View this post on Instagram

A post shared by La Biennale di Venezia (@labiennale)

Curated by High Line art director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani, the 2022 edition is titled The Milk of Dreams, a reference to Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington’s 2017 children’s book. Alemani shared her thoughts on the show’s purpose in an official statement with La Biennale di Venezia:

During these endless months in front of the screen, I have pondered the question of what role the International Art Exhibition should play at this historical juncture, and the simplest, most sincere answer I could find is that the Biennale sums up all the things we have so sorely missed in the last two years: the freedom to meet people from all over the world, the possibility of travel, the joy of spending time together, the practice of difference, translation, incomprehension, and communion.

Owusu is a Ghanaian American filmmaker and educator based in New York. By investigating themes of feminism and interactions between disparate Black identities in her practice, she seeks to cultivate a “third cinematic space.” Her works have screened at numerous international films and festivals, and can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles; among others. In 2021, a selection of her award-winning short films were featured on the Criterion Channel.

Hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most significant artists to emerge from the vibrant Los Angeles art scene this century,” Upson was a sculptor and installation artist known for her exploration of family, Americana, and identity. Shortly after graduating from the Institute, Upson gained recognition with her famous The Larry Project exhibition at the Hammer Museum in 2007. More recently, the work was presented at the Biennale Arte 2019. Her work resides in the public collections of various museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Upson and her legacy were paid tribute by numerous CalArtian friends and colleagues upon her passing in August 2021.

Vicuña is a Chile- and New York-based poet, filmmaker, and activist and the 2019 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Visual Art. The artist-poet’s childhood, upended by the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, has informed much of her politically tinged art, which addresses socioeconomic disparities and ecological destruction. She has exhibited at numerous venues throughout her career, including The Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago; The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Art in General in NYC; The Whitney Museum of American Art; and MoMA, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Established in 1895, La Biennale di Venezia has been considered one of the world’s premier international cultural festivals. The 59th International Art Exhibition features works by 213 artists from 58 countries around the world. 

This latest show features new works by Simmons including paintings, wall drawings, and sculpture sprawling across the North Galleries and the outdoor courtyard. Additionally, his installation Recapturing Memories of the Black Art will be presented for the first time in LA. More about the exhibition from Hauser & Wirth: 

‘Remembering Tomorrow’ foregrounds Simmons’ distinctive contributions to contemporary image making, particularly through his use of erasure as a form of Action Painting freighted with deep cultural significance. Simmons wipes the surface of his work while the paint is still wet in order to smear the image so that it simultaneously emerges and disappears. This tactic is central to the new paintings on view, in which Simmons presents the viewer with racialized imagery once prevalent in American popular culture.

Among the once-commonplace images in Simmons’ new works are the 1930s cartoon characters Honey and Bosko, whose designs and personalities hearkened to the minstrelsy and vaudeville acts of the era. In canvas works like Honey Typer (2021) and Joy Ride (2021), the artist depicts the pair engaging in “carefree activities like typing on an antiquated typewriter or innocently kissing on a date.” These pieces highlight the dissonance between the seemingly innocuous imagery and the implicit violence of stereotyped and racialized caricatures.

Simmons’ sculptural installation Recapturing Memories of the Black Ark will be on view in the gallery’s courtyard. An ongoing project since 2014, the work is crafted from “materials sourced from the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” per Hauser & Wirth’s press release. On Saturday, Feb. 19, the sculpture will serve as the site for an opening celebration and a vinyl set by DJ Jihaari paying homage to legendary Jamaican record producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry who passed away in 2021. 

Simmons is a multidisciplinary artist whose more than three decade-long practice draws from personal and collective memory, and is informed by performance and musical genres like dub, punk, hip-hop, reggae, and rap. In 2015, Simmons was among the CalArtians whose works were exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale. His first Los Angeles exhibition Fade to Black took place three years later at the California African American Museum (CAAM).

Hauser & Wirth is open Tuesdays through Sundays from 11 am to 6 pm. No prior reservations are necessary.

The Tuesday night online screening and discussion seminar provides an overview of animation made at CalArts during its first few decades, as well as tracks the development of alumnx and faculty artists covered in the course, from Jules Engel and Adam Beckett (Film/Video BFA 73) to Joyce Borenstein (Film/Video MFA 74) and John Musker (Film/Video 77) and beyond.

Nearly half of the filmmakers are scheduled to join the class online to present their work, including Larry Cuba (Film/Video MFA 74), Sky David (Film/Video MFA 74), Chris Casady(Film/Video BFA 76), Paul Demeyer (Film/Video MFA 77), Jerry Rees (Film/Video 77), Peter Chung (Film/Video 81), Gary Schwartz (Film/Video MFA 81), Christine Panushka (Film/Video MFA 83), Joanna Priestley (Film/Video MFA 85), David Daniels (Film/Video MFA 83), and Drew Neuman (Film/Video BFA 82).

Scroggins received his MFA from CalArts where he studied video under the tutlelage of artists Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, with whom he worked on the construction of the historic Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer. He joined the School of Film/Video in 1978, and has exhibited or screened animation works at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, Union of Filmmakers in Moscow, Seibu Ginza in Tokyo, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. More recently, he’s been working on immersive virtual reality projects.

The Spring 2022 schedule for CalArts Animation: The Early Years follows, with confirmed guests in italics. The appearances are subject to change.

Week 1: Jan. 25
Jules Engel’s compilation: “CalArts: 20 Years of Experimental Animation, 1970-1990,” Part 1

Week 2: Feb. 1
Jules Engel’s compilation: “CalArts: 20 Years of Experimental Animation, 1970-1990,” Part 2

Week 3: Feb. 8
Kathy Rose (Film/Video MFA 74) / Adam Beckett

Week 4: Feb. 15
Larry Cuba / Glen Keane (Film/Video 74)

Week 5: Feb. 22
Sky David / Joyce Borenstein

Week 6: March 1
Chris Casady / David Wilson (Film/Video MFA 76)

Week 7: March 8
Paul Demeyer / Henry Selick

Week 8: March 15
Jerry Rees / Brad Bird (Film/Video BFA 76) / John Musker

Week 9: March 22
Peter Chung / Mark Kirkland (Film/Video BFA 78)

Week 10: March 29
Spring Break

Week 11: April 5
Gary Schwartz / Robert Jahnke (Film/Video MFA 80)

Week 12: April 12
Christine Panushka / Nancy Beiman (Film/Video BFA 79)

Week 13: April 19
Joanna Priestley / Lisze Bechtold (Film/Video MFA 76)

Week 14: April 26
David Daniels / Ellen Woodbury (Film/Video MFA 84)

Featuring 16 of Piller’s sculptural works, Atmospheric Pressures is categorized across three sections: “views from above ground,” “views looking out to the horizon,” and “views from above earth.” The textured multimedia pieces are constructed from materials like vinyl, latex, geode slices, plastic, and glass beads in order to investigate “uncertainty amid disintegrating ecological and political systems.” More about the exhibition from Track 16:

This material exploration is a poetic look at our obsessive need to check news, both the weather forecast and shifting political climates, in an attempt to establish some level of control over the future. Raw materials, curated objects, and news clippings fuse together to capture the unpredictable energy of the Western world. Sculptural works become a part of a fragmented mirror, capturing the convergence of environmental and societal disintegration, while simultaneously allowing this space created for uncertainty to become a catalyst forward, a glimpse into landscapes of growth, hope, new weather, new environments.

Among the works in the “views from above ground” section is Warming Earth Plagued. Party Systems—an amalgam of Manjaadi Kuru seeds, glass beads, plastic, and palm fronds to represent decay and the encroachment of clustered forms upon “old systems.” This and the other displayed sculptures evoke a sense of chaos and disruption reminiscent of climate disasters and deep-seated political divides, yet also offer an optimistic glance at possible futures and new growth.

“My enveloping sculptures and installations expand out, to actualize singular systems that feel equally familiar and foreign,” said Piller. “The construction of each work becoming a biological unfolding of time that examines the energy around wounds left by historical traumas.”

Piller is a Los Angeles-based artist whose microscopal exploration of past atrocities, suffering, and accomplishments manifest in biological forms “broken down to a cellular level.” Her works are included in the Hammer Permanent Collection, Glendale College Collection, Forrest Kirk Collection, and the Pam Royalle Collection.

Track 16 is open Wednesdays to Saturdays from 12-6 pm.

how we are in time and space is a historical survey of the practices and bonds between former School of Film/Video faculty emeritus Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, and Barbara T. Smith (Chouinard 65). Comprising more than 50 works and spanning more than 3,000 square feet, the exhibition seeks to “significantly elevate dialogue around these groundbreaking artists in tandem with the Armory’s robust education and community outreach programs.” More about the exhibition from the Armory: 

This exhibition is shaped by the forces of proximity, friendship, generosity, and longevity. Buchanan, Hafif, and Smith met in the newly formed MFA program at UC Irvine and remained friends for life. Structured around the subjects of bodies, communication, and dwelling, this exhibition reveals a remarkable range of pursuits explored by the three artists for the past 50 years. Though each followed their own trajectory, this exhibition highlights the differences as well as the “empathic overlaps” of these life-long friends.

Buchanan is an installation, performance, and video artist known for elaborate drawings of hair and exploration of body transformation. She is a four-time recipient of NEA’s Individual Artist grants, as well as a COLA grant and a Rockefeller Fellowship in New Media. In 2013, her videotapes were the subject of a solo screening at REDCAT. Her works have also been included in various group exhibitions, including Agitprop at the Brooklyn Museum; RE-ACTION, a traveling exhibition originating in Spain; and Jonny at Insitu, Berlin. Buchanan taught in the School of Film/Video from 1988 to 2012.

Hafif, whose drawings investigating the human body also appear in the exhibition, was an experimental painter best known for her monochromatic paintings. Her works have been the subject of numerous international solo shows, and has been exhibited at MoMA PS 1; Haus für Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zurich; FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon; and MAMCO, Geneva; and other galleries and museums. Hafif passed away in 2018 at the age of 88 and was memorialized in an obituary by The New York Times.

Known primarily for her feminist performance art in the late 1960s, Smith’s practice explores themes of spirituality, gender, and power. Like Buchanan, she is also a four-time NEA grantee. Her works are included in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Hammer Museum, MOCA, LACMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Among her notable recent exhibitions are The 21st Century Odyssey at The Box, Los Angeles; Outside Chance, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Artists and Their Books / Books and Their Artists, the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; and Experiments in Electrostatics, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Reservations to the exhibition are currently being accepted through Thursday, Feb. 6. Admission to the Armory is free.

Three CalArts alums were included among the 2022 ranks:

• luciana achugar (Dance BFA 95) is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who has been making work in both locations since 1999. Her pieces are concerned with the “post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out.” A much-lauded artist, achugar was a 2017 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts recipient.
• Nataki Garrett (Theater MFA 02), former associate dean of CalArts School of Theater, serves as the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the largest theater-producing organizations in the U.S. Garrett was a visiting artist last semester at CalArts, returning to remount the Center for New Performance’s production, The Carolyn Bryant Project.
• Lars America Jan (Theater MFA 08), a current School of Theater faculty member, is a director, artist, writer, and activist. Jan is the founder of Early Morning Opera, a genre-bending performance and art lab whose works explore “emerging technologies, live audiences, and unclassifiable experience.”

“After another year facing the challenges of the pandemic, artists once again demonstrate their deep commitment to uplifting those around them and nurturing their communities,” noted Lynnette Miranda, program director of United States Artists. “The 2022 USA Fellows were selected for their remarkable artistic vision, their commitment to community – both in their specific communities and their discipline at large – and the potential to influence future
generations.”

Founded in 2006 by the Ford, Rockefeller, Rasmuson, and Prudential Foundations in direct response to the cuts in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, USA provides unrestricted support to artists working and living in the United States. Since its founding, the organization has awarded more than 750 artists and cultural practitioners with over $36 million of direct support through the USA Fellowship.

Several CalArtians are included in the 80th iteration of a series of annual and biennial exhibitions created by the museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932.

• Nayland Blake (Art MFA 84)
• Jonathan Berger (Theater BFA 02)
• Raven Chacon (Music MFA 04)
• Danielle Dean (Art MFA 12)
• Daniel Joseph Martinez (Art BFA 79)
• Rodney McMillian (Art MFA 02)
• Ralph Lemon – 1999 HAAIA recipient
• Coco Fusco – 2003 HAAIA recipient

Co-organized by two Whitney curators, David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, the title of the Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept, refers to a colloquial phrase said prior to something—sometimes obvious—that should be kept secret. The curators were inspired by the ways novelist Toni Morrison, jazz drummer Max Roach, and artist and Chouinard alum David Hammons, have invoked it in their works. 

In The New York Times’ coverage of the biennial announcement, writer Siddhartha Mitter notes that the exhibition will lean toward conceptual art, with a focus on Native artists and the border between Mexico and the US.

Of Chacon’s work, he writes:

Chacon, a composer — he took part in the 2017 biennial as a member of the collective Postcommodity — is bringing works that result from 20 years of sonic research. They include graphic scores dedicated to Indigenous women composers, which will be performed, and a recording of a silent standoff between Indigenous women and police during the Standing Rock protests. His video installation, filmed on Navajo, Cherokee and Seminole lands, features women singing in those languages the stories of sites where massacres or removals took place — areas now contested again, for mining or other uses.

During one protest following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Chacon joined actions to topple the statue of a conquistador in Albuquerque, N.M.; one of his friends was shot by a militia member. “We’ve been through a lot,” Chacon said, adding that he hoped the difficult times encouraged artists to “try different tactics to create work.”

The Times’ story also includes an image of Chacon’s For Carmina Escobar (For Zitkála-Šá), 2018. Escobar is a CalArts alum and currently faculty in The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Raven Chacon (@ravenchcn)

Each of the Arts Posse Scholars—together known as the Arts Posse—will receive a full-tuition scholarship beginning when the group enrolls for the Institute’s Fall 2022 semester. CalArts is the first partner institution to have joined the new program, a collaboration with the foundation to enable a pipeline of diverse leaders in the creative arts. 

“We’re believers in the Posse process,” said Lin-Manuel Miranda, the actor, playwright, and Posse Foundation supporter, who attended the livestream with his father Luis A. Miranda Jr. The event honored the CalArts cohort and 16 other Arts Posse scholars bound for Bard College in New York and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. 

Together the recipients will receive $5.2 million in scholarships from the schools. Miranda cast college as a time for self discovery, “to find what you’re passionate about.”

“You may go in thinking, ‘I’m passionate about this [particular interest]’ — and end up being passionate about something else” through the college experience, he told Arts Posse members.

They can lean on one another for support and as potential collaborators, Miranda added, urging the students to get to know one another.

Miranda and his father, the founding president of the Hispanic Federation, said the Posse Arts Program echoes less-formal support systems that buoyed their own college years. The duo and the Miranda Family Fund joined in the creation of the Arts Posse program, which connects young artists from public high schools across the country to top arts-oriented colleges and universities.

The initiative was first announced publicly in April 2021 with the help of former First Lady Michelle Obama.

CalArts is a natural fit, as the Institute focuses on cultivating arts leaders from underrepresented communities, CalArts President Ravi Rajan said at the Monday ceremony. He jumped at the chance for the Institute to be the program’s first institutional sponsor, he said.

“When artists come from underrepresented communities, they can create pathways through their work to allow new voices to blossom,” Rajan said. The work fulfills the promise of the U.S.’ founding—the idea that all people are created equal, he added.

Members of the first Arts Posse cohort at CalArts

Ivan Nunuz, School of Art

Frances Sheehy, School of Art

Evan Ferguson, The Herb Alpert School of Music

Jaylin Rosado, The Herb Alpert School of Music

Khai Umstead, School of Film/Video

Richecia Henry, School of Film/Video

Menelik Lee, School of Film/Video

Madison Dorsey, School of Film/Video

Amara Mancia, School of Film/Video

Shyteek McLeod, School of Theater

Rileigh McDonald, School of Theater

Formed in 1989, the Posse Foundation has 64 partner colleges and universities as the nonprofit identifies, recruits, and trains future leaders in a variety of fields. Partner institutions have awarded about $1.6 billion in scholarships to more than 10,000 Posse Scholars, who graduate at a rate of 90%.

More than half of the scholars—57%—are first-generation college students. The foundation equips scholarship recipients with extensive support—including a network of other Posse Scholars—to help them make the most of their potential.

Nearly 7,000 Posse alumni are now in the workforce, foundation President and Founder Deborah Bial said in the Monday ceremony. The Arts Posse Scholars “will have this wrap-around program with you through the rest of high school, into college and into the workforce,” she said.

Another speaker, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, said Posse Scholars lead in their homes, on their campuses, and in their communities.

“You’re going to pursue your art, and you’re going to lead,” Cardona said. “We so desperately need leaders, and we forget: We need leaders in the arts who come from diverse backgrounds. That’s you. We believe so, so much in you.”

—by Adam Smeltz

Przyblyski joined the Institute in 2012 after serving as vice president and dean of academic affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). In announcing her as the new provost, former CalArts President Steven Lavine lauded her “deep commitment to consensus building and collaboration” which helped her guide CalArts through rapidly changing, artistic, economic, and educational issues.

An accomplished artist, art historian, and educator, Przyblyski sought to connect the arts with local communities.

In 2016, Przyblyski was among the speakers who delivered a “spark talk” at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles based on arts integration. Her spark talk was based on The Some Place Chronicles, a project that combined the talents and artistic practices of many CalArts alumni and faculty, including former School of Art Dean Tom Lawson, Art faculty Harry Gamboa, and alumni Sandy Rodriguez (Art BFA 97), Nicole Miller (Art BFA 05), and Isabelle Lutterodt (Art MFA 01). During her talk (watch in its entirety below), Przyblyski underscored the importance of arts integration:

We want to build whole people. We want to help the growth of whole resilient citizens who are connected to each other and can reach their own personal goals and be nimble in the world no matter what it throws at them. And on the other hand, we want to see those people living in substantial and vibrant places where they feel connected to one another, where they can live and work and feel completely fulfilled.

Lawson shared the following remembrance of his friend and former colleague: 

She was quite remarkable, full of energy. Full on as provost, pushing the modernizations needed in all departments and schools, but also found time to co-teach a class with me. She shepherded a massive project, funded by LA County, to create place-making books in five unincorporated parts of South LA, with me and [Art faculty] Harry Gamboa, plus some Graphic Design students and a number of alumni. And, through connections with her previous job at SFAI, she developed an international MFA program in China, at Hangzhou Academy. Remarkable.

Przyblyski lectured at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and other cultural institutions in the Bay Area. Beyond academia, she served on the Board and Advisory Council of the San Francisco Planning and Research Association (SPUR) and the San Francisco Arts Commission, where she chaired the Visual Arts Committee and served on the Civic Design Review and Executive Committees. 

Przyblyski is survived by her husband Eric Jaye and daughter Isabella.

Through their visual, curatorial, and art historical works, Fleetwood and Hough have both brought vital contributions to the contemporary art world. Their practices challenge the systemic violence of mass incarceration and racial capitalism in the US. 

Hough, who spent his formative years developing his artistry while incarcerated within the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, is among the artists featured in Fleetwood’s groundbreaking curatorial project, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, with a book of the same title published by Harvard University Press. The exhibition opened at PS1/MoMA in 2020, and is currently traveling between the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, where it will open in April. 

During the PBVALS conversation, Hough and Fleetwood will reflect on their individual works, as well as their collaborations, allowing the CalArts community to reflect upon these experiments, experiences, and conceptualizations. Participants may further consider the challenges Hough and Fleetwood offer to conventional art world values, criteria, participation, and organization, as they bring their practices rooted in care, justice, and an expansion of our fields and sense of what one’s artistic practice can achieve. 

The lecture was organized within the fall 2021 class Prisons & Systems & Structures, led by School of Art faculty Ashley Hunt, whose work is also included in the Marking Time exhibition and referenced in Fleetwood’s book.

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), the exhibition’s accompanying publication, earned Fleetwood the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism from the College Art Association. Fleetwood currently serves as the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU.

Hough lives and works in Pittsburgh. For more than a decade, Hough has been heavily involved with Mural Arts Philadelphia. Since working with Mural Arts, Hough has created more than 50 works that have been installed in Philadelphia, State Correctional Institution Graterford, and State Correctional Institution Phoenix. In 2019, as a part of a program supported by the Art for Justice Fund and Fair and Just Prosecution, Hough was selected to be the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Office of the District Attorney of Philadelphia.