Wednesdays at 5:00 PM in the University Theater (UT-108)
March 2: Fallen Fruit — Interdisciplinary Arts Collective
Fallen Fruit is a collaboration between David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Using fruit as their lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. From protests to proposals for new urban green spaces, Fallen Fruit aims to reconfigure the relationship between those who have resources and those who do not, to examine the nature of and in the city, and to investigate new, shared forms of land use and property. It is an art collaboration that began with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. Fallen Fruit has worked with numerous art and cultural institutions locally and internationally. Over time, Fallen Fruit’s interests have expanded from mapping public fruit to include “Public Fruit Jams” where citizens are invited to bring homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam making. EATLACMA was a yearlong residency in which Fallen Fruit created new work and curated an exhibition and a final one-day event titled “Let Them Eat LACMA”. It was initiated by curator Charlotte Cotton and completed with LACMA curators Michele Urton and José Luis Blondet.
March 9: Joel Tauber — Installation Artist and Filmmaker
Joel Tauber received his MFA from Art Center College of Design and his BA from Yale University. His work has been featured in the 2004 and 2008 California Biennials, Orange County Museum of Art; in “No Matter. Failure and Art”, Kunstverein Hildesheim, Germany; in “Love is Like Oxygen”, W139, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Film Festivals include the San Francisco Documentary Festival, the Hartford International Film Festival, and the Downtown Film Festival - Los Angeles, where his movie, “Sick-Amour”, was awarded “Best Green Film.” Tauber won the 2007 Contemporary Collectors of Orange County Fellowship and the 2007-2008 CalArts / Alpert Ucross Residency Prize for Visual Arts. Tauber’s recent solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, “Pumping” is an investigation of the early history of trains in Los Angeles and that history’s intersection with water and oil resources. Throughout the project, Joel Tauber ponders the fragility and temporality of the city’s foundation.
March 16: Sirje & Michael Gold — Art Collectors
The Golds have been collecting art together since the early 1970s, and have acquired a sizable, museum worthy assortment that includes contemporary works by Charles Long, Ana Mendieta, Joel Morrison, Yoshitomo Nara, Steve Roden, Fred Tomaselli, and Kim Dingle. In addition to collecting, Michael Gold has also curated several exhibitions, including “Wives and Husbands” in 2005, and “Tree Service” in 2008, both for Domestic Setting, an alternative art space in Los Angeles. Sirje and Michael Gold curated the art auction segment of the annual fundraising event WIDE ANGLE in 2009 at the UAM. GOLDMINE, the exciting new UAM exhibition focuses around these two prominent and innovative Los Angeles collectors. Unlike many other LA collections, the Gold’s collection is a remarkable cross section of established, emerging, mid-career and undiscovered artists working in the region. Their thoughtful selection of paintings, works on paper, photographs and sculpture represent an unprecedented look at the diversity of aesthetic threads and array of issues that characterize work being made in and around Los Angeles today.
March 23: Pato Hebert — Intermedia Artist
Patrick “Pato” Hebert is an intermedia artist, educator and cultural worker based in Los Angeles. His work explores the aesthetics, ethics and poetics of interconnectedness. His practice covers a range of media including photography, installation, sculpture, language, light, temporality and graphic design. Progressive praxis, spatial dynamics and the spirit of social topographies are also of particular interest. Hebert is the recipient of a 2010 Mid-Career Fellowship for Visual Artists from the California Community Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation, the Creative Work Fund and the Durfee Foundation have also supported his work. Herbert currently teaches in the Photography and Imaging Department at Art Center College of Design. In 2008 he received the Excellence in Photographic Teaching Award from Center in Santa Fe, NM. He also serves as the Senior Education Associate with the Global Forum on MSM & HIV and at AIDS Project Los Angeles, where he develops design and publishing interventions as an innovative approach to HIV prevention.
April 6: Brook Hodge — Architecture, Fashion and Design Curator
Brooke Hodge organizes exhibitions and writes about design, architecture, art, and fashion. From 2001 to 2009, she was a Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where she organized major exhibitions on the work of architect Frank Gehry and car designer J Mays, as well as “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture,” a groundbreaking thematic exhibition that examined the relationship between contemporary fashion and architecture. “Skin + Bones” opened in Los Angeles in 2006 and traveled to museums in Tokyo and London. Prior to her tenure at MOCA, Hodge was Director of Exhibitions and Publications at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where she also held the positions of Adjunct Curator of Architecture at the Fogg Art Museum and Assistant Dean of Arts Programs at the Graduate School of Design. Holding a master’s degree in architectural history from the University of Virginia, Hodge is a regular contributor to Wallpaper and writes “Seeing Things,” an ongoing column for The Moment, the New York Times T magazine blog. She is currently working on exhibition projects with designers Thomas Heatherwick and Peter Saville. Hodge recently joined the Hammer Museum as the Director of Exhibition Management and Publications.
April 20: Alexandra Grant — Painter
Alexandra Grant is a text-based artist who uses language and networks of words as the basis for her work in painting, drawing and sculpture. She has been the subject of shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Contemporary Museum (Baltimore), and galleries in the US and abroad. Grant has explored ideas of translation, identity, and dislocation not only in drawings, painting and sculpture, but also in conversation with other artists and writers, such as her longterm collaborator, hypertext author Michael Joyce, the actor Keanu Reeves, and the philosopher Hélène Cixous. Grant maps language in different media: from intricate wire filigree sculptures to large scale drawing/paintings on paper. She investigates translation not only from language to language, but also from text to image, spoken language to written word, and representations in two dimensions to three dimensional objects. Some of the basic queries that fuel her work are: How do we “read” and “write” images? How does language place us? What is the role of the hand in a world dominated by electronic communication?
Grant recently had a second solo show with Honor Fraser Gallery in September, 2010, and currently has work on view at the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She is the founding Board Chair and artist with the Watts House Project in Los Angeles, an artist-driven redevelopment of the homes across the street from Watts Towers.
April 27: Vicious Circle — Paul Young’s Performance Video Art Panel
“Vicious Circle: Dark Performative Works from the 1980s” was an exhibition curated by Paul Young and exhibited at his Pacific Design Center gallery in 2010. The 1980s stand as a crucial period in West Coast art history. It was a period when artists deliberately located their work outside the established art system and began to make more confrontational, difficult and abject works that had no place within conventional art practices. “Vicious Circle” seeks to capture the spirit of that period with 15 performance videos by the likes of Johanna Went, Bob Flanagan & Sheree Rose, Skip Arnold, Jon Reiss, Survival Research Laboratories, Kirby Dick, Bruce Yonemoto, Stephen Holman and the Shrimps. These artists shared an intense desire test their audiences and themselves by creating highly expressive, often extremely dangerous works that ultimately raised important questions about valuation and form. Such works were a direct reaction to Reagan’s America and the so-called culture wars, and often referenced punk rock, Dada, Actionism, and DiY aesthetics. In the process they fueled one of the vital and important movements of West Coast artÑone that provided an important context for artists such as Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthyÑdespite being sorely overlooked by most art historians. The exhibition includes exceptionally rare works from each artist’s archives.
