PLACE IS THE SPACE to Open at CAP UCLA as Four-Hour Immersive Jazz Experience
Edgar Arceneaux and Frank Lawson's Sun Ra-inspired work journeys from The Nimoy to the Hammer Museum.
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UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance (CAP UCLA) will present Place Is The Space by artist Edgar Arceneaux and co-creator Frank Lawson at The Nimoy on Saturday, August 29, 2026. Co-presented with the Hammer Museum, Place Is The Space is a four-hour immersive performance experience combining live jazz improvisation, theatrical storytelling and multimedia design inspired by Sun Ra's philosophy and his film Space Is The Place. The work functions as both a concert and an experiential ritual where musicians, actors, visual elements and audience members collectively shape the Space into a Place – metaphorically building the vehicle that Sun Ra aspired towards, expressing Afrofuturistic themes of transcendence, liberation and joy.
This cosmic jam session will culminate with the audience crowning a “New Sun Ra” who will lead the entire theater on a pilgrimage to Saturn for one final performance at the Hammer Museum where everyone is invited and encouraged to play along.
Presented in conjunction with the Hammer Museum's current exhibition SPACE IS THE PLACE, which frames “space” as a conceptual framework inspired by the works and views of experimental jazz artist Sun Ra, Arceneaux's Place Is The Space marks his second collaboration with CAP UCLA, after 2024's Boney Manilli. Arceneaux's work is featured in the Hammer Museum exhibition, which brings together installations, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and multimedia works by nearly thirty artists exploring themes of Afrofuturism, belonging, placemaking and the act of taking up space.
Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux constructs drawings, installations, video and film works as complex arrangements of association that examine adjacencies and points of contact between implausible relations. Arceneaux, who received a BFA from the Art Center College of Design and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, won the prestigious Mike Kelley Foundation Award in 2019 and the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship in 2020. He has participated in prestigious artists residencies internationally and presented solo exhibitions at the Vera List Center at MIT, Hammer Museum, The Studio Museum, and Museum für Gegenwartskunst. His work is in major museum collections at the Whitney Museum, MOMA NY, Carnegie Museum, Museum Ludwig in Köln, Germany, the Hammer Museum and LACMA to name a few.
Place Is The Space is co-written by Frank Lawson, an award-winning actor, singer and playwright who has starred in Marilyn! at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas and Edgar Arceneaux's Until, Until…Until, which won the Malcolm McLaren Award at the Performa 15 Biennial in NYC. He toured Asia in RENT and appeared in Porgy and Bess, Hair, Yemandja with Angelique Kidjo at The Kennedy Center and garnered awards for his portrayal of Billy Strayhorn in When Jazz Had The Blues. His works as a playwright include the plays Unstoppable, Riding With Sunshine and City Skyline. His collaborations with Arceneaux as both co-writer and performer include A Western Audition for Tinworks Arts and The Mirror Is You at Nuit Blanche in Paris. Lawson has shared stages with icons Debbie Allen, Michelle Lee, Ben Vereen, Bernadette Peters and Stephen Sondheim. He is a graduate of SMU's Meadows School Of The Arts.
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