Faculty Spotlight: Winter 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, publications, interviews, and current and upcoming exhibitions, performances, lectures, and events.
Exhibitions, Events, and Performances
View of the performance A Phrase That Fits, by Will Rawls, at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo. (Levi Fanan / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo)
Will Rawls, associate professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, premiered A Phrase That Fits at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo in Sept. 2023. The performance is an homage to his father, Oree Rawls, and Tina Turner, who met in the early 70s and both died in 2023. The dynamic of the performance itself invites spectators to read the words formed, which transform into others throughout the activation.
Casey Reas, professor in the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, is among the first 15 artists to be included in MoMA’s collaborative global digital Postcard Project, powered by the Autonomy App. An experiment in collective creativity on blockchain, MoMA Postcard invites anyone to collaborate, learn, and experiment with web3 technologies. Akin to a digital chain letter, each Postcard is designed collaboratively. Stamp by stamp, person by person, the aesthetics and ownership of the Postcard develop until all 15 stamps have been designed, signed, and minted to the blockchain.
Rebecca Morris, professor in the UCLA Department of Art, currently has a survey show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through Sunday, April 7. Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022 presents a 21-year survey of Morris' work, an artist best known for her large-scale paintings and inventive approach to composition, color, and gesture. The exhibition, which originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, marks the artist’s first major museum survey since 2005. Her first major monograph — Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022 — coincides with the survey exhibition and was published by DelMonico Books.
Morris also has work in the group survey 50 Paintings at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The exhibition celebrates the medium’s continued relevance and aesthetic range, and invites visitors to engage in close looking and formulate their own assessments of trends in contemporary painting.
The opening reception of Rodrigo Valenzuela’s commission, the underpinning, was held Saturday, December 9, 2023 at Los Angeles State Historic Park. (Clockshop)
UCLA Department of Art Associate Professor Rodrigo Valenzuela’s the underpinning, a public art commission at Los Angeles State Historic Park, debuted on Saturday, Dec. 9. “I call it a sculpture, a drawing, a performance site. It’s many things,” Valenzuela told Hyperallergic. “Ultimately it’s a diagram of the house I grew up in.” the underpinning serves as both a sculptural installation and a stage for public programming. Mimicking the foundation of a home, this structure is informed by the standardized government housing of the artist’s childhood in Chile and the site’s proximity to William Mead Homes, a city-operated public housing project.
Miguel Gutierrez, associate professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, and cohort recently completed a residency at Vermont's The Field Center. The residency is part of The Field Center's ongoing effort to support artists in the development of new work in the fields of contemporary performance and dance.
Gutierrez also recently released his debut album, sueño. Recorded over the last four years, the album of sweet and sorrowful songs is dedicated to his mom, Elena Gutierrez. The album is available via Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon music, and many other platforms.
Catherine Opie, professor in the UCLA Department of Art, has a new show at Regen Projects in Los Angeles. harmony is fraught features over 60 works spanning her career, on view publicly for the first time. The images in the exhibition are celebratory and elegiac, portraying people and places often located on the fringes of the mainstream with dynamic intimacy while serving as reminders of inevitable change and loss. The show opens Thursday, Jan. 11 and runs through Sunday, March 3.
Part performance event, durational installation, and social agitation, Reorient the Orient is Lionel 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, professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and associate dean of academic affairs, draws from his nearly 30-year archive of dance-making. In REDCAT’s theater and gallery, dancers, videos, archival materials, rugs, sculptures, neon yellow waffle balls, and the headpiece from an elephant costume invite audiences to make their way, choosing where to be and what to see. Reorient the Orient will be at REDCAT from March 9–10.
Awards and Recognitions
View of Refik Anadol's Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations, 2022–23, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. (Robert Gerhardt / MoMA)
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) marked a historic milestone by acquiring UCLA Department of Design Media Arts Lecturer Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations. This acquisition is the museum’s inaugural inclusion of a tokenized artwork in its permanent collection. Anadol employed a sophisticated machine-learning model to interpret public data from MoMA’s collection, crafting a distinctive piece infused with light, movement, sound, and external climatic elements. This is all displayed on a vast media wall, elevating the vibrant visual and auditory experience.
Anadol was also a recipient of Turkey’s Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Award. "I congratulate our artists, scientific, and cultural people who have crowned the pride of the 100th anniversary of our Republic with their contributions and achievements to the 'Türkiye Century' vision,” said President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
UCLA Department of Design Media Arts Professors Emeriti Rebecca Allen and Jennifer Steinkamp have both been nominated for the 2023 DAM Digital Art Award. Established in 2005, the award is the first major international one of its kind and is bestowed for exceptional achievements in the area of digital art. The laureate is celebrated the following year with a solo exhibition in Berlin along with a catalog.
Catherine Opie was an honoree at this year’s Los Angeles Center of Photography’s eighth annual awards ceremony at its new Downtown space to celebrate the nonprofit’s 10th anniversary. Each year, LACP honors photographers making waves in the field as well as emerging artists, photographers committed to social change, and those working behind the scenes to support artists. This year’s honorees included Opie, William Camargo, Rose Shoshana, and Jordie Oetken.
Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW), the grant-making nonprofit that has awarded over $7 million to women-identifying artists since 1996, has named the 15 winners of its 2023 grants. Each recipient will receive an unrestricted prize of $25,000 each. Candice Lin, associate professor in the UCLA Department of Art, and Cauleen Smith, professor in the UCLA Department of Art, are two of this year’s winners. “This year’s nominations were particularly impressive,” artist and AWAW founder Susan Unterberg, who does not sit on the jury, told ARTnews. “Hopefully, the world will see more of their work in the coming years.”
Magdalena Kozená as Medea, left, and Carolyn Sampson as Creuse in Peter Sellars’ production of Charpentier’s Medee, with sets by Frank Gehry at Berlin State Opera. (Ruth Walz / Berlin State Opera)
Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times wrote a glowing review of UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Distinguished Professor Peter Sellars’ production of Médée at the Berlin State Opera. The opera presents “a darker, subtler, more shocking Medea…[m]oment by moment over three hours, we witnessed Medea’s mind in action, how she could reach the point where murdering her children would be emancipation.” The production was essentially a pop-up opera, with no plans for revival; no recordings, video, or audio; no broadcasts. It was the brainchild of two famed L.A. artists — Sellars and architect and designer Frank Gehry.
UCLA Department of Design Media Arts Professor Rebeca Méndez delivered an art and science plenary on Thursday, Dec. 14, at AGU23. This annual meeting convenes thousands of attendees from 100+ countries to share research to better understand our planet and environment.
Dana Cuff, professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design and director of cityLAB, will be UCLA’s 135th Faculty Research Lecturer. A tradition established at UCLA in 1925, the purpose of the annual Faculty Research Lectures is to recognize two Academic Senate members with records of exceptional achievement in research and/or creative activities. Nominated and selected by peers, the distinguished recipients of this award are exemplary of UCLA’s commitment to research excellence. Cuff will deliver her lecture on Thursday, March 7.
Dan Froot, professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, was awarded a UCLA Office of Research and Creative Activities Acceleration Grant for 2023-2024, in support of his podcast and live performance project, Arms Around America (AAA). AAA is a collection of six short audio dramas based on oral histories of families around the country whose lives have been shaped in some way by guns. The live performance of AAA will premiere at the UCLA Nimoy Theater, presented by UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, in November 2024. Froot has also been selected to present at the 2024 Association of Performing Arts Professionals conference’s “Up Next" artist pitch session in New York City on Jan. 12. Froot will speak about AAA.
Interviews
Still-Life 3, 2020, at exhibition Axis of Horizon, MMCA, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea, Jennifer Steinkamp. (Yoonjae Kim)
Casey Reas spoke about art after the crypto crash with ArtReview. Crypto has crashed and burned, but NFT visual culture is the better for it, according to Reas. “The generative art and code-based art community was once isolated from the larger art community,” said Reas. “I think of generative work as relating to the history of performance, like [art movement] Fluxus, as well as to the history of video art. When generative work is operating, it is a performance – I don’t know what’s going to happen one minute to the next, I’m often surprised.”
Natasha Sandmeier, assistant adjunct professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, was interviewed by Archinect on narrative, media, and AI in architectural academia. Sandmeier sits at the forefront of an architectural academic landscape, already asking what the recent popularized adoption of AI in design and world-building means for authorship, ethics, representation, learning criteria, and the role of the architect. “Most architecture students are dreamers and world changers at heart. You enter architecture school with big ideas about improving the world and asking how you can effect change through the design of the built environment, houses, streets, cities, etc. That dream hasn’t changed,” said Sandmeier.
Mariana Ibañez, associate professor and chair of the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, was interviewed by Archinect for their Dean’s List series. Since 2013, Archinect's Deans List series has provided in-depth conversations with architecture and design leaders (deans and department chairs), giving readers invaluable perspective on their pedagogical stances, the institution’s curriculum, and academic environment. “Especially as an educator, it’s important to articulate clearly what an architecture education offers, in terms of general, nimble skill sets and enriched perspectives, including but also operating beyond the shaping of form and space,” said Ibañez.
“I view the apartment as an oasis,” Henry Schober III says of the slim, two-story ADU he rents in Venice. Designed by Sharif, Lynch: Architecture, the ADU rests an inch from a 1920s bungalow and five feet from a 1990s duplex. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Mohamed Sharif and Todd Lynch, associate adjunct professor and lecturer in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, respectively, were profiled in the Los Angeles Times for the detached home they constructed in Venice, California. With Southern California in desperate need of housing and state and federal laws constantly evolving to make permitting ADUs easier, the detached home by architects Lynch and Sharif of Sharif, Lynch: Architecture is a harbinger of what’s to come. “We viewed it as a challenge and a way to transcend ADUs in an SB9 world,” Sharif said, referring to Senate Bill 9, the 2022 state law that allows homeowners to convert their homes into duplexes on a single-family parcel or divide the lot in half to build another duplex for no more than four units.
When the fall term began at UCLA, there was a new major on campus: Disability Studies. It was the first time a California college had made it a full-fledged major. Victoria Marks, a professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, is the head of the multidisciplinary program. “We have faculty from all across the campus contributing research and teaching to the major,” explained Marks in a KCRW interview. “So we're looking at history, law, rights and representation, access, identity, culture, and politics. We have faculty members from the humanities, the social sciences, health care, public policy, the arts, which is where I'm from, technology and education.”
In the artistic domain of Jennifer Steinkamp spectators transcend their role as external observers, undergoing a transformative immersion within the core of the artwork. “The American artist's spatially extensive installations submerge the audience into an environment where the intersection of video and new media create a hypnotic universe, fostering a nuanced exploration of architectural spatiality, dynamics, and perceptual intricacies,” wrote Daria Kravchuk for STIRworld in her interview with Steinkamp.
Julia Koerner, associate adjunct professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and her Vienna atelier were profiled by TCT Magazine. To the right as you come through the front door of her studio is an extrusion 3D printing system adorned with a JK3D label working away on the latest build. There is, however, no sign of Koerner. She dials into Vienna from Los Angeles, where she has been living for much of the last decade. “What we wanted to pilot with these two locations was the idea of utilizing 3D printing as a method of eliminating shipping and carbon footprint, really designing products and fashion accessories which are made on location on demand,” Koerner told TCT. “We design between LA and Vienna, send each other the files, and then produce locally.”
Publications
Elena Phipps, lecturer in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance, has four publications in 2023. Two were papers presented the previous two years at conferences; one was published in Dyes in History and Archaeology (Archetype Publications), and the other in Silver: Transformational Matter (Oxford University Press). The other two — both about Inca textiles — were essays in conjunction with exhibitions; one was at Museo de Arte de Lima, Los incas: Más allá de un imperio (June–Dec. 2023), and the other was a traveling exhibition in China, The Inka and their Tawantinsuyu: The Land of Four Quarters.
Header image: View of Botanic, 2015-2023, Jennifer Steinkamp at Midnight Moment, presented by Times Square Art, New York, NY in 2016. (James Ewing / JBSA)
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