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 met...

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 publ...

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...

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 wh...

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 e...

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 adv...

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...

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 fo...

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 Urba...

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, K...

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...

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 overco...

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 tr...

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...

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,...

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...

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 le...

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 ma...

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...

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 o...

What role should the arts have in the coronavirus pandemic? Peter Sellars is a theater director, MacArthur Fellow, and distinguished professor at UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where he’s taught since 1988. His work is often described as controversial and edgy, and he's known for staging traditional operas in radically different settings that offer contemporary messa...

When times are challenging, how can the arts help us find our way forward? Works In Progress is a podcast from the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, a forward-looking interdisciplinary center for creativity and scholarship, hosted by Avishay Artsy. We look at current topics and trends in art, architecture, and design, and explore the ideas and practices of UCLA’s faculty, staff, students a...