'S.A.D. But Not Afraid': UCLA Art Students Respond to the Campus Shooting

June 3, 2016

On the morning of Wednesday, June 1, 2016 a tragic shooting occurred in one of the Engineering Department buildings and our campus was in lockdown mode for much of the first half of the day. On the north side of campus, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture students were in the first floor galleries installing artwork for the senior shows. In the face of a terrible crisis, they decided to continue with their exhibition.

Wednesday morning at the University of California, Los Angeles, a murder-suicide sparked panic with rumors that there was a mass shooting with up to four gunmen and as many as seven injured. Meanwhile, 49 seniors at UCLA's four-year Design Media Arts Program were putting together their final group show before graduation, which was supposed to open the following day. But instead of installing their individual projects inside the school's Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center as planned, many of them found themselves under lockdown, along with the rest of the campus, until early that afternoon. They had a decision to make: postpone their show's opening, or soldier on? After some divided discussion, the students decided to open the next evening as scheduled, many of them returning to work the same day in order to resume installing their projects, with some even staying throughout the night.

The young artists and designers had been working on their exhibition since April, calling it The S.A.D. Show. The acronym stands for "Staring in the Age of Distraction," which was inspired by an article in Elephant by Richard Blandford, about the implications of appreciating art in the short-attention-span era of web 2.0+ and beyond.

While the theme predated the shooting by months, it quickly seemed a little too ironic that the show's branding features an all-too-familiar sad face, which some on the curatorial team worried might be in bad taste. But by forging ahead, the artists nevertheless managed to uncover new layers of meaning that weren't necessarily there before.

The students had only been installing the show for about a week, and in that short time, the shooting wasn't their only major diversion. Just one day before on Tuesday, UCLA's Bruin Republicans decided to host a lecture inside the arts building called “Feminism is Cancer,” which sparked a protest. That, plus the shooting, uncovered another unforeseen irony: the entire concept for the The S.A.D. Show is about the implications of coming-of-age and making art in the face of distraction. And that's exactly what the students decided to do. — Tanja M. Laden, Jun. 3, 2016

Read the full article at the Creators Project website.