Staff Spotlight: Spring 2022
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.
Ceramic busts created by students of AMBOS Ceramics at Jardin de Las Mariposas in Tijuana. Photo courtesy Karla Aguiñiga.
Karla Aguiñiga ‘11 (B.A., Art), public programs manager at the Hammer Museum, started a project with her sister Tanya Aguíñiga in 2020 called AMBOS Ceramics, a trauma-informed ceramics program for LGBT refugees in Tijuana, Mexico.
The AMBOS ceramics studio started during the pandemic, intended to serve as a temporary program to provide a therapeutic outlet for the residents of Jardin de Las Mariposas, an LGBTQ+ center and rehabilitation shelter for migrants and other refugees in Tijuana. As the pandemic continued, the program became an invaluable outlet for residents. During 2020 all the ceramics classes were held virtually, lead by Los Angeles based artist-educators Gerardo Monterrubio and Patricia Yossen.
The AMBOS ceramics program began in-person instruction in January 2021. Weekly live instruction at the Jardin de las Mariposas in Tijuana has been led by accomplished queer ceramic artist Juan Villavicencio and assisted by a therapist from Centro 32/Families Belong Together Mexico. The works produced by participants in the AMBOS ceramics program at Jardin began and continue to be provided through repurposing upcycled clay and other materials from ceramics studios from across Southern California that are transported to Mexico every other month. Thanks to a small grant from the Future Crafts Fund, AMBOS obtained funding to provide a year of instruction and partnered with Tijuana’s Lustre Studio for the firing and glazing of works created at Jardin. The remaining program costs have been provided through crowdsourced mutual aid fundraising.
AMBOS Ceramics will soon expand to a second LGBTQ+ shelter called Arcoiris, with classes beginning in May 2022. Jardin de Las Mariposas and Arcoiris are the only two shelters for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers in Tijuana, many of whom fled their home countries because of gender-based violence and persecution.
“The image above is a collection of busts created by students of AMBOS Ceramics at Jardin de Las Mariposas,” Karla writes. “The lesson for this project was to build a work based on the female form. It was an exercise on representing the human form that quickly turned personal. During the lesson, there were lots of conversations about what it means to be a woman. Some of the students responded by creating female portraits that did not have breasts -- most of the artists are transwomen – some created portraits of genderless figures. But what is the most sticking in these portraits is how personal they become. You can see despair, aspiration, even alienation. Their traumatic life experiences of migration and gender-based violence are present in the work. Others choose to take the prompt very literally and make a portrait of a beautiful lady, maybe as a manifestation of joy and hope for the future they hope to have once they cross the border.”
Connie Butler. Photo by Mark Hanauer
Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum at UCLA was honored at a gala celebration and dinner on April 6 in New York City by the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard). In 2020, she received the 2020 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, which for 23 years has celebrated the achievements of a distinguished curator whose lasting contributions have shaped the way we conceive of exhibition-making today. The award, which is accompanied by a $25,000 prize, reflects CCS Bard’s commitment to recognizing individuals who have defined new thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition practice.
Alex Prager, Sharper Image, See’s Candies, Blockbuster (2021)
Bianca Collins, curator of public programs for the Fowler Museum at UCLA, is also an emerging public art consultant. A staunch advocate for the 99%, she believes her ultimate goal of democratizing access to art through direct, daily exposure to work created by female and BIPOC artists is most effectively achieved through realizing permanent public art installations.
In January 2022, Bianca oversaw the installation of the first permanent public artwork she has consulted on for the City of Culver City and Runyon Group, whose Platform retail complex in Culver City has expanded with a new adjacent building at 8888 Washington Boulevard. An immersive trompe-l'œil installation by Los Angeles photographer Alex Prager, Sharper Image, See’s Candies, Blockbuster (2021), activates the parking garage entrance and pedestrian walkway linking the interior and exterior of the building. In 2023, the building’s ground floor will house a signature full-service restaurant and independent boutiques joining the dozens of leading merchants already at the adjacent Platform project.
In Sharper Image, See’s Candies, Blockbuster, life-size pedestrian consumers drenched in bright California light promenade against the brick walls of a shopping center that we assume exists just out of the frame in the photographs (eg: 8888 Washington). These hybrid images, a conflation of two realities, force the viewer to consider what is real and what is constructed. The viewer’s engagement with the work is critical to its conceptual identity, playing out on site where individuals will experience the work as the figures in the piece itself - walking down the street, or perhaps driving into the garage.
Bianca is included on the pre-qualified public art consultant lists maintained by the City of Culver City’s Art in Public Places program and El Segundo’s Cultural Development program, and looks forward to projects down the line that will offer more opportunities to uplift marginalized voices in public spaces.
Left: Isabella Kelly-Ramirez, Eden, 2018, Acrylic on wood. Right: Isabella Kelly-Ramirez, Grace, 2015, Collage on paper
Isabella Kelly-Ramirez is collections manager at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, where she looks after more than 125,000 objects and artworks from around the globe. She is also a mixed media assemblage artist working primarily in painting, collage, soft sculpture and assemblage—all with pop surrealist flair. Her vivid candy-colored portraits of female figures set in alien dreamscapes offer up a personal mythology of beauty. “I hope people are inspired to think in terms of what is possible, instead of the status quo,” Isabella says. With a keen eye for pattern, play and texture, Isabella deftly manipulates found images with humor and irony. Her collages flow from order to chaos, and lean into a cosmetic color palette as they recontextualize faces from mainstream media. Isabella received her B.A. in Art from UCLA, shows sporadically around Los Angeles and also teaches pop-up classes. Her web store features painted canvases, works on paper, and a recent series of soft sculpture dolls.
Photo courtesy of Kristopher Kirk
Alberto Keossian ‘21 (B.A., Art), frontline services coordinator at the Hammer Museum, Adam Otto Lutz, part-time A/V technician at the Hammer, and third partner Jinseok Choi are co-founders of MOTOR, a mobile and modular artist-run-space that navigates the complexities of exhibition and unconventional methodologies of artistic production. MOTOR emphasizes the transporting of events alongside the narratives/histories of its contingent location and communal engagement to uplift the underrepresented and the complex.
MOTOR began in 2019 as an extension of The Official California Institute of the Arts Residency Program where Adam Otto Lutz, Jinseok Choi and Alberto Keossian began working together. While seeking an alternative venue for experimental artist-run-spaces, the group became fascinated by the idea of a space that could be dynamic in its location. The three artists received a hand-me-down storage trailer the project was able to materialize from. Renovations to the trailer were initiated and its conversion to a programming venue – with its distinct pegboard walls and flip-up shutter door – established a space lending the ability of reconfiguration for each exhibition. MOTOR opened its doors in June of 2021 and has since organized a multitude of programs and events including both solo and group exhibitions, pop-up shops, pirate radio shows and a variety of serviceable workshops. MOTOR will be opening their latest organized group exhibition in April 2022 featuring artists Jackie Castillo, Hope Stutzman, Erica Vincenzi, Dajin Yoon, and Sarita Zed-Schreiber.
Alberto Keossian is a Los Angeles-based artist and received his BA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Adam Otto Lutz is a Los Angeles-based artist and musician and received his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Jinseok Choi is a Los Angeles-based artist and fabricator and received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and Korea National University of Arts.
Photo courtesy of Theo Perkins
Theo Perkins, Arts Coordinator/Advisor for the Student Committee for the Arts at UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, is starring in Detained at the Fountain Theatre, running through May 15th. Originally commissioned by immigration attorney Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, Detained is based on interviews with longtime U.S. residents held in immigration detention, and with their family members, advocates, attorneys, and representatives of ICE. Inspired by their stories, Detained explores how families fight to stay together as U.S. immigration legislation keeps them apart through mass deportations and immigration detention centers. Theo plays an ICE agent, a young immigrant from Guinea, and an immigrant from Eritrea who’s graduated from Columbia University.
HEADER IMAGE: Isabella Kelly-Ramirez, Zoe, 2020. Acrylic on wood.
Stay engaged. Use #UCLAarts to stay connected.
