" or time traveler from the future who journeys from South Carolina to Harlem, New York. This present-day depiction of the Great Migration raises many questions regarding the role of the "other" in our society and considers the many ways that location, landscape, and material objects continue to construct and inform our understandings of racial and class disparity.
Department of Design Media Arts Professor Rebeca Méndez awarded the Medal of AIGA
The Medal of AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts)—the most distinguished in the field—is awarded to individuals in recognition of their exceptional achievements, services or other contributions to the field of design and visual communication. Medals have been awarded since 1920 to individuals who have set standards of excellence over a lifetime of work or have made individual contributions to innovation within the practice of design.
Department of Art Associate Professor Silke Otto-Knapp to deliver artist on artists lecture at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).
Los Angeles–based artist Silke Otto-Knapp is known for luminous watercolor-on-canvas paintings rendered in a black, gray, and silver palette. Her subjects have included botanic gardens, L.A. cityscapes, Las Vegas hotels, Busby Berkeley musicals, women artists, and avant-garde stage designs. Otto-Knapp, associate professor of painting and drawing in the UCLA Department of Art, speaks about the work of R. H. Quaytman as part of MOCA’s Artists on Artists series.
Department of Art Professor Catherine Opie will lecture at the Annenberg Space for Photography in February and her solo exhibition, 700 Nimes Road, travels to the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale.
On February 12, Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road opens at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale. Taken over the course of six months at the Bel-Air, California residence of the late actress Elizabeth Taylor, the exhibition’s photographs are drawn from two series: Closets and Jewels, and 700 Nimes Road. Inspired by William Eggleston’s images of Elvis Presley’s Memphis estate, Graceland, Opie creates a portrait of Taylor from her personal space and mementos. Then, on February 23, Opie will discuss her life and work, including her iconic series of portraits and American urban landscapes in a lecture at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles as part of the Iris Nights Lecture Series.
Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Professor and Chair Lionel Popkin presents the Los Angeles premiere of his work, Inflatable Trio, at the Skirball Cultural Center Feb. 23–25.
Performed on and around an inflatable plastic living room set, Inflatable Trio looks at the ways we attempt to orient ourselves within ever-changing domestic, social, and environmental landscapes. As the elements of a family room are repeatedly deflated, dismantled, and re-formed, three dancers persist, react, and cope. Each in turn upends—and is upended by—the objects, people, and situations that surround them in this domestic drama expanded beyond walls.
Department of Design Media Arts Professor Casey Reas’s work will be featured in Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art exhibition, Crooked Data: (Mis)Information in Contemporary Art.
The University of Richmond Museums opens Crooked Data: (Mis)Information in Contemporary Art on February 9 through May 5, 2017, in the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art. The exhibition features art by twenty-one contemporary artists, including Design Media Arts Professor Casey Reas, and studios who work with data in nontraditional ways. Some artists incorporate data from known sources, using it as an aesthetic device divorced from its originally intended interpretive function. Others gather and manifest data that might not normally be considered worthy of collecting. And, some of the works explore alternatives to standard data visualization forms and practices.
The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts, an exhibition curated by Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Professor Polly Nooter Roberts will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from Feb. 26–Jul. 9.
The exhibition features 100 outstanding sculptures and eye-catching textiles that explore how the arts and their visual regimes enable transitions from one stage of life to the next and from one state of being to another. Works reflect culturally specific notions of visuality and celebrate artists as agents of insight and transformation. Iconic figures, masks, initiation objects, and reliquary guardians guide people to spirit realms, to the highest levels of esoteric wisdom, and to the afterlife.
Interim Dean and Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Professor David Roussève choreographed the upcoming CAP UCLA presentation of Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars featuring SITI Company and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
On January 28 and 29, CAP UCLA and LACO present Lost in the Stars. This all-new production directed by Anne Bogart, conducted by Jeffrey Kahane and choreographed by UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture Interim Dean David Roussève is bold and rare chance to revisit Weill’s final score. Read the Los Angeles Times preview.
Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Distinguished Professor Peter Sellars will be in conversation with Ayanna Thompson, Professor of English, George Washington University at the Downtown Library for the Aloud program titled "Shakespeare Now: Race, Justice and the American Dream."
Distinguished Professor Peter Sellars, the renowned avant-garde theater director, and Ayanna Thompson, a prominent Shakespeare scholar, will discuss the ways Shakespeare remains relevant in our contemporary American world. From expressions of black rage to the challenges facing systems of justice, they hope to illustrate how Shakespeare’s plays provide rich texts through which the most pressing problems in our world can be debated and solutions become, perhaps, imaginable.
Department of Design Media Arts Professor Jennifer Steinkamp will deliver a lecture for the UCLA Architecture & Urban Design Lecture Series on Monday, Jan. 23.
UCLA Design Media Arts professor Jennifer Steinkamp employs new media to create projection installations in order to explore ideas about architectural space and phenomenological perception. On Monday, Jan. 23, Steinkamp will present a lecture in Perloff Hall for the UCLA Architecture & Urban Design Lecture Series.
Department of Art Professor Emeritus James Welling presents Metamorphosis, a solo exhibition at Ghent and the Museum of Contemporary Art (S.M.A.K.).
With an extensive selection of work from the early 1970s to today, Welling’s exhibition at S.M.A.K. reflects the fundamental changes in photography in recent decades. In sounding out the medium’s aesthetic and conceptual foundations, the artist’s series spring continually from image to matter, from process to result, from representation to abstraction, and back again.
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