UCLA Arts Announces Fall 2019 Public Events

The UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture will present more than 200 public events this fall. Featured in exhibitions, lectures, screenings, and performances are emerging and established artists, designers, architects, dancers, writers, musicians, policymakers, and cultural critics whose diverse work and perspectives will enliven the campus - and Los Angeles - and will offer insight and context for our current cultural climate. Many of the events are free and all are open to the public.

This fall the school will present "10 Questions: Centennial Edition." Giving community members a special opportunity to experience the dialogue and idea exchange that are essential components of contemporary knowledge production, this hybrid academic course and public event series brings together leading minds from across and beyond campus to explore one fundamental question each week.

Beginning Oct. 1 and continuing every Tuesday for 10 weeks, UCLA faculty members, distinguished alumni and community experts from disciplines as diverse as dance, psychology, astrophysics, Chicana and Chicano studies, law, philosophy, biology, and more will join Victoria Marks, associate dean of UCLA Arts and professor of choreography, to ask What is Justice? What is Love? What is Community? What Matters? and more.

A selection of UCLA Arts fall events follows. For more details and a complete listing of events, see the UCLA Arts calendar.

Exhibitions

Sept. 15-Feb. 16, 2020: "Through Positive Eyes" is a large-scale photography and storytelling project created in collaboration with more than 130 people living with HIV/AIDS from 10 cities across the globe. The works conjure a broad picture of the epidemic. Public programs incorporate live storytelling in the gallery performed by HIV-positive Angelenos. Presented by the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the exhibition is co-curated by David Gere, UCLA professor of world arts and cultures and director of the UCLA Art & Global Health Center. On Oct. 5, the exhibition's opening program features a curator lecture, live storytelling performances by members of the Los Angeles Through Positive Eyes Collective, and an opening party with a live DJ set by Funk Fiction.

Sept. 23-27: CityLAB at UCLA presents an exhibition of "Next Gen Dorms," the results of research examining current student living conditions, including housing insecurity, food insecurity, and "super-commuting," all of which are associated with poor academic outcomes.

Sept. 27-Oct. 10: The UCLA Department of Art presents the "2019 Theme Exhibition: Circadian Region." Curated by UCLA M.F.A. students Sydney Acosta, Cherrise Gray, and Sam Richardson, this exhibition brings together work from students in M.F.A. programs across Southern California.

Sept. 29-Jan. 5, 2020: The Hammer Museum at UCLA will mount the most comprehensive retrospective in 20 years of the work of Lari Pittman, prolific painter, long-revered teacher, and UCLA professor of art. Over the course of his four-decade career, Pittman's works have remained some of the most prescient and influential of any artist since the 1980s. "Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence" will include approximately 80 paintings and 50 works on paper drawn from the Hammer Museum's holdings as well as from public and private collections throughout the world. Organized by Connie Butler, Hammer Museum chief curator, with Vanessa Arizmendi, curatorial assistant.

Oct. 17-24 and Oct. 31-Nov. 14: UCLA's top-ranked fine arts graduate programs present group exhibitions. The UCLA Department of Design Media Arts presents its annual M.F.A. fall exhibition beginning on Oct. 17, and the UCLA Department of Art's M.F.A. preview exhibition opens on Oct. 31.

Opens Oct. 28: The UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design will present "Superposition," a joint exhibition of work from Los Angeles-based designers and department lecturers Katy Barkan and Gabriel Fries-Briggs.

Dec. 8-May 31, 2020: The Fowler Museum presents "Make Me a Summary of the World," a retrospective of Rina Banerjee's work. Large-scale sculptures and installations as well as a thorough selection of works on paper create a multisensory space for reflecting upon the splintered experience of identity, tradition, and culture within diasporic communities. Co-organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the San José Museum of Art.

Dec. 11: The newly restored and expanded UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Studios will open to the public for the first time for the semiannual Graduate Art Open Studios. During this community celebration the public is invited to meet the M.F.A. students, see their work in progress, and experience the new environment that Los Angeles-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee created for the education of emerging artists.

Performances

Oct. 3: UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance will bring legendary keyboardist, composer, and bandleader Chick Corea back to Royce Hall, where he will be joined by bass powerhouse Christian McBride and drummer extraordinaire Brian Blade to perform works from their landmark three-CD set, "Trilogy."

Oct. 11-12: Presented by CAP UCLA to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riot, "217 Boxes of Dr. Henry Anonymous" tells the largely unknown story of a courageous gay psychiatrist whose activism made a profound and lasting impact on LGBTQ civil rights. Obie Award-winning writer/director Ain Gordon re-imagines this historic moment featuring Laura Esterman, Derek Lucci, and Ken Marks.

Oct. 18-19: Dancer Wendy Whelan, of the New York City Ballet, and cellist Maya Beiser, a veteran of the world's most revered stages, together with iconic modern dance choreographer Lucinda Childs and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang present a collaborative new work. A meditation on two journeys - the mortal passage of time and the post-mortal voyage of the soul - "THE DAY," presented by CAP UCLA, explores memory, aging, death, and the survival of the soul through the lens of mundane daily calendar appointments and the visceral, poetic languages of music and dance.

Nov. 21 -22: The world arts and cultures/dance department's MFA3 Upstarts Series presents "Some Ways to Continue?" a dance theater installation about stamina. For each six-hour segment, M.F.A. candidate in dance Letty Bassart, will physicalize aphorisms as she addresses experiences of carrying and carrying on.

Lectures and workshops

Oct. 3: New York-based artist and writer Hannah Black will give a lecture at the Hammer Museum as part of the art department's visiting artist lecture series. Originally from the U.K., her work has been exhibited internationally and spans video, text and performance, and it draws on communist, feminist, and afro-pessimist theory.

Nov. 14: The art department presents a lecture by assistant professor Vishal Jugdeo at the Hammer Museum. An interdisciplinary artist working in Los Angeles and New York, Jugdeo uses video, installation, performance, and sculpture to construct experimental approaches to narrative and revealing the mediated process through which we interpret and understand the present as it unfolds.

Oct. 11-13: A three-day workshop offers members of the public a rare opportunity to study in the United States with Nakajima Natsu, who has played an important role in the spread of butoh dance theatre beyond Japan. Since the early 1990s, Nakajima has been working with dancers of mixed ability. Presented by the world arts and cultures/dance department.

Oct. 20-Nov. 3: Art historian, curator, and museum director John Walsh will discuss paintings by Vincent van Gogh in a series of lectures at the Hammer Museum. Considering them in their artistic and historical context, Walsh illuminates how the works exemplify the artist's struggles and achievements. In conjunction with these talks, a selection of drawings by van Gogh will be on display with the Armand Hammer Collection installation from Oct. 15 to Nov. 3.

Oct. 22: The UCLA Department of Design Media Arts presents a UC Regents' lecture by Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari. Allahyari's work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day, considering technology as both a philosophical toolset to reflect on objects and a poetic means to document our personal and collective lives and struggles in the 21st century.

Nov. 26: The architecture and urban design department presents a lecture by Kai-Uwe Bergmann, partner at Bjarke Ingels Group - a Copenhagen and New York-based group of architects, designers, and builders operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research, and development in more than 20 different countries. Registered as an architect in the United States and Canada, Bergmann compliments his professional work with teaching assignments around the United States and participates on numerous international juries.

 

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