Works In Progress

Few things strike fear into the hearts of college students like the words “organic chemistry." Neil Garg, a distinguished professor and the Kenneth N. Trueblood Endowed Chair in Chemistry and Biochemistry, wants his students to get creative and enjoy learning. His undergraduate class has been one of UCLA’s most popular classes, and he uses a range of innovative and out-of-the-box teaching methods to make what can be a very dry topic more fun and engaging.   

Garg will respond to the question “What Is Humor?” as part of the multidisciplinary discussion series “10 Questions.” In this episode of the UCLA Arts podcast “Works In Progress,” Garg speaks about his passion for education and about using humor to get students excited about chemistry. 

As cities adapt to climate change, how should urban planning decisions be made? And who gets to make them?

Kian Goh is an urban studies and climate justice scholar, and an architect. She's also an assistant professor of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Goh’s recent research has focused on three cities – Jakarta, Rotterdam and New York – and the pressures – from public officials, community activists or outside bodies – that determine cities’ responses to a warming planet.

Goh will talk about resilience on Monday, Nov. 9 as part of the UCLA Arts series “10 Questions: Reckoning,” which brings UCLA faculty from across campus together to examine ten essential questions.

She spoke to the UCLA Arts podcast “Works In Progress” about the power structures that dictate how cities respond to climate change.

Social media, like most technologies, is a double-edged sword. It can shrink distance but it can also manipulate our behavior and help disinformation spread like wildfire. It can help us feel connected, but keeps us doom scrolling well past our bedtimes. Ramesh Srinivasan suggests other possibilities in his latest book, “Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow.”

Srinivasan is a Professor in the UCLA Department of Information Studies and Director of the UC Digital Cultures Lab. He was an advisor to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and to the Biden/Harris campaign. And he’s a panelist for the UCLA Arts discussion series “10 Questions: Reckoning” on Nov. 2, responding to the question, “What Is Hope?” In this interview with Works In Progress, he looks at efforts around the world and in the U.S. to reclaim technology to serve people’s needs, and not unaccountable corporate interests.

What is the role of the performing arts, while theaters sit empty and large gatherings are banned? That question has been at the forefront for artist and curator Kristy Edmunds. She’s the executive and artistic director of UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance. The public arts organization has been "using every tool at our disposal to find ways to carry things forward [and] migrate what resources we have directly to artists.”

Edmunds will be a panelist at the next “UCLA 10 Questions: Reckoning” event on Oct. 26, responding to the question “What Is Kindness?" For this episode of Works In Progress, she discusses kindness in her work, and the challenges facing CAP UCLA and other performing arts centers during this period of extreme uncertainty.

Chon Noriega’s interests are wide-ranging, including cinema and television, new media, arts curation, and health policy. He is dedicated to “research that makes a difference" for the community.

Noriega is a professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Since 2002 he’s served as the director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA.

He’ll join a panel of UCLA faculty to explore the question “What Is Power?” as part of 10 Questions: Reckoning, the live arts-driven discussion series that tackles complex, essential topics of our time. On this episode of Works In Progress, Noriega explores faith and community activism; Latinx representation in museums; and health disparities in communities of color.

Museums are experiencing a cultural reckoning over race, identity and historical legacy. Black arts workers have been central in calling on museums to be more inclusive of the communities they serve. 

Erin Christovale, associate curator at the Hammer Museum, focuses on experimental moving images and visual art. She has helped give emerging Black artists the infrastructural support they need to advance their careers. 

In this episode of Works In Progress, Christovale talks about the changing role of the museum in the Black Lives Matter era; why Afrofuturism is relevant today; and the topic of justice, which she’ll be exploring as part of the UCLA event series “10 Questions: Reckoning.” 

The interdisciplinary artist and choreographer Ann Carlson views dance as any conscious movement in time and space. That expansive definition has led her to work with a wide range of participants – lawyers, basketball players, nuns, fly fishermen, college administrators, and a variety of animals – to turn their unconscious gestures into choreographed movements.  

She first arrived at UCLA in 2015 when the Center for the Art of Performance commissioned her to orchestrate a dance, part of a body of work she calls The Symphonic Body, and stayed on as a teacher in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.  

She spoke to Works In Progress about her journey to developing her unorthodox approach to dance, her process of creating these large-scale works, and the idea of presence, a topic she’ll be exploring as part of “10 Questions: Reckoning,” the arts-driven initiative that brings UCLA faculty from across campus together to examine ten essential questions. 

Conversations feel especially fraught in this time of political and social division. Choreographer, filmmaker, scholar, and activist Victoria Marks has made a career of orchestrating dances for people one normally wouldn’t see on stage – mothers and daughters, elderly men, combat veterans – for what she calls “action conversations.”

In this episode, Marks, the associate dean of academic affairs for the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and a professor of choreography in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, reflects on the importance of leading by listening; the ‘10 Questions’ event series she co-curates with an arts-led multi-disciplinary approach to exploring essential questions; and how she is making dance in a time of physical distancing.

Just after we began physical distancing, Jake Matatyaou had an idea: what if every week there was a phone number strangers could call to talk to each other?

"One of the main things that we wanted to achieve was to interrupt or break free from the relentless image economy that we're constantly circulating in," said Matatyaou, a lecturer in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, as well as a designer and writer. "Returning to the human voice was something that was really important to us in coming up with this PartyLine."

Matatyaou spoke to Works In Progress about starting PartyLine. He also discussed his interest in slower modes of work ("I'm a big fan of idleness and promote it wherever I can"), and he shared his experience with teaching and working remotely, something he was already very familiar with.

Two months have passed since the start of “safer at home” and the transition to remote learning. We are still struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy as the novel coronavirus upends much of what seemed normal.

So, imagine being a teacher, in a Zoom class, helping your students try to address or process the anxiety and uncertainty while still teaching the subject of the class.

In this episode, Kevin Kane, director of the UCLA Visual and Performing Arts Education program, also known as VAPAE, reflects on teaching art to high school and college students during a pandemic, and the role arts education played in his own coming of age.