The UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture will present more than 150 public events this fall. Featured in exhibitions, lectures, screenings, and performances are artists, designers, architects, dancers, writers, musicians, policymakers and cultural critics whose diverse work and perspectives will enliven the campus — and the city — and will offer insight and context for our current cultural climate. Many of the events are free, thanks to the support of donors, and all are open to the public.
This fall the school will debut “10 Questions,” a new hybrid academic course and public event series that brings together leading minds from across campus. The series gives community members a special opportunity to experience the conversations that drive innovation at UCLA.
Beginning Oct. 2, every Tuesday for 10 weeks, UCLA faculty members from disciplines as diverse as dance, medicine, photography, astrophysics, athletics, Chicana and Chicano studies, law, philosophy and religious studies will join Brett Steele, dean of UCLA Arts, to explore a fundamental question such as: What is space? What is failure? What is freedom?
A selection of UCLA Arts events follows. For more details and a complete listing of events, see the UCLA Arts calendar.
Performances
Oct. 18–20: UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance presents “Barber Shop Chronicles,” a co-production of Fuel, National Theatre and West Yorkshire Playhouse. This new play by Nigerian playwright and poet Inua Ellams leaps from a barber shop in London to Johannesburg, to Harare, to Kampala, Lagos and Accra, exploring the African immigration experience.
Oct. 25: Salia Sanou, the inaugural recipient of the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Alma Hawkins Memorial Chair, is a renowned choreographer and dancer from Burkina Faso. He is co-founder and co-director of the Center for Choreographic Development La Termitière in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The first of its kind in Africa, this initiative is dedicated to creation and training worldwide.
Nov. 3 and 4: “Analogy Trilogy,” a new and ambitious three-part work from the acclaimed Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company searches for the connection between three varying stories, focusing on memory and the effect of powerful events on the actions of individuals and on their often unexpressed inner life. CAP UCLA brings all three works to Royce Hall to be presented in one seven-hour marathon performance that includes dinner and a post-show Q&A.
Nov. 30: This year marks the 30th anniversary of World AIDS Day and the 10th anniversary of the creation of the UCLA Sex Squad, a collective of undergraduate students who use life experiences and creative talents to create funny, multimedia theater to open dialogue about sex and sexuality with Los Angeles teens. The UCLA Sex Squad will commemorate this special year with a night of performance and activism.
Dec. 14 and 15: After the successful epic extravaganza, “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” MacArthur Fellow Taylor Mac returns to Los Angeles to present “Taylor Mac's Holiday Sauce.” Celebrating the holiday season in all its dysfunction, Mac is joined by longtime collaborators: designer Machine Dazzle, music director Matt Ray, and a band of musicians and special guests. Presented by CAP UCLA.
Exhibitions
Sept. 27–Oct. 11: The “New Wight Biennial 2018: We, Activeast,” an exhibition curated by the art department graduate students, will bring together East Asian artists working in performance, video, writing and installation to consider how art and culture can establish acts of socio-political resistance. Curators Jae Hwan Lim and Hailey Loman (both M.F.A. candidates at UCLA) will present a forum for open dialogue about equality, oppression, censorship and history.
Sept. 27–Dec. 30: The Hammer Museum at UCLA presents “Stones to Stains: The Drawings of Victor Hugo,” shedding new light on the remarkable artistic output of Victor Hugo (1802-1885). One of the greatest writers of all time, Hugo’s drawing practice was largely a private endeavor. Although more than 3,000 sheets by him survive today, they were rarely seen in public during his lifetime. The Hammer’s presentation is only the second U.S. exhibition of Hugo’s drawings, and the first in 20 years.
Oct. 7–Jan. 6, 2019: The Hammer Museum at UCLA presents “Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965–2016,” the most comprehensive West Coast exhibition to date of the work of Piper. It features more than 270 works from the wide range of mediums that Piper has explored for more than 50 years. A related symposium on opening day, “Adrian Piper: The Long View,” will provide a sustained examination of the art-historical and social changes Piper has lived through, and the ways in which they contribute to an understanding of the works on view.
Oct. 18–Oct. 25 and Nov. 1–15: 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. 18, and the art department’s M.F.A. preview exhibition opens on Nov. 1.
Oct. 21–Feb. 10, 2019: The Fowler Museum at UCLA presents “World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean,” which features more than 150 artworks from eastern and central Africa and the western Indian Ocean rim. The exhibition enters the streets and homes of Swahili port towns and beyond, highlighting the arts of diplomacy and trade, the built environment and domestic interiors, society and fashion, and spiritual knowledge and devotion. On Oct. 20, co-curators Prita Meier and Allyson Purpura will give a lecture, followed by an opening party featuring DJ Afro Funké.
Lectures, panels and readings
Sept. 30: Fran Lebowitz will join Matt Holzman in conversation presented by CAP UCLA at The Theatre at the Ace Hotel. A cultural critic, raconteur, and keen observer of human nature, Lebowitz is often described as a modern-day Dorothy Parker. She is the author of two bestselling books of essays, “Metropolitan Life” (1978) and “Social Studies” (1981), and has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1997.
Oct. 14: The Fowler Museum presents Radical Publishing Weekend, featuring an artbook pop-up and panel discussion on contemporary radical publishing in México in conjunction with their exhibition, “South of No North: Gato Negros Ediciones.” Participants include León Muñoz Santini, founder of Gato Negro Ediciones, and Diego Flores Magón, director of La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote. Moderated by Sebastian Clough, exhibition curator and Fowler director of exhibitions. Co-presented with the Vincent Price Art Museum.
Oct. 15: Tobias Rees is the Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at the New School for Social Research, director at the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, and a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His expertise lies at the intersection of art history, the history of science, and the philosophy of modernity. Presented by the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design.
Oct. 18: The Hammer Museum presents Judy Baca and Anna Indych-López in conversation. Baca, UCLA Arts professor emerita, is best known for “The Great Wall of Los Angeles” (1976–83), a mural that presents a multiracial history of California. The project — which involved hundreds of community youth and artists — exemplifies Baca’s distinctive approach to creating public art. Art historian Anna Indych-López recently published a dynamic account of Baca’s “public art of contestation.”
Oct. 23: Juliana Huxtable is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer, DJ and co-founder of the New York-based nightlife project Shock Value. Her work explores issues of race, gender, queerness and identity and has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, New York (2014); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); and Frieze Projects, London (2014); among other venues. Presented by the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts.
Nov. 8: The UCLA Department of Art presents a UC Regents’ lecture by artist Monika Baer at the Hammer Museum. Baer is a Berlin-based painter whose work engages with both the legacy and present state of painting at the threshold of figuration and abstraction. Her complex, multi-layered paintings unfold fields of conflicts and reflect on questions of authorship, painting’s relationship to objecthood, and its scenic character.
Nov. 9: Acclaimed visual artists Sokari Douglas Camp and Alison Saar will deliver the Striking Iron Symposium keynote address, followed by a conversation moderated by Marla Berns, Shirley & Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum. This symposium explores iron in the context of its history, spiritual potencies, cultural roles and meanings, and artistic possibilities in Africa and its diasporas in association with the acclaimed exhibition, “Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths.”
Nov. 13: Theaster Gates’s practice spans sculpture, installation, performance and urban interventions that aim to bridge the gap between art and life. In his work as an artist, curator, urbanist and facilitator, Gates engages cultural communities through projects that have the potential to lead to political, social and spatial change. Presented by the Hammer Museum.
Nov. 26: Architecture and urban design presents a Richard Weinstein Lecture by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi of WEISS/MANFREDI, a New York City-based design practice that combines landscape, architecture, infrastructure and art. Their work has been recognized with the Academy Award for Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Louvre.
