Works In Progress

Leroy Moore is a writer, poet, community activist, and a hip-hop and music lover. He was born with cerebral palsy, and has dedicated much of his writing and activism to disability rights. He co-founded Krip-Hop Nation, a movement that uses hip-hop as a means of expression for people with disabilities. Moore is currently a doctoral student in linguistic anthropology at UCLA. He writes and delivers...

Luis Alfaro is a celebrated and award-winning artist and writer. His plays, short stories, poems, and performances are often set in barrios like the Pico-Union district of downtown Los Angeles where he grew up, and tell stories about working class people and the systems that trap them – systems of poverty, incarceration, racism and homophobia. Alfaro is a MacArthur "genius" fellow, teach...

The arts can heal and transform us. This is something that Ping Ho has been advocating since she founded the group UCLArts & Healing in 2004. It trains artists, educators, therapists, health care professionals, and community members to use visual art, movement, music and writing, in concert with mental health practices, to build social and emotional skills and foster self-discovery.  These alt...

California Assemblymember Isaac Bryan ran in a special election earlier this year and won the California State Assembly seat representing the 54th District. The district includes a wide swath of West LA and South LA, including Westwood, Mar Vista, Culver City, Ladera Heights, View Park and Leimert Park. Prior to holding elected office, Bryan was a longtime organizer and educator, and the director...

The Fowler Museum at UCLA has brought together approximately 200 objects from collections across campus for an exhibition called " The Map and the Territory: 100 Years of Collecting at UCLA. " The show was set to open last spring to coincide with UCLA’s Centennial, and will now open in July. Thematically linked and geographically diverse, the objects – such as a guitar made from an armad...

Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK is a GPS-enabled work of public sound art that gives users a customized soundtrack for their walk. Subtly shifting compositions change along with users’ paths to reflect their environment.   SOUNDWALK 's creator is the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and sound artist Ellen Reid . UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance presented the Griffith Park version of the app.   In...

In the late ‘90s, Fulton Leroy Washington, also known as Mr. Wash, was convicted of a nonviolent drug offense and sentenced to life in prison. He has always maintained his innocence. He served 21 years, until President Obama granted him clemency and commuted his sentence in 2016.  Washington learned how to paint in prison. Several of his teardrop paintings – which show photorealistic portraits of...

The vast majority of UCLA's research budget, which topped $1.4 billion last year, is spent in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math to develop vaccines and robots as well as break new ground in agriculture, chemistry, nanoscience, and other fields. Although the arts and humanities historically receive considerably less research funding than the STEM fields, they are just as...

These are polarized times. Fights over masks and vaccines, the debate over policing, immigration reform and the border situation – even in this new political era, partisan divides feel as wide as ever. For Janet O’Shea, fighting may be the solution. She’s a professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, and focuses on critical dance studies, performance, and the social and poli...

The rise of blockchain-enabled NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, to buy and sell artwork has created a boon for digital artists, who have long struggled with selling works that can be infinitely reproducible.  In this episode of Works In Progress, faculty and alumni of the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts weigh in on the potential for NFTs to empower artists, connect them directly with fans and co...

Three alumni of the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design have teamed up to design an art gallery housed in an industrial stretch of Historic South-Central Los Angeles. Kevin Sherrod gave Works In Progress a tour of Gallery 90220, which he – along with fellow UCLA architecture alums Chris Doerr and Wayne Thomas – hopes will become a hub of community and inspiration, to be led by and pri...

When Susan Leigh Foster gets in front of an audience, she doesn’t spend much time standing behind a podium or pointing at slides. The choreographer and scholar dances freely around the stage, her movements underlining and sometimes building on her words. "I needed to provide the audience with an example of what I was talking about, and also an example of why it's so difficult to talk abo...

The Hammer Museum at UCLA plans to reopen April 17, allowing the public to finally see Made in L.A. 2020: a version , the acclaimed biennial that spotlights emerging Los Angeles artists and, for the first time, extends to galleries at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. “We’re not allowed to have big gatherings or big crowds,” said Connie Butler, the Hammer’s ch...

Before the pandemic, downtown L.A. was in the midst of a renaissance, with the steady opening of new bars, restaurants, hotels and apartment buildings. Architect and UCLA alumna Karin Liljegren has been a leader in that effort. Over the past 20 years, she has overseen or consulted on more than 400 adaptive reuse projects, mostly in downtown’s historic core. Last year, the American Institute of Arc...

A student-conducted survey from across the School of the Arts and Architecture found that the pandemic is having a profound impact on students' mental and physical health, and "Zoom fatigue" is a major factor. In this episode of the UCLA Arts podcast "Works In Progress," Joy Chen, a second-year design media arts student, breaks down the findings; Victoria Marks, associate...

Students at the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design are proposing a hypothetical center where principles of AEDI – anti-racism, equity, diversity, and inclusion – are put into action. "I think what we're trying to do is a paradigm shift away from a distant, automated, estranging kind of environment where people are bureaucratized, into something way more engaging,” said Moha...

Verlena Johnson is a student affairs officer in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. But she’s also a multi-media visual artist with a published children’s book and a series of paintings that pay homage to LGBTQ African American icons. She talks to the UCLA Arts podcast "Works In Progress" about the themes of race, gender, sexuality, and divinity in her paintings; how...

Photographer Janna Ireland is known for portraits of family and friends that explore domesticity and Black life. But she has devoted the last four years to driving the streets of Los Angeles, seeking out some of the more than 3,000 projects designed by barrier-breaking Los Angeles architect Paul Revere Williams. The result: her critically praised collection of photographs “Regarding Paul R. Willia...

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a handful of galleries in downtown LA’s Chinatown neighborhood opened amid souvenir shops and restaurants. With names adopted from previous businesses, China Art Objects and Black Dragon Society showed work by UCLA art students and became hubs of a burgeoning art scene. A DIY-inspired community of artists threw parties and staged concerts while selling their work...

Internet art is a broad term for the work of artists who use the internet as their canvas. Think of Flash animation, psychedelic glitch art, computer-generated art, GIFs, and many other examples. The internet has been around for five decades now, and internet art is falling victim to broken links, expired domains, and unsupported file types. "I believe we're in a crisis right now, where...

UCLA Department of Art Professor Rodney McMillian's practice embodies a wide range of media and technique, and often confronts racial and socioeconomic injustice. McMillian’s most recent show at Vielmetter Los Angeles, "Body Politic," explores the body’s symbolic meaning and the relationship between politics and aesthetics. It included sculptural works depicting body parts made of c...

This week, pro-Trump supporters marched through Washington D.C. and stormed the Capitol building, just as Congress was meeting to formally certify the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The insurrection left five people dead and a world in shock. Many are asking, is this what America has become? The attack also comes the same week that Tucson, Arizona is marking the ten-year anniversary of...

How does one create a more equitable learning environment? Anna Spain Bradley, UCLA’s new vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, has been thinking a lot about this question. Despite the political polarization of our time, Spain Bradley – a scholar of international law, global racism and human rights – says it’s imperative that we sit down and have conversations with people we disagre...

Sharon Hayes makes video, performance and installation art that tackles complex questions about history, politics and speech. Her work is staged on the street, in living rooms, and in museums and galleries. She incorporates historical texts and her own writing into her work. She might involve strangers, activists, and fellow artists as performers.  Hayes was born in Baltimore and came of age in a...

Jenna Caravello makes mind-bending video games, interactive installations and animated short films that use symbolism and metaphor to ask profound questions about memory, loss, and meaning. Caravello is an assistant professor in the Department of Design Media Arts. And she'll respond to the question “What Is Loss?” as part of the UCLA Arts series “10 Questions: Reckoning,” which brings UCLA f...