Last month, Ake’s latest CD Bridges was released by Posi-Tone Records. The album brings together a sextet that includes several CalArtians, with Ralph Alessi (Music MFA 90, BFA 87) on trumpet, Scott Colley (Music BFA 88) on standup bass, Ravi Coltrane (Music MFA 99) on tenor saxophone and Peter Epstein (Music BFA 92) on alto saxophone, as well as visiting faculty member Mark Ferber on drums. Something Else! Reviews lauds Ake and Bridges, saying the “performances are as unpredictable as they are thoughtful.”

Ake’s latest publication is University of California Press’s Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries. Co-editing with Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Daniel Goldmark, Ake brings together writings on jazz history that have not been included in the canon, assembling a book that explores the musicians, concepts, places and practices that have not been traditionally characterized as jazz, and yet have contributed to the music.

Above, listen to Ake’s “Story Table” from Bridges.

The film is part of an ongoing interdisciplinary project The Corrections Documentary Project, in which Hunt investigates the institution of the prison, and more specifically, how incarceration helps structure and preserve racial and economic divisions within society.

The film looks at the privatization of the prison system, “exposing the conflict between for-profit corporations focused on pleasing investors and the communities which must deal with the consequences of high incarceration rates.” More from the Whitney Museum:

In February 1942, after Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forced to vacate their homes to be interned in “War Relocation Camps” for the duration of World War II. Almost overnight, Japanese-American communities in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles became ghost towns.

In Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, the sudden removal of its inhabitants provided an opportunity for the influx of African-Americans moving to LA from the South—themselves barred from living anywhere west of Central Avenue by the cityʼs racially restrictive housing covenants. In the few years that African-Americans settled in the area (most estimates put it at 1943-46), Little Tokyo became known as Bronzeville.

CalArts alumna Kathie Foley-Meyer’s (Critical Studies MFA 99) longtime fascination with this brief and little-known period in LA history inspired her to organize Project Bronzeville, a multidisciplinary initiative that combines fine art, theater, a panel discussion and music to explore Bronzeville’s role as a harbinger of a changing Los Angeles.

Outside of select photographic and microfiche archives, little to no traces of the period can be found today, and yet it looms large as a precursor of Los Angeles’ postwar changes. The eviction and internment of the Japanese citizens from their homes in Little Tokyo and the subsequent influx of African-Americans, the postwar transformation of the neighborhood, and the effect of the city’s housing covenants provide a direct connection for understanding contemporary LA.

Several events are slated for Project Bronzeville. (Full event details including ticketing information are listed at the end of this post):

• Project Bronzeville, an exhibition of artwork created by Kathie Foley-Meyer at LA Artcore - Union Center for the Arts in Little Tokyo,
• An encore production of the play Bronzeville, produced by the Robey Theatre Company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. The production is based on the true story of an African-American family who moves into a house in Little Tokyo and discovers a member of the Japanese family hiding in the attic,
• A Night in Bronzeville, live jazz music featuring The Miguel Atwood-Ferguson Ensemble at the blue whale jazz club, and
• A symposium and panel discussion about the Bronzeville period with Bronzeville scholars Christopher Jimenez y West, PhD, Hillary Jenks, PhD and Anthony Macias, PhD at the Downtown Independent theater.

Project Bronzeville runs from June 1 to July 21 with events held in or near Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. The project offers a unique opportunity to examine the city’s shared history through the lens of the arts, and to bring these perspectives to new audiences.

Bitcoin, first described in a paper by a developer (or developers) with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, is a digital currency, protocol and software that enables worldwide payments over the Internet. Bitcoin, unlike traditional currency, is powered by its users and has no central authority.

The show features a series of generative soundscapes, visuals, performances, and reports by artists and technologists Sam Bruce, Sean Buckelew (Film/Video MFA), School of Art faculty member Robert Dansby, Kerstin Hovland (Film/Video MFA 12) and Electronic Countermeasures LLC, a new media company co-founded by Martin.

The works seek to explore the feasibility of Bitcoin as a daily currency, the long-term future of the currency, its impact on monetary exchanges, nation states and food staples. Special presentations on the cryptocurrency and its relation to food staples along with sound performances are also slated, with the following schedule:

• June 13 at 6:30 pm
  Speculative: Origins I
• June 15 at 6 pm
  Speculative: Origins II
• June 20 at 6 pm
  Speculative: Present I
• June 22 at 6 pm
  Speculative: Present II
• June 27 at 6 pm
  Speculative: Future I
• June 29 at 6:30 pm
  Speculative: Future II

Speculative: Futures, Origins, and Everyday Staples is presented by Yáuhjagwái Holdings, a company interested in testing the staying power of Bitcoin as both a commodity investment and a viable currency.

Stephen Prina

In the 1980s, while walking on La Brea Avenue, Stephen Prina (Art MFA 80) and fellow artist Christopher Williams (Art MFA 81, Music BFA 79) encountered a bright pink object on a storefront display. Upon closer inspection, the object turned out to be a built-in desk for a house designed by architect R.M. Schindler. The object had been removed from its context and presented as a stand-alone unit. Prina said of the almost three-decade-old encounter, “It appeared to us as an amputated limb.”

For As He Remembered It, an ongoing exhibition at LACMA, Prina used surviving plans and photographs of two now-demolished Los Angeles houses designed by Schindler to build copies of their unit furniture and lay them out on the exhibit floor, following the lines of the original walls. The result is a ghostly arrangement of 28 objects painted Pantone Honeysuckle 2011 Color of the Year, evoking a sense of architectural absence.

As He Remembered It is on view through Aug. 8. The exhibit is part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.

Above is a video of Prina discussing the exhibit.

From Victoria Fu’s ‘Milk of the Eye,’ part of the group exhibition ‘Approximately Infinite Universe.’ | Photo courtesy of the artist.

Edgar Arcenaux, Victoria Fu, Andrea Bowers, Kara Tanaka

At the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, a group exhibit that includes the works of Edgar Arcenaux (Art MFA 01), Victoria Fu (Art MFA 05), Andrea Bowers (Art MFA 92) and Kara Tanaka (Art MFA 08), is on view until Sept. 1. Titled Approximately Infinite Universe, the show references and borrows from existing science fictions, including those made popular by Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany and Star Trek.

From the program notes:

The seventeen artists featured in the exhibition understand art as a vehicle for time travel, employing an array of mediums as means to move backward and forward through time. Their work re-visions fraught histories and en-visions utopian futures, with the effect of gaining insight into the complexities of the present.

Laddie John Dill

In Laddie John Dill’s (Chouinard BFA 68) Elementary (ongoing until July 26 at NYC’s Nyehaus) colored sections of glass tubing filled with gases of varying intensity are encased in individual containers and recessed into the wall. Chosen from Dill’s colored light series Light Sentences, the nine pieces offer a contrast from past exhibits, where the argon, neon, helium, xenon or mercury-filled glass tubings were displayed with industrial hardware, therefore almost diluting the colored lights’ effect by bringing into focus extraneous light projections on the wall. In this current iteration, “the compressed space intensifies and contains the light like a firefly cupped in one’s hands. It took addition to create the sense of subtraction,” according to the program notes.

Also on view are miniature sculptures composed of sand, light and glass. The panes of glass, arranged in an arc, glow blue at the edges.”They could be models for updates of Stonehenge, monuments for a new cosmic paganism,” notes The New York Times.

Founded in 2011 by CalArts’ alumni—Arjuna Neuman (Art MFA 11), Marco Di Dominico (Critical Studies MFA 11) with Clifford Pun (Art MFA 11), Eirik Schmertmann and Erin Schneider—the collective plans to redesign an old school bus to experience and experiment with art and education in various locations.

The project, P.S. 1010, is envisioned as a classroom on wheels. Neuman writes in an email, “The bus will be transformed into a laboratory of learning, a gallery, a library, a temporary home, and a space for art to happen. The kind of art that happens as conversations, performances, workshops, feasts and exchanges. Already art collectives from Texas to Buffalo are getting in touch, requesting we visit them and collaborate.”

If the project’s funding comes through, the bus currently has only two planned destinations/exhibitions for later this summer: Good Children Gallery in New Orleans and a Studio Hangar in California City. From Concord’s website:

But if the goal is to let new practices emerge, our approach must be open to detours, contingent re-directions, and mishaps. We will be traveling across the country to communities we want to learn from. We will be gathering methods and materials to teach. And we invite you and your friends to ride with us.

Di Domenico asks other artists who are interested in participating in P.S. 1010 on its journey across the country to either email or visit the Concord Space in Los Angeles.

Leon Rothenberg (Theater MFA 02) won the Tony for Best Sound Design of a Play for Douglas Carter Beane’s The Nance. The play stars Nathan Lane as a performer during the burlesque heyday of the 1930s—a time when it was “easy to play gay and dangerous to be gay….”

Rothenberg’s other Broadway credits include The Heiress (2012), A Streetcar Named Desire (2012) and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (2009), for which he earned his first Tony nomination. (His acceptance speech is posted above).

Christopher Durang’s comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, took home one of the big awards: the Tony for Best Play. Meredith Lynsey Schade (Theater MFA 06) is among the play’s winning producing team. Starring David Hyde Pierce, Kristine Nielsen, Sigourney Weaver and Billy Magnussen, Durang borrows some of Anton Chekov’s most time-tested themes (futility, disillusionment) and tells the story of step-siblings who’ve never left their childhood home in Bucks County, Penn. Their world is thrown into turmoil by a surprise visit from their sister, a world-famous actress, and her much younger boy toy.

A clip from the production:

Related story: CalArtians Among Nominees for Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards

On Saturday evening (June 8), CalArts alumnus Eusong Lee (Film/Video BFA 13) was among the 16 students honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the 40th Student Academy Awards ceremony. Lee took home the Silver Medal in the animation category for his short 9-11-themed film, will.

The medal placements were announced at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater Beverly Hills during a ceremony hosted by writer-director and 1978 Student Academy Award winner Bob Saget. Writer-director Kimberly Peirce and actors Clark Gregg, Jason Schwartzman and Quvenzhané Wallis presented the awards.

We’ve posted a few photos from the evening in the photo gallery, above, and his speech, below:

It’s turning out to be a banner week for Lee: will screens in competition this week at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Festival in France.

The CalArts ensemble is celebrating the performance traditions of the Ewe and Dagomba people of Ghana.

This J.A.M. Session at the Ford follows another session the group led Thursday night (June 6) at at Old Town Newhall near campus.

J.A.M. Sessions at the Ford is a free participatory music and dance series that takes place on Monday evenings. Reservations are recommended. Members of the audience are encouraged to take to the Ford stage and jam along with the CalArts ensemble.

The project, the latest edition in a series of collaborative projects by Glassman, aims to offer dance performance in unexpected places—in other words, bringing dance to audiences, instead of the other way around. Referencing a time when the Beat Generation used coffeehouses as spaces to test experimental performance and literature, A Poet, A Musician and A Dancer Walk Into a Coffeehouse…  combines spoken word, original music and choreography in the intimate settings of cafes.

Poets previously featured in the series are Santa Perversa and Gloria Alvarez, who read in Atwater Village and Hollywood, respectively. Admission is free, reservations suggested and venue patronage encouraged.

Keith Glassman’s choreography features septuagenarian performer Klyda Mahoney. | Photo: Rollence Patugan