Staff Spotlight: Spring 2021
UCLA Arts staff are an essential part of our community. Their work underpins every aspect of our operations. Staff Spotlight highlights the creative, scholarly, and professional contributions of our staff, many of whom maintain impressive artistic and creative practices outside their campus roles. Learn more about our remarkable staff in this list of recent activities, accolades, and current and upcoming virtual and in-person exhibitions, performances, lectures, and more.
Marina Belozerskaya, Managing Editor at the Fowler Museum, was a featured commentator in a BBC Radio 3 podcast Blood and Bronze, about the charismatic Italian Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. Belozerskaya has previously written on Cellini, as well as on a range of topics related to art and cultural history. Her books include Luxury Arts of the Renaissance (Getty Publications and Thames & Hudson, 2005); The Medici Giraffe and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power (Little, Brown & Co., 2006); The Arts of Tuscany: From the Etruscans to Ferragamo (Harry N. Abrams, 2008); To Wake the Dead: A Renaissance Merchant and the Birth of Archaeology (W.W. Norton, 2009); and Medusa’s Gaze: The Extraordinary Journey of the Tazza Farnese (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Motet Furniture Group, 2021, Sapele, Glass, Brass, and hand woven textiles.
Sebastian Clough, Director of Exhibitions at the Fowler Museum, has a studio called Motet Design Group, which was recently commissioned to design the exhibition galleries at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, along with wHY Architecture and Studio Joseph. The studio also recently completed the design for an exhibition of the work of Andrea Zittel at Spruth Magers, Berlin, and have completed projects with the Hammer, the Huntington, and many other cultural institutions.
Outside of exhibition design, Motet Design Group is now engaged in designing a house and studio in Joshua Tree, has premiered a new line of furniture which they are hoping to bring to the Salone del Mobile in Milan in September, which includes tables, seating, and handmade weavings (by Clough, who is a weaver), and he is collaborating on a house in Silver Lake with Barbara Bestor.
Clough also works with Native American tribes and was recently asked to consult on a proposal for the California Indian Cultural Center in Sacramento, and is part of a team that received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant this year to restore the Owens Valley Paiute/ Shoshone Cultural Center in Bishop, CA.
IMG6313, IMG6411, & IMG7637 (2016)
30x40
dye sublimation on aluminum
Valerie Green, Photography Area Lab Supervisor in the Department of Art, has a solo exhibition, Reprograph, opening at Los Angeles gallery Moskowitz Bayse on May 15. This will be her third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Meanwhile in Qatar, Experimental Photography, curated by Charlotte Cotton, is part of the inaugural Tasweer Photo Festival Qatar, which runs from March 24 - May 30, 2021. Green has eight pieces in the show, and her work is used for the exterior signage. Four of the six artists in the show are UCLA alumni: Valerie Green (BA '06), Asha Schechter (MFA '09), Brandon Lattu (MFA '98), and Lucas Blalock (MFA '13).
Green’s work is also included in CULVER@10: A Decade of Art, Celebration, and Community at the UCR Culver Center of the Arts in Riverside, CA.
Green will also deliver a virtual lecture at Cal State Fullerton’s Begovich Gallery on April 12 at 10 am.
Theo Perkins, Arts Coordinator/Advisor for the Student Committee for the Arts at UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, is the executive and artistic director of Elizabeth Youth Theater Ensemble, a nonprofit theater company with a focus on social justice. Walking the Beat, a performance on reimagining policing and cultures of care, was featured on Oxygen Network’s “2020 Unsung Heroes,” American Theatre Magazine and Spectrum News.
Walking the Beat is an arts education program that brings together police officers and young people to cultivate relationships between both groups. Together they create and develop a performance that builds trust towards common humanity, and a commitment to community and social justice.
Currently, the company is partnered with the Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Fountain Theatre to produce a nine-week residency program with high school students and police officers: Walking the Beat: Hollywood. The program is supported by Warner Media, LA City Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, and LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.
Lena Pozdnyakova, program coordinator for xLAB and researcher at the UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, is also part of the interdisciplinary practice 2vvo with Eldar Tagi.
Their sound sculpture Attention Environment #1 (seen above) is part of ongoing research of the Anthropocene, with its materiality presented in junk, ‘abjected’ societal produce, abandoned pieces and found objects that were once made and experienced by people. The work was included in the group show Archive Machines at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG).
Another piece from the same series was shown at Ars Electronica 2020 in Linz (as part of their Global Art Gallery) in September 2020. The piece “Thick Skin" was included in the 2020 international juried virtual exhibition “Us: What divides us and what unites us?” at Touchstone Gallery in Washington, D.C. in late 2020.
Their project "11 Sculptural Abjects" was included in the show Abstract Mind 2021 at CICA Museum in South Korea. Also, the upcoming publication of the whole series of "Attention Environments" will be presented by Materials & Applications, and will be broadcasted on Lookout FM.
HEADER IMAGE: Residence, Joshua Tree, Motet Design Group. Courtesy of Sebastian Clough.
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