Works In Progress

In the midst of global crisis, how can art and design change our behavior and beliefs?

"I feel that that is a key aspect of my design and my art practice: what can I say that can make you a better human being?"

In this episode of Works In Progress, Rebeca Méndez — artist, designer, and professor in the department of Design Media Arts at UCLA — discusses how her formative life experiences shaped her artistic practice. From family vacations to explore jungle ruins in her home country of Mexico, to being a young gymnast on Mexico's Olympic team who couldn't compete after Mexico withdrew from the games in protest, to being raised by chemical engineers who instilled in her a scientific rigor and love of research that informs her approach to art and design.

UCLA Arts faculty and adjuncts had to quickly rethink their courses to be taught online because of the novel coronavirus and the UCLA campus closure.

Candice Lin (ceramics), Casey Reas (software design), Gracie Whyte (dance) and Julia Koerner (building construction) teach in the four departments that make up the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, and they spoke about how they're overcoming the challenges of remote learning.

At UCLA right now, one would normally be hearing the robust exchange of ideas in studios and classrooms, sawing and drilling from the fabrication labs, the hum and whir of 3D printers and CNC machines, the spinning of ceramics wheels, feet hitting a dance floor.

But as we all know, that’s not happening. Learning has continued, but it’s changed.

UCLA Arts students share how they are handling the transition from their pre-pandemic studio environments to remote learning.

Healing practices vary across time and culture. Much of that knowledge has been lost to cultural extinction, but a decades-long effort to save and catalog that information has resulted in The Archive of Healing, the largest database of medicinal folklore from around the world.

Dr. David Shorter, a professor in the department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA and the current director of the archive, is set to publish a curated version of the archive later this year.

He spoke to the UCLA Arts podcast “Works In Progress” about traditional healing practices that can benefit us, especially in a time of widespread sickness and anxiety.

The novel coronavirus pandemic, like every disease, has shown the stark divides in health care access in this country. Those most likely to get sick are the poor, people of color, and people with pre-existing health conditions.

Alongside modern medicine – the hospitals, doctors and nurses – are more traditional practices of healing. Think of performative rituals that come from Africa, from Haiti, from Latin America and elsewhere. These practices are not peer-reviewed in scientific journals. But they are forms of indigenous knowledge that date back thousands of years, and they take into account the overall wellness of the individual and the community.

Christina Novakov-Ritchey studies folk practices of peasants and villagers in the Balkans. That’s the area of Southeastern and Central Europe where Yugoslavia was until it broke up in the early 90s. She is a doctoral candidate in the World Arts and Cultures Dance department at UCLA, and spoke to “Works In Progress” about the traditional healing practice of bajanje.

Artists took to the streets to protest government inaction in response to the AIDS crisis. What lessons can a new generation apply to COVID-19?

Works In Progress talks to David Gere, a professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and the director of the UCLA Art and Global Health Center. His center sponsors the UCLA Sex Squad -- a theater troupe that teaches young people about sexual health through music, dance and spoken word -- and organized the recent photographic exhibition "Through Positive Eyes" at the Fowler Museum.

Gere moved to San Francisco in 1985 to be a dance critic, and he wrote about theatrical dances and the "choreography of activism" in response to the AIDS crisis in his 2004 book "How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS.” 

The city of Los Angeles feels very different than usual. Gone are the large crowds and traffic jams. The trains and buses are mostly empty, as the world has shrunk to the size of our homes and neighborhoods.

Will everything go back to normal once the pandemic is over? Or will we forever move through the city differently? And how might the home change as it replaces the office for many of us, at least for now?

For more on the physical changes that might result from COVID-19, we reached out to Dana Cuff, a professor in the Architecture and Urban Design department at UCLA and the founding director of CityLab, a research center at UCLA that explores urban possibilities through experimental projects. She also co-authored the new book "Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City."

Willem Henri Lucas is a professor in the Design Media Arts department at UCLA. These days he’s in Zoom meetings and classes a lot, catching glimpses into other people’s homes and private lives.

As a consummate collector, he's fascinated with the objects people collect and display in their homes. His downtown LA loft is filled with art, books, masks and other trinkets that he bought at flea markets on his foreign trips.

"What I'm interested in still is what home actually means. In the times that I've moved, I realized it was not just the space that you're in, like the actual building or the actual surrounding, that it's memories and that it's things," Lucas said.

Home and domesticity have been themes of artist and photographer Catherine Opie's work for a long time. She made portraits of lesbians and their families in the series “Domestic,” captured scenes of family and community in the series “In and Around Home,” photographed Elizabeth Taylor’s home and possessions in “700 Nimes Road,” and in her recent series “The Modernist,” her friend and longtime subject Pig Pen appears to be running around LA and setting fire to famous modernist homes designed by John Lautner.

Opie spoke to Works In Progress about her explorations of home, and what being at home means to her now.

As performance venues across the country were shutting their doors to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance decided that the show must go on. On March 16 Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the Grammy Award-winning South African choral group, delivered an incredible performance to an empty Royce Hall auditorium. This is the story of that concert.

On this episode of Works In Progress, we hear from Albert Mazibuko, founding member of Ladysmith Black Mambazo; Tom Schnabel, the host of KCRW’s Rhythm Planet; and Kristy Edmunds, the Executive and Artistic Director of UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.