Two Iconic Amritas: The Painter and the PoetIn conjunction with the exhibition I Will Meet You Yet Again: Contemporary Sikh Art this virtual lecture by Dr. Nikky G.K. Singh focuses on two postmodern women featured in the exhibition: painter Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) and poet Amrita Pritam (1919–2005). Through paintbrush and pen they tell us about themselves, just as they tell us about violence, modernity, gender-injustice. Through their respective genres, the two Amritas expose patriarchal, social, political, national, and religious infrastructures. How do these poems and paintings echo one another? How does the language of color fuse with the language of sound? What is the verbal visual nexus of these artworks? How do these works make space for what poet Percy Shelley called the “wonder of our being?”
Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh is Crawford Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Colby College in Maine. She has published extensively in the field of Sikh studies. Her recent books include Poems from the Sikh Sacred Tradition (2023), Janamsakhi: Paintings of Guru Nanak in Early Sikh Art (2023), and The First Sikh: The Life and Legacy of Guru Nanak (2019). Her pioneering study The Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the Transcendent was published by Cambridge University Press in 1993. Professor Singh has served on the editorial board of several journals including History of Religions, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Sikh Formations, and CrossCurrents.
Artist Conversations: Rupy C. Tut, Keerat Kaur, Saira WasimThis special online conversation gathers artists Rupy C. Tut, Keerat Kaur, and Saira Wasim, and co-curators Sonia Dhami and Syona Puliady for an in-depth look at our current exhibition I Will Meet You Yet Again: Contemporary Sikh Art. These artists—Sikh and non-Sikh—contributed to the hybrid array of material approaches reflecting personal and gendered perspectives on the history of the community and its visual expressions. The works on view inform a Sikh understanding of “home,”and find inspiration in holy scriptures, legacies of persecution and protest, and the entwined forces of home and longing at play throughout Sikh history.
Artist Bios
Rupy C. Tut (b. 1985, Chandigarh, India) studied calligraphy and Indian miniature painting at the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, London in 2016. She previously received a BS from UCLA and MPH from Loma Linda University, CA. She has enjoyed solo exhibitions including Out of Place, ICA San Francisco; Search and Rescue, Jessica Silverman, San Francisco and A Recipe for Brown Skin, Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA; and A Journey Back Home, Peel Art Gallery and Museum Archives, Ontario. Tut’s work is in the permanent collection of Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the de Young, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. She lives and works in Oakland, CA and is represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.
Keerat Kaur (b. 1991, London, Ontario, Canada) is an artist and architect with Sikh-Panjabi roots. Her work takes shape through the disciplines of painting, sculpture, writing, music, and architecture. Drawing inspiration from Sikh philosophies, she employs metaphor and symbolism to revolutionize our relationship to nature and spirituality. Her recent work contributes to the advancement of language learning and preservation. Keerat currently lives and works between Vancouver, British Columbia and London, Ontario.
Saira Wasim (b. 1975) is a visual artist based in Massachusetts but originally hailing from Lahore, Pakistan, where she earned her BFA from the National College of Arts. Trained in Persian and Indian miniature painting traditions, she has cultivated a unique artistic practice that deeply engages with the visual narratives of South Asia. Her artistic repertoire spans painting, mixed media collage, sculpture, and video animation.Exploring themes of power, politics, globalization, female identity, and the nuanced experiences of being a Muslim woman in the United States, Saira’s work reflects a profound interrogation of societal constructs.
Exhibition Tour: The House Was Too SmallJoin Fowler senior curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts, Patrick A. Polk, as he highlights key works in the exhibition The House Was Too Small: Yoruba Sacred Arts of Africa and Beyond.
Patrick A. Polk is senior curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts at the Fowler Museum and a lecturer in UCLA’s Study of Religion Program. His research interests include material religion and visual piety, religion and healing, popular religion in North and Latin America, and African diasporic sacred arts. He has curated such Fowler exhibitions as Botánica Los Angeles: Latino Popular Religious Art in the City of Angels; Sinful Saints and Saintly Sinners at the Margins of the Americas; and Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis.
Lunch & Learn: Gassia Armenian
Lunch & Learn: Isabella Kelly-RamirezJoin us for a conversation with artist Isabella Kelly-Ramirez who will discuss the process and inspiration behind Cosmic Provenance—a radiant collage transposed onto a 20’ x 40’ vinyl banner exhibited on the exterior of the Fowler Museum.
Cosmic Provenance was commissioned by the museum on the occasion of the Fowler’s 60th Anniversary and installed in October 2023. The hand-cut collage, which has been digitally photographed and blown up to its monumental size, features over 100 artworks from the Fowler’s permanent collection.
About the Artist
Isabella (Izzy) Kelly-Ramirez lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Born and raised in Santa Barbara, she has been making and stewarding art since she was a child. She received her B.A. in studio art from UCLA in 2008 and has served as the Fowler’s collections manager since 2011.
Kelly-Ramirez’s engagement with art from around the globe at the Fowler Museum informs and inspires her own artistic practice. She works primarily in painting, collage, soft sculpture, and assemblage—with a pop and surrealist flair—and uses her unique sense of color and pattern to create playful assemblages and dreamscapes. She introduces fascinating female characters: modern-day saints, superheroines, and champions of the avant-garde. Through these icons of her own mythology, Kelly-Ramirez seeks to upend prevailing female beauty standards, as she co-opts and repurposes imagery from fashion and popular culture.
Lunch & Learn: Patrick A. PolkJoin Fowler senior curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts, Patrick A. Polk, as he highlights key works in the exhibition The House Was Too Small.
Patrick A. Polk is senior curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts at the Fowler Museum and a lecturer in UCLA’s Study of Religion Program. His research interests include material religion and visual piety, religion and healing, popular religion in North and Latin America, and African diasporic sacred arts. He has curated Fowler exhibitions such as Botánica Los Angeles: Latino Popular Religious Art in the City of Angels; Sinful Saints and Saintly Sinners at the Margins of the Americas; and Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of objects, topics, and discussions from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind and soul.
Gala Porras-Kim: Containment & FramingJoin us for a conversation with exhibition curator Matthew H. Robb and artist Gala Porras-Kim moderated by art historian and critic Kavior Moon. Porras-Kim’s current exhibition The weight of a patina of time includes a chronological selection of Porras-Kim’s installations and series of research-based projects from the past seven years (2016–2023). All these works consider a container and its contents, as well as the relationship of the container’s scale to those contents: the bag that holds the tiny fragment; the glyph that holds the sound of language; the building that houses the hidden chamber; the box that holds the curious objects; the body of water that contains the offerings; and the documents that list and describe all these containers across time and space.
About the Speaker
Gala Porras-Kim lives and works in Los Angeles/London. She received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009 and an MA in Latin American studies from UCLA in 2012. Solo exhibitions have been held at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville (2023); Gasworks, London and CAMSTL, St. Louis (2022); Amant and Kadist, Brooklyn (2021); and MOCA LA (2019). She has participated in numerous biennials, including the 12th Liverpool Biennial (2023); 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021); 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021); Whitney Biennial (2017); and the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA (2016). Porras-Kim is a recipient of numerous awards, including an Art Matters Foundation Grant (2019), Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2016), and a Creative Capital Grant (2015). She has participated in residencies at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22); Delfina Foundation, London (2021); and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge (2020). Her work is in the collections of MOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum in New York; MOCA, LACMA, and Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; MCA and DePaul Art Museum in Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Perez Museum, Miami; and the Seoul Museum of Art.
Kavior Moon is an art historian and critic based in Los Angeles, where she received a PhD in art history from UCLA. Her scholarly work focuses on institutional critique and experimental post-studio art practices. She has taught at UCLA, ArtCenter College of Design, Claremont Graduate University, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. Her essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Kaleidoscope, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly.
Matthew H. Robb is the Mesoamerican specialist at the Library of Congress. He is an expert in the history of art and architecture at Teotihuacan, as well as the history of collecting pre-Columbian art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has lectured and written on a broad range of topics related to the Indigenous arts of the Western Hemisphere.
UCLA/Getty Program's Distinguished Speaker Series feat. Gala Porras-KimUCLA/Getty Program's Distinguished Speaker Series feat. Gala Porras-Kim
speaking on
"The Weight of a Patina of Time"
featuring a panel discussion with
Glenn Wharton
Professor, Department of Art History
Lore and Gerald Cunard Chair
UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage
and
Matthew H. Robb
Mesoamerican Specialist, Library of Congress
Livestreamed via Zoom
Vital Matters: Curatorial Collectives—Jain Art in Los Angeles and ZürichDeputy director of the Museum Rietberg Johannes Beltz, co-founder of the Arihanta Institute Christopher Jain Miller, the Fowler’s senior curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts Patrick A. Polk, and assistant professor, department of religious studies, UC Davis Lynna Dhanani, will discuss two current exhibitions focused on the lived experience of Jain religious practices and ethical principles: Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and Being Jain: Art and Culture of an Indian Religion at Museum Rietberg in Zurich, Switzerland. Moderated by Amy Landau, director of education and interpretation at the Fowler Museum, this conversation will address how museum curators and educators have worked closely with local communities to understand the practice of religion in everyday life: in devotional, domestic, commercial, and community spaces. These contextualized viewpoints provide new insights that move beyond the more traditional “dates and doctrines” approach to museum presentations of religion.
This event was co-sponsored by the UCLA Center of India and South Asian Studies and the Center for the Study of Religion and generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Johannes Beltz is deputy director of Museum Rietberg in Zurich. He read theology, Indian studies, and religious studies at the Universities of Halle, Strasbourg, Paris, and Lausanne. From 1999 to 2002, he worked at the renowned South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg, before taking up a post at the Museum Rietberg, where he is now curator of the collection of Indian bronzes, sculptures, and textiles, as well as of the South East Asian collection. He has chaired the museum’s curatorial board since 2009, has been in charge of art education since 2015, and was appointed assistant director in 2016.
Lynna Dhanani obtained her doctorate at Yale University and joined the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis in the Fall of 2020 as an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. She is currently the Chair holder for the Mohini Jain Presidential Chair in Jain Studies. Her research explores the confluence of interreligious polemics, philosophical debate, devotional themes, and poetics in the Sanskrit hymns of the celebrated twelfth-century Svetambara Jain Hemacandra, court pandit to two Hindu kings of medieval Gujarat. Having dedicated herself to the study of multiple Indian religions for more than two decades, Lynna has a wide range of interests, including Jainism, Sanskrit and Prakrit language and literature, medieval Indian alchemical traditions, yoga and tantra, Indian devotional movements, Indian philosophy, and especially South Asian religious art.
Christopher Jain Miller received his PhD in the study of religion from the University of California, Davis. He is a vice president of academic affairs; professor of Jain and Yoga studies; and co-founder at Arihanta Institute, an international online non-profit institution for Jain studies. He is the co-editor of Beacons of Dharma: Spiritual Exemplars for the Modern Age (Lexington 2020) and Embodying Transnational Yoga (Routledge, forthcoming).
Patrick A. Polk is senior curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts at the Fowler Museum and a lecturer in UCLA’s study of religion program. His research interests include material religion and visual piety, religion and healing, popular religion in North and Latin America, and African diasporic sacred arts. He has curated such Fowler exhibitions as Botánica Los Angeles: Latino Popular Religious Art in the City of Angels; Sinful Saints and Saintly Sinners at the Margins of the Americas; and Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis.
Amy Landau is director of education and interpretation at the Fowler Museum, where she oversees programs, educational initiatives, and gallery interpretation, and co-leads the Fowler initiative “Engaging Lived Religion in the 21st Century Museum.” She is also director of Museum Co-Lab at Morgan State University, where she founded a museum studies initiative in 2018. Landau previously served as director of curatorial affairs and curator of Islamic and South & Southeast Asian art at the Walters Art Museum (2009–18). In 2017, Landau was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. She publishes on the arts of early modern Iran and museum interpretation.
Vital Matters: Vital Matters public programs explore objects that arouse devotion, awe, or serenity; mediate relationships between human and spiritual realms; and are of vital importance to the cultural heritage of individuals and communities. This series accompanies the new digital educational initiative Vital Matters: Stories of Belief—a platform for sharing different perspectives on devotional works at the Fowler Museum.
Vital Matters: Jainism and EcologyDrawing inspiration from the sacred landscapes depicted on devotional textiles presented in Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings, Venu Mehta will discuss intersections of ascetic principles, spirituality and sociocentric environmentalism in the twenty-five-hundred-year-old tradition of Jainism. Highlighting nonviolence as the path to liberation, Jainism offers an important perspective on environmental activism.
This event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Center of India and South Asian Studies and the Center for the Study of Religion and generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Venu Mehta is Bhagwan Chandraprabhu Postdoctoral Fellow in Jain Studies and assistant professor of comparative religions at Claremont School of Theology. Her research focuses on the devotional practices, literature, and iconography of the Jaina goddess Padmāvatī, with special attention to vernacular and regional forms of devotion and goddesses in Jainism. Her areas of scholarship in Jain studies include Jain religious diaspora and sectarian negotiations in the USA; Jainism and ecology; Jain bhakti literature and practices in Gujarat; Jaina theory of Anekāntavāda; and the Jaina notion of forgiveness.
Share the Mic: Amir H. Fallah’s CHANTJoin us for a conversation between artist Amir H. Fallah and matt dilling from Lite Brite Neon Studio, a beloved collective of craftspeople specializing in neon art, moderated by cultural historian Shiva Balaghi.
In his most recent collaborative work, Fallah has leveraged his art to keep public attention on protestors risking their lives in the fight for freedom in Iran. CHANT is a large-scale neon artwork that will be displayed on the front of Shulamit Nazarian Gallery at the intersection of La Brea and Melrose Avenues in Los Angeles. The work is a collaboration between Fallah and dilling, and was made possible by Fallah’s GoFundMe effort.
In Fallah’s words, “CHANT is a beacon for all those united in the struggle for freedom,” designed to hold public attention on Iran following the senseless murder of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police.
Shiva Balaghi is a cultural historian specializing in the visual culture of the Middle East and its diasporas. She is academic coordinator of the Area Global Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously, she served as senior advisor to the president of the American University in Cairo for Arts and Cultural Programs and taught history and history of art at NYU and Brown University for nearly two decades.
matt dilling is a Queer art fabricator and the founding partner of Lite Brite Neon Studio. Since 1999, they have helped develop and fabricate luminous artworks for a number of public and private institutions worldwide, with a focus on work that speaks to and facilitates social justice, human rights, and the awakening of the best qualities of the human spirit. dilling resides on unceded Lenape land in what is currently known as the Catskills.
Amir H. Fallah received his BFA in fine art & painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has been shown extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. In 2009, he was chosen to participate in the 9th Sharjah Biennial; in 2015, he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 2019, Fallah was awarded the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago for his painting Calling on The Past. Fallah was recognized with the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and the Artadia grant in 2020. His work forms part of the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami; Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; and Xiao Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, China.
This program is co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Lunch & Learn: Female Leadership in Asafo Military CompaniesJoin us to hear from Silvia Forni, co-curator of Art, Honor, and Ridicule: Fante Asafo Flags from Southern Ghana (October 23, 2022–February 12, 2023), who will discuss the politics and aesthetics of Asafo female leadership in historical and contemporary contexts. Among the Fante people of Ghana, membership in an Asafo military company is passed down along patrilineal lines. This differs from the otherwise matrilineal culture of Ghana’s Akan people, to which the Fante belong. In all aspects of life, men and women share political and social responsibilities and leadership roles.
Silvia Forni is the Shirley & Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum. Previously, she served as senior curator of global Africa and deputy vice president of the department of art & culture at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. Forni oversaw the institution’s large African collection and was responsible for the museum’s permanent and rotating displays of African artworks. Her research focuses on the significance of art both in local contexts and within wider exchange networks. She has initiated institutional conversations to interrogate and dismantle the colonial legacies embedded in institutional structures, and sought ways to ground the museum’s impact on more equitable premises.
Lunch & Learn: The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind and soul.
Fowler Talks: Destination Crenshaw X UCLATo celebrate Black history and creativity in LA, Destination Crenshaw—a $100-million, transformative, revitalization project—will develop a walkable commercial corridor defined by public artworks, tranquil green spaces, and beautiful storefronts along the 1.3 miles of Crenshaw Boulevard. Once finished, Destination Crenshaw will serve as an epicenter of Black American culture, as well as the most significant public/private Black art program in the United States.
Join us for a discussion of the ways UCLA faculty and alumni have contributed ideas, expertise, and artworks to this pioneering “Afrocentric streetscape,” including its monuments, murals, and augmented reality storytellings. Darnell Hunt, advisor to the project and UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, will be joined by president and COO of Destination Crenshaw Jason Foster, influential art collector and advisor Dr. V. Joy Simmons, prominent artist Maren Hassinger, and arts educator and independent filmmaker Ben Caldwell.
This program is part of the Fowler initiative “Art of Liberation: Africa and the African Diaspora,” which is generously funded by the Nissan Foundation and The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.
Ben Caldwell is an arts educator and independent filmmaker. His passion for the visual arts led him to study film at UCLA, where he was a part of the “LA Rebellion” film movement. After teaching film and video at Howard University in Washington, D.C. from 1981 to 1984, Caldwell moved to Leimert Park, the epicenter of the African American art scene in Los Angeles, and created an independent studio for video production and experimentation that became the KAOS Network: a community arts center that provides training in digital arts, media arts, and multimedia. Since the early 90s, KAOS has hosted the legendary open-mic workshop Project Blowed, which gave birth to such rappers as Aceyalone, Medusa, Busdriver, Freestyle Fellowship, and Jurassic Five.
Jason Foster is the president and COO of Destination Crenshaw. Previously, Foster served as director of strategic partnerships at River LA, where he worked closely with local partners, corporate representatives, and residents to revitalize communities adjacent to the 51-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River. Before that, Foster worked as a project manager for IMPACCT Brooklyn in New York. He holds a BA in business administration and finance from Howard University, and an MBA from the Metropolitan College of New York, where he focused on community redevelopment and small business incubation.
Maren Hassinger is a visual artist and an alumna of UCLA’s former fiber arts program. She served as director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore for 20 years. During her four-decade-long career, Hassinger has explored relationships between the industrial and natural worlds in a practice that is both meditative and critical. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for the Arts. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Hirshhorn Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Darnell Hunt is UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, an esteemed scholar of race and media, and the author of four books and numerous articles. For more than two decades, he has studied questions of access and diversity in the entertainment industry. From 2014 to 2022, he was the lead author of UCLA’s annual Hollywood Diversity Report, which provides comprehensive analyses of the employment of women and people of color in front of and behind the camera in film and television. He served as a member of the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations Academic Advisory Board, and as a staff researcher for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hearings on the 1992 Los Angeles civil disturbances.
Dr. V. Joy Simmons, a UCLA alumna, is the senior art and exhibition advisor for Destination Crenshaw. A physician at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center for 37 years, Simmons masterfully juggled her passion for patients and her love of art. She has been an avid collector of contemporary African American art for three decades; and serves on the boards of California African American Museum, Stanford University, and The Mistake Room. Her extensive and growing collection has been featured in exhibitions around the world, including at Tate Modern and California African American Museum. Her eye for spotting talent has earned Simmons recognition in NY Magazine's “The Cut,” W Magazine, Ebony magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.
Fowler Talks: The Fowler is honored to be a convening place for conversations, lectures, and readings that explore the many ways art creates meaning and defines purpose for people across the globe.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons: Chicken Shawarma Tacos with X’tiosu KitchenX’tiosu Kitchen in Boyle Heights is a Oaxacan-Lebanese culinary mashup created by Zapotec brothers Ignacio and Felipe Santiago. Their dishes draw on the vibrant flavors of rural Mexico and quality ingredients from Lebanese suppliers. Join the Fowler and Ignacio and Felipe to learn how to make chicken shawarma tacos topped with their famous tahini-based arabesque salsa and pickled turnip. Ingredients list will be sent upon RSVP. Come with supplies prepared and ready to cook!
Curator’s Choice: Vernacular Flags in Los AngelesThe Fowler’s senior curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts, Patrick A. Polk, will explore the history of African American vernacular flags and highlight key aspects of their creation and use. This program accompanies our current exhibition Art, Honor, and Ridicule: Asafo Flags from Southern Ghana. From the era of United States Independence to the present day, Black communities have used a wide variety of banners as symbols of collective identity, political solidarity, resistance to oppression, and religious affiliation, among other concerns. Polk will place special emphasis on the display of African American flags and flag imagery in Southern California.
Fowler Talks: Provenance Research in Asian ArtsJoin Najiba H. Choudhury, collections information specialist & provenance researcher at the National Museum of Asian Art, to learn how scholars trace objects’ ownership histories. Glimpse the multifaceted ways objects enter museum collections and different methods, including archival and art historical research, used to establish provenance. You will hear about an archaeological expedition in West Asia and the sale of a Chinese ceramic in the U.S. during the tumultuous WWII period. This program complements the Fowler exhibition Particular Histories: Provenance Research in African Arts. Following her presentation, Choudhury will be joined by the Fowler’s exhibition curator, Carlee S. Forbes, for a discussion of the global markets on which Asian and African materials circulated, as well as approaches to provenance work in their respective fields.
Najiba H. Choudhury holds B.A. degrees in art history (with a focus on South Asian art) and economics from George Mason University, and a M.A. in art history from the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include Asian art collectors, dealers, early museum collections, and provenance research. Her article on Yamanaka & Co. and the U.S. seizure of the American collection during WWII was published in the Journal for Art Market Studies. She has a forthcoming essay on Carl W. Bishop and his acquisition of a Buddhist stele.
Curator’s Choice: Gold Weights from West AfricaThe Fowler invites you to a behind-the-scenes look at the ongoing research and conservation of gold weights from West Africa, currently on view in Particular Histories: Provenance Research in African Arts. Hear from staff about the collection’s care and storage in situ; then follow several objects to the lab where staff will discuss their investigations and findings. This program will include pre-recorded elements as well as a live discussion.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons: Ropa Vieja with El CochinitoEl Cochinito is a family-owned business that has been serving authentic Cuban food in Silver Lake since 1988. Join the Fowler and third-generation owner Daniel Navarro to learn how to make the Cuban national dish ropa vieja with shredded beef, chicken, or pork; white rice and black beans; and crispy plantain tostones with garlic sauce. Come with supplies prepared and ready to cook!
El Cochinito – Ropa Vieja with crispy tostones and garlic sauce
Equipment Needed:
Stove
Large stock pot 8qt
medium dutch oven dish 6 qt
medium pot 3 qt
slotted spoon or medium skimmer
kitchen towel
paper towel
Rice cooker or 3 qt pot and lid -
measuring cup
strainer
measuring spoon
food processor OR mortar and pestle
Ropa Vieja Ingredients (serves 4-6 people)
2lb Flank Steak (substitute: chicken breast or pork butt)
1 Spanish Onion (yellow onion)
1 green bell pepper
2 large tomatoes
6 cloves garlic
16 oz tomato sauce
32 oz chicken stock
2 bay leaf
4 TB ground cumin
1 TB ground dry oregano
1 C olive oil
Tostones Ingredients:
2 green plantains
1 qt vegetable oil
Garlic Sauce Ingredients:
2 heads peeled garlic cloves
1/2 C vegetable oil
1/4 C white vinegar
1/4 C lime juice
White Rice Ingredients:
2 C long grain white rice
2 TB olive oil
TO PREPARE IN ADVANCE:
1) Shredded Meat (2-2.5 hours)
- PUT MEAT IN STOCK POT AND FILL WITH WATER TO COVER MEAT (IF USING FLANK STEAK, CUT ACROSS THE GRAIN INTO 3 INCH PIECES BEFORE PUTTING INTO POT)
- BRING WATER TO SIMMER FOR 90 MIN
- LET COOL 30 MIN
- THEN SHRED BY HAND
- REFRIGERATE UNTIL CLASS
2) Black Beans (2.5 hours)
Chef recommends the dish with black beans and encourages you to make black beans in advance and reheat if refrigerated.
Equipment Needed:
Lage 8 qt pot
cutting board
chef knife
mortar and pestle
wooden spoon
Black Beans Ingredients:
4C dry black beans
6 QT water
1/2 Spanish onion
1/2 green bell pepper
1 C Vegetable Oil
1 C Spanish Onion medium. dice
1 C green bell pepper, medium dice
½ C Garlic, minced
4 bay leaf
4 TB ground cumin
1 TSP black pepper
4 TBSP salt
4 TBSP golden cooking wine
4 TBSP olive oil
4 TBSP raw sugar
2-4 TBSP salt
Instructions:
RINSE YOUR BEANS AND ADD THEM TO A LARGE POT WITH THE WATER. ADD A PEELED SPANISH ONION AND A CLEANED GREEN BELL PEPPER. BRING POT TO A BOIL.
IN A SMALL SAUCE POT, ADD THE NEXT SECTION OF INGREDIENTS AND BRING TO A SIMMER. COOK SLOWLY AND STIR WITH A WOODEN SPOON. ONCE THE ONIONS ARE TRANSLUCENT ADD EVERYTHING TO THE POT OF BEANS. KEEP THE BEANS AT A SIMMER UNTIL TENDER. AND CHECK FOR SEASONING.
Opening Program: Particular Histories: Provenance Research in African ArtsThis talk will introduce the ongoing investigations underpinning Particular Histories: Provenance Research in African Arts. Exhibition curator Carlee S. Forbes will consider the works on view alongside additional examples drawn from this Mellon-funded project. She will elucidate how African objects featured in the exhibition moved from their places of creation to communities and countries near and far; address the changing late-19th and early-20th-century cultural, economic, and political settings in which these objects circulated; touch on the acquisition activities of different actors through whose hands these works passed; and explore the shifting notions of value and authenticity as African material moved through a range of markets and contexts.
PRIDE at the Fowler: Archiving Gay HistoryThe Fowler, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and ONE Archives at USC are proud to co-present a program in honor of Pride, focusing on the work of contemporary artist Sadie Barnette and filmmaker Whitney Skauge at the intersection of art, archives, and anti-erasure efforts. Recent celebrated projects by Barnette and Skauge feature archival content about the lives of two gay Black activists—the 1992 presidential candidate Terence Alan Smith, aka Joan Jett Blakk, and Black Panther Party member Rodney Barnette, who established the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco—who fought against political oppression and advocated for the safety of their community at the height of the AIDS crisis in the early 90s.
Join us in the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s Virtual Screening Room for a viewing of The Beauty President (dir. Skauge), a presentation by Barnette; followed by a conversation, moderated by the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s May Hong HaDuong, about the capacity of contemporary art to breathe new life into archival content; how to deal with what’s missing from and the limits of existing archives; and the power of images to undo the lies of history.
Sadie Barnette’s multimedia practice illuminates her own family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the US. Barnette has a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from UC San Diego. Her work is in permanent collections of LACMA, Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Guggenheim. Her permanent, site-specific commission at the LAX International Airport will open in 2024. Barnette lives and works in Oakland, CA and is represented by Jessica Silverman.
Faridah Gbadamosi is the Artistic Director of Outfest, one of the only global LGBTQIA+ arts, media, and entertainment organizations whose programs empower artists, communities, and filmmakers to transform the world through their stories. Gbadamosi oversees the year-round artistic vision for the organization’s many programs, including the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, the only program in the world exclusively dedicated to preserving lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender moving images at risk of becoming lost due to deterioration and neglect.
Alexis Bard Johnson is the curator at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. She oversees the exhibitions and programs at one of the largest repositories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer materials in the world. Johnson earned her PhD in Art History with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University. Before joining ONE, Johnson worked at the Princeton Art Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
May Hong HaDuong, a UCLA alumna, joined the UCLA Film & Television Archive as its fourth director in 2021. Previously, she was the senior manager of public access at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where she served as a principal representative for the Academy’s film archive. Before that, she was the project manager for the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project for LGBT Moving Image Preservation, a collaboration between the UCLA Film & Television Archive and Outfest, which produces the Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ Film Festival. Hong HaDuong currently serves on the Legacy Project Advisory Committee and on the Board of Directors of the ONE Archives Foundation.
Whitney Skauge is an award-winning filmmaker dedicated to diverse storytelling and representation. They are vice president of development at two-time Oscar-nominated Breakwater Studios, dedicated to the craft of the short documentary. Skauge’s debut short film The Beauty President (2020), produced by Breakwater Studios, premiered at SXSW and was distributed by LA Times Short Docs in 2021. Skauge’s films act as an extension of social and political activism with hopes of helping audiences understand themselves and the world around them better.
Share the Mic: Indigenous Knowledge–Aboriginal Artists & LawTo complement our current exhibition, Aboriginal Screen-Printed Textiles from Australia’s Top End, the Fowler is honored to bring together a group of cultural ownership experts in the fields of law, education, copyright, and the art market to discuss the biggest challenges indigenous Australians face in their attempts to maintain control over their intellectual property.
Case studies shared by three Australian panelists will illuminate the work they do to protect Indigenous art, and the ways in which they rely on one another. Their presentations will be followed by a conversation moderated by Lauren van Schilfgaarde, San Manuel Band of Mission Indians Director, Tribal Legal Development Clinic, Native Nations Law and Policy Center, UCLA School of Law. The speakers will discuss what, if any, cultural knowledge should remain internal and confidential, how the history of Australian-Aboriginal relations impacts the policies in place today, and what immediate and longer-term solutions are being applied to a variety of concerns in this field.
This program is co-presented by UCLA School of Law’s Native Nations Policy & Law Center.
Patricia Adjei is a Wuthathi, Mabuiag Islander, and Ghanaian woman from Sydney, Australia. She holds Bachelor degrees in Arts and Law from UNSW and currently works at the Australia Council for the Arts as the Head of First Nations arts and culture. Previously, she worked at the Copyright Agency l Viscopy as the Indigenous engagement manager; served on the City of Sydney, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory panel; and has been a Board member of the Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival and the Moogahlin Performing Arts Board. As a 2018 Churchill fellowship recipient, Adjei investigated the practical application of laws protecting Indigenous cultural rights in the US and Panama.
Robyn Ayres has been a lawyer for over 20 years and has served as the CEO of Arts Law Centre of Australia since 2002. She is committed to ensuring that artists and arts organizations properly understand their rights as well as their legal responsibilities, and are fairly rewarded for the work they do. Prior to joining Arts Law, Ayres spent a significant part of her legal career working to achieve social justice for different groups in the community: she was a lawyer with Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1988-91); a public interest lawyer at the Aboriginal Legal Service WA (1993-98); and executive director of the Mental Health Law Centre WA (1998-2002). In 2004, under her direction, Arts Law established the Artists in the Black service, which focuses on offering legal advice to Indigenous artists.
Stephanie Parkin belongs to the Quandamooka People of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island). In her role at the Copyright Agency, she assists Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists with licensing and resale royalty queries. Parkin is also chairperson of the Indigenous Art Code, a voluntary code of conduct aimed at promoting fair and ethical dealings between art dealers/licensors and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. Both roles have a strong focus on artist advocacy, including the launch of the Fake Art Harms Culture campaign in 2016. Parkin is involved in lobbying for stronger Indigenous cultural and intellectual property protections.
Lauren van Schilfgaarde (Cochiti Pueblo) supervises live-client projects concerned with tribal governance and justice systems, ethics, cultural resources protection, voting, child welfare, and more. She received her undergraduate degree at Colorado College and her law degree from UCLA School of Law. Previously, van Schilfgaarde served as the Tribal Law Specialist at the Tribal Law and Policy Institute (TLPI) in West Hollywood, CA, where she worked with over 80 tribal nations; coordinated training and technical assistance at tribal courts; and focused on Tribal Healing to Wellness Courts, restorative justice, tribal court infrastructure, and federal Indian law.
Fowler Talks: Publisher Textiles with Merrepen Art CentreStephanie Isaac-Newton is half of the duo behind Publisher Textiles and Papers, Australia’s largest manufacturer of hand-printed textiles and a hive of design and manufacturing, which employs traditional hand-printing methods to create wallpaper, fabrics, and clothing. Publisher Textiles’s extensive portfolio includes over 20 designs created in-house over the years, among them those conceived at seven Indigenous art centers in Australia’s Top End. You can see several Publisher Textiles pieces in our current exhibition, Aboriginal Screen-Printed Textiles from Australia’s Top End, on view through July 10.
Join the Fowler and Isaac-Newton to learn about Publisher Textiles’s printing process, from draft to production, and the different levels of service they offer to art centers, including co-development of clothing ranges. Kieren Karritpul and Cathy Laudenbach of Merrepen Art Centre will share their experiences of working with Publisher Textiles, and explain why their Aboriginal art center has chosen to engage a non-Indigenous company to print their designs.
Stephanie Isaac-Newton is co-owner of Publisher Textiles. Since 2015, she has managed their extensive library of Indigenous prints and maintained the company’s close working relationships within the Indigenous textile industry. She has created a range of service packages for artists and art centers, allowing them to select what is relevant to their production needs. She is also the main force behind Publisher Textiles’s clothing collaborations, selecting the prints, styles, and colors used in their ranges.
Kieren Karritpul has worked in painting, printmaking, fabric, and ceramics. His work can be found in major collections, including the National Gallery of Australia and Myer Collection and Artbank. He presented an example of his textile work as a gift to Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, during his visit to Darwin. Karritpul was the youngest director ever appointed to the Association of Northern, Kimberley and Arnhem Aboriginal Artists (ANKAAA). A young leader in his community, he still engages in traditional hunting and fishing practices.
Cathy Laudenbach is an artist, arts manager, and curator. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and received numerous grants and awards for her work, which is held in Australian public and private collections. Laudenbach currently serves as manager of Merrepen Art Centre in the Daly River area. Previously, she has been a lecturer at the Australian National University and Charles Darwin University and has curated numerous public exhibitions.
Share the Mic: Printing and Activism in Los AngelesSince 1973, Self Help Graphics & Art (SHG) has produced more than 2,000 art print editions and exhibitions all over the world. The organization remains dedicated to the production, interpretation, and distribution of prints and other art media by Chicana/o and Latinx artists; and continues to empower LA’s artistic community by providing access to working space, tools, and training. Thanks to this essential arts organization’s investment in community over the past 50 years, Los Angeles has witnessed the organic development of a vanguard of professional creatives from marginalized communities who utilize the art of printing to produce eye-catching and provocative calls to action in support of social justice movements and revolutions.
As a complement to our current exhibition, Aboriginal Screen Printed Textiles from Australia’s Top End, the Fowler and SHG are proud to co-present a program exploring the dynamic intersection of printing and activism in Los Angeles and the role of artists as community leaders. Join us for a conversation, moderated by CalTech’s Visual Culture and Social Sciences instructor J.V. Decemvirale, with Carol A. Wells, founder of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Culver City, and artists Miyo Stevens-Gandara, Dewey Tafoya, and Ernesto Yerena Montejano.
J.V. Decemvirale is the Weisman Postdoctoral Instructor in Visual Culture and the Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. An Angeleno of Italian and Peruvian descent, he focuses his research on the art histories of people of color in Los Angeles. Decemvirale’s writings on LA arts activism and community art spaces can be found online at: Smithsonian American Art Museum blog, Artsy, and Smarthistory.
Miyo Stevens-Gandara is an LA-based artist working in various media, including photography, drawing, embroidery, and printmaking. Her imagery explores issues of ancestry, migration, feminism, cultural identity, and environmental degradation. She received her BFA from the California College of the Arts, and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Stevens-Gandara’s work can be found in the collections of LACMA, Museum of Latin American Art, Riverside Art Museum, and private collections in the US and internationally.
Dewey Tafoya is master printer & assistant director of the Professional Printmaking Program at Self Help Graphics & Art (SHG). Influenced by his local community, he uses symbols and imagery connected to the urban landscape, Chicanx culture, and indigenous civilizations to critique, deconstruct, and rebuild historical narratives. Tafoya’s work has been exhibited throughout Southern California, including at LACMA. He has been sharing his knowledge with youth and young adults as a teaching artist with ArtworxLA, SHG’s Barrio Mobile Art Studio, and SOY Artista summer program.
Ernesto Yerena Montejano was born in El Centro, CA, a farming town bordering Mexicali, BC, MX. Fueled by his cross-national upbringing, his art practice reflects his observations of the views and interactions between Mexican communities living on both sides of the US-Mexico border. In 2008, Yerena created Hecho Con Ganas, which produces politically and socially conscious images in limited edition silkscreen prints. Highly esteemed for his activism, Yerena is founder and curator of the Alto Arizona Art campaign (2010) and a founding member of the We Are Human campaign (2009).
Carol A. Wells is an activist, art historian, curator, writer, and poster collector. She received both her BA in history and MA in art history from UCLA. In 1988, she founded Center for the Study of Political Graphics, an activist, educational, and research archive in LA. The center’s more than 90,000 social movement posters from the 19th century to the present include the largest collection of post-WWII posters in the US. Wells believes that posters can combat public apathy and feelings of helplessness, as well as stimulate political debate.
Vital Matters: The Gifts of Sheikh Amadou Bambaba
Curator’s Choice: Beloved GhanaA number of works of art by Ghanaian painter Kwame Akoto, aka Almighty God, address his love of his country. Akoto often employs iconic and recognizable symbols to express his pride: from the red, gold, and green of the Ghanaian flag; to popular political figures, such as Kwame Nkrumah and Kofi Annan; to Asante kings and queen mothers. These images stem, in part, from the central role Ghana played in pan-African politics in the 1950s and 1960s, and the pride Ghanaians felt as their nation was among the first in sub-Saharan Africa to assert its independence in the 1950s.
Betsy D. Quick, co-curator of ‘How Do You See This World?”: The Art of Almighty God, will offer a brief introduction to the exhibition and selected works that speak to the diversity of imagery that define Akoto’s style. Then, Kevin Gaines, Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia, and Raymond Silverman, professor emeritus of history of art, African studies, and museum studies at the University of Michigan, will discuss a selection of paintings by Akoto that express his affection for his Asante heritage, pride for his homeland, “Beloved Ghana,” and, more broadly, how this patriotism is manifest among Ghanaians today. They will also explore Akoto’s fascination with the history of the United States, especially its presidents, and the important role Africans in the diaspora played in shaping the Pan-African movement in Ghana and beyond.
Kevin K. Gaines is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia, with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. He is the author of The African American Journey: A Global History (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023). His current book project, The World the Civil Rights Movement Made, argues that internal tensions within the movement and among African Americans gave rise to subsequent thought and activism that envisioned expansive democratic conceptions of human rights and Black liberation.
Raymond Silverman, a historian of the visual cultures of Africa, is professor emeritus of history of art, African studies, and museum studies at the University of Michigan. His research and writing have explored historical and contemporary visual practices in Ethiopia and Ghana, and museum and heritage discourse in Africa. Silverman’s recent work has focused on the visual culture of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the 20th and 21st centuries, resulting in his book Ethiopian Church Art: Painters, Patrons, Purveyors (2022). He also published National Museums in Africa: Identity, History and Politics (2022).
Betsy D. Quick is guest co-curator of ‘How Do You See This World?”: The Art of Almighty God and former director of education at the Fowler Museum. She has authored publications and articles on the teaching of world arts and humanities; was a contributing author to Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity; and curated a number of African art exhibitions at the Fowler, including Mandela for President: South Africa Votes for Democracy and Yards of Style: African-Print Cloths from Ghana. Quick also served as project director and co-curator of African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization.
Curator’s Choice
Join curators for lively conversations about their passions and projects that inspire audiences to engage with different worldviews and find joy in the multiplicity of human experiences.
Fowler Talks: The African Art in Venice ForumThe African Art in Venice Forum (AAVF) is a free public platform presented in Venice, Italy during the opening week of the Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte di Venezia. The event provides opportunities to discover, learn, and discuss topics and projects related to contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas.
This year, AAVF will take place on April 20 and 21. Check out the schedule and watch live-streamed and recorded conversations here. Then, join us for a program with AAVF founder and director Neri Torcello, moderated by AAVF board member Azza Satti, who will talk with Vice President of African Art Dialogues Ilaria Conti; artist and photographer exhibiting in the South African Pavilion Lebohang Kganye; the creative director of SOMETHING WE AFRICANS GOT Anna-Alix Koffi; and Co-Founder and Director of Black History Month Florence and The Recovery Plan, Justin Randolph Thompson. The panelists will share the highlights of the 2022 forum, including conversations about the rise and impact of intra-African cultural cooperation; activities promoting Black history in Italy; African artists who have established foundations to support education and creativity; and women leading in the African creative sector.
The African Art in Venice Forum is produced by African Art Dialogues, a not-for-profit organization registered in Italy whose members serve on a pro-bono basis. AAVF was born in 2017 with the aim of bringing together in Venice a multiplicity of voices in the contemporary African art ecosystem; and facilitating a broader cultural dialogue during the Biennale’s opening week. AAVF advocates for a wider spectrum of creative practices and conversations that address individual, societal, and global issues of our time.
Fowler Talks
The Fowler is honored to be a convening place for conversations, lectures, and readings that explore the many ways art creates meaning and defines purpose for people across the globe.
Vital Matters: Applied Jain Ethics for Earth Day
Lunch & Learn: An Inka KhipuJoin Alba Menéndez Pereda, PhD candidate at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, for a program inspired by a Peruvian Inka khipu on display at the Fowler in Communications Systems in a Global Context. Khipu were used by the Inka to keep many kinds of records, but interpreting them has been challenging. Only a handful are directly linked to any translatable texts. Learn how to better understand khipu materials, structure, colors, and forms; how they communicate numerical accounts and narratives; the challenges to their decipherment; and the legacy of their use today.
Alba Menéndez Pereda is a PhD candidate at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. Her research focuses on the commemorative practices of the Inka elites and the construction of Inka history through performances across the natural and built environment. Prior to her arrival in Los Angeles, Menéndez Pereda earned her bachelor’s degree at Durham University in the UK and completed her master’s at the University of Cambridge. At UCLA, she serves on the Fowler Museum Student Council; co-organizes the Andean Working Group, which brings together scholars working on the Andes from multiple disciplinary perspectives; and shares information about the Andes with the public via social media.
Lunch & Learn: Contemporary Congolese Artists and MemoryIn a recent conversation with UCLA students about her photographic series Imaginary Trip, currently on view at the Fowler, artist Gosette Lubondo explained that Congolese people are always thinking about memory. While this may not be unique to those from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it is the case that many Congolese artists today are investigating collective and personal memories. Join us for a presentation by the exhibition co-curator Elaine Ericksen Sullivan, who will consider Lubondo’s photography alongside the work of other contemporary Congolese artists who delve into local histories.
Elaine Ericksen Sullivan is co-curator of Gosette Lubondo: Imaginary Trip and the Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow for the arts of Sub-Saharan Africa at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She received her PhD in 2020 from the interdisciplinary department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. Her research focuses on both historical and contemporary arts from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind and soul.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons: Bronzed Aussie Pie ShopThe original Bronzed Aussie Pie Shop in LA was founded in 2013 by Australian-born Samantha Bryan who wanted to bring authentic Aussie tucker to the States, give her fellow countrymen (and others within the Commonwealth) that nostalgic feeling of home, and turn Yanks into genuine Australian Pie fans. Bryan linked up with fellow female entrepreneur Andrea Davis, owner of Kitchen 1437-A Virtual Food Court, and they turned Bronzed Aussie into a Virtual Pie Shop.
Join the Fowler, Bryan, and Davis to learn how to make (and eat) Bronzed Aussie’s newest menu item, the Impossible Vegetarian Pie—a spin on their “original” meat pie with Impossible “ground beef” in a flaky puff pastry—and a side of classic Australian mushy peas. Ingredients list will be sent upon RSVP. Come with supplies prepared and ready to cook!
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons
Variety is the spice of life. Learn how LA’s favorite international restaurants cook up their most famous, easy-to-make dishes in live cooking classes led by their chefs on Zoom. When food is your love language, some secrets are too good not to share.
Lunch & Learn: Sam Cook on the New Aboriginal Art Centre ExperienceAn Aboriginal Australian arts, entertainment, and tech professional now based in the US, Sam Cook is a cross-artform practitioner, educator, arts manager, and leader in Indigenous Arts. Join the Fowler in welcoming Cook who will share her work that supports increased access to international markets for Aboriginal artists, including the recent launch of Virtual Girringun, “The new Aboriginal Art Centre experience.” This new platform enables Aboriginal artists from nine Traditional Owner Groups in the Far North of Australia to maintain their autonomy and participate in the global economy while their borders with the outside world are restricted.
Sam Cook is a retired musician, playwright, writer, visual artist, graphic designer, and head of The KMBA Creative Agency. A recipient of the UK Arts Council Fellowship in 2007 and 2011, she was the founding Aboriginal columnist for Artshub and Tracker; founder of Australia’s Blak History Month, #SOSBLAKAUSTRALIA, and Festivillian; and co-founder of Kaltja (pronounced Culture). Cook is currently a member of the First Nations Independent Arts Alliance, Artivist Entertainment, International Association of Blacks In Dance, and Australians in Music. She is also launching the United Stages Collective, the first Aboriginal Australian-led creative ensemble in the US.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind and soul.
A Global Destination for Art: Patrick Martinez and Carolina A. MirandaAs a complement to our current exhibition, ‘How Do You See This World?’: The Art of Almighty God, the Fowler invites you to join a virtual studio visit with contemporary artist Patrick Martinez who will discuss his work with Carolina A. Miranda, arts and urban design columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Martinez is celebrated for his suite of neon signs that feature provocative political messages in English and Spanish, and a multimedia approach to art-making inspired by the landscape of LA streets.
After a studio tour, Martinez and Miranda will talk about the ways in which his work simultaneously takes from and is part of Los Angeles; and how he records official and unofficial histories by engaging with specific architectural signifiers in an urban, vernacular dialogue.
Patrick Martinez (b. 1980, Pasadena, CA) earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in 2005. His work has been exhibited extensively domestically and internationally and resides in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, LACMA, The Autry Museum of the American West, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Museum of Latin American Art, among others. Martinez lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
Carolina A. Miranda is arts and urban design columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she was a long-time independent journalist contributing stories to Time magazine, ARTnews, Fast Company, Architect, Art in America, and National Public Radio. She is a regular contributor to KCRW’s “Press Play” and a winner of the 2017 Rabkin Prize in Visual Arts Journalism. Miranda served as founding co-chair of the Los Angeles Times Guild, the newspaper’s employee union.
A Global Destination for Art
Artists from all over the world flock to work in Los Angeles, drawn by the energy of ingenuity and the space for experimental expression. Join us on Zoom as we visit artists creating in our City of Angels.
Vital Matters: Traces of Humanity–The Armenian Cultural Legacy in Los AngelesThe Gladzor Gospels, one of the most iconic Armenian illuminated manuscripts, is on view in the exhibition Communication Systems in a Global Context. Penned in the 14th century at Gladzor Monastery (Siwnik Province, Armenia), it underwent numerous upheavals, mirroring the shifting fate of the Armenian Diaspora: it was captured by Tamerlane from an Armenian princess, kept hostage by him until the family rescued it, subjugated to the forced exodus of Armenians to Isfahan in the 17th century, brought to America, and donated to UCLA by Dr. Caro Minassian in 1968. Now safely preserved in UCLA Library Special Collections, this manuscript bears witness to Armenian diasporic histories and the cultural legacy of thriving Armenian communities in Los Angeles.
Museum professionals and scholars will gather for a virtual tour, exploring the Gladzor Gospels and other Armenian devotional works preserved at three institutions in Los Angeles: UCLA, the Getty Museum, and the Ararat-Eskijian Museum. The program will celebrate Armenian cultural legacies preserved in the City of Angels, with the speakers discussing how cultural and educational institutions can collaborate to honor the inspirational histories and experiences of the Armenian diaspora.
This program is presented in partnership with the Ararat-Eskijian Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum and UCLA Promise Armenian Institute.
Vital Matters: Stories of Belief is generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Maggie Mangassarian Goschin has served as Director of the Ararat-Eskijian Museum for the past 24 years. In this role, she has turned the museum into a world-class cultural and educational center that houses authentic Armenian heirlooms. She takes pride in the museum’s recent expansion, which includes three libraries, a rare archival room, and a periodical room for students, researchers, and scholars in the field of Armenian Studies and the Caucuses. Goschin continues to advance the museum’s collection, encourage families to actively participate in the preservation of Armenian history, and foster their appreciation of family heirlooms.
Amy Landau is Director of Education and Interpretation at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, where she oversees programs, educational initiatives, gallery interpretation, and co-leads the Fowler initiative “Engaging Lived Religion in the 21st Century Museum.” Landau is also Director of “Art, Religion and Cities” at Morgan State University, which she co-founded in 2018. Landau previously served as Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Islamic and South & Southeast Asian Art at the Walters Art Museum (2009-18). In 2017, she was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. Landau lectures and publishes on representations of religion in museums, early modern cultural exchange, and the Armenian community of New Julfa.
Elizabeth Morrison is Senior Curator of Manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She received her PhD in the History of Art from Cornell University and began work at the Getty in 1996. During her 25 years there, she has curated numerous exhibitions, including Imagining the Past in France, 1250-1500 in 2010 and Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World in 2019. She has published on both Flemish and French illumination and has served on the boards of the International Center of Medieval Art and the Medieval Academy of America. She is currently the Vice President (Governance and Nominating) of the Association of Art Museum Curators.
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She researches the visual cultures of the Middle East. Her book The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice (Stanford University Press, 2019) is the only one to win awards from both the Society for Armenian Studies and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Trust, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright-Hays, among others. Watenpaugh is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.
Vital Matters: Stories of Belief
Vital Matters programs explore objects that arouse devotion, awe, or serenity; mediate relationships between human and spiritual realms; and are of vital importance to the cultural heritage of individuals and communities. This series accompanies the new digital educational initiative Vital Matters: Stories of Belief—a platform for sharing different perspectives on material expressions of devotion at the Fowler Museum.
Lunch & Learn: A Japanese Gagaku Music ManuscriptJapan is a culture of strong contrasts. Rapid advances in technology are balanced with the careful preservation of traditions in music, dance, theater, painting, sculpture, woodwork, ceramics, and other arts. One of the most remarkable of these traditions is that of Gagaku (雅楽), the music of the Japanese Imperial Court. Unlike Western notation, Gagaku is a tablature system, in which each of the instruments has a separate notation, with each symbol representing a finger position on the instrument.
Join Robert Garfias, a distinguished ethnomusicologist, to learn more about a particular Gagaku manuscript now on display at the Fowler in Communications Systems in a Global Context. He will discuss the notation for the Sho, a bamboo mouth organ with 17 pipes.
Robert Garfias studied at San Francisco State University, then completed his graduate work at UCLA in Ethnomusicology. He went on to teach at and direct the graduate program in Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington. Garfias served as Dean at UC Irvine for six years, as well as professor of Anthropology. He was a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts and a member of the Council of the Smithsonian Institution. In May 2005, in recognition of his life’s work, he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the Emperor of Japan—one of the highest honors bestowed on a non-Japanese citizen.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind and soul.
Share the Mic: Predatory Visual Marketing by Big TobaccoMany artworks by Ghanaian painter Almighty God feature textual variations on a campaign against smoking. “I will stop smoking for it kills gradually” is frequently included alongside images of animals, celebrities, plants, and even personified cigarettes preaching a mantra of conversion to everyone passing by the Almighty God Art Works studio. Almighty God was aware of the major 1991 legal case in the United States that documented and accused R.J. Reynolds (Camel’s parent company) of targeting and attracting youth to the cigarette brand by marketing Joe Camel as hip and cool.
Join us for a panel discussion inspired by Almighty God’s anti-smoking artworks currently on view in our galleries. Experts in marketing, public health, and community organizing through artivism will discuss the predatory visual marketing strategies employed by Big Tobacco in the US and Africa; the resulting impact on and resistance by targeted Black communities; and the capacity of street art to reflect and reinforce the values of a community.
Tracy Brown is an Independent Curator, Artivist (Artist Activist), Capacity Building Consultant, and community worker. Born in San Francisco, CA, she received her MA in Arts Politics (Art and Public Policy) from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Brown curated Same Game Different Smokers, an exploration of the aggressively pernicious relationship between the tobacco industry and the Black Community for the past 400+ years. She was formerly Project Manager & Resident Artivist for the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council (AATCLC).
Dr. Arti Singh is a public health physician and faculty in Epidemiology and Global Health at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. She is also a research fellow for the Global Challenges Research Fund’s Tobacco Control Capacity Program for Ghana. Her research interests include non-communicable diseases, with a main focus on tobacco control in Ghana. She has researched secondhand smoke exposure, illicit tobacco trade, cigarette warning labels, and tobacco industry interference in Ghana.
Share the Mic
We at the Fowler believe in the civic duty of museums to give forum to multiple points of view. This series features thought leaders—artists, activists, and allies—who are guiding us along the arc of justice.
Curator’s Choice: Redirecting Perspectives on Colonial Archives and CollectionsWhat are the approaches to researching collections and archives gathered in the early 20th century? Henry S. Wellcome’s enormous holdings included material from around the world, mostly obtained by his staff, researchers, collaborators, friends, and acquaintances. The material was first consolidated in Wellcome’s possession, then dispersed to museums across the globe after his death. At both stages, much of the history of this material was obscured, if not lost. This program offers a glimpse at the work currently being conducted at the Fowler Museum and the Wellcome Collection to recover and highlight information about these objects, the artists who created them, circumstances of their acquisition, financial transactions surrounding them, and the roles of different individuals involved.
Join curators from the Fowler and the Wellcome Collection in London for brief presentations and a moderated discussion. The program will address some of the complexities of tracing the provenance of objects from this collection and highlight the importance of collaboration in performing such work.
Alexandra Eveleigh is Collections Information Manager at Wellcome Collection in London, where she leads a multidisciplinary team of archivists, librarians, and museum professionals responsible for documenting and maximizing access to Wellcome’s rich holdings of archives, manuscripts, books, and paintings. Her role also complements her research interest in digitally-enabled participatory practices in cultural heritage contexts. In March 2020, Eveleigh’s team launched Transcribe Wellcome, opening up the Wellcome archive to the public in order to facilitate provenance research and a virtual reunification of the “Wellcome diaspora”—former Wellcome objects dispersed to museums and libraries across the world.
Carlee S. Forbes is the Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Fowler, where she researches African objects donated by the Wellcome Trust to the museum in 1965. Forbes received her PhD in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has worked with the Ackland Art Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art. Her research focuses on art produced during the colonial period in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, museum and collecting histories, and issues of provenance.
Ruth Horry is Collections Curator in the Exhibitions team at Wellcome Collection, London, where she works on temporary exhibitions and permanent galleries. Her background is in history, medical and science museums, and collections research. Previously she was part of the collections staff at the Whipple History of Science Museum in Cambridge, and a post-doctoral researcher mapping dispersed Iraqi archaeological collections in UK museums. Horry studied Henry Wellcome’s Historical Medical Museum for her PhD. More recently she has been researching Wellcome’s junior museum staff and the networks of people involved in his collecting.
Erica P. Jones is Curator of African Arts at the Fowler Museum. She received her PhD in Art History from UCLA. Since joining the Fowler in 2015, Jones has organized several exhibitions. In 2018, she curated a solo exhibition of Botswana-born painter Meleko Mokgosi, Bread, Butter, and Power, and authored the accompanying publication. Her 2019 exhibition, On Display in the Walled City: Nigeria at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–1925, directly relates to the research conducted by the Fowler’s Mellon team.
Helen Mears is Inclusive Collections Officer for Wellcome Collection, London. Her former roles include Keeper of World Art for Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove; and African Diaspora Research Fellow for the V&A Museum, London. She is interested in the intersections between colonial-era collections and contemporary diaspora communities.
Lunch & Learn: The First Internet MessageFew cultural revolutions can trace their origins as precisely as the one that took place in 3420 Boelter Hall at UCLA on October 29, 1969, the day the internet came into existence. Professor Leonard Kleinrock developed the mathematical theory of packet networks, the technology that underpins the internet. The first node of the ARPANET was established at Kleinrock’s UCLA lab, and a new era of connectivity was born.
The Interface Message Processor Log entry for the first message sent over the ARPANET is currently on view in Communications Systems in a Global Context. Join the Fowler in welcoming Kleinrock, who will share the events surrounding that seminal moment at Boelter Hall, which has since been redesigned by Sebastian Clough, Fowler’s director of exhibitions, as the Kleinrock Internet History Center.
Leonard Kleinrock is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. He is considered a father of the Internet, having developed its foundational technology as an MIT graduate student in 1962. Kleinrock has served as Professor of Computer Science at UCLA since 1963 and as department Chair from 1991–1995. He has received eight honorary degrees, published over 250 papers, authored six books, and has supervised the research of 50 PhD students. In 2007, Kleinrock received the National Medal of Science, the highest honor for achievement in science bestowed by the President of the United States.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind and soul.
Image credit: Charley S. Kline (b. 1949, USA) and Leonard Kleinrock (b. 1934, New York, USA), Interface Message Processor Log entry for the first message sent over ARPANET, 1969; NCR carbon paper, staple bound on short top edge; UCLA Library Special Collections, Leonard Kleinrock Papers
DISRUPT the Fowler: Kayla TangeKayla Tange is an emerging Korean-American performance artist and sculptor whose works address such topics as sex work industry and adoption. Drawing on her childhood as an adoptee in a Japanese American household, and her experiences as an exotic dancer in Los Angeles, Tange transforms stories of shame into a symbolic and valuable medium, using collaboration, sexuality, and dark comedy to explore love, longing, catharsis, and impermanence. Join the Fowler and DISRUPT to welcome Tange and learn more about her work, including her drive to use it as a medium to break down cultural stereotypes and disrupt societal taboos.
Kayla Tange is a Los Angeles-based artist born in South Korea and adopted by a Japanese American family. Her work has been performed or exhibited at Human Resources, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Torrance Art Museum, Performance Studies International, Melbourne, OUTFEST, and Asian Pacific Film Festival.
DISRUPT the Fowler
DISRUPT is a student-run UCLA organization that aims to establish inclusive spaces and create opportunities for students of all backgrounds to engage in creative collaborations. The Fowler is honored to partner with DISRUPT to offer programs that break down barriers in the art world and promote innovative ideation through inclusivity, diversity, equity, and accessibility.
Vital Matters: Stories of Belief–Muslim Prayer Boards of West AfricaMuslim prayer boards combine divine arts with practical purposes. Made of wood and inscribed with a reed pen, they help young Muslims commit to memory Words of God. When the boards are washed for reuse, the water bears blessings that—if imbibed or applied to afflicted bodies—can console, heal, and bring hope. The Fowler is pleased to welcome Amira Hassnaoui, who will share her ongoing doctoral research involving people of West African descent in southern Tunisia; and Allen F. Roberts, who will discuss religious practices he and Polly Nooter Roberts (d. 2018) studied for their 2003 Fowler Museum exhibition, A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal.
Vital Matters: Stories of Belief is generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Amira Hassnaoui is originally from Tunis, Tunisia. She is currently a fourth-year PhD student and a Teaching Associate in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance (WAC/D) at UCLA. She holds an executive position as the Director of Publications at the UCLA Graduate Student Association (GSA) and is editor at Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies; one of the oldest African Studies Journals in North America. She received a prior MA in English Literature and Civilization from the Superior Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis in 2014, and a BA in English Literature and Civilization from the Higher Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis in 2011.
Allen F. Roberts is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. His recent projects as a humanistic anthropologist include editing and writing for the Fowler’s exhibition book Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths (2019); and his prize-winning monograph A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo (2013). Roberts has co-edited Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint: Shirdi Sai Baba’s Presence (2022) dedicated to the memory of Polly Nooter Roberts (d. 2018), Professor of World Arts and Cultures, Consulting Curator of African Art at LACMA, and Deputy Director of the Fowler Museum (1999-2009).
Vital Matters: Stories of Belief
Vital Matters programs explore objects that arouse devotion, awe, or serenity; mediate relationships between human and spiritual realms; and are of vital importance to the cultural heritage of individuals and communities. This series accompanies the new digital initiative Vital Matters: Stories of Belief–a platform for sharing different perspectives on devotional works at the Fowler Museum.
Lunch & Learn: Carrie Burckle on Aboriginal Screen-Printed Textiles from Australia’s Top EndJoin the Fowler and Carrie Burckle—artist, educator, and co-founder of Textile Arts / Los Angeles—to learn about the methodologies, inspiration, and meaning behind the imagery in select prints from Aboriginal Screen-Printed Textiles from Australia’s Top End. An instructor in pattern design and screen-printing, Burckle will highlight aspects of design ideation, use of dyes and pigments, and pattern repeats in the production of screen-printed yardage.
Carrie Burckle is a visual artist and educator living in Los Angeles. She is co-founder of Textile Arts / Los Angeles and a member of California Fibers. She received her BFA in Textile Design and MFA in Fibers from California State University, Long Beach, where she has been teaching in the Fiber Program since 2002. Burckle has exhibited at Craft in America Center, Craft Contemporary (originally Craft and Folk Art Museum), Visions Art Museum, Mingei Museum, Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, Downey Museum of Art, Collins Gallery, and University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, among other venues.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind and soul during your lunch break.
Lunch & Learn: The Life and Times of the Gladzor GospelsWhat do an Armenian Baroness, a Mongol Khan, and a book of Gospels have in common? You are invited to join Gassia Armenian on a journey tracing the history of a masterpiece of illumination: the Gladzor Gospels. Armenian will begin at the Monastery of Gladzor in the Syunik Region of Armenia and end at UCLA Library Special Collections. Spanning more than 800 years, this journey will make stops at the Monastery of Geghart in Kotayk Region, at New Julfa in Isfahan, Iran, and at other destinations.
Gassia Armenian is the curatorial and research associate at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, where she conducts collections research and facilitates curatorial and scholarly endeavors. She also liaises with domestic and international institutions, private collectors and lenders to the Fowler, and manages various aspects of planning and organizing the museum’s exhibitions and publications. Over the past 20 years, Armenian has helped to mount many exhibitions at the Fowler. Prior to that, she served as a consultant/project coordinator for the U.S. Agency for International Development for Junior Achievement of Armenia, developing and implementing civics education training programs and teaching methodologies.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind and soul during your lunch break.
Opening Program: Aboriginal Screen-Printed Textiles from Australia’s Top EndJoin us online for an opening program with Joanna Barrkman, Senior Curator of Southeast Asian and Pacific Arts. Special greetings from the art centers will be followed by a virtual walkthrough of the exhibition with Barrkman, including a sneak peek at an exhibition video that traces the screen-printing process and the ways in which artists translate ancient painting techniques into new media.
Aboriginal Screen-Printed Textiles from Australia’s Top End presents a stunning exhibition of over 70 distinctive, screen-printed textiles made by contemporary artists at five Aboriginal-owned art centers in Northern Australia, known as the “Top End.” The presentation is organized around the individual art centers, revealing the creativity and innovation of Aboriginal artists and their sources of inspiration. The textiles pay tribute to the resilience and beauty of Aboriginal Australia, and celebrates the enduring connections between people and their lands.
Off the Press: The Good KingsJoin the Fowler in welcoming bestselling author and UCLA Egyptology professor Kara Cooney for a program about her newest publication released this month: The Good Kings (National Geographic). A provocative narrative about the “impossible attractions of masculine rule, both yesterday and today,” Cooney’s book focuses on five ancient Egyptian pharaohs: Khufu, Senwosret III, Akenhaten, Ramses II, and Taharqa. At this time, when democracies around the world are threatened or crumbling, Cooney will explain why Egypt still has much to teach us about our continued proclivity to choose leaders in the mold of “strong men,” whether we call them kings, presidents, or chairmen.
Kara Cooney is chair of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and professor of Egyptology at UCLA. A specialist in social history, gender studies, and economies in the ancient world, she received her PhD in Egyptology from Johns Hopkins University. In 2005, she co-curated Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at LACMA. Cooney’s first book, The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt (2014), presented an illuminating biography of Egypt’s least well-known female ruler. Her When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt (2018) was published by National Geographic Press.
Off the Press
Join the Fowler to hear from UCLA professors and cultural leaders from beyond the university about their recently published books, hot off the press.
Vital Matters: Stories of Belief–The Astonishing Survival of the Gladzor GospelThe Gladzor Gospels (1300-07) is an incomparable illuminated manuscript of the four Gospels and one of the gems of UCLA Library Special Collections. The opening page of The Gospel According to Mark [page 189] is currently on view at the Fowler in Communication Systems in a Global Context exhibition. Join the Fowler in welcoming S. Peter Cowe, professor of Armenian Studies, and Chela Metzger, head of Preservation & Conservation at UCLA Library, for a discussion about the context, content, and materials of this 582-page masterpiece of 14th-century Armenian art. Learn about its genesis at the illustrious center of learning in medieval Armenia; the relationship between text and image on the Gospels’ pages; the traditional Armenian binding structure; and current work underway at UCLA to rebind this world treasure.
Vital Matters: Stories of Belief is generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
S. Peter Cowe is Narekatsi Professor of Armenian Studies and director of the Center for World Languages at UCLA. His research interests include Late Antique and medieval Armenian intellectual history, Muslim-Christian dialogue, and modern Armenian nationalism. The author of five books in the field and editor of 10, he is a member of the Accademia Ambrosiana, Milan, and a doctor honoris causa of the Russian-Armenian University of Armenia.
Consuela (Chela) Metzger does not have a Latinx background but, inspired by her name, has learned Spanish and collaborated with conservation teams at libraries and archives in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and Chile. She holds a library graduate degree and a diploma from the North Bennet Street School in Hand Bookbinding. Metzger publishes on bookbinding history and is head of Preservation & Conservation for the UCLA Library, where she has been working together with colleagues on a collaborative effort to rebind the Gladzor Gospels.
Vital Matters: Stories of Belief
Vital Matters programs explore objects that arouse devotion, awe, or serenity; mediate relationships between human and spiritual realms; and are of vital importance to the cultural heritage of individuals and communities. This series accompanies the new digital initiative Vital Matters: Stories of Belief–a platform for sharing different perspectives on devotional works at the Fowler Museum.
DISRUPT the Fowler: DEFERDEFER is renowned as one of the pioneering members of the original Los Angeles graffiti scene. Though his name has become synonymous with West Coast street art, his distinct, flowing handstyle and spontaneous typographic “spiritual language” are equally grounded in fine art spaces, such as LA Louver, the Getty Research Institute, and LACMA. Join the Fowler and DISRUPT to welcome DEFER and learn more about how he built his career and what inspires his art, including Asian calligraphy, the Mexican American community of Los Angeles, and the use of stream-of-consciousness to weave deeper social and political commentaries into his work.
Alex “DEFER” Kizu has been an integral part of the early graffiti art movement in Los Angeles, going back to the mid-1980’s, and is known for expertly rendering beautifully complex letter forms. His works on canvas have been displayed at various museums and galleries, including the LA Louver, the Getty Research Institute, LACMA, Pasadena Museum of California Art, and OTIS College of Design’s Ben Maltz Gallery. His work has been featured in numerous publications, including Art In America, The Los Angeles Times, and Forbes.
DISRUPT the Fowler
DISRUPT is a student-run UCLA organization that aims to establish inclusive spaces and create opportunities for students of all backgrounds to engage in creative collaborations. The Fowler is honored to partner with DISRUPT to offer programs that break down barriers in the art world and promote innovative ideation through inclusivity, diversity, equity, and accessibility.
Lunch & Learn: Sandrine Colard on Photo CameroonThe Fowler is pleased to welcome Sandrine Colard, scholar of modern and contemporary African art history and independent curator, for a program inspired by the images taken by Jacques Toussele, Joseph Chila, and Samuel Finlak, and featured in Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture 1970-1990s. Colard will draw on her extensive research in African photography to discuss the advent of the medium on the continent, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Through a comparative approach to early and modern African photography practices, she will highlight, among other things, the dual practice of photographers from that time who, like the photographers in our exhibition, produced not only state documents but more personal, intimate portraits, shaping the sitters’ national as well as private identities.
Sandrine Colard is assistant professor of art history at Rutgers University-Newark. A researcher, independent curator, and historian of modern and contemporary African arts and photography, she divides her time between New York City and Brussels, Belgium. Having received her PhD from Columbia University in 2016, she has lectured internationally and is the author of multiple publications. Colard was the curator of the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale, Future Genealogies: Tales from the Equatorial Line (Lubumbashi, DRC, 2019). Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships, including those from Musée du quai Branly and the Ford Foundation. She is a 2021-22 Getty/ACLS fellow, working on her book about the history of photography in the colonial Congo.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind and soul during your lunch break.
Curator’s Choice: Feather Embellishments in Mexican HuipilesThe huipil—a garment worn by women in Mexico from the time before the arrival of the Europeans until the present day—is a landmark in Mesoamerican attire. Generally formed of handwoven cloth panels that are folded and stitched into a rectangular garment, they feature a rich array of materials, colors, techniques, and designs, and constitute one of the essential and dynamic forms of cultural identity.
Join the Fowler and Elena Phipps, scholar of textile traditions of the Americas, in welcoming Hector Meneses Lozano, director of the Museo Textil de Oaxaca. The program will briefly trace the history of the huipil and highlight some of its special features. Meneses Lozano will share some examples from the extensive collection of the Museo Textil de Oaxaca, alongside a few special pieces from the Fowler Museum. The discussion will then focus on a unique group of huipiles woven with spun downy bird feathers. We invite you to glimpse the subtle beauty of these sophisticated creations from the 16th to the 21st century.
Hector M. Meneses Lozano has served as director of the Museo Textil de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico, since 2012. Previously, he was, for four years, the museum’s head of Conservation and Collections Management. He trained at the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía “Manuel del Castillo Negrete” in Mexico City. Meneses Lozano has been a Board Member of the North American Textile Conservation Conference since 2008 and co-organizer of the Encuentro de Textiles Mesoamericanos, hosted in Oaxaca, since 2014.
Elena Phipps holds a PhD in pre-Columbian Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University (1989) and teaches textile history, techniques, and cultures in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. During her time as senior textile conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1977-2010), she co-curated two major exhibitions: the award-winning Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork 1430-1830 (2004) and The Interwoven Globe: Worldwide Textile Trade (2013). Among her publications are Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color (MMA, 2010), The Peruvian Four-Selvaged Cloth (Fowler Museum, 2013), and “Investigation of a Colonial Latin American Textile” (TSA Proceedings, 2007), which details her research on a special Mexican textile composed of spun feathers and rabbit hair.
Curator’s Choice
Join curators for lively conversations about their passions and projects that inspire audiences to engage with different worldviews and find joy in the multiplicity of human experiences.
Image credit: María Santiago González Pérez (Zinacantan, Chiapas, México), Huipil, 2016. Photo courtesy of Museo Textil de Oaxaca.
Photo Cameroon: The Archives
Photo Cameroon: Jacques Toussele Family Photos
Photo Cameroon: Introduction to Jacques Toussele, Joseph Chila and Samuel Finlak in Cameroon
Photo Cameroon: Jacques Toussele as Chameleon and Hitchcock
Photo Cameroon: Photographers’ Studio
Fowler Talks: Dress and Power with Kennedi Carter and Taylor Renee AldridgeAs a complement to our current exhibition, Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture 1970-1990s, the Fowler is proud to welcome photographer Kennedi Carter and curator Taylor Renee Aldridge. The program will explore Carter’s recent series, Flexing/New Realm, which features portraits of friends in historically-inspired costumes and poses. Carter’s work will serve as a catalyst for a conversation about photography as a device for Black people to self-image; ways in which Black Americans use their artworks to communicate ideas of Blackness and its relationship to wealth, power, respect, and belonging; and the practice of Black artists who subvert power dynamics of traditional art historical portraits by placing Black sitters in traditionally white contexts.
This program is co-presented with California African American Museum.
Taylor Renee Aldridge is the visual arts curator and program manager at the California African American Museum (CAAM). Prior to this position, she worked as a writer and independent curator in Detroit, Michigan. In 2015, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism focused on Black perspectives. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Art21, ARTNews, Frieze, and Harper’s Bazaar. Aldridge earned her MLA from Harvard University with a concentration in Museum Studies and BA from Howard University with a concentration in Art History.
Kennedi Carter is a native of Durham, North Carolina. She is a fine art and editorial photographer with a primary focus on Black subjects. Her work highlights the aesthetic and sociopolitical aspects of Blackness as well as the overlooked beauties of the Black experience. In 2020, Carter became the youngest photographer to shoot the cover of British Vogue (for which she photographed Beyoncé). Also in 2020, her first solo exhibit was hosted by the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh. Features about Carter’s work and illustrious career have been presented by W Magazine, BBC Reel, Good Morning America, and Access Hollywood.
Fowler Talks
The Fowler is honored to be a convening place for conversations and lectures that explore the many ways art creates meaning and defines purpose for people across the globe.
Lunch & Learn: Stuffed Birds in the Dickey CollectionThe UCLA Dickey Bird and Mammal Collection houses more than 70,000 skins and skeletons of birds and mammals from the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Central America, and Pacific Islands. Each specimen represents a snapshot of an ecosystem in a particular place and time, recording significant environmental changes, such as the origin and spread of diseases or harmful substances, and the loss of genetic diversity in declining species. Join the Fowler in welcoming Blaire Van Valkenburgh, professor and curator, who will explain the Dickey Collection’s history and provide a virtual tour of some of its highlights. Learn about why such natural history collections exist, and how they are important as libraries of biodiversity.
Distinguished Research Professor Blaire Van Valkenburgh holds the Donald R. Dickey Chair in Vertebrate Biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. Her more than 112 publications explore the biology and paleontology of carnivorous mammals, such as hyenas, wolves, and lions. She is an Honorary Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Paleontological Society, and served as President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2008-10. Van Valkenburgh has appeared in various television documentaries on prehistoric predators ranging from terror birds to sabertooth cats, and is a leading expert on the evolutionary biology of large carnivores, past and present.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind and soul during your lunch break.
Share the Mic: FrontearteThe “Borders and Boundaries” section of The Map and the Territory exhibition explores how borders affect relationships among individuals, communities, and places. At certain international boundaries, such as the U.S.-Mexico border, the establishment of physical divide only further motivates those on either side to unify. The Fowler is proud to present a special program celebrating artists whose transcendent projects at the U.S.-Mexico border reflect the dynamic, complex, and interdependent relationship between the U.S. and Mexico; and embrace the possibilities of what that relationship can become.
Join us for a conversation—moderated by professor and artist David Taylor—with renowned jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill, interdisciplinary Southwest Native American artist collective Postcommodity, and multidisciplinary Mexican artist Marcos Ramírez ERRE. They will invite us to think critically and consider the indigenous framing of issues surrounding border discourses, the impact and consequences of the militarization of ancestral homelands, and the power of art to facilitate continued dialogues about deeply problematic colonial frameworks that reinforce hegemonic power.
Arturo O’Farrill, pianist, composer, and educator, was born in Mexico and raised in New York City. In 2007, he founded the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the performance, education, and preservation of Afro Latin music. O’Farrill’s “Afro-Latin Jazz Suite” from CUBA: The Conversation Continues (Motéma) received the 2016 Best Instrumental Composition Grammy award and the 2016 Best Latin Jazz Recording Latin Grammy. His most recent album, Four Questions, won a 2021 Grammy award. His newest project streaming on HBO Max, “Fandango at the Wall,” was inspired by a festival in which he participated at the U.S.-Mexico border. O’Farrill is Professor of Global Jazz Studies and Assistant Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UCLA.
Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist. Their art offers a shared Indigenous lens on the assaultive manifestations of the global market, its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial, and multiethnic colonizing forces defining the 21st century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence. The collective has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at: 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY; documenta14, Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany; Desert X, Coachella Valley, CA; and The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Their historic land art installation, Repellent Fence, appeared at the U.S.-Mexico border near Douglas, AZ and Agua Prieta, SON.
Marcos Ramírez ERRE, born in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, received his law degree from the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California. In 1983, he immigrated to the United States and in 1989, became active in the visual arts. He has participated in residencies, lectures, individual and group exhibitions in more than 17 countries. He has been invited to show in major exhibitions: InSITE, Havana Biennial, Whitney Biennial, the second Moscow Biennial; and the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, among others. In 2007, ERRE received a United States Artists fellowship, and since 2009, he has been a fellow member of Mexico’s National System of Art Creators.
David Taylor’s artwork, which examines place, territory, history, and politics, has been exhibited nationally and internationally. His long-term projects reveal the changing circumstances of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. His most recent efforts posit border space as a network of contingent circumstances that operate proximate to and distant from national boundaries. Taylor’s work can be found in numerous collections, including the Library of Congress, and has been recently featured in The Guardian and Places Journal. He teaches at the University of Arizona School of Art.
Share the Mic
The Fowler believes in the civic duty of museums to give forum to multiple points of view. This series features thought leaders—artists, activists, and allies—who are guiding us along the arc of justice.
Curator’s Choice: Jason De León and the Undocumented Migration ProjectJason De León is an anthropologist whose research interests include theories of violence and Latin American migration. He is the executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a long-term study of clandestine border crossing intended to understand the phenomenon in a variety of geographic contexts, particularly those of Northern Mexican border towns and the southern Mexico/Guatemala border.
Join the Fowler’s Chief Curator Matthew H. Robb and Jason De León for a discussion inspired by photographs of the Mexican border in 1920 from the LA Times archive— currently displayed in The Map and the Territory exhibition. Learn about De León’s research and recent travels as part of Hostile Terrain 94, an art project that brings together ca. 3,200 handwritten toe tags representing migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between mid-1990s and 2019.
Jason De León is professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. He is executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a research-arts collective that seeks to raise awareness of the experiences of clandestine migrants; and president of the Board of Directors for the Colibri Center for Human Rights, a non-profit that seeks to identify and repatriate the remains of people who have died while migrating through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. De León is the author of the award-winning book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015) and a 2017 MacArthur Fellow.
Matthew H. Robb has served as chief curator of the Fowler Museum since 2016. He oversees the museum’s diverse exhibitions and collections devoted to the ancient, traditional, and contemporary cultures of Africa, Native and Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. Prior to joining the staff of the Fowler, he was the first curator of the Arts of the Americas at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Robb holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton University; a Master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin; and a PhD from Yale University.
Curator’s Choice
Join curators for lively conversations about their passions and projects that inspire audiences to engage with different worldviews and find joy in the multiplicity of human experiences.
Vital Matters: Stories of Belief–Wixárika (Huichol) Yarn PaintingTaking the Fowler’s exquisite yarn painting by José Benítez Sánchez, Untitled (2005), as a point of departure, educator and curator Diana Negrín will provide context for its symbolism as it relates to Wixárika culture, history, and territory. Negrín will also speak with yarn artist and daughter of Benítez, Maymi; together they will provide insight into Benítez’ practice as an artist and shaman, pointing to his background as a Wixárika migrant in Tepic; and his relationship to Juan Negrín, who promoted and collected Benítez’ art and became his companion on numerous pilgrimages. Thanks to these biographical details, we can better understand the stories behind this and other Benítez paintings, which manifest cartographies of indigenous ancestral territories currently under multiple threats.
Vital Matters: Stories of Belief is generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Diana Negrín is a geographer, writer, educator, and curator who focuses on land and social movements in the Wixárika territories of Mexico, and of Abya Yala more generally. Her scholarship engages human and cultural geography, critical race theory, cultural studies, political ecology, and urban studies. She is the author of Racial Alterity, Wixárika Youth Activism and the Right to the Mexican City (University of Arizona Press, 2019). Between 2008 and 2010, Negrín co-curated a series of exhibits at Pueblo Nuevo, a community art space in Berkeley, California. More recently, she has worked with her family’s unique Wixárika art collection, most notably through the Grandes Maestros del Arte Wixárika: Acervo Negrín exhibit at the Museo Cabañas in Guadalajara (2019-20).
Maymi Benítez is a contemporary Wixárika artist based in Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico, and daughter of the late artist José Benítez Sánchez. She has built upon her father’s innovative yarn painting techniques, establishing herself as one of the preeminent contemporary Wixarika artists.
Vital Matters: Stories of Belief
Vital Matters programs explore objects that arouse devotion, awe, or serenity; mediate relationships between human and spiritual realms; and are of vital importance to the cultural heritage of individuals and communities. This series accompanies the new digital initiative Vital Matters: Stories of Belief–a platform for sharing different perspectives on devotional works at the Fowler Museum.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons: African ChopThe Fowler is pleased to partner with African Chop Food Truck and offer a foray into the taste of Cameroon. The first African food truck in Los Angeles, African Chop is headed by Cameroonian founder and Executive Chef Opportune Akendeu and co-founder Hector Tantoh. Their delicious West African cuisine offers a fresh take on classic dishes they ate growing up, with a flavor profile inspired by fond memories of their home.
Join the Fowler, Opportune, and Hector for a special chance to learn how to cook a regional specialty: ndolé, a dish consisting of stewed nuts, ndoleh (bitter leaves indigenous to West Africa), and fish or beef, with optional add-ins like prawns and rice, and a side of boiled plantains. Ingredient list will be sent upon RSVP. Come with supplies prepared and ready to cook.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons
Variety is the spice of life. Learn how LA’s favorite international restaurants cook up their most famous, easy-to-make dishes in live cooking classes led by their chefs on Zoom. When food is your love language, some secrets are too good not to share.
African Chop – Ndolé with boiled plantains
Equipment Needed:
Blender
Chef knife
Utility knife
Stove top
Frying pan
(2) Medium Size Pot
Standard Strainer
Kitchen towel
Apron
Ndolé Ingredients (serves 6-8)
*** Please remember to wash produce before cooking.
1lb fresh frozen (not dried) bitter leaves (purchase at markets listed below or online. If you cannot find bitter leaves, you can substitute fresh, finely-chopped spinach or collard greens)
3-4 Maggi cubes (2 Tablespoons bouillon)
1 large red onion
6-7 cloves garlic
1-3 habanero
1/2 - 1 Inch Ginger
1lb wild shrimp (Peeled & Deveined)
Salt (Himalayan preferred)
2 1/2 cups peanut (raw, unsalted, skinless)
3/4 Cup Crayfish (ground)
1lb Beef or Goat meat (Chop into little chunks and boiled, see below)
1/2 Pound Smoked dry fish (ie: mackerel or catfish)
2-3 cups vegetable oil
3 Pound spinach (Frozen chopped spinach)
4-6 Plantains (Preferred Yellow not ripe)
P.S Can be eaten with boiled yams or basmati rice too
*****Prep in advance***** (30 minutes)
Boil your Beef or Goat or mixed meat in a pot with enough water to cover the meat by 2inch, a little salt and half of the red onions chopped until meat is tender to your liking. You should have at least 2-3 cups of stock reserved on the fridge after cooking.
Boil skinless peanut for 10-12min, drain, let cool, and put in fridge.
Defrost your spinach: rinse with warm water, squeeze it dry and put in fridge.
Defrost your frozen Bitter leaves, boil for 5-7min, rinse with warm to cool water a few times, squeeze it dry and put it the fridge.
Chef-Recommended Markets
African Obichi Market
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Los Angeles CA 90016
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P & J
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Lunch & Learn: Southeast Asian Music EnsemblesSoutheast Asian music ensembles have been prominent in UCLA’s Ethnomusicology program since its beginnings in the 1950s. Central to the program was the novel idea of bi-musicality: that researchers of foreign music ought to learn to perform in the traditions they study. Join us for a presentation by Supeena Insee Adler and PhD candidate Otto Stuparitz on ensembles from Bali, Java, Philippines, and Thailand—among the first Asian ensembles established at UCLA. Learn about the history of these instruments, including the spectacular, ornately decorated Mon gong circle exhibited at the Fowler now; and discover how they continue to enrich the lives of students, faculty, and community members.
Otto Stuparitz is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He has received numerous fieldwork and archival research grants in Indonesia and the Netherlands, as well as a Student of the Month award from the Society of Ethnomusicology. For 15 years, he has studied traditional and popular music of Indonesia; he also helped revive UCLA’s Javanese gamelan ensemble. Stuparitz is currently completing a dissertation on the role of Indonesian popular music sound archives in the historiography of jazz in Indonesia. In May 2021, he released a recording with Sundanese jazz and traditional musicians entitled, Bluesukan.
Supeena Insee Adler is an adjunct assistant professor, World Musical Instrument Collection curator, and director of the Music of Thailand Ensemble at UCLA. She received her BFA in Thai classical music from Mahasarakham University, Thailand; and her MA in Southeast Asian Studies and PhD in music (ethnomusicology) from UC Riverside. Adler restored the Thai instrument collection and re-established the Music of Thailand Ensemble at UCLA in 2015. Her main areas of interest include: Thai royal court music; music and community; musical instruments, mediums, and healing rituals; music in Northeast Thailand and Southern Laos; Thai music performance in Southern California; and Okinawan minyo.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind and soul during your lunch break.
Lunch & Learn: Zarina’s Dividing LineA line zigzagging across a piece of paper, a contested border, a festering wound, an unbridgeable ravine: Zarina’s iconic woodcut print Dividing Line (2001) contains a lifetime of history, memory, and dispossession. Join the Fowler and Saloni Mathur, Chair of the Department of Art History at UCLA, in welcoming Aparna Kumar, who will discuss the importance of this abstracted landscape in the life and practice of Indian-born, NY-based artist Zarina (1937-2020), and to our understanding of home and belonging. Learn about Zarina’s unique attachment to paper and printmaking, her laborious woodcut carving process, her innovations in cartography, and the intimate relationship of Dividing Line to her experience of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan.
Aparna Kumar is a Lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at University College London. She received her PhD in Art History at UCLA in 2018. Her research spans modern and contemporary South Asian art, 20th-century partition history, museum studies, and postcolonial theory. Kumar’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright-Nehru Program, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. In 2021, her doctoral dissertation, “Partition and the Historiography of Art in South Asia,” was awarded the inaugural UC Berkeley South Asia Art and Architecture Dissertation Prize.
Saloni Mathur is Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History at UCLA. Her areas of interest include the visual cultures of modern South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, colonial studies and postcolonial criticism, museum studies in a global frame, and modern and contemporary South Asian art. Her most recent book, A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art (Duke University Press, 2019), is available online as part of an Open Access initiative at the following link: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22291.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind during your lunch break.
Lunch & Learn: Yves Chatap on Photo CameroonJoin the Fowler and Cameroonian art curator and critic Yves Chatap for a deeper dive into the history of photography and studio practice in Cameroon. Using a selection from 110 black & white portraits by Jacques Toussele, Joseph Chila, and Samuel Finlak presented in Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture 1970-1990s, Chatap will discuss the relationship between fútbol and masculinity, the social benefits of signaling one’s religious piety, and the meaning of textiles worn by the sitters.
Yves Chatap is a Cameroonian curator, publisher, and art critic based in Paris, France. He served as guest curator for the Treignac Project (2011) and S A V V Y Contemporary in Berlin (2013), and as Associate Curator for the 10th Rencontres de Bamako Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (2015). He was also one of the curators for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, 2019. Chatap is the 2021 guest curator for Jeu de Paume LAB. He is currently the artistic director of La clairière d’Eza Boto, conceived around the work of Cameroonian writer Mongo Beti. Chatap received the ACASA award for Curatorial Excellence in 2018 for the exhibition [Re]Generations. His writings are regularly published in magazines, exhibition catalogues, and artist monographs.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind during your lunch break.
Share the Mic: The Folklore of the FreewayThe “Borders and Boundaries” section of The Map and the Territory exhibition explores how borders affect relationships among individuals, communities, and places. Some boundaries are systemic and require decades of struggle to overcome.
UCLA professor Eric Avila’s book, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modern City, maps the creative strategies devised by urban communities in the 1960s and 1970s to document and protest the damage wrought by highways, which cut through and destroyed many communities of color. Join the Fowler and Avila to learn about this history; the impact of redlining on LA’s Boyle Heights; the work of the Latinx artists who critique and satirize highway construction as a racist and sexist enterprise; and the influence of diverse communities on urban policy.
Eric Avila, Professor of History and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA, also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Urban Planning. He is a 20th-century U.S. urban historian whose research and teaching emphasize race and ethnicity, cultural expression, and the built environment. Avila earned his BA, MA, and PhD degrees in History from UC Berkeley and is the author of three books: Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (California, 2004), The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minnesota, 2014), and American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2018).
Share the Mic
The Fowler believes in the civic duty of museums to give forum to multiple points of view. This series features thought leaders—artists, activists, and allies—who are guiding us along the arc of justice.
Lunch & Learn: A Javanese Ivory FiddlePlayed by highly respected musicians, the Javanese rebab is the only bowed string instrument in the gamelan orchestras of the Central Javanese courts (which are primarily comprised of bronze metallophones and gongs). Join the Fowler and Helen Rees, Director of the World Music Center at UCLA, in welcoming Tyler Yamin, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, who will discuss a notable rebab from the Department of Ethnomusicology’s World Instrument Collection: the first to be included in a university ensemble in the United States. Learn about the use of the rebab in traditional Javanese music and culture; and about the role of this particular instrument in establishing world music performance ensembles across the globe.
Helen Rees is a professor in the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology and director of the Department’s World Music Center. For 30 years, she has conducted ethnographic and archival research on Chinese music, publishing widely in English and Chinese, and has collaborated on numerous ethnographic CDs of music from the multi-ethnic southwest of China. With UCLA professor Aparna Sharma, she co-directed the award-winning documentary film Playing the Flute in Shanghai: The Musical Life of Dai Shuhong (Pan Records, 2021).
Tyler Yamin is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He is the recipient of the 2020 Best Article Prize from the International Council for Traditional Music. Yamin has researched traditional musical cultures of Indonesia for over a decade, as well as directing, teaching, and tuning numerous gamelan ensembles across Southern California. He is currently completing a dissertation on the role of sound among the gibbons—Southeast Asian apes famous for their complex vocalizations (his work is part of an endangered species conservation project).
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind during your lunch break.
Lunch & Learn: Cameroonian ThronesJoin Erica P. Jones, the Fowler’s Curator of African Arts, as she discusses three thrones made in the Cameroon Grassfields Kingdom of Kedjom Ketinguh. Likely carved in a palace workshop in the late 19th or early 20th century, these thrones embody the complexities of the art market during the colonial period and the ways the meaning of African arts shifted once they arrived in Europe. Learn how one royal workshop, headed by a king who was a sculptor, adapted his style to changing market forces and left an artistic legacy that can be found in museums throughout Europe and the United States.
Erica P. Jones is Curator of African Arts at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. She received her PhD in Art History at UCLA, specializing in African art. Since joining the Fowler Museum in 2015, Jones has organized multiple exhibitions, among them: Pantsula 4 LYF (2017), Meleko Mokgosi: Bread, Butter, and Power (2018), Inheritance: Recent Video Art from Africa (2019), and On Display in the Walled City: The Nigerian Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition 1924-1925 (2019). Her publishing has been focused on the arts and museums of the Grassfields; she is the author of the book accompanying the exhibition Bread, Butter, and Power.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind during your lunch break.
A Global Destination for Art: Mercedes Dorame and River GarzaThe Map and the Territory includes two site-specific installations by Tongva artists Mercedes Dorame and River Garza. Featuring objects excavated in Southern California, along with archival materials from the Fowler’s archaeological collection, the installations prompt viewers to examine the processes by which institutions like the Fowler acquire, catalog, store, and study objects from Indigenous communities. The installations give new meanings to these objects, creating new spaces of intersection and understanding.
Join the artists, the Fowler’s Chief Curator Matthew H. Robb, and Senior Curator of Archaeology Wendy Teeter for a conversation about these installations; the artists’ current projects; the systems that have brought such objects to the Fowler; and the ongoing dialogues between tribal communities and museums.
This program is presented in partnership with the UCLA American Indian Studies Center.
Mercedes Dorame is a visual artist who calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of visibility and ideas of cultural construction as an outcome of the need to tie one’s existence to the land. Dorame was recently honored by UCLA as an outstanding alumna of the past 100 years; and was part of the Hammer Museum’s 2018 Made in LA biennial. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley, among other institutions. Dorame was born in Los Angeles; received her undergraduate degree from UCLA; and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
River T. Garza is a Los Angeles-based artist of Indigenous and Mexican descent, a paddler, and a member of Ti’at Society. Garza’s work draws on Tongva and Mexican cultures, traditional Indigenous aesthetics and graffiti, as well as Southern California Indigenous maritime culture. He uses his work to critique settler capitalism, while exploring how the literal and metaphoric layers of colonialism add weight to contemporary Indigenous identity, which is a source of both pain and creativity.
A Global Destination for Art
Artists from all over the world flock to work in Los Angeles, drawn by the energy of ingenuity and the space for experimental expression. Join us on Zoom as we visit with artists exhibiting in our City of Angels.
Opening Program (online)—Photo Cameroon: Studio Portraiture, 1970s–1990sPhoto Cameroon: Studio Portraiture 1970–1990s features more than 110 black-and-white images by Jacques Toussele, Joseph Chila, and Samuel Finlak, who ran successful photo studios during Cameroon’s post-independence era. Their clients often chose specific dress, props, and poses to show their cultural, political, and religious affiliations, musical preferences, important relationships, vocations, leisure activities, and more. These portraits expand our knowledge of life and individuality in Cameroon, and offer glimpses of communities that were and continue to be diverse, vibrant, and responsive to change.
The program will include a welcome by the co-curator of the exhibition, the Fowler’s Curator of African Arts Erica P. Jones; a sneak peek at the exhibition with co-curator David Zeitlyn; and a conversation with Sam van Schaik, Head of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, which was instrumental in digitizing Toussele’s photo archive.
Opening Program (online)—The Map and the Territory: 100 Years of Collecting at UCLAThe Map and the Territory distills the vast holdings of the university’s diverse collections of rare books, works of art, musical instruments, meteorites, bird specimens, and more into a single exhibition. Organized by the Fowler together with the Hammer Museum, UCLA Library, and other campus partners, this exhibition illuminates connections between people and places, both real and imagined, and celebrates the valuable place collections hold in the history of UCLA’s pursuit of knowledge.
This program will include a welcome by Cindi Alvitre (Tongva), Director, Ti’at Society and Professor, CSULB American Indian Studies; Carole Goldberg, Chair of the Centennial Celebration Steering Committee; and Marla C. Berns, the Shirley & Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum. A conversation about the collaborative process of shaping the show will follow, featuring Heather Briston, University Archivist and Head of Curators and Collections at UCLA Library; Rebecca Fenning Marschall, Manuscripts & Archives Librarian at William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA; Juliet Hook, Meteorite Manager at UCLA Meteorite Collection; and Matthew H. Robb, the Fowler’s Chief Curator, who will moderate the discussion.
COCKTAILS AND A QUEENCasita Del Campo is a classic Mexican restaurant in Silverlake that boasts a 55+year history as one of LA’s iconic queer spaces—in large part thanks to The Cavern Club theatre downstairs, which hosts a wide array of comedy, drag, and holiday shows. The restaurant’s craft cocktails, patio oases, and famed stained glass tables depicting Mexican icons make Casita Del Campo a destination for queers and allies alike.
Join the Fowler and owners Robert and Gina Martin Del Campo to learn how to mix Casita Del Campo’s famous classic Margarita and Paloma cocktails (ingredients will be sent upon RSVP). Then, stick around for a drag comedy performance by Kay Sedia, Top National Tupperware Saleslady and star of the long-running Cavern Club hit “Chico’s Angels.” Kay Sedia will entertain us with songs, stories, and—of course—a Tupperware demonstration. ******INGREDIENTS LIST FOR
Casita del Campo’s famous Classic Margarita and Paloma cocktails
Classic Margarita
Supplies
Glass
Plate
Measuring cup with oz
Cocktail Shaker (optional)
Ingredients
Tequila of choice
Triple Sec
Fresh Lime Juice
Salt or Tahine
Ice cubes
Paloma Cocktail
Supplies
Glass
Measuring cup with oz
Ingredients
Tequila of Choice
Squirt or Sprite or lime/lemon sparkling water
Fresh grapefruit juice
Soda water
Grapefruit or Lemon for garnish
Ice cubes
GLOBAL CUISINE COOKING LESSONS: DUMPLING MONSTERIn honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, the Fowler is pleased to present a cooking lesson with Dumpling Monster, a Shanghainese-inspired restaurant marked by Los Angeles’ busy-yet-laid-back vibes. It features a straightforward menu of traditional and classic Chinese fare; locally-sourced ingredients; and an elevated, chef-driven approach.
Join head chef and owner Perry Cheung to learn how to make his famous pork and shrimp wontons, and chicken chive dumplings (boiled and pan fried), complete with dipping sauce. Then, spend time making dumplings with your friends and family over Memorial Day weekend. Ingredient list will be sent upon RSVP. Come with supplies prepared and ready to cook!
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons
Variety is the spice of life. Learn how LA’s favorite international restaurants cook up their most famous, easy-to-make dishes in live cooking classes led by their chefs on Zoom. When food is your love language, some secrets are too good not to share.
CURATOR’S CHOICE: PROVENANCE RESEARCH AND REPATRIATION TO AFRICAN COMMUNITIESRepatriation, provenance, and collaboration with community partners are among the pressing issues facing museums with collections of African objects. These conversations have entered public discourse through discussions of the objects looted from Benin City in 1897. Yet, questions of African collections extend beyond the Benin case. Each collection has its own specific histories and presents unique challenges for museum professionals.
Join curators from the Fowler, New Orleans Museum of Art, and University of Michigan Museum of Art for presentations and a panel discussion about current approaches and examples of work happening in museums today. The program will be moderated by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie.
This program is generously supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Laura De Becker is the Interim Chief Curator and the Helmut and Candis Stern Curator of African Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). A specialist in Central African art, she joined UMMA after a fellowship at Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. De Becker has been working for many years with a team to reinstall UMMA’s permanent African collection, which will double the footprint of the African gallery and has prompted a separate project grappling with issues of restitution entitled, Wish You Were Here.
Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba is the Francois Billion Richardson curator of African art at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He received his doctorate in Art History from the University of Florida, Gainesville, and specializes in the visual cultures of shrines, having contributed articles and book chapters on the topic to various publications. He also writes on the museum and the politics of acquisition.
Carlee S. Forbes is the Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Fowler Museum, where she researches the African objects donated by the Wellcome Trust in 1965. Forbes received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has worked with the Ackland Art Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art. Her research focuses on art produced during the colonial period in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, museum and collecting histories, and issues of provenance.
Erica P. Jones is Curator of African Arts at the Fowler Museum. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from UCLA. Since joining the Fowler Museum in 2015, Jones has organized several exhibitions. In 2018, she curated a solo exhibition of Botswana-born painter Meleko Mokgosi, Bread, Butter, and Power, and authored the accompanying publication. Her 2019 exhibition, On Display in the Walled City: Nigeria at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–1925, directly relates to the research conducted by the Fowler’s Mellon team.
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie is Professor of African and African Diaspora Arts in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on modern and contemporary African art, cultural informatics, and the arts and cultural patrimony of Africa and the African diaspora in the age of globalization. He is the author of Ben Enwonwu: The Making of An African Modernist (2008), Making History: African Collectors and the Canon of African Art (2011), and founder-editor of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture.
Curator’s Choice
Join curators for lively conversations about their passions and projects that inspire audiences to engage with different worldviews and find joy in the diversity of human experiences.
ENGAGING LIVED RELIGION: MUSLIM COMMUNITIES IN LAJoin the Fowler for a moderated panel discussion featuring three local community leaders: Marta Khadija Felicitas Galedary, Edina Lekovic, and Imam Jihad Saafir. This panel will reveal the histories of Black and Latino Muslims in Los Angeles, and their interactions with Muslims of other backgrounds in the city. It will also highlight the leadership of Muslim women within these groups. The testimonies of the panelists will shed light on intersections of Islamic belief, race, and gender in Southern California; and show how lived experiences of Muslims map onto the city of Los Angeles. The program will begin with a brief history of Islamic communities in LA by Asma Sayeed. The panel will be moderated by Harold D. Morales.
This program is co-presented by UCLA’s Islamic Studies Program, in partnership with the Center for the Study of Religion and the City at Morgan State University.
Marta Khadija Felicitas Galedary was born in Mexico, Guerrero State; she emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1983 and became a U.S. Citizen in 1988. Marta Khadija is the founder of “La Asociación Latino Musulmana de América” (LALMA), based in Los Angeles. She was a U.S. representative, sponsored by the State Department, at the First Latin American Muslims Conference in Spain (2003). In 2014, she established a partnership with LA Voice, leading to a new approach to outreach in non-Muslim communities through civic engagement. Currently, she coordinates Latino Muslims activities with diverse multi-ethnic, non-Muslim communities.
Edina Lekovic is the Executive Director of the Robert Ellis Simon Foundation, which supports innovative mental health projects addressing the needs of vulnerable populations in L.A. County. As a leading voice on American Muslims and an inter-community builder among diverse faith traditions, she has been featured on CNN, Buzzfeed, NPR, and many other media outlets. She is a co-founder and board member of NewGround: A Muslim-Jewish Partnership for Change, and a lay leader at the Islamic Center of Southern California. She also hosts the podcast, Meeting the Moment, which explores how people find opportunities within life’s big challenges; it was named one of the best new podcasts of 2018.
Dr. Harold D. Morales is Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and the City (CSRC) at Morgan State University. His research is inspired by his roots in Central American religiosity and focuses on the intersections between race and religion, and between lived and mediated experience. He uses these critical lenses to engage Latinx religions in general and Latino Muslim groups in particular. Morales is currently focusing on developing public scholarship initiatives through his research on mural art and social justice issues in the city of Baltimore, and through the CSRC, which is generously supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.
Imam Jihad Saafir has a bachelor’s degree in Arabic studies, a master’s in Islamic leadership, and a Ph.D. in practical theology from the Claremont School of Theology. He is the founder of Islah LA, a community restoration initiative rooted in the Islamic principles of social justice. Islah LA promotes the betterment of community, education, social and economic empowerment in South LA.
Asma Sayeed is Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and Director of the Islamic Studies program at UCLA. Her primary research interests include early and classical Muslim social history, the history of Muslim education, the intersections of law and social history, and women and gender studies. Her book, Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013), analyzes Muslim women’s transmission of ḥadīth from the rise of Islam to the early Ottoman period. She is passionate about fostering collaborations between the broader community and partners at UCLA to promote better public education about Islam and Muslims.
Engaging Lived Religion
The Fowler’s new initiative, “Engaging Lived Religion in the 21st Century Museum,” generously funded by Lilly Endowment Inc., brings to the fore lived, multisensory experiences of religion in Los Angeles. Offering a platform to different religious and spiritual viewpoints, these programs facilitate greater appreciation of the rich, diverse, and indispensable knowledge of our city’s faith-based communities.
FOWLER TALKS: CELEBRATING CSRC DIRECTOR CHON NORIEGA
LUNCH & LEARN: CONSERVING STRIKING IRONStriking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths was a significant exhibition for the Fowler Museum, earning honors and accolades as one of the best exhibitions of 2018. After its successful international tour and return, conservation of the forged iron objects continues, including work on a substantial donation to the museum by artist and exhibition co-curator Tom Joyce.
Join Head of Conservation Christian de Brer for a presentation on the role of the Fowler Museum’s Conservation Department in preparing for the exhibition and donation, with a focus on stabilizing and treating the objects for display, travel, and long-term storage. De Brer will also address unique issues related to works in iron, such as weight, corrosion, and past use.
Christian de Brer has overseen conservation-related activities at the Fowler Museum since 2011. A graduate of the UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials, he is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in the Conservation of Material Culture at UCLA and investigating ancient West Mexican ceramics. De Brer’s areas of focus include characterization of materials and stabilization treatments for objects from non-Western cultures, as well as mitigation of display and storeroom environments for preventative collections care.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world in our permanent collection. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind during your lunch break.
GLOBAL CUISINE COOKING LESSONS: CHIFA LALA is buzzing about Chifa LA, the hip new Peruvian/Chinese/Taiwainese restaurant in Eagle Rock with lots of flair. An intergenerational family affair, it goes back to the original Chifa: a Cantonese restaurant run by the matriarch in Lima, Peru, in the 1970s. Join the Fowler and Head Chef John Liu to learn how to make vegetarian Tacu Tacu with a fried egg and salsa criolla, a simple Peruvian dish that stems from North Africa. While this dish is typically eaten at breakfast, it’s delicious at any time of day. Ingredient list will be sent upon RSVP. Come with supplies prepared and ready to cook!
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons
Variety is the spice of life. Learn how LA’s favorite international restaurants cook up their most famous, easy-to-make dishes in live cooking classes led by their chefs on Zoom. When food is your love language, some secrets are too good not to share.
DISRUPT THE FOWLER: ERIC HUEric Hu is a DISRUPTOR in the fields of branding, graphic design, and typography. Inspired by the diverse aesthetic influences offered by the City of Los Angeles, he has built an international reputation for pairing maximalist image-making with typographic nuance.
After serving as the Global Design Director at Nike and Director of Design at SSENSE, Hu launched his creative consultancy and design practice, Eric Hu studio. As the studio’s art director, he pairs his creative vision and experience with clients in the fashion, music, architecture, and technology spaces. Join the Fowler and DISRUPT for a glimpse at Hu’s work and a conversation about how he pushes the bounds of experimental graphic design and disrupts corporate identities in the creation of new visual languages.
DISRUPT the Fowler
DISRUPT is a UCLA student design organization that aims to establish inclusive spaces and create opportunities for students of all backgrounds to engage in creative collaborations. The Fowler is honored to partner with DISRUPT to offer programs that break down barriers in the art world and promote innovative ideation through inclusivity, diversity, equity, and accessibility.
SHARE THE MIC: THE ART OF TRASH WITH BENJAMIN VON WONGIn honor of Earth Day, the Fowler is proud to co-present a special program with Rogue Agency that celebrates the work of photographer, installation artist, and environmental activist Benjamin Von Wong. Benjamin’s images, which regularly go “viral,” combine everyday recycled objects with shocking statistics, generating over 100 million views and inspiring action on such urgent concerns as ocean plastics, electronic waste, and fashion pollution. Join the Fowler and Maddy Pryor, Founder and CEO of Rogue Agency, for a conversation with Benjamin about intersections of sustainability and art, how crises can catalyze growth, and how one can measure the impact of art and activism.
Benjamin Von Wong’s work lies at the intersection of fantasy and photography. He is a well-known environmental activist, keynote speaker, and host of the Impact Everywhere podcast, in which he interviews a wide range of guests, from NASA scientists to local artists and entrepreneurs. His photography has attracted the attention of corporations like Starbucks, Dell, and Nike. Most recently, he was named one of Adweek‘s 11 Branded Content Masterminds. He is a creative advisor for the Ocean Plastic Leadership Network and the Sustainable Ocean Alliance.
Rogue Agency is a creative agency dedicated to amplifying the voices of purpose-driven brands and organizations through compelling digital campaigns and authentic brand storytelling. They represent clients who are committed to innovation, representation, sustainability, equity, and general goodness. Rogue is committed to nurturing a diverse stable of intersectional artists and activists who stand for something and create for change, pairing those creators with the brands and organizations they serve.
LUNCH & LEARN: LOVE DIVINITIES IN VODOU ARTJoin Katherine Smith, the Fowler’s Curatorial and Research Associate of Haitian Art, as she explores an altar assemblage by sculptor Samuel François. Based in Port-au-Prince, François apprenticed under the renowned artist Pierrot Barra, who made famous the Vodou-inspired, found-objects sculptures, which he sold at the downtown Iron Market. François’ work is characterized by a bright, pop aesthetic exemplified in his 1999 homage to two female deities of love. Learn about the religious and historical aspects of this radiant masterpiece.
This program is generously supported by a grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc.
Katherine Smith, Ph.D., is the Fowler’s Curatorial and Research Associate of Haitian Art and a Lecturer in the Departments of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and Art History at UCLA. Her research explores the intersection of art, religion, and urban migration in Haiti and the Black Atlantic.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world in our permanent collection. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind during your lunch break.
SHARE THE MIC: PERFORMING SOCIAL JUSTICE ARTIVISMArtivism—a word combining art and activism—emerged as part of the vernacular in recent years. As anti-racism protests proliferate, artists are using their work to catalyze political participation and action in ways that move beyond traditional paradigms of activism. Join the Fowler, LA Commons’ Karen Mack, comedian and performance artist Kristina Wong, and Chicana feminist Martha Gonzalez of rock band Quetzal for a conversation about how one can powerfully organize, and engage hearts and minds, by creating a narrative about struggles to promote justice through art.
Karen Mack is founder and Executive Director of LA Commons, an organization dedicated to promoting Los Angeles’ diverse neighborhoods through locally based, interactive, artistic and cultural programming. LA Commons has implemented community art projects, tours, and classes in partnership with organizations such as the Fowler Museum, National Endowment for the Arts, LA Department of Cultural Affairs, and LA County Arts Commission. Mack holds an M.P.A. from Harvard University and an M.B.A. from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is a past president of the board of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative and of the City’s Board of Neighborhood Commissioners.
Martha Gonzalez, Ph.D., is a Chicana Artivista, born and raised in East Los Angeles. She is the lead singer, percussionist, and songwriter for Quetzal—an “East LA Chican@ rock group” that tells the social, cultural, political, and musical stories of people in struggle, rooted in the complex cultural currents of life in the barrio, social activism, and feminist stance. In 2020, she released her book, Chican@ Artivistas: Music, Community and Transborder Tactics in East Los Angeles. In addition, Quetzal just released Puentes Sonoros on Smithsonian Folkways Label. Gonzalez is currently an Associate Professor in the Intercollegiate Department of Chicanx Latinx Studies at SCRIPPS / Claremont Colleges. At UCLA, she majored in Ethnomusicology with a focus on music, dance, and drumming of Ghana and Cuba.
Kristina Wong is a performance artist, comedian, writer, and elected representative whose work has been recognized through many grants, including Creative Capital, COLA Master Artist Fellowship from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and eight Los Angeles Artist-in-Residence awards. Her long-running show, Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, looked at the high rates of depression and suicide among Asian American women and is now a concert film. Her recent piece, Kristina Wong for Public Office, is a simultaneous real-life stint as the elected representative in Koreatown Los Angeles and campaign rally show. During the pandemic, she founded the Auntie Sewing Squad, a collective of volunteers sewing facemasks for vulnerable communities.
CURATOR’S CHOICE: REFRAMING THE PAST WITH MEGHANN O’BRIEN AND ELENA PHIPPSMeghann O’Brien is a Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw artist whose Chilkat textiles are based on the knowledge and artistic practices of her ancestors. Her projects engage specialized techniques of basketry and weaving, and use mountain goat wool, cedar bark, and other earthly materials to connect to the rhythms and patterns of the natural world. With these materials, she explores issues related to Indigenous fashion and couture, reframing the past and applying it to present-day life. Join the Fowler for a conversation between Meghann O’Brien and textile scholar Elena Phipps about new ways of looking at Indigenous knowledge and creative practice in the realm of textile making.
Meghann O’Brien (b. 1982) is a Northwest Coast weaver from the community of Alert Bay, B.C. Her innovative approach to traditional art forms of basketry and Yelth Koo (Raven’s Tail) and Naaxiin (Chilkat) textile weaving creates a continuity between herself and her ancestors. Meghann now lives in Vancouver, B.C. and is currently exploring the intersection of Indigenous materials and techniques with the world of fashion and 3D printing. She travels globally to lecture and demonstrate her work, yet emphasizes the value of contributing to the contemporary ceremonial practices of the Haida and Kwakwakw’wakw peoples.
Elena Phipps focuses on the history of textile materials and techniques in cultural contexts. She was a textile conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 34 years and co-curated the award-winning textile exhibitions, The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork 1430–1830 (2004) and The Interwoven Globe: Worldwide Textile Trade (2013). In 2013, she curated The Four-Selvaged Peruvian Cloth: Ancient Threads/New Directions for the Fowler Museum. Elena’s most recent publication is “Woven Brilliance” (Textile Museum Journal, 2021). She has served as President of the Textile Society of America (2011–14) and taught in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Culture/Dance since 2011.
SHARE THE MIC: DECOLONIZING AN AFRICAN MUSEUMThe Ethnographic Museum of Rwanda, financed by Belgium in the late 1980s as a symbol of cooperation with Rwanda, houses one of Africa’s most significant ethnographic collections. The selection of material and its display, however, have been products of colonial perspectives, rather than those reflecting the knowledge, values, and priorities of African countries and communities from which the objects originated. As part of decolonizing and renovating the museum, staff from the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Belgium are currently working with Rwandese colleagues to reevaluate conservation practices. Join Fowler staff and museum professionals from the RMCA and Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy for a conversation about how conservation practices can serve as one of many strategies for decolonizing museums in different countries with unequal resources.
The panelists will include Marci Burton, the Fowler’s Mellon Conservation Fellow; Siska Genbrugge, Objects Conservator at Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium; André Ntagwabira, Archaeology Researcher at Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy; and Chantal Umuhoza, Curator at Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy. The program will be moderated by Ellen Pearlstein, Professor, UCLA/Getty Conservation Program.
This program is co-presented by the Fowler Museum and the UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials.
DISRUPT THE FOWLER: MISTER CARTOONMister Cartoon is a DISRUPTOR in the fine arts. His refinement of the fine line technique in graffiti, canvas, murals, and – most famously – tattoos, challenges the boundaries of art and brings Los Angeles street art style into galleries and international exhibitions. Mister Cartoon also infiltrates corporate design through partnerships with such companies as Microsoft and Nike. Join Fowler and DISRUPT for a conversation with Mister Cartoon, who, through his community-based initiatives, serves as a mentor and inspiration to Angelenos and those beyond the city.
DISRUPT the Fowler
DISRUPT is a UCLA student design organization that aims to establish inclusive spaces and create opportunities for students of all backgrounds to engage in creative collaborations. The Fowler is honored to partner with DISRUPT to offer programs that break down barriers in the art world and promote innovative ideation through inclusivity, diversity, equity, and accessibility.
LUNCH & LEARN: FANTASTIC ALEBRIJES BY THE LINARES FAMILYJoin Patrick A. Polk, Fowler’s Senior Curator of Latin American and Caribbean Popular Arts as he discusses a chimerical papier-mâché alebrije crafted by Miguel Linares (b. 1946) of Mexico City. While the Linares Studio artists are best known for their images of skulls and skeletons, they have long crafted figures for the Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) observances. They have garnered acclaim for sharp-fanged, deadly-clawed, and winged creatures that merge characteristics of mundane and otherworldly animals. Learn the sources of inspiration for this artistic tradition, considered by many to occupy one of the highest perches in Mexican popular art.
Patrick A. Polk is Senior Curator of Latin American and Caribbean Popular Arts at the Fowler Museum and a lecturer for the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion. His research interests include material religion and visual piety, religion and healing, popular religion in North and Latin America, and African Diasporic sacred arts. He has curated such Fowler exhibitions as Botánica Los Angeles: Latino Popular Religious Art in the City of Angels; Sinful Saints and Saintly Sinners at the Margins of the Americas; and Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world in our permanent collection. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind during your lunch break.
DISRUPT the Fowler: MOOSAJEESaad Moosajee is a DISRUPTOR in animation and academia, exploring new intersections between art and moving images in contemporary culture. He has directed videos for musicians, including Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Mitski, and Joji, pushing the boundaries of visual storytelling through distinct art direction and experimental techniques. Moosajee’s use of technological media is strengthened by his meticulous attention to detail, and by leveraging the power of computation against the imperfections of human process to create complex imagery grounded in emotion. His dreamlike videos blur the boundaries between surrealism and escapism, providing windows into unseen cinematic worlds.
Moosajee’s work has received numerous honors, including a SXSW Special Jury Award, D&AD Graphite Pencil, UKMVA, and ADC Gold Cube. He has screened his videos at festivals and museums around the world, worked with Pixar and the Google Five team, taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of Visual Arts, and was included in Forbes 30 Under 30: Art & Style list for 2020. Join us for a conversation with Moosajee about his path to success, and learn why you might not need that graduate degree to succeed, after all.
A GLOBAL DESTINATION FOR ART: RELE GALLERY AND ORITA META – CROSSROADSOn International Women’s Day, the Fowler is pleased to welcome Adenrele Sonariwo, the founding director of L.A.’s first contemporary art gallery from Africa, and three Nigerian women artists—Marcellina Akpojotor, Tonia Nneji, and Chidinma Nnoli—who are featured in Rele Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Orita Meta – Crossroads. Fowler Director Marla C. Berns will join Sonariwo in a conversation about her goals for her gallery and other venues showing contemporary African art in Los Angeles. The artists will discuss how their works address issues of concern to women in Nigeria, including purity and sexual autonomy, identity and trauma.
Adenrele Sonariwo is an award-winning gallerist, curator, and founder of Rele Gallery and Rele Art Foundation. She has curated and overseen high-profile art exhibitions in Lagos, Los Angeles, New York, and Venice, Italy, challenging the boundaries of art and engaging in provocative subjects and techniques. Sonariwo curated the first ever Nigerian Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale.
Marcellina Akpojotor employs collage and traditional painting to produce richly textured and layered works that explore femininity, personal and societal identity, and women’s empowerment in contemporary society. Akpojotor had her first solo exhibition at Rele Gallery in 2018 and has participated in prominent art fairs across the world, including the FNB Art Joburg Fair 2019 (South Africa), Art Dubai 2020 (Dubai), and the 2020 edition of the LA Art Show (USA). She lives and works in Lagos.
Tonia Nneji is known for her work’s bold colors and intricate patterns, and for her exploration of the relationship between the female body and trauma. Nneji was recently among the artists selected for the Art Dubai Residency program. Her works are widely collected locally and internationally. She lives and works in Lagos.
Chidinma Nnoli’s practice draws on personal experiences to challenge stereotypes, psychology, and cultural conditioning of women, while exploring elements of identity, sexuality, and mental health. Her debut solo exhibition, To Wander Untamed, will open at Rele Gallery’s location in Lagos in March, 2021. Nnoli earned her Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Benin. She currently lives and works in Lagos.
SHARE THE MIC: THE CARE WE CREATEACLU Southern California and artist Audrey Chan revealed a massive mural in Los Angeles last month; The Care We Create depicts major figures in the fight for civil liberties and civil rights in Southern California. The 5,500-square-foot painting is the product of ACLU SoCal’s inaugural artist-in-residency program and serves as a “constant reminder that the work of challenging systems that perpetuate injustice is a profound expression of love and compassion.”
Join Audrey Chan, Marcus Benigno, ACLU SoCal’s Chief Communications & Marketing Officer, and two activists featured in the mural—Janaya Future Khan and Marjan Vayghan—for a conversation about this project and the power of art to advocate for social change.
This program is presented in partnership with ACLU of Southern California.
Audrey Chan is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator. Her research-based projects use drawing, painting, video, and public art to challenge dominant historical narratives through allegories of power, place, and identity. She received an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts and a B.A. with Honors from Swarthmore College. She was commissioned by LA Metro to create a large-scale public artwork for the future Little Tokyo/Arts District Metro Station, opening in 2022.
Marcus Benigno is Chief Communications & Marketing Officer at the ACLU of Southern California. Since 2016, he has led the communications and media advocacy arm for the affiliate. Previously, Benigno was a freelance correspondent abroad, reporting for domestic and international outlets. He earned his degree in International Development Studies from McGill University and is currently a member of the board of directors for the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust.
FOWLER TALKS: KOMFA AND THE RITUAL EMBRACE OF SHADED HERITAGESJoin us to celebrate Mashramani—Guyana’s annual “carnival” commemorating the South American nation’s formal severing of ties with the British Crown—and the Guyanese ritual of dance, drumming, and altar-making called Komfa. The program, led by UCLA scholar Jeremy Jacob Peretz, will explore through the lens of Guyana’s religious material culture how Komfa encourages devotees in “the Land of Six Peoples” to embrace marginalized aspects of their heritage and “shaded” facets of themselves—known in Guyana’s Creolese language as jumbi, or “ghosts.”
This program is generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Jeremy Jacob Peretz is a Lecturer in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, where he recently earned his Ph.D. in Culture and Performance. In Spring 2021, Peretz will begin teaching in the Department of History and Caribbean Studies at the University of Guyana. His research has focused on intersections of religious and racial politics in the southern Caribbean.
LUNCH & LEARN: JAIN SHRINE HANGINGSJoin Joanna Barrkman, the Fowler’s Senior Curator of Southeast Asia and Pacific Arts, for a program exploring embroidered Jain temple and shrine hangings that offer insights into the religious beliefs and imagery of the Jain faith. Associated with the Svetambara (the white-clad) sect of Jainism, these textiles once formed backdrops to stone sculptures of gods—the 24 Jina or “victors”—in Jain temples. The works featured in this talk are from the Ronald and Maxine Linde Collection, part of a promised gift to UCLA, where it will find its future home with the Fowler Museum.
Joanna Barrkman is Senior Curator of Southeast Asian and Pacific Art at the Fowler Museum. She has published her research on double-ikat silk patola and mordant-block-printed cotton textiles imitating patola; they were produced and traded between Gujarat, India and Indonesia in 17th to 19th centuries. Barrkman’s work explores the influence of these Indian “trade textiles” on the design repertoire and ceremonial practices of Atoin meto people in West Timor, Indonesia.
FOWLER TALKS: ANDREW LAMAR HOPKINS AND FABIOLA JEAN-LOUISIn celebration of Black History Month, the Fowler is honored to welcome painter Andrew LaMar Hopkins and photographer Fabiola Jean-Louis, two artists renowned for works that reclaim and reimagine Black histories that have been forgotten or silenced. Join the Fowler’s Curatorial and Research Associate of Haitian Arts, Katherine Smith, for a program with the artists who will share their work and discuss the influence of Haiti in New Orleans; Black glamour, gaze, and identity; and their personal stakes in changing historical narratives to celebrate Black bodies.
Andrew LaMar Hopkins (b. 1977, Mobile, AL) paints meticulous, lush, minute depictions of 19th-century interior scenes and architectural set pieces based on the histories of free Creole people in the antebellum American South. In 2020, Hopkins mounted a solo presentation, entitled Créolité, at Venus Over Manhattan in New York; it received coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Artforum, and New York magazine, among other prominent publications. Hopkins lives and works between New Orleans, LA, and Savannah, GA.
Fabiola Jean-Louis (b. 1978, Port Au Prince, Haiti) is creating an ongoing series, Rewriting History, which consists of period paper gowns, painterly photographs, and Polaroids. The project was shown as a solo exhibition at Smithsonian affiliates DuSable Museum of African American History, Alan Avery Art Company, and Andrew Freedman Home, receiving critical acclaim. Jean-Louis was accepted into the highly sought-after residency at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York City, and in September 2019 at LUX Museum in San Diego. Her works have been featured in Elle Decor, Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune, Artnet News, Hyperallergic, Chicago Sun Times, The Haitian Times, and other publications.
GLOBAL CUISINE COOKING LESSONS: FAT TUESDAY WITH HAROLD & BELLE’SLA’s famous Harold & Belle’s restaurant has been serving authentic Louisiana Creole Cuisine for over 50 years; Zagat declares that you’d “have to drive to Louisiana to do better.” Join the Fowler and Ryan Legaux, owner and chef of Harold & Belle’s, to celebrate Fat Tuesday the most appropriate way—with food! “Fat Tuesday,” or Mardi Gras, is perhaps best known in the U.S. as part of the Carnival in New Orleans. The phrase refers to the last night before Lent, when observant Christians can indulge in rich, fatty foods prior to a period of fasting. Don’t sleep on this chance to learn how to make jambalaya, the ultimate Creole dish traditionally consumed on Fat Tuesday. Ingredients list will be sent upon RSVP. Come with supplies prepared and ready to cook!
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons
Variety is the spice of life. Learn how LA’s favorite international restaurants cook up their most famous, easy-to-make dishes in live cooking classes led by their chefs on Zoom. When food is your love language, some secrets are too good not to share.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons: Pearl River Deli CantoneseThe Chinatown neighborhood in Los Angeles was established by immigrants from the Cantonese “Pearl River Delta” region of China. The aptly named Pearl River Deli—Chef Johnny Lee’s newest restaurant—offers an innovative take on Cantonese food with a small but strong menu that changes regularly. It celebrates the natural state of ingredients and reflects Lee’s appreciation, preservation, and evolution of Cantonese cuisine. Join the Fowler and the “Prince of Poultry” Chef Lee to learn how to make his famous Soy Sauce Chicken with Ginger Scallion Sauce. Ingredients list will be sent upon RSVP. Come with supplies prepared and ready to cook!
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons
Variety is the spice of life. Learn how LA’s favorite international restaurants cook up their most famous, easy-to-make dishes in live cooking classes led by their chefs on Zoom. When food is your love language, some secrets are too good not to share.
DISRUPT the Fowler: MEAR ONEMEAR ONE is a DISRUPTOR in the world of fine arts; his work calls on viewers to think beyond the canvas. MEAR ONE has been at the forefront of LA’s graffiti and mural culture for nearly four decades, earning his status as a pioneer of the Melrose graffiti art movement in the late 80s and one of the city’s most prolific public muralists. His works’ powerful narratives juxtapose philosophy, ancient mythology, and modern politics to inspire an evolved consciousness, achieved through a balanced dialogue between surrealism and metaphysics. MEAR ONE helps us envision the sublime spirit of our time—not by escaping reality, but by confronting it head on.
MEAR ONE (Kalen Ockerman) was the first graffiti artist to exhibit at the infamous 01 Gallery on Melrose, as well as at 33 1/3 Gallery in Silverlake, where Banksy would later debut his first North American show. MEAR ONE’s work was part of the landmark 2011 Art in the Streets exhibition at the MOCA Los Angeles, Street Cred at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and Last Thursday at the Orlando Museum of Fine Art. His artworks reside in the permanent collection of the Laguna Fine Art Museum as well as in numerous private collections across North America.
LUNCH & LEARN: THE PERUVIAN FOUR-SELVAGED CLOTHJoin Elena Phipps for a program unraveling the Peruvian tradition of weaving textiles with four finished edges—also known as selvages. She will highlight examples from the Fowler Museum’s noteworthy collection of pre-Columbian textiles that demonstrate the high level of artistic achievement of Peruvian weavers, known for their mastery of color, technique, and design.
Elena Phipps, Ph.D., Columbia University (pre-Columbian Art History and Archaeology, 1989) has focused her professional work on the study of the history of textile materials and techniques in cultural contexts. She was senior conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1977- 2010), where she co-curated two major textile exhibitions: The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork 1430-1830 (2004; the accompanying catalogue received the CAA Alfred Barr Jr. Award and the Mitchell Prize) and The Interwoven Globe: Worldwide Textile Trade (2013). In 2013, Phipps guest curated the Fowler exhibition, The Peruvian Four-Selvaged Cloth: Ancient Threads, New Directions,and authored its catalogue. She was President of the Textile Society of America (2011-14); and has taught textile history, techniques, and cultures in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and at the Fowler Museum since 2011.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world in our permanent collection. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind during your lunch break.
A Global Destination for Art: Ardeshir TabriziArdeshir Tabrizi’s colorful mixed media paintings and works on paper feature imagery and methods that reference the rich literary and visual traditions of Iran, a country he left in his childhood. Tabrizi draws on the Shahnameh, an ancient epic poem describing the history of Persian kingship; historical artifacts, tapestries, rugs, and embroideries; and his own memories. Join the Fowler’s Director of Education and Interpretation Amy Landau for a virtual visit to the artist’s studio and a conversation with Tabrizi about his chosen iconography, which represents the many opposing cultural, political, and religious ideologies that have existed throughout the history of Iran.
Ardeshir Tabrizi was born in Tehran, Iran. He left the county with his family at age four in 1986, during the Iran-Iraq War, and settled in Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works.
This program is presented in partnership with Farhang Foundation.
Crafting Cartographies – Mapping LAUCLA has several pioneering digital projects that map Los Angeles and enable people to visualize and interact with the city’s layered histories of humanity, from sacred burial sites to beloved corner delis. This panel brings together for the first time contributors to Mapping Jewish Los Angeles, Mapping Indigenous LA, and the Fowler’s Vermont Avenue project. The goal is to share the results of these digital projects; to better understand the city’s cultural and spiritual geographies; and ultimately to explore how this knowledge might inform museum practices.
Panelists include Todd Presner, Chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities program and the Michael and Irene Ross Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature; Caroline Luce, Associate Director, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies; Patrick Polk, Senior Curator of Caribbean and Latin American Popular Arts, Fowler Museum at UCLA, and lecturer in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance; Christopher Greene, former Curatorial Assistant and Geographic Information Systems Specialist, Fowler Museum at UCLA; Professor Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs at UCLA; Craig Torres, Tongva Educator, contributor to UCLA’s Mapping Indigenous LA; and Juliann Anesi, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at UCLA. Panel will be moderated by Genevieve Carpio, Assistant Professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA.
This program is presented in partnership with the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and Mapping Jewish Los Angeles.
Curator's Choice: Séisme (Earthquake)On the 11-year anniversary of a devastating earthquake in Haiti, the Fowler’s Curatorial and Research Associate of Haitian Arts, Katherine Smith, and Assistant Professor of Art History and Africana Studies at Boston College, Kyrah Malika Daniels, discuss Séisme (Earthquake), a beaded flag created in 2010 by Haitian artist Evelyne Alcide. In Séisme, Alcide details the nightmarish post-earthquake landscape of Port-au-Prince. The artwork conflates city and cemetery, revealing the overwhelming presence of the dead, while Vodou spirits and angels hover above the carnage.
Katherine Smith, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and a Visiting Researcher in the UCLA International Institute. She has held fellowships at Brown University and New York University, and publishes regularly in academic journals and edited volumes. Smith has played a curatorial role in two exhibitions: Reframing Haiti: Art, History and Performativity at Brown University (2011) and In Extremis: Life and Death in 21st Century Haitian Art at the Fowler Museum (2012). She is the lead curator on the forthcoming retrospective on Haitian textile artist Myrlande Constant at the Fowler Museum. Smith is finishing a manuscript on death, art, and the religious imaginary in urban Haiti.
Kyrah Malika Daniels, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Art History, African & African Diaspora Studies, and Theology at Boston College. Her research interests include Africana religions, sacred arts, material culture, and ritual healing traditions. Daniels was awarded a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art for 2019-20. She is currently completing her first book, Art of the Healing Gods, which examines sacred art objects used in healing ceremonies to treat spiritual illnesses in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Following the Haitian earthquake of 2010, she worked in St. Raphael, Haiti, with Lakou Solèy Academic and Cultural Arts Center, a grassroots organization that develops arts-based pedagogy. Daniels currently serves as Co-Vice President for KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou.
Curator’s Choice
Join curators for lively conversations about their passions and projects that inspire audiences to engage with different worldviews and find joy in the diversity of human experiences.
Festivals in the City of Angels: Kwanzaa in Leimert Park VillageKwanzaa is a relatively new holiday, created in 1966, following the Watts Rebellion, to bring the Black community together. Today, it is celebrated annually around the world, most notably on the West Coast in Leimert Park Village, the vibrant heart of Black culture in Los Angeles. The Fowler has partnered with We Love Leimert for a program honoring Kwanzaa and its seven principles and symbols rooted in the sacred teachings of Asante and Zulu harvest celebrations. We’ll hear from cultural bearers and figures from the Leimert Park Village community who are organizing for Black liberation and self-determination. The program will culminate with a dance class led by Kamilah Marsh and Keti Ciofassa, giving participants an opportunity to embody the principles of Kwanzaa.
This program is co-presented by UCLA’s Department of African American Studies, in partnership with We Love Leimert.
Fowler Out Loud: Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra’s Holiday ConcertThe UCLA Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, led by renowned jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill, celebrates the holidays with the music of Tito Puente, Graciela, Machito, and the great creators of Afro Latin Jazz. Get your best dancing shoes on and join the Fowler to mambo your way through Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, and even Festivus.
Arturo O’Farrill, pianist, composer, and educator, was born in Mexico and grew up in New York City. He is currently Professor of Global Jazz Studies and Assistant Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at UCLA. O’Farrill has received commissions from Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Apollo Theater, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, and has been honored as a Steinway Artist for many years.
In 2007, he founded the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the performance, education, and preservation of Afro Latin music
In 2020, O’Farrill’s weekly concerts with the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, dubbed “Virtual Birdland,” topped the list of 10 Best Quarantine Concerts in the New York Times.
This program is presented in partnership with the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
Wonder what we’ve been up to for these past nine months?To learn more, visit:
https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/fowler-funds/
Music by Scott Holmes, "Teamwork".
Lunch & Learn: Indonesian Rod PuppetsJoin Student Educator Carolina Guerrero and Senior Curator of Southeast Asian and Pacific Arts Joanna Barrkman for a discussion about the Fowler’s collection of wayang golek (rod puppets). Rod puppets are one of the most popular forms of animation in the rich history of puppet theatre in Indonesia. Don’t miss this “tea time” Lunch & Learn, scheduled at a later time to accommodate our curator Zooming in from Australia.
Carolina Guerrero is a senior at UCLA, double majoring in Linguistics and Anthropology, and Arabic. January 2021 marks her fourth year of working at the Fowler. She was a research intern for NASA, and for the Center for Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) of CSU San Bernardino—all before graduating high school. After finishing college, she hopes to teach language at the K-12 level and pursue linguistic forensics.
DISRUPT the Fowler: Estevan OriolEstevan Oriol is a worldwide DISRUPTOR in photography. The subject and director of the Netflix documentary, “LA Originals,” he captures both the glamour of Hollywood celebrities and the uncut reality of the inner cities. Oriol reveals the true essence of his subjects in an unapologetic approach to photographic truth. Join the Fowler and DISRUPT for a conversation with Oriol and a look back at some of his most famous images, including those of Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Ryan Gosling, Floyd Mayweather, and Snoop Dogg.
A Global Destination for Art: Mark Steven GreenfieldMark Steven Greenfield, a native of LA, uses his art to explore the African-American experience, critiquing and offering unique perspectives on a society still grappling with the consequences of slavery and racial injustice. His newest body of work consists of 17 “Black Madonna” paintings that re-imagine Medieval religious icons rendered in the Byzantine style of their art historical predecessors. Greenfield places Black bodies in a place of exaltation, offering an imagined time that is hard to pinpoint, but during which white supremacy suffers the same vicious deaths that have historically been forced upon Black bodies.
Join Mark and Naima J. Keith for an exhibition walk-through at William Turner Gallery, followed by a conversation and Q&A
Mark Steven Greenfield studied with Charles White at Otis Art Institute; received his Bachelor’s degree in Art Education in 1973 from California State University, Long Beach; and an M.F.A. in painting and drawing from California State University, Los Angeles in 1987. Greenfield’s work has been exhibited extensively in the United States, including in a comprehensive survey exhibition at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles in 2014. From 1993-2011, Greenfield worked for the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs as Director of the Watts Towers Arts Center; later, he served as Director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park. He currently teaches drawing and design at Los Angeles City College, and serves on the board of Side Street Projects.
Naima J. Keith is Vice President of Education and Public Programs at LACMA. Previously, she was the Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the California African American Museum, where she guided the curatorial and education departments as well as marketing and communications; she was an Associate Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2011–16); and held a curatorial position at the Hammer Museum. Keith has lectured extensively and her essays have appeared in numerous publications. She holds degrees from Spelman College and UCLA, and is a proud native of Los Angeles.
This program is generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
CURATOR’S CHOICE: PROJECT 1521 AND THE FLORENTINE CODEXPresented by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in partnership with the Getty Research Institute
The approaching quincentennial of the conquest of Mexico offers many lessons for us today. A vital document of that cataclysmic era is The General History of the Things of New Spain—aka the Florentine Codex—a massive, 2,000-page guide to 16th century central Mexico. Created by Nahua scholars and artists under the direction of a Spanish Franciscan friar and in the wake of the Spanish invasion, it was completed during a devastating epidemic caused by the viruses introduced to the region by the conquistadors.
Project 1521—a collaboration between artist Sandy Rodriguez and writer Adolfo Guzman-Lopez—was inspired by Indigenous perspectives on the Spanish invasion. The project brings together artists, writers, and scholars to generate visual and literary works as acts of resistance. Join panelists for live readings of these works and hear their reflections on the continued relevance of the encyclopedic record of Indigenous knowledge contained in the Florentine Codex.
Panelists will include artist Sandy Rodriguez; writer and KPCC/LAIST reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez; Abelardo de la Cruz de la Cruz, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at University at Albany—State University of New York, Associate Instructor and Nahuatl Instructor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah, and Associate Instructor at Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas (IDIEZ AC); Diana Magaloni Kerpel, LACMA’s Deputy Director, Program Director & Dr. Virginia Fields Curator of the Art of the Ancient Americas, and Suzanne D. Booth and David G. Booth Conservation Center Director; Kim Richter, Senior Research Specialist, Director’s Office, Getty Research Institute; Kevin Terraciano, Professor of History, Director of the Latin American Institute, and co-chair of Latin American Studies Graduate Program at UCLA.
The conversation will be moderated by Matthew H. Robb, Chief Curator, Fowler Museum at UCLA.
Curator's Choice: Marie Watt and Nancy Marie MithloJoin the Fowler Museum, independent curator Nancy Marie Mithlo, and artist Marie Watt for a conversation about American Indian art, intellectual traditions, social activism, and the foundational practice of gratitude in Native communities. We’ll take a look at some of Watt’s most important, powerfully symbolic sculptural works informed by Indigenous knowledge, Iroquois proto-feminism, and American Indian matriarchal structures. Watt uses textiles, beads, cedar, and other materials conceptually attached to American Indian narratives in her work, which explores what it means to be a true “companion species.”
A Fowler Member-only virtual Happy Hour and Studio Visit with Marie and Nancy will follow the program. Click here to become a Fowler Member.
Presented in partnership with UCLA American Indian Studies Center.
Marie Watt (b. 1967) is an American artist with partial German-Scot heritage and a citizen of the Seneca Nation. She earned her M.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Yale University; has degrees from Willamette University and the Institute of American Indian Arts; and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Willamette University in 2016. Through collaborative actions, she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations affirming Native peoples’ connections to place, one another, and the universe. Watt lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Nancy Marie Mithlo, Ph.D., is an Indigenous (Chiricahua Apache) scholar of race and representation. She is Professor in the UCLA Department of Gender Studies and affiliated faculty in the UCLA American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program. Her training as a cultural anthropologist (Stanford University Ph.D., 1993) informs how she examines cultural, institutional, and political systems that often mask the normalization of bias in contested realms of power. Mithlo, whose work engages comparative global Indigeneity movements in the arts, curated nine exhibitions at the Venice Biennale.
Festivals in the City of Angels: Diwali Sweets Cooking LessonWe have invited Mayura Indian Restaurant to help us prepare for Diwali, the Indian festival of lights celebrated, in part, with sweet desserts. Owner Padmini Aniyan and Head Chef Sathi Venu will teach us how to make traditional Keralan sweets, such as unniyappam (Indian dumplings made of flour, banana, and jaggery) and payasam (Indian pudding), dishes served as part of the MICHELIN-recognized restaurant’s annual Diwali feast. Ingredients and preparation instructions sent upon RSVP. Come with everything prepared and ready to cook!
Presented in partnership with Indian Student Union at UCLA.
This program is generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Festivals in the City of Angels: Flames of DevotionIn honor of Diwali, the “festival of lights” that celebrates the beginning of the Hindu New Year, scholar Lakshika Senarath Gamage will explore the origins of this holiday and its manifestations in contemporary faith communities. She will also offer her perspective on the design, construction, and use of the spectacular bronze oil lamps in the Fowler’s collection, acquired by the pre-eminent scholar of Indian art in LA. Such oil lamps would have been used in Diwali celebrations to symbolize the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.
Lakshika Senarath Gamage received her Ph.D. in 2018 from the UCLA Department of Art History. Her research on Early Modern South Asian Art focuses on Hindu and Buddhist temple art and architecture in India and Sri Lanka. While at UCLA, her dissertation fieldwork in the southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala was supported by the Ralph C. Altman award bestowed by the Fowler Museum in 2014. She currently teaches Asian Art history at Santa Monica College and conducts research on South Asian Art at the Getty Research Institute.
Presented in partnership with Indian Student Union at UCLA.
Festivals in the City of Angels
This series connects museum programs with communities across the city in order to better understand manifestations of lived religions in Los Angeles and honor local expressions of global faiths.
This program is generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons: GueleguetzaThe renowned Oaxacan restaurant Guelaguetza’s website says it all: ilovemole.com. In honor of the Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos, which is often celebrated with a dinner of mole, co-owner Bricia Lopez will teach us how to make the restaurant’s famous Estofado de Pollo (chicken in mole estofado), a dish featured in the restaurant’s 2019 cookbook, Oaxaca: Home Cooking from the Heart of Mexico. Ingredients list will be sent upon RSVP. Come with supplies prepared and ready to cook! Bricia Lopez is an entrepreneur, cultural ambassador, and key figure in LA’s gastronomic world. Her family’s restaurant, which won the James Beard Foundation Award, helped put Oaxacan cuisine and culture at the forefront of today’s dynamic culinary scene. Bricia lives in LA with her husband and son, and travels frequently to Oaxaca.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons: Variety is the spice of life. Learn how LA’s favorite international restaurants cook up their most famous, easy-to-make dishes in live cooking classes led by their chefs on Zoom. When food is your love language, some secrets are too good not to share.
Festivals in the City of Angels: Día de los Muertos and Linares StudioGet into the spirit of Día de los Muertos by joining us for a conversation with Self Help Graphics & Art’s teaching artist William Acedo and the Coronado Family, and hear their perspectives on calacas by Felipe Linares in the Fowler’s collection. Norma and Edgar Coronado learned the craft of making calacas cartonerías (papier-mâché skeletons) from William Acedo through Self-Help Graphics & Art’s community art workshops and became master craftsmen themselves.
Self-Help Graphics & Art is the leading non-profit visual arts center serving the Latino community of Los Angeles. Founded in 1970 in the heart of East Los Angeles, Self Help Graphics & Art is dedicated to the production, interpretation, and distribution of prints and other art media by Chicana/o and Latinx artists. Their multidisciplinary, intergenerational programs promote artistic excellence and empower our community by providing access to space, tools, training, and capital.
William Acedo is a member of Self-Help Graphics & Art’s Artists’ Roundtable. Besides printing, he assists with the popular calavera papier-mâché workshops and the annual Día de los Muertos celebrations. His detailed, narrative woodcut prints can be found in the permanent collections of LACMA, the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and in the private collection of Cheech Marin.
Lunch & Learn: An Ancient AcrobatJoin Chief Curator Matthew Robb as he explores one of the Fowler’s most intriguing ancient Mexican objects: a small ceramic vessel in the form of an acrobat balancing a ball on his feet. The use of gold leaf and finely painted imagery suggests that this object required great skill to make and may have been used in a courtly feast. Learn how to recognize the distinct features of the Nahua-Mixteca style, and how artists used it to record epic histories and ritual practices in a variety of objects, from screen-fold books, to precious metals, to ceramics like this acrobat figure.
Lunch & Learn
The Fowler’s Lunch & Learn series offers easily digestible explorations of charismatic objects from around the world in our permanent collection. Join us to chew on some sustenance and feed your mind during your lunch break.
A Global Destination for Art: Amir H. FallahIranian-born artist Amir H. Fallah uses personal history as an entry point for discussions of race, the body, and the memories of cultures and countries left behind, while also interrogating systems of representation embedded in Western art. His newest body of work probes the history of portraiture, reimagining it as standing apart from the body altogether and offering a wider representation of personhood. Join the Fowler for an artist-led walk-through of his current exhibition at Shulamit Nazarian Los Angeles, followed by a conversation with Shiva Balaghi, Ph.D.
Shiva Balaghi, Ph.D., is a cultural historian who specializes in the arts of the Middle East and its diasporic communities. For nearly two decades, she taught History and Art History at NYU and Brown University. She is currently Senior Advisor to the President and Provost of the American University in Cairo on Arts and Cultural Programs.
A Global Destination for Art
Artists from all over the world flock to work in Los Angeles, drawn by the energy of ingenuity and the space for experimental expression. Join us on Zoom as we visit with international artists creating in our City of Angels.
This program is co-presented by the Farhang Foundation
Lunch & Learn: El AnatsuiThe Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (b. 1944) dazzled the art world with his monumental textile-like wall panels exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2007. At the same time, the Fowler was hosting a solo exhibition of Anatsui’s large-scale works, including Versatility (2006), a sculptural wall assemblage that hangs today in the museum’s exhibition space, Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives. Visitors often mistake Versatility’s shimmering surface for a cloth woven from gold; in reality, El Anatsui used thousands of metal liquor bottle wrappers. Join Fowler Director Marla C. Berns, who was instrumental in acquiring Versatility for the museum’s permanent collection, as she discusses the complex meanings and inspirations behind this sumptuous work.
Share the Mic: Incarcerated ArtsArt programs for incarcerated youth and adults provide healing-informed strategies for coping with trauma and the significant challenges of re-entering society. These programs empower the imprisoned to break generational cycles and reclaim their individual narratives; they also provide opportunities for those outside prison walls to see the value and creative potential of all human beings.
Join us for a panel discussion with the inspirational leaders of art programs for imprisoned people. We’ll explore how museums and other cultural and academic institutions can destigmatize and center incarcerated voices in the public sphere and elevate all forms of experience and knowledge.
Panelists will include Bidhan Roy, co-founder of WordsUncaged and Faculty Director of CSULA’s Bachelor of Arts program at Lancaster State Prison; Tobias Tubbs, spoken word artist, former inmate, and co-founder of WordsUncaged; Fabian Debora, Executive Director of Somos L.A. Arte – Homeboy Art Academy; and Jahanna Blunt, Program Director of Rhythm Arts Alliance. Conversation will be moderated by Amy Landau, Director of Education and Interpretation at the Fowler Museum.
With days left before the November election, the panel will conclude with a spoken word performance by Tobias Tubbs, “When I’m President.”
Share the Mic
The Fowler believes in the civic duty of museums to give forum to different points of view and is committed to amplifying the voices and concerns of Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized people. This series offers a platform to thought leaders—artists, activists, and allies—who are guiding us along the arc of justice.
Tobias Tubbs - "When I'm President"In this performance, excerpted from the Fowler's "Share the Mic: Incarcerated Arts" program, spoken word artist Tobias Tubbs presents his newest monologue.
Curator’s Choice: Mystical RomanticismLegends have long told of fantastic beasts and unexplained phenomena. On Catalina Island, located off the coast of Los Angeles, stories of Nephilim, giants, hollowed earth portals, ancient aliens, and white Indians have obscured the actual 10,000+ year history of the Tongva people on Pimungna (as they call Catalina). The Pimu Catalina Island Archaeology Project was founded in 2007 to counteract the deep lack of understanding about Tongva history, the Indigenous people of the Los Angeles basin, and the four Southern Channel Islands. Panelists will share some of their favorite experiences on and historical documents about Catalina Island, and will unpack the implications of its legends.
Panelists will include Pimu Catalina Island Archaeology Project Co-Director Wendy Giddens Teeter, Curator of Archaeology, Fowler Museum at UCLA; Desiree R. Martinez (Tongva) President, Cogstone Resource Management; and Karimah Kennedy Richardson, Associate Curator, Autry Museum of the American West.
This program is co-presented by Catalina Island Museum.
Curator’s Choice
Join museum curators for lively conversations about their passions and projects that inspire audiences to engage with different world views and find joy in the diversity of human experiences.
DISRUPT the Fowler: Denisse Ariana PérezDenisse is a DISRUPTOR in the field of photography. Her work, such as the Men in Water series, addresses the fluidity of the masculine identity. Denisse identifies herself as a “people photographer” and provokes her viewers to dive deep and challenge the public consciousness. By depicting a vulnerable balance between her subjects and their environments, Denisse rewrites the narrative surrounding the idea of masculinity.
Denisse Ariana Pérez is a Caribbean-born, Copenhagen-based copywriter and photographer. Her photographic work gives “a face to culture,” highlighting the beauty of marginalized groups she feels inspired by and connected to, such as Afro and LGBTQI+ communities. Her photography has been featured in a variety of publications, including The Guardian, El Pais, VICE, Afropunk, Dazed, Ignant, Marie Claire, and Accent Magazine. Denisse currently works as a freelance Senior Creative and is represented by Probation Agency London as a photographer worldwide.
DISRUPT the Fowler
DISRUPT is a UCLA student design organization that aims to establish inclusive spaces and create opportunities for students of all backgrounds to engage in creative collaborations. The Fowler is honored to partner with DISRUPT to offer programs that break down barriers in the art world, and promote innovative ideation through inclusivity, diversity, equity, and accessibility.
Soy CubanaThis program has been modified from the original recording
Mix yourself a mojito and join us for a special screening of Soy Cubana. This award-winning short documentary features the Vocal Vidas, a female Cuban a cappella quartet whose infectious spirit and precise vocal harmonies embody the sounds of Santiago de Cuba—the cradle of Afro-Cuban music. A post-screening program will include a conversation between Producer Robin Miller Ungar and Afro-Cuban pianist, composer, and arranger Dayramir Gonzales, followed by an appearance by the Vocal Vidas.
This program is co-presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Robin Miller Ungar, a speech-language pathologist, found the subject for her first film when she encountered the Vocal Vidas in a small chapel in Santiago de Cuba. Soy Cubana (2015) screened at 60 film festivals in 2016-17, winning audience awards and jury prizes around the world. Ungar’s second short, As We Are (2020), documents a concert in which autistic musicians collaborate with music students and professionals in their Maryland community.
Dayramir Gonzalez began his professional career as a pianist and composer with the Afro-Cuban jazz ensemble Diákara at the age of 16. Since winning 1st place in the performance and composition categories at Havana’s JoJazz festival in 2004 and 2005 respectively, Dayramir has won three Cubadisco awards—for Best Jazz Album, Best Debut Album, and Best Recording. He was selected as Berklee College of Music’s first Cuban national “Presidential Scholarship” recipient; and has headlined at Carnegie Hall, representing the young generation of Afro-Cuban jazz.
Lunch & Learn: Joli: A Masquerade of HopeThis spectacular headdress was created by young artists who emigrated from the countryside of Sierra Leone to the capital of Freetown after the country gained independence from the British in 1961. Charitable organizations in the city, such as the Joli Society, offered food, shelter, a variety of guided activities, and, most of all—hope, to help migrants adjust to urban life. Join the Fowler’s Curatorial and Research Associate Gassia Armenian to learn about Joli headdresses from the outside in, and discover what they can tell us about the blending of cultural influences and peoples in Freetown.
Gassia Armenian is the Curatorial and Research Associate and Editorial Assistant at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, where she conducts collections research to facilitate curatorial and scholarly endeavors. She also liaises with domestic and international institutional and private collectors and lenders to the Fowler, and manages various aspects of planning and organizing museum exhibitions. Ms. Armenian has helped to mount many exhibitions at the Fowler over the past 20 years. Prior to that, she served as a Consultant/Project Coordinator at the U.S. Agency for International Development for Junior Achievement of Armenia, where she developed and implemented civics-education training programs and teaching methodologies.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons: Ma'am SirRecognized by MICHELIN as one of LA’s best restaurants, Ma’am Sir was a labor of love of Filipino chef Charles Olalia. Ma’am Sir dishes embody the energy of a “Filipino party in urban Manila,” in which the party, the vibe, the family, and the congregation of people are exemplified by food prepared from the heart. Join the Fowler and Chef Charles to say “paalam” (goodbye) to the celebrated restaurant which just announced it is closing its doors. Learn how to prepare Ma’am Sir’s famous Lumpia (Filipino spring rolls) and Vegetable Pancit (a traditional Filipino dish made with rice noodles).
Please note: the lumpia recipe calls for several steps to be done in advance – make sure you review and give yourself time to prepare steps 1-3 before joining the Zoom class.
Chef Charles recommends these markets:
Seafood City - 134-140 S Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90004
Lax C - 1100 N Main St, Los Angeles, CA 90012
American Ranch & Seafood Market - 1001 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90029
Temple Seafood Market - 2422 W Temple St, Los Angeles, CA 90026
Equipment Needed
Stove top
2 medium mixing bowls
2 large mixing bowl
1 small bowl
Cutting board
Chef knife
Plastic wrap
Whisk
Deep fryer OR 4qt Dutch oven (OR similar saucepan with tall sides)
Tongs
Brush
Paper Towels
10in sauté pan (non-stick or greased) OR Wok
Spatula
Optional: deep fry thermometer
Lumpia Ingredients
• ½ teaspoon light soy sauce
• ½ teaspoon cornstarch
• 1 ½ teaspoons granulated sugar
• ½ teaspoon kosher salt
• Pinch of ground white pepper
• ¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon vegetable oil, plus more for frying
• 8 cups shredded green cabbage
• 1 cup coarsely grated carrots
• 1 cup thinly sliced scallions
• 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
• 30 sheets (8-inch-square) spring roll wrappers, preferably TYJ brand
• 1 large egg white
• Cracked Pepper Coconut Vinegar Sauce (see recipe below), for serving
Lumpia Instructions – Prepare In Advance!
1. Mix the soy sauce, cornstarch, sugar, salt, white pepper and Maggi, if using, in a medium bowl. Pour half the marinade into another medium bowl. Put the pork in one and the shrimp in the other. Mix each well, then cover with plastic wrap and marinate in the refrigerator for 1 hour.
2. Meanwhile, heat ¼ cup oil in a wok or large skillet over high heat. When the oil starts to smoke, add the cabbage, carrots, scallions and a pinch of salt. Cook, stirring, until the vegetables wilt, 3 to 4 minutes. Transfer to a large bowl and refrigerate to chill. Rinse out and dry the wok.
3. After the pork and shrimp have marinated, heat 1 tablespoon vegetable oil in the wok over high heat until shimmering. Add the pork and cook, stirring to break into small bits, for 1 minute. Add the shrimp and cook, stirring, until opaque, about 30 seconds. Remove from the heat and stir in the sesame oil. Transfer to the bowl with the vegetables and stir until well mixed. The filling should be cool or room temperature. If it’s hot, refrigerate to cool.
Make ahead: The filling can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 3 days.
Cracked Coconut Vinegar Sauce Ingredients
• 1 cup coconut vinegar
• 6 garlic cloves, crushed and peeled
• 1 piece (½ inch) fresh ginger, smashed
• ¼ cup sliced Thai chiles
• 1 ½ teaspoons cracked black pepper
Pancit Bihon Ingredients
• 1 lb pancit bihon Rice Noodles (possible substitutes: thin rice noodle stick vermicelli or angel hair pasta)
• 1 cup carrot, julienned
• 1/2 green cabbage chopped, julienned
• 1 cup celery, chopped finely
• 1 medium sized onion chopped
• 1/2 tbsp garlic minced
• 5 tbsp soy sauce
• 3 to 4 cups water
• 1 fresh lemon juice to taste
DISRUPT the Fowler: Lauren Lee McCarthyLauren Lee McCarthy is a DISRUPTOR in tech and academia. An artist and computer programmer, she creates work that invites deep examination of the intimate relationship between technology and human behavior. Lauren actively creates opportunities for WOC, mixed-race, and under-represented groups to present their work in new media fine art spaces, increasing accessibility and visibility for these artists within the art industry. Her development of P5.JS, an open source platform for learning creative expression through code, is a testament to her continuous effort to disrupt the patriarchal systems within the realms of technology.
Lauren Lee McCarthy (she/they) is Associate Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. An LA-based artist, she examines social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living through a variety of media and techniques, including performance, artificial intelligence, and programmed computer-based interaction. She has received numerous honors, including a Creative Capital Award, Ars Electronica Golden Nica, Sundance Fellowship, Eyebeam Fellowship, and grants from the Knight Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google, and Rhizome.
A Global Destination for Art: CRYPTIKCRYPTIK’s signature calligraphy appears in massive public artworks across the globe, creating everyday sacred spaces intended to reconnect us with the sacred within ourselves. CRYPTIK coined the term “mantradala”—an exploration of how art can be used as a tool for meditation, introspection, and trance induction—to help us understand our connection to one another, the planet, and the universe. Join the Fowler for a rare peek into the extremely private artist’s studio and garden, and learn about the diverse philosophies and ancient wisdom traditions that inspire him.
CRYPTIK, a Korean-born artist based in Los Angeles, creates works of art that explore the realm of spirituality, consciousness, and our connection to the divine. He is best known for his signature style of calligraphy, which employs his own stylized version of English. It reflects a time when writing itself was considered sacred and draws inspiration from some of the world’s oldest writing systems. His is a language of universality, a singular human script.
Intersections: Gender Equity and Anti-Racism at the Ballot BoxFacing the triple threats of a global pandemic, economic recession, and racism, womxn have taken to the frontlines, advocating for change. In this historic election year, the Fowler Museum has partnered with TIME’S UP to bring together leaders in the fight for gender equity and ending racism. Panelists will discuss crucial issues at the intersection of racial and gender identity that impact womxn daily, including equitable pay, caregiving, and protection for vulnerable families.
Join us for a conversation with Jess Morales Rocketto, Civic Engagement Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Executive Director of Care in Action; Marya Bangee, Executive Director at Harness, an organization that works within Hollywood to center the narratives of marginalized communities in popular culture; visual artist Ashley Lukashevsky; Sarah Eagle Heart, social justice storyteller and CEO of Return to the Heart Foundation, an Indigenous women-led grantmaking organization; and Aditi Fruitwala, staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California for the LGBTQ, Gender, and Reproductive Justice Project. The conversation will be moderated Angie Jean-Marie, Director of Public Engagement at TIME’S UP.
Bharatanatyam Abhinaya: Emotion through Gesture with Arushi SinghBharatanatyam is a dance form originally practiced by hereditary performers and ritual officiants in Bahujan communities in pre-colonial Southern India. Globally recognized as one of the eight “classical” Indian dances, Bharatanatyam was reconstructed in the early and mid-20th century as part of India’s nationalist movement against colonial rule. In this class, you will have a chance to explore two elements of Bharatanatyam abhinaya (art of expression): hastas (hand gestures) and bhava (the emotional state embodied by the performer). No experience is necessary.
Arushi Singh is a Ph.D. Candidate and Teaching Fellow in Culture and Performance at UCLA Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance. Her research interests lie at the intersection of South Asian performance histories and political economies of cultural production. Arushi is a trained Bharatanatyam dancer, with a performance career spanning more than a decade. She has also collaborated on multiple interdisciplinary and intercultural art projects in India and Los Angeles. Arushi is currently a guest editor for a special issue of Race & Yoga, the first peer-reviewed journal in the field of critical yoga studies, entitled “South Asian Perspectives on Yoga.”
The Ancestors of AtaúroThis pair of Ancestor figures—created by an unknown sculptor on Ataúro Island, Timor-Leste in the early to mid-20th century and known in the Tetum language as itara—was intended to honor family members who had passed away. Joanna Barrkman, Senior Curator of Southeast Asia and Pacific Arts at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, will explain the significance of these sculptures, aspects of their production, and their ritual uses. She will also present an original short video showing Atauroan master sculptor Antonio Soares creating a pair of itara.
Joanna Barrkman’s research interests relate to the island of Timor—both West Timor, Indonesia, and the independent nation of Timor-Leste. She has curated the exhibition Sculptures of Atauro Island at Charles Darwin University Art Gallery (2017) and authored the accompanying publication (republished tri-lingually in 2019). She also co-curated Textiles of Timor: Island in the Woven Sea at the Fowler Museum (2014) and co-edited the eponymous publication with Roy W. Hamilton. In addition, Barrkman curated Husi Bei Ala Timor Sira Nia Liman: From the Hands of Our Ancestors, a major exhibition about the arts of Timor-Leste presented by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, which featured the National Collection of Timor-Leste (2009). Recently, with support from UNESCO, Barrkman developed a website about the Baguia Collection, held at the Museum der Kulturen, Basel, Switzerland, based on her doctoral studies at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her current exhibition, Aboriginal Screen-Printed Textiles from Australia’s Top End, will be presented at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2021 and will be accompanied by an eponymous publication.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons: Jitlada Thai RestaurantIf you’re an LA local, you probably already know about Jitlada. The late, great food critic Jonathan Gold featured this Southern Thai restaurant in his documentary City of Gold, while Bon Appétit declared it is: “definitely the best Thai food in L.A., and likely the whole country.” Join the Fowler Museum, Chef Jazz, and Chef Sugar for a home-style cooking class and learn to prepare Jitlada’s famous Chili Basil Stir-Fry with Tofu and Fried Rice. Ingredients list will be sent upon RSVP. Come with supplies prepared and ready to cook!
Chef Jazz is famous as the Celebrity Chef at Jitlada Thai Restaurant. A native of a small town in Thailand, she emigrated to the U.S. and took over Jitlada in 2006 with her late brother, Tui Sungkamee, transforming the restaurant with a spicy southern Thai cuisine menu. She now runs the business with her niece, Chef Sugar Sungkamee, Chef Tui’s daughter.
Chef Sugar Sungkamee grew up in the restaurant business under the tutelage of her late father, Chef Tui, who taught her all the recipes as well as how to run his establishment. Chef Sugar earned her Master’s Degree in Business Administration and now co-owns Jitlada Thai Restaurant with her aunt, Chef Jazz.
Galia Linn’s Cognitive Resonance with Shana Nys DambrotSculptor and site-specific installation artist Galia Linn is influenced by her early childhood in Israel, a land full of ancient and contemporary relics of past and present civilizations. Linn’s work engages both her physical body and the emotional and historical resonance of her life through manipulation of materials. What appears fragile is, in the end, rock strong; the cracks turn into windows that reveal the internal makeup of the vessels, metaphors for resilience and beauty, and serve as a testament of surrender. Linn will offer a behind-the-scenes look at works in progress at her Blue Roof Studios, while conducting a conversation with art critic, curator, and author Shana Nys Dambrot. Q&A will follow.
Galia Linn has shown nationally and internationally. Her work is held in private collections in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, New York, Paris, Brussels, and Tel Aviv. Selected solo and group exhibitions include: Note To Self at Five Car Garage Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Evidence Of Care at Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; La Reina De Los Angeles, Descanso Gardens, CA; Inside at The Athenaeum, La Jolla, CA; Art Beyond Conflict, a year-long installation in Bellingham, WA; Experience 19: Touch, El Segundo Museum of Art, El Segundo, CA; Uncommon Terrain, Shulamit Nazarian Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Clay, Lefebvre et Fils, Paris, France; and Vessels at LA>
DISRUPT the Fowler: Justin BUATo put it simply, Justin BUA is a DISRUPTOR. BUA’s groundbreaking work seamlessly blends street culture with the fine arts, documenting the collective memories of HipHop culture. BUA reaches beyond the traditional canvas, applying his discipline to music videos, TV, film, animation, gaming, apparel, education, and more. BUA’s countless achievements are indicative of his ceaseless commitment to bridge his identity and culture to the fine arts world. BUA will share advice and anecdotes from his experiences of navigating the art industry as an artist of color. He will then offer a drawing technique workshop to help sharpen the skills of budding artists. Q&A to follow.
Justin BUA is an award-winning artist, author, speaker, and entrepreneur. Groundbreaking in his field, he is internationally known for his best-selling collection of fine art posters—The DJ being one of the most popular prints of all time.
Born in 1968 in NYC’s untamed Upper West Side, and raised between Manhattan and East Flatbush, Brooklyn, BUA was fascinated by the raw, visceral street life of the city. He attended the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Performing Arts, and complemented his formal education with street experience, creating graffiti and performing worldwide with breakdancing crews. BUA went on to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he earned his B.F.A. degree. He taught figure drawing at the University of Southern California for 10 years.
In June 2013, BUA became the first artist to launch an online school with ArtistWorks, enabling beginning and advanced students around the world to study his curriculum and interact one-on-one with him through video exchange.
BUA exhibits throughout the United States and internationally—including in recent shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Pop International Gallery, New York. His energetic and vocal worldwide fan base ranges from former presidents, actors, musicians, professional athletes, and dancers, to street kids and art connoisseurs.
Classic Bollywood Dance! with Danish Bhandara“Bollywood” refers to the Hindi-speaking film industry in India that produces movies with vibrant music-dance sequences. Classic Bollywood Dance features movements derived from Classical as well as Folk Indian dance styles: lively and dramatic, with sharp and flowing movements, articulation of specific hand and wrist gestures, and graceful spins. The face, too, is used to convey emotions and tell a story. Classic Bollywood Dance can express a range of feelings, but in this class, you will be learning a joyful, fun-filled piece! No experience necessary.
Danish Bhandara has been training in Classical Indian, Bollywood, and Middle Eastern dance forms for more than 12 years; and graduated from UCLA in 2017 with a B.A. degree and Honors in World Arts and Cultures/Dance. While at UCLA, she was part of the Visual and Performing Arts Education Program; taught at and choreographed for various schools, including LAUSD, as well as studios, shelters, and colleges. She has performed at Disney California Adventures and Disney Animal Kingdom with Blue13 Dance Company, and has worked with many other well-accredited choreographers and artists in Hollywood.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons: Guerrilla TacosIf you’re looking for an adventurous, inventive take on street tacos, Guerrilla Tacos in the Arts District is the place to go. This restaurant, which had humble beginnings as a food truck, was recently included in the first-ever 2019 MICHELIN Bib Gourmand restaurant list for Los Angeles. Join us and Chef de Cuisine Steve Londono to learn how to make their famous Cauliflower Tacos with Molcajete Salsa. Ingredients list will be sent upon RSVP. Come with supplies prepared, and ready to cook!
Chef de Cuisine Steve Londono had the privilege to work for Leah Cohan from PIG AND KHAO, Cosme Aguilar at CASA ENRiQUE (where they received a Michelin Star), and Chef Max MNG at SSAM BAR by momofuku. He stumbled upon a documentary called “The Migrant Kitchen,” which featured an interview with Chef Wes Avila, founder of Guerrilla Tacos. Steve sent in his resume and started on day two of opening, working his way up from prep cook to Chef de Cuisine.
Global Cuisine Cooking Lessons: Variety is the spice of life. Learn how LA’s favorite international restaurants cook up their most famous, easy-to-make dishes in live cooking classes led by their chefs on Zoom. When food is your love language, some secrets are too good not to share.
The Abstract Language of Memory: Refik Anadol StudioJoin Refik Anadol, internationally recognized media artist and UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts’ Visiting Researcher, for a live virtual tour of his lab in Frogtown. Refik will give us a behind the scenes look at his Artificial Intelligence research and the tools he has created to enable machines to learn from pools of data and visually dream by creating data paintings. He will also share his progress on neuro-scientific projects that seek to find and duplicate the moment of human memory recollection. Finally, we will have the unique opportunity to accompany Refik into his Infinity Room, an immersive space created through quantum computing. Q&A will follow.
Dancing with Death: Patrick A. Polk on Papa Gede and Hatian Vodou BannersPatrick A. Polk, Curator of Latin American and Caribbean Popular Arts, discusses a remarkable Haitian Vodou ritual banner (drapo) dedicated to Papa Guede, patriarch of a family of Vodou divinities associated with death and resurrection. Exuberantly clicking his heels beside a funereal skull and crossbones, Guede epitomizes the temporality of the flesh and the eternality of the spirit.
Patrick A. Polk is Curator of Latin American and Caribbean Popular Arts at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and also serves as a lecturer for the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion. His research interests focus on Latin American and Caribbean ritual and aesthetic systems, global popular culture, and urban visual traditions. Exhibitions he has curated include “Botánica Los Angeles: Latino Popular Religious Art in the City of Angels” (2004), “In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art” (2012), “Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis” (2017-2018), and “Guatemalan Masks: The Jim and Jeanne Pieper Collection” (2019). His writings on drapo Vodou include the monography Haitian Vodou Flags (1997) and the essays “Sacred Banners and the Divine Cavalry Charge” in “Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou” (1995) and “Remember You Must Die!: Gede Banners, Memento Mori, and the Fine Art of Facing Death” in “In Extremis” (2012).
World Movement: Space, Place and Visions with Jack IronstoneExplore Tibetan improvisational techniques that enhance sensory awareness. Barbara Dilley’s Five Eye Practices expands a dancer’s use of the eyes during improvisation. Dana Reitz’s Space and Place thesis asks a dancer to “listen” to their space and respond with their entire body. Let’s move together to feel free!
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Jack Ironstone (he/she/they) began their formal dance education at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. After attending the Juilliard School, they finished their degree as a graduate of the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures with a minor in Visual and Performing Arts Education. As a choreographer for queer, non-binary pop artists such as Dorian Electra, they border the commercial and experimental worlds of art-making to embrace the full spectrum of human existence.
Queer Latinx Arts in LADocumentation of "Queer Latinx Arts in LA" with Alma López Gaspar de Alba and Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Recorded June 23, 2020.
Join artist Alma López Gaspar de Alba and her partner, UCLA Professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba, for a conversation tracing queer Angeleno artists’ contributions to contemporary art. Their discussion will highlight the couple’s most recent artistic collaboration, which explores the controversial life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the 17th-century Mexican nun, philosopher, composer, poet, and advocate for women.
Alma López Gaspar de Alba is a Mexican-born queer Chicana artist who has lived in Los Angeles since she was four years old. Her art often portrays historical and cultural Mexican figures filtered through a radical Chicana feminist lesbian lens. Alma’s work aims to empower women, queers, and indigenous identities through her reappropriation of Mexican symbols and icons. She earned her M.F.A. at U.C. Irvine in 1996, and is currently Assistant Professor in Residence at the UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and UCLA’s LGBTQ Studies Program. Her website is almalopez.com.
Professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba is a scholar-activist with a Ph.D. in American Studies. Hired in 1994, Alicia is a founding faculty member and former Chair of the UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies (2007-10). She also chaired the LGBTQ Studies Program from 2013-19. Alicia has published 12 books, among them award-winning novels and academic volumes. Her research areas include Chicana/o art and culture, gendered violence on the U.S.-Mexico border, and Chicana feminist lesbian theory and literature. For more information, go to aliciagaspardealba.net.
Introduction to AfrikFusion/VogueAfrik Documentation of "Introduction to AfrikFusion/VogueAfrik" with Omari Wiles of The House of Nina Oricci and Les Ballet Afrik. Recorded June 20, 2020
Omari Wiles combines voguing and ballroom with West African and contemporary dance to create AfrikFusion. Participants will learn basic vogue moves, including catwalk, duckwalk, floor performance, spins and dips, and hand performance. No dance experience is necessary. Following the lesson, Wiles will lead a discussion identifying the stylistic influences from African and Latin cultures on VogueAfrik.
Omari Wiles is the legendary founder of The House of Nina Oricci and Creative Director of Les Ballet Afrik. He began his training in African dance forms at the age of six, and in his teens took on the role as Assistant Director of The Maimouna Ketia School of African Dance, established by his family. Omari worked with master African dancers, and his understanding of African cultures, rhythms, and dance has been his foundation.
Omari will be assisted by Shireen Rahimi, a first-generation Iranian-American dancer from the Bay Area. Shireen is one of the first company members of Les Ballet Afrik and also works as Omari’s right-hand assistant. Shireen has been a part of the Underground ballroom scene for 10 years representing Women’s Vogue.
A Prayer for the Runner by Patrisse CullorsLive Performance by Patrisse Cullors, followed by a talk-back with Melina Abdullah
The premiere of Patrisse Cullors’ newest performance piece, a public act of mourning centered on a prayer she co-wrote with Damon Turner, prompted by the modern-day lynching of Ahmaud Arbery. Talk-back to follow with Melina Abdullah, touching on grief, parent-child relationships, and healing.
“This piece takes us through ritual, prayer, and ancestry. Black death, trauma, and pain are age-old crises. Our bodies have been used as sacrifice. How do we manage? What role does collective prayer have and how can it inspire our healing?” – Patrisse Cullors
Patrisse Cullors is one of the most important artistic voices of our time. Her work lies at the intersection of activism, performance art, and queer identity. Internationally respected as the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, the seminal civil rights movement in recent U.S. history, Cullors has also revolutionized the American incarceration system through her initiative, Reform L.A Jails, which successfully advocated for the release of California’s inmates in response to the threat of COVID-19.
Melina Abdullah is Professor and former Chair of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, founder of the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter, and a mother of three.
For more visit: https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/at-home/pride-fowler/
Rina Banerjee on Contagion, Aversion, and Humanity
Virtual Studio Visit: Jemima WymanMany of the exceptional artists the Contemporary Council has visited are making short videos to give us a special behind-the-scenes look at current projects they are working on. In the height of the pandemic, they all have very different stories to tell and we look forward to sharing them with you.
Culture Fix: Betty Seid on Rina BanerjeeWe are bringing our "Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World" exhibition and programming to you!
Enjoy our first online Culture Fix with Independent Curator Betty Seid. Our Culture Fix series offers brief explorations of exhibition objects.
Betty Seid is an independent curator, writer, and lecturer. From 1995 to 2005, she was Research Associate and Exhibition Coordinator for South Asian Art in the Department of Asian Art of The Art Institute of Chicago. During her ten-year tenure, she curated and oversaw the installation of several important South Asian exhibitions. Her exhibition, "New Narratives: Contemporary Art" from India, was the first to show 21st-century Indian art in the United States. Most recently, she curated "Alteration Activation Abstraction" for New York’s Sundaram Tagore Gallery in 2019. As a specialist in South Asian art, Seid gives private museum tours, and has participated in symposia in both the U.S. and India.
Image support generously provided by LA Louver.
Culture Fix: Marla C. Berns on Rina BanerjeeWe are bringing our "Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World" exhibition and programming to you! Our Culture Fix series offers brief explorations of exhibition objects.
Enjoy our second online Culture Fix with Marla C. Berns, Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director of The Fowler Museum at UCLA.
Marla C. Berns has served as the Shirley and Ralph Shapiro Director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA since 2001. Her publishing and curatorial work has concentrated on women’s arts of Northeastern Nigeria and encompasses ceramic sculpture, decorated gourds, programs of body scarification, and issues of gender and identity. Berns served as the lead curator of the major international traveling exhibition, "Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley," which premiered at the Fowler in 2011. She also was co-editor and author of its accompanying publication, which won the 2014 ACASA (Arts Council of the African Studies Association) Arnold Rubin Book Award. She is project director and co-curator of the international traveling exhibition, "Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths," which opened at the Fowler in June 2018 and is currently at the musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. It received the Award for Curatorial Excellence in 2019 from the Association of Art Museum Curators. In 2013 Berns received the medal of chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.
Culture Fix: Nayan Shah and Candace Browne on Rina BanerjeeWe are bringing the exhibition and our programming to you! Our digital Culture Fix series offers brief explorations of exhibition objects.
Enjoy this Culture Fix with USC Professor Nayan Shah and Great Grandaughter of Viola Ida Lewis, Candace Browne.
Nayan Shah is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History at USC. He is a historian with expertise in 19th and 20th century Asian American history and author of a book on South Asian migrants and their interracial relationships on the Pacific Coast and Southwest: Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West (University of California Press, 2011).
Become a Fowler Member!For more information visit https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/membership/
Music: "Daydream" by Podington Bear
Walkthrough of Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the WorldTo learn more visit https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/rina-banerjee/
The Map and the Territory: 100 Years of Collecting at UCLADid you know? UCLA has collected over 14 million objects, including rare books, art works, films, musical instruments, and even birds and meteorites! Much of UCLA’s vast collection has never been seen by the public… until now!
In celebration of UCLA’s Centennial, a major exhibition led by the Fowler Museum in partnership with the Hammer Museum and the UCLA Libraries will share with the public, as never before, the wonderfully diverse collections of UCLA.
Visit spark.ucla.edu/UCLACOLLECTS to learn how to help make this exhibition a reality!
Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the WorldDecember 8, 2019 – May 31, 2020
Make Me a Summary of the World brings together several of Banerjee’s monumental installations in conversation with more than two dozen sculptures, as well as a thorough selection of works on paper to create an otherworldly and multi-sensory space. Using a variety of gathered materials ranging from African tribal jewelry to colorful feathers, light bulbs, and Murano glass, Banerjee’s works investigate the splintered experiences of identity, tradition, and culture, prevalent in diasporic communities. These sensuous assemblages present themselves simultaneously as familiar and unfamiliar, thriving on tensions between visual cultures and raising questions about exoticism, cultural appropriation, globalization, and feminism.
Learn more at:
https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/rina-banerjee/
India's Subterranean Stepwells: Photographs by Victoria LautmanStepwells are structures unique to India, built at least as early as 600 CE. They are magnificent feats of architectural and engineering ingenuity found most commonly across the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan and stretching to Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
For the past 30 years, Victoria Lautman has visited and photographed more than 200 stepwells. This selection of 48 photographs surveys 16 sites built between the 9th and 18th centuries.
Exhibition on view at the Fowler until October 20, 2019.
For more information, visit:
https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/indian-stepwells/
Music credit:
"Beat 60" by Shahed
instagram.com/imshahed
Guatemalan Masks: Selections from the Jim and Jeanne Pieper CollectionApril 7 – October 6, 2019
Traditional Guatemalan dance-dramas come to life in a vivid installation of 80 wood masks depicting animals, folk personae, and historical figures that are deeply rooted in Guatemalan religiosity and popular culture. With some examples dating back a century or more, the masks offer insights into how the dances articulate community identities.
See more at:
https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/guatemalan-masks/
Music credit: "Touching Down" by Scott Nice
Inheritance: Recent Video Art from Africa (February 17 – July 28, 2019)This exhibition features video works by contemporary African artists who are contending with inherited political, social, and environmental realities in their respective countries. The artists—Kudzanai Chiurai (b. 1981, Zimbabwe), Zina Saro-Wiwa (b. 1976, Nigeria), and Mikhael Subotzky (b. 1981, South Africa)—grapple with the ramifications of colonial legacies.
https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/inheritance/
Music credit: "Switchin' Lanes" by Yung Kartz
Fowler Museum Year in Review 2018
South of No North: Gato Negro EdicionesVideo by León Muñoz Santini
South of No North: Gato Negro Ediciones
Exhibition at the Fowler Museum opening July 22, 2018.
For more information visit:
https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/gato-negro-ediciones/
South of No North: Gato Negro EdicionesVideo by León Muñoz Santini
South of No North: Gato Negro Ediciones
Exhibition at the Fowler Museum opening July 22, 2018.
For more information visit:
https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/gato-negro-ediciones/
STRIKING IRON: SOUNDING MBIRAWatch the Shona peoples of Zimbabwe play a Lamellophone or "mbira".
For more information visit: https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/striking-iron/
STRIKING IRON: SOUNDING BELLSWatch the making and playing of iron bells.
For more information visit: https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/striking-iron/
STRIKING IRON: OSHELEWatch Striking Iron curator Tom Joyce describe this currency blade or "oshele".
For more information visit: https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/striking-iron/
Video produced by Peter Kirby for the Fowler Museum at UCLA
STRIKING IRON: LIGANDA DOAWatch Striking Iron curator Tom Joyce describe this currency blade known as "liganda doa".
For more information visit: https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/striking-iron/
Video produced by Peter Kirby for the Fowler Museum at UCLA
STRIKING IRON: IGBO STAFFWatch Striking Iron curator Tom Joyce describe this titled man's staff from the Igbo peoples in Nigeria.
For more information visit: https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/striking-iron/
Video produced by Peter Kirby for the Fowler Museum at UCLA
STRIKING IRON: ASENWatch Striking Iron curator Tom Joyce describe this ancestral altar or "asen".
For more information visit: https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/striking-iron/
Video produced by Peter Kirby for the Fowler Museum at UCLA
STRIKING IRON: DOKWAZA: LAST OF THE AFRICAN IRON MASTERSWatch an archival documentary film profiling Dokwaza, a master African blacksmith.
For more information visit: https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/striking-iron/
STRIKING IRON: FORGINGWatch Striking Iron curator Tom Joyce describe the practice of forging iron in Africa.
For more information visit: https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/striking-iron/
Video produced by Peter Kirby for the Fowler Museum at UCLA
STRIKING IRON: ORISA OKOWatch Striking Iron curator Tom Joyce describe this staff called by the Yoruba peoples of Nigeria "opa Orisa Oko"
For more information visit: https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/striking-iron/
Video produced by Peter Kirby for the Fowler Museum at UCLA
Protecting Global Arts EducationProtect Cultural & Arts Education
with the Fowler Museum at UCLA
https://spark.ucla.edu/FowlerArts
Global education exposes young people to different ways of viewing the world.
For many students, school field trips to the Fowler Museum are one of the few—if only—opportunities to interact with art that mirrors their sense of self, providing affirmation of their culture and lineage in our shared community. Without the support of generous donors like you, we would not be able to sustain or grow these award-winning educational programs.
Most teachers lack sufficient resources to integrate the arts, let alone global arts, into 1st–6th grade classrooms as mandated by the California education code. The Fowler strives to bridge this critical gap in services by offering teacher workshops, free field trips, and subsidized bus transportation for the most underserved K-12 public schools in the district.
https://spark.ucla.edu/FowlerArts
Ayrson Heráclito Popcorn CeremonyBrazilian artist Ayrson Heráclito performs a Candomblé ritual blessing with popcorn on opening night of "Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis" (September 24, 2017–April 15, 2018) at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
Eder Muniz paints his mural "A força que habita em mim," 2017Brazilian artist Eder Muniz speaks about his work on view in "Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis" (September 24, 2017–April 15, 2018) at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
Eder Muniz (b. 1982, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil)
A força que habita em mim/The Force that Resides Within Me, 2017
Aerosol paint, varnish, wood
fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/axe-bahia
Music" "Jahnoy" by Med Dred
Caetano Dias: The Making of "Cabecas de Acucar"See behind-the-scenes of footage of artist Caetano Dias producing his "Cabecas de Acucar" works. Dias is a featured artist in the Fowler's exhibition Axe Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazillian Metropolis. See more at https://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/axe-bahia/
Organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in association with Vlisco Netherlands B.V.
Exhibition is guest curated by Suzanne Gott with Kristyne S. Loughran, Betsy D. Quick, and Leslie W. Rabine.
Featured works:
Docta (Amadou Lamine Ngom), artist and designer (b. Senegal)
Docta Wear, based in Dakar, Senegal
Tombouctou, 2013
Graffiti wax appliqué on canvas
Deep Dakart (Mame Mor Diba), artist and designer (b. Senegal)
Mizérables Grafff, based in Dakar, Senegal
Hoodie and T-shirt, 2016
African-print cloth
Big Key (Thierno Moussa Sane), artist and designer (b. Senegal, 1981)
Based in Dakar, Senegal
Appliqué and graffiti T-shirt and jeans, 2014
Diablos (Maguette Traore), artist and designer (b. Senegal, 1989)
Doxkatt, based in Dakar, Senegal
Hand-painted T-shirt and print chaya (traditional baggy pants), 2013
African-print cloth
African-Print Fashion Now!: Designer Titi AdemolaDesigner Titi Ademola of Kiki Clothing
https://kikiclothing.com/
African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style
March 26–July 30, 2017
Organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in association with Vlisco Netherlands B.V.
Exhibition is guest curated by Suzanne Gott with Kristyne S. Loughran, Betsy D. Quick, and Leslie W. Rabine.
Organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in association with Vlisco Netherlands B.V.
Exhibition is guest curated by Suzanne Gott with Kristyne S. Loughran, Betsy D. Quick, and Leslie W. Rabine.
African-Print Fashion Now!: Designer Alexis TemomaninDesigner Alexis Temomanin of Dent de Man
http://www.dentdeman.com/
African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style
March 26–July 30, 2017
Organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in association with Vlisco Netherlands B.V.
Exhibition is guest curated by Suzanne Gott with Kristyne S. Loughran, Betsy D. Quick, and Leslie W. Rabine.
Alexis Temomanin, designer (b. Côte d’Ivoire)
Dent de Man, based in London, United Kingdom
Les Toiles d’araignée, man’s suit, designed 2014, produced 2016
Vlisco, the Netherlands; wax print
Alexis Temomanin, designer (b. Côte d’Ivoire)
Dent de Man, based in London, United Kingdom
Mangues, man’s suit, designed 2014, produced 2015
Vlisco, the Netherlands; Java print
Organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in association with Vlisco Netherlands B.V.
Exhibition is guest curated by Suzanne Gott with Kristyne S. Loughran, Betsy D. Quick, and Leslie W. Rabine.
Featured cloth:
Uniwax, Cote d’Ivoire, Yao Kouassi Norbert, designer
Aoulaba Tresse (Aoulaba ’s hairstyle), designed 1987
Wax print
Vlisco Museum, Foundation Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen, Helmond, the Netherlands.
PANTSULA: MOVEMENT AND SOUNDProduced by Chris Saunders
"Pantsula 4 LYF: Popular Dance and Fashion in Johannesburg"
January 29-May 7, 2017
For more information see:
http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/pantsula
Excerpts of a Performance by Bernard BrownBernard Brown performs in Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón.
For more information on the performance:
http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/events/fowler-out-loud-bernard-brown/
For more information on the exhibition:
http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/nkame-belkis-ayon/
Enduring Splendor - Hanuman Soni & Jasraj SoniEnduring Splendor exhibition co-curator Tom Seligman describes the process of producing a silver anklet.
For more on the exhibition see:
http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/enduring-splendor/
Belkis Ayón: A Documentary Video Work in ProgressThe late Cuban artist Belkis Ayón in her Havana studio.
video, color, 7 min 35 seconds /English, Havana, ca. 1998. Director: Yoland Skeete-Laessig. (produced by Hal Laessig and Yoland Skeete-Laessig)
Enduring Splendor: Khan Musicians, JaisalmerMusicians from Jaisalmer, India perform traditional music about the importance of jewelry in Indian culture.
For more information, see the Fowler's exhibition Enduring Splendor
http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/enduring-splendor/
Enduring Splendor: B.D. SoniEnduring Splendor co-curator Tom Seligman interviews the Indian silversmith B.D. Soni about his work
For more info on the exhibition see:
http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/enduring-splendor/
Austronesian MigrationAnimated map depicting the migration of the Austronesian peoples.
Poetry Reading: José Montoya, "Resonant Valley" (1969)Poet, novelist, and scholar Maceo Montoya reads José Montoya's 1969 poem "Resonant Valley."
For more information on the work of José Montoya visit http://fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/montoya
José Montoya’s Abundant Harvest: Works on Paper/Works on LifeChicano activist, poet, artist, intellectual, professor, and musician, José Montoya (1932-2013) was a veritable Renaissance man. Montoya often found inspiration in the verdant fields of the San Joaquin Valley where his family arrived from their home in New Mexico in the 1940s looking for work. The visual artist and poet humanized the farmworker and understood the backbreaking work of field labor from firsthand experience. A Chicano civil rights activist, he marched alongside Cesar Chavez and advanced the cause of the United Farm Workers movement to bring justice and dignity to agricultural laborers.
José Montoya’s Abundant Harvest honors the artist’s prolific work as well as his subject matter in this exhaustive and energetic survey that includes nearly 2,000 drawings along with paintings, poems, sketchbooks, video footage, music, and other ephemera. The works on paper will be displayed in nearly 100 boxes that evoke the flat containers and grape trays used to hold the Central Valley’s harvested fruit. The boxes will stand in long rows like the rows of grapevines in a vineyard, allowing visitors to walk freely among them and view their contents.
Alive and pulsating with the bebop rhythms of pachucos and pachucas, the Beatnik scene in the Bay Area, and sailors on leave in port cities, each curated box shows how Montoya captured the spirit of the times with his pen and pencil. The artist also documented some of the most important civil rights and labor movements of the 20th century.
SPIRITS IN THE LOOM: RELIGION AND DESIGN IN LAO-TAI TEXTILESThe intriguing Lao-Tai textiles in this exhibition were collected by Professor Ellison Banks Findly in northeastern Laos. These textiles, produced by Tai weavers, reflect religious and spiritual beliefs, incorporating Buddhist and Hindu mythology and shamanistic practices. Findly’s extensive research illuminates how women in these communities interpret the significance of the images, designs and materials in the textiles they produce and use.
A Fowler in Focus exhibition
Abundant Harvest Spark Campaign
Designing Treasured Textiles from the American Southwest: The Durango Collection®With Sebastian Clough, Director of Exhibitions at the Fowler Museum at UCLA
Disguise: Masks & Global African ArtOpening October 18, 2015
http://fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/disguise
Conserving "Pill-fill" (2011) by Vivan SundaramFowler Head of Conservation Christian De Brer discusses the work he did to conserve "Pill-fill" (2011) by Vivan Sundaram, on view in "Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem by Vivan Sundaram."
The Art of Hair in Africa: Combs that CommunicateAssistant Curator Erica Jones describes several combs with symbolic messages on view in the Fowler's current exhibition The Art of Hair in Africa.
The Art of Hair in Africa: Curator's Picks
The Art of Hair in Africa: Everyday CombsAssistant Curator Erica Jones takes us behind the scenes to the Fowler's Conservation lab in order to show us several African combs featured in the exhibition "The Art of Hair in Africa." This is the second in a series of videos focused on African combs.
The Art of Hair in Africa: Combs for PowerAssistant Curator Erica Jones takes us behind the scenes to the Fowler's Conservation lab in order to show us several African combs featured in the exhibition "The Art of Hair in Africa." This is the first of a series of videos focused on African combs.
Vivan Sundaram's "Making Strange" - April 19-September 6, 2015Check out some behind the scenes footage of legendary artist Vivan Sundaram installing his solo exhibition "Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem"
Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem by Vivan SundaramGo behind the scenes in Vivan Sundaram's New Delhi studio as he discusses the two bodies of work that will be on view at the Fowler in Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem by Vivan Sundaram.
2014
Directed by Pankaj Butalia
Full-length version. 15 minutes 48 seconds
http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/making-strange-gagawaka-postmortem-vivan-sundaram
Sahmat's LegacyWhat is Sahmat's legacy? What impact has it had on contemporary Indian society and artistic practice? Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
Ways of ResistingSahmat's exhibition Ways of Resisting spotlighted art made during a volatile decade of sectarian and communal violence in India, between the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid and the 2002 riots in Gujarat. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
Tribute to GandhiIn 1994-1995, Sahmat commemorated the 125th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birth with a yearlong series of events that invoked Gandhi's quest for a secular India, a sovereign nation, and universal compassion. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
The Making of IndiaIn the 2004 exhibition The Making of India, Sahmat engaged with artists to rethink the country's cultural and political histories. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
Sufi-Bhakti TraditionsAfter the destruction of Babri Masjid in India, Sahmat draws on the medieval Sufi-Bhakti poetry and musical tradition to reflect the complex fabric of India's culture. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
Slogans for Communal HarmonyAfter the destruction of Babri Masjid in India, Sahmat draws on the medieval Sufi-Bhakti poetry and musical tradition to reflect the complex fabric of India's culture. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
Sahmat's Tributes to M.F. HusainThe fight for freedom of expression and Sahmat's tributes to M. F. Husain, "the Picasso of India." Learn more about Sahmat: fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
Sahmat's BeginningsIn 1989, playwright, actor, and activist Safdar Hashmi was fatally attacked by political thugs while performing a street play outside of Delhi. His death led to the founding of Sahmat. Learn more at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
Postcards for GandhiMahatma Gandhi famously used inexpensive postcards to communicate with vast numbers of people. In this spirit and in commemoration of the 125th anniversary of his birth, Sahmat invited hundreds of artists to create postcard-sized works about Gandhi's relevance to contemporary India. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
On PerformanceThrough the performing arts, Sahmat has brought people together while celebrating the diversity of India's cultural history. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
National Street Theater DayEach year, Sahmat marks Safdar Hashmi's birthday on April 12 by organizing the National Street Theater Day in India, producing posters and engaging with theater groups all across India in a day of joint action and performance. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
MuktnaadIn the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Sahmat organized Muktnaad, a nightlong program of music and dance on the banks of the Sarayu River in Ayodhya, in an effort to break the siege of the Hinduvata forces through creative, rather than political action. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
M.F. HusainM.F. Husain, the "Picasso of India," is forced into exile after hardline Hindus orchestrated a wide-ranging campaign against him in response to his painting Hindu goddesses in the nude. Learn more at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
Hum Sab AyodhyaIn the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Sahmat produces the exhibition kit Hum Sab Ayodhya (We are All Ayodhya) and explores the multifaceted history, geography, culture, and life of the people of Ayodhya, India. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
Art on the MoveSahmat works with emerging artists in India to make mobile works from humble, ready-made pushcarts and rickshaws. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
Anhad GarjeIn 1993, Sahmat presented Anhad Garje (a phrase from the poet Kabir that roughly translates to "the silence reverberates"), a program of Sufi-Bhakti performances that promoted communal harmony in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Learn more about Sahmat at fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/sahmat-collective-art-and-activism-india-1989
Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem by Vivan SundaramGo behind the scenes in Vivan Sundaram's New Delhi studio as he discusses the two bodies of work that will be on view at the Fowler in Making Strange: Gagawaka + Postmortem by Vivan Sundaram.
2014
Directed by Pankaj Butalia
Edited version. 5 minutes 08 seconds
http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/making-strange-gagawaka-postmortem-vivan-sundaram
Intersections: Felipe Linares, Cemetery of the Little Red Devil (1982)
World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou
Spark Update #1Thank you for helping the Fowler Museum bring the art of cycling and photography to UCLA! We’re proud to share that our first-ever crowd funding campaign is off to a great start: after just 4 days, we’ve already reached 40% of our goal and raised a total of $3,000. We could not have come this far, this fast without you.
We have one more favor to ask: help us spread the word! Share your support on Facebook and Twitter using #roundtrip. Here’s a sample message to copy, paste and personalize: “I donated to bring the art of cycling and photography to the Fowler Museum at UCLA! Visit http://spark.ucla.edu/roundtrip to learn more and participate in #roundtrip”
Thanks again!
Fowler Museum at UCLA
Installing World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou
Round Trip Spark Video
Yaqui-slideshowThis video is about Yaqui-slideshow
La Santîssima Muerte
Ernest Cole slideshow
Oscar Castillo: Icons of the InvisibleIn this video, Oscar Castillo talks about his experience photographing the Chicano community in Los Angeles. Chon Noriega, curator of the exhibition "Icons of the Invisible" at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, puts the importance of Castillo's work into context.
This video was produced in conjunction with the exhibition "Oscar Castillo: Icons of the Invisible" at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. September 25, 2011 – February 26, 2012
For more information about the Fowler visit: www.fowler.ucla.edu
CREDITS:
Featuring: Oscar Castillo and Chon Noriega
Artwork by Oscar Castillo
Filmed by Agnes Stauber
Still Photograp by Anabel Garcia-Romo
Edited by Anabel Garcia-Romo
Fowler Out Loud: Afrotango EnsembleApril 12, 2012: Fowler Out Loud performance of the Afrotango Ensemble at the Fowler Museum at UCLA
Blending the seductive sounds of Argentine tango and the smooth rhythms of Afro-Latin jazz, Afrotango kicks of Spring quarter with a performance that is sure to intrigue.
Filmed and edited by Rajat Ghosh.
For more information about the Fowler, visit www.fowler.ucla.edu
Pot Smashing Ceremonies among the Mumuye in Nigeria
Fowler Out Loud: Gaayatri KaundinyaThe captivating Gaayatri Kaundinya is an Indian classical vocalist and student of renowned classical musician Ustad Ali Akbar Khan who blends several styles of traditional Indian vocal music to create a uniquely beautiful sound.
This video is a short documentation of her performance at the Fowler Out Loud event on February 23, 2012 at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
For more information on the museum visit fowler.ucla.edu
Fowler Out Loud: UCLA Gluck Groupa PendariThe UCLA Gluck Groupa Pendari combines a love for traditional Balkan music with a passion for education. Join the quartet as they perform traditional acoustic music from Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, and other Eastern European countries while educating about these genres.
They performed at the Fowler Museum at UCLA on February 16, 2012.
For more information about the Museum visit www.fowler.ucla.edu
CREDITS:
Filmed and edited by Rajat Ghosh and Guillum Atrid
Folwer Out Loud: UCLA Near Eastern Takht EnsembleOn February 2, 2012, the UCLA Near Eastern Takht Ensemble returned to the Fowler Museum to showcase their unique musical styles from the Arab world including pop, classical, and transcendental improvisation.
More info about the Museum at www.fowler.ucla.edu
CREDITS:
Filmed and edited by Rajat Ghosh
Fowler in Focus: Bedia SelectsIn this video, artist José Bedia talks about the objects he selected from the Fowler Museum's collection for the exhibition "Fowler in Focus: Bedia Selects."
The show is on view at the Fowler Museum from September 18, 2011 to January 1, 2012. It compliments the exhibition "Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia".
For more information visit www.fowler.ucla.edu
CREDITS:
Featuring: José Bedia
Still Photography by Reed Hutchinson
Video by Anabel Garcia-Romo
Edited by Anabel Garcia-Romo
Produced by the Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2011
José Bedia installing "Figure Who Defines His Own Horizon Line" at the Fowler MuseumThis video documents José Bedia's installation of the piece "Figure Who Defines His Own Horizon Line" at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
This work was created for the exhibition "Transcultural Pilgrim: Three Decades of Work by José Bedia," on view at the Fowler from September 18, 2011 – January 8, 2012.
For more information visit http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/transcultural-pilgrim-bedia
Video Credits:
featuring José Bedia
footage by Anabel Garcia-Romo and Agnes Stauber
still photographs by Brian Forrest
music by Martin Fackovec, Productiontrax.com Track ID 251368
edited by Agnes Stauber
Elephant masquerade in NigeriaItrokwu masquerade
Idoma/Akweya peoples
Otobi village
Documented by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, 1986
Super-8 film; 22 seconds
This video is part of the exhibition "Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley" on view at the Fowler Museum at UCLA February 12–July 24, 2011.
For more information on the exhibition visit: www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/benue
Oglinye MasqueradeOglinye masquerade
Idoma peoples
Otobi village
Documented by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, 1977
Super-8 film; 48 seconds
Crest masks (Oglinye) in the form of human heads carved fully in the round were made for warriors’ masquerades. The tradition derives from the Cross River area, where human trophy skulls were originally worn atop the head. The British banned Oglinye in 1917, but after 1940 they tried, largely unsuccessfully, to use the masquerade groups to assist with local efforts at social control and to help collect taxes and enforce orders. While the masquerade was associated with male warrior associations, the faces on these two crest masks appear intriguingly female. They may reference the roles of women as arbiters of male social status in the community.
This video is part of the exhibition "Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley" on view at the Fowler Museum at UCLA February 12–July 24, 2011.
For more information on the exhibition visit: www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/benue
Maternal Sculpture in the Lower Benue
Jazz Diplomacy Conversation with Kenny Burrell, Edward Hasse, and Quincy JonesMarch 20, 2011:
Fowler Outspoken Conversation on
Jazz Diplomacy with Kenny Burrell, Edward Hasse, and Quincy Jones
Moderated by Tom Schnabel
Since the end of World War II, the State Department has called on performing artists to play the role of cultural ambassadors, a practice that has experienced a resurgence in the last decade. Jazz great Kenny Burrell, leading jazz historian John Edward Hasse from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and music legend Quincy Jones discuss their experiences as cultural ambassadors and the importance of jazz as a diplomatic tool. Tom Schnabel will moderate the conversation.
This event was organized in conjunction with the exhibition Jam Session: Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World (on view at the Fowler Museum at UCLA March 20–August 14, 2011)
For more information visit www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/jam-session
UCLA Jazz Combo live performance in Jam Session gallery at Fowler Museum (UCLA)April 15, 2011
As a part of the Fowler's signature series "Fowler Out Loud" UCLA Jazz Combos performed live jazz music in our Jam Session gallery.
The exhibition "Jam Session: America's Jazz Embassadors Embrace the World" is on show at the Fowler Museum from March 20 through August 14, 2011.
More information: http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/jam-session
Ritual Sites in the Upper Benue RegionThis slideshow displays various ritual sites in the Upper Benue region, including sites of the Jen, Ga'anda, B'ena, Yungur peoples.
Photographs by Marla C. Berns, 1980-1982
This video was produced by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in conjunction with the exhibition "Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley"
Introductory Video: Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River ValleyThis video gives a brief overview of the Benue River Valley, the arts of the people living there, and some context of the history of this region.
It was produced by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in conjunction with the exhibition Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley.
The exhibition is on view at the Fowler Museum February 13 through July 24, 2011.
For more information visit the Fowler's website at www.fowler.ucla.edu
CREDITS:
Created by:
Agnes Stauber
Content Consultants:
Marla C. Berns
Richard Fardon
Sidney Kasfir
Music by:
Kevin MacLeod
Photographs by:
Joerg Adelberger
Marla C. Berns
Richard Fardon
Sidney Kasifr
John Picton
Arnold Rubin
Constanze Weise
Video footage by:
Jean Borgatti
Produced by the Fowler Museum at UCLA, 2011
Benue: Ancestral Masquerades / Ghost MasqueradesBoundary Crossing: The Circulation of Masquerades
Whether to incarnate ancestors, enforce social codes, support royal and chiefly authority, celebrate warriors, or to entertain, masquerades were performed throughout the Lower Benue. The circumstances of war, migration, and resettlement since the nineteenth century have meant that masks were and continue to be highly mobile. They could be taken as war booty, bought and sold, adopted with or without accompanying rituals, and altered to suit aesthetic or social requirements of a new community. Reinterpreted by new owners, their meanings changed in response to different contexts and needs.
As cultural boundary crossers, masquerade traditions also retain some traces of where they have been. Their names, origin stories, accompanying musical instrumentation, idiosyncratic dance steps, or special adornments are all clues to their historical paths. The influence of Igbo, Ibibio, Boki, and other Cross River peoples can be seen especially in Idoma masquerades, particularly the whiteface mask so recognizable in southeastern Nigeria.
DETAILS ABOUT THIS VIDEO
Total Running Time: 15 minutes, 20 seconds
Ekwula masquerade
Idoma peoples
Igumale town
Documented by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, 1989
Super-8 film; 31 seconds
Egwu Afia masquerade
Igala peoples
Abocho town
Documented by Olobo-Ojo and His Royal Highness, the Onu Abocho (Ayidu), Alhaji Tijani Okutachi, 2010
Video; 1 minute, 51 seconds
Akwujane masquerade
Igala peoples
Onyedega town
Documented by Constanze Weise, 2010
Video; 2 minutes, 20 seconds
Aja masquerade
Okpella peoples
Ogute town
Documented by Jean Borgatti, 2003
Video; 3 minutes, 30 seconds
Omeshe masquerade
Okpella peoples
Afokpella town
Documented by Jean Borgatti, 2003
Video; 1 minute, 50 seconds
Alabala Omo Egungun masquerade
Awori-Yoruba peoples
Ota town
Documented by John Thabiti Willis, 2004
Video; 36 seconds
Ndako Gboya masquerade
Nupe peoples
Kusogi village
Documented by Constanze Weise, 2000
Video; 4 minutes, 42 seconds
Arnold Rubin FilmsMasquerades of the Middle Benue
Filmed and documented by UCLA Professor Arnold Rubin in 1965 and 1970
These six Super-8 films were shot by UCLA Professor Arnold Rubin in 1965 and 1970 in several Middle Benue towns. They have been excerpted from unedited footage housed in the Rubin Archive in the Fowler Museum. Although the masquerades were performed with music, the technology did not allow for simultaneous sound recording. These rare films have never before been shown in a public setting.
Initiation into the Vaa-Bong association, from which these sequences derive, lasted three days and took place on the edge of town. The initiates are identified by their bare torsos, shaved heads, and traditional dancing skirts secured at the front with sticks; some of the most senior men sit with their backs supported by monoliths. The masqueraders demonstrate how to perform to the initiates. The horizontal wooden mask head fuses human features with those of the dwarf forest buffalo or bushcow. Each set of initiates will go on to control its own masquerades.
The masquerade features the female whose male counterpart wears a mask exhibited nearby. Female gender is indicated by the crest surmounting its head, which represents a sculpted hairstyle, by its breasts ornamented with red abrus seeds, and by the way in which it wears its several cloth wrappers.
The Chamba of Donga are immigrants from the east who brought this mask type with them. Like the horizontal Mumuye mask, this is a human-buffalo fusion. Some of the masquerader’s attendants play flutes, another plays with a small horn upon a double iron gong, and the custodian of the masquerader’s tail also controls the masquerade. On display nearby is a mask almost identical to the one seen here, likely to be by the same hand, and collected more than fifty years earlier.
The masquerade in Pantisawa differs in some respects from the one in Zinna. The first of the two masks we see has a pointed beak that represents a fusion of human features with those of a fish-eating bird, and the second is a buffalo-human fusion mask, like those of Zinna, but the masqueraders wear less substantial hibiscus fiber costumes. Led by the masqueraders who carry sticks and switches, a group of initiates descends from the hillside into the deserted streets of the village, which have been vacated by the women and children who take shelter in their homes to avoid seeing or confronting the costumed performers.
Aku masquerade, Jukun peoples, Wukari (the Jukun capital), 1965
Super-8 film, 3 minutes 27 seconds
This male Aku masquerader wears its mask differently from those we have seen so far: instead of a horizontal orientation, it is vertical and works like a face mask. Its cantilevered, almost hunched, appearance is similar to that of some Jukun figure sculptures on view nearby. The mask fuses a human face with stylized buffalo horns that are attached to the end of its long nose. The second of the male masqueraders is joined by its female counterpart, identifiable by its crest. All of these wear prestige cloths, which are loosely identified with the ancestral dead, as well as with the creatures of the wild.
The first male Akuma mask we see has a bird’s beak; a second male mask has the squarer mouth of the buffalo. Their female counterpart joins the dance toward the end of this clip, and her wild-haired appearance is uncultivated compared to her more refined counterpart in the Aku masquerade. There is a palpable sense that the quivering Akuma masqueraders demand greater control from their custodians than do the more refined Aku couple. All the masqueraders seen in these clips represent extraordinary powers that enter villages and towns bringing with them attributes of death and wildness; all therefore have to be controlled, and by controlling the masqueraders, their custodians suggest their own powers.
Exhibition Trailer: Central Nigeria Unmasked - Arts of the Benue River ValleyFebruary 13 – July 24, 2011
The Benue River Valley is the source of some of the most abstract, dramatic, and inventive sculpture in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet compared to the majority populations living in northern and southern Nigeria, the many and diverse groups flanking the 650-mile-long Benue River—and their fascinating arts—are far less known and studied. Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley will be the first major international exhibition to present a comprehensive view of the arts produced in the region. See more than 150 objects used in a range of ritual contexts, with genres as varied and complex as the vast region itself—figurative wood sculptures, masks, figurative ceramic vessels, and elaborate bronze and iron regalia—in a groundbreaking exhibition that demonstrates how the history of central Nigeria can be “unmasked” through the dynamic interrelationships of its peoples and their arts.
Introductory Video to exhibition Intersections: World Arts, Local LivesCREDITS:
Produced by: Media Art Services
Director: Peter Kirby
Camera: Harry Dawson, Peter Kirby
Editors: Aaron Bourget, Peter Kirby
Production Coordinator: Agnes Stauber
Production Consultants: Marla Berns, Roy Hamilton, Polly Roberts, Betsy Quick
Thanks to: Rowland Abiodun, Cindi Alvitre, Ysamur Flores-Pena, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Hirokazu Kosaka, Diya Larasati, John Latsko, Jose Rodriguez, Robert F. Thompson, Robert Wisdom
Photography of Museum's Work of Art: Don Cole
Felix Lopez: Santos Maker - New Mexico, U.S.A.Felix Lopez is an outstanding santero (santos carver) who lives and works in Espanola near Santa Fe, New Mexico. In this video, Lopez talks about how he became a carver, his artistic and aesthetic considerations while creating a santos figure, and what it means to him to be a creator of devotional objects.
CREDITS:
Life in Ceramics: artist Lee Kang Hyo in 2008This video shows artist Lee Kang Hyo working on a pot in his studio in 2008. Filmed by Burglind Jungmann.
His work is features in the exhibition "Life in Ceramics: Five Contemporary Korean Artists" in Los Angeles. On view at the Fowler Museum at UCLA August 22, 2010 - February 13, 2011.
For more information visit www.fowler.ucla.edu
Taxco Silver - Then and NowInterviews with:
Antonio Pineda
Javier Ruiz Ocampo
Bruno Pineda Gómez
Manuel Gómez Islas
Carmen Tapia
Wolmar Antonio Castillo
Content Consultants:
Gobi Stromberg
Betsy Quick
Kim Richter
Videographer:
Lina Rodríguez Martínez
Editor:
Agnes Stauber
Photographs provided by:
Antonio Pineda
Javier Ruiz Ocampo
Wolmar Antonio Castillo
Gobi Stromberg
Lina Rodríguez Martínez
This video was produced for the exhibition “Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexcian Modernist Antonio Pineda” and funded by the Fowler Museum’s Donald B. Cordry Fund and the UCLA Latin American Institute.
Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio PinedaThis video is part of the exhibition "Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda"
In memory of Antonio Pineda (1919-2009)
CREDITS:
Interviews with:
Antonio Pineda
Javier Ruiz Ocampo
Content Consultants:
Gobi Stromberg
Betsy Quick
Kim Richter
Videographer:
Lina Rodriguez Martinez
Editor:
Agnes Stauber
Images provided by:
Antonio Pineda
Javier Ruiz Ocampo
Wolmar Antonio Castillo
Gobi Stromberg
Lina Rodriguez Martinez
Manuel Echeverria Diep
Alan Weissman
Don Cole
Latin American Library at Tulane University
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Special Thanks to:
Kristel Alliaume
Natasha Cordova
Karina Deyko
Kathleen Donnelly
Mary Elise Hayden
Weavers' Stories: Dapong anak Sempurai (Sarawak, Malaysia)This video was produced by the Fowler Museum for the exhibition "Weavers' Stories from Island Southeast Asia" on view August 1, 2010 to December 5, 2010. For more information visit http://fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/weaversstories
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Anthropologists have described Iban society as egalitarian with status based on achievement rather than birth, and this is still evident when visiting an Iban longhouse today. At Entawau, the central apartments belong to the family of Temenggong Koh, perhaps the most famous Iban leader of the first half of the twentieth century. Dapong anak Sempurai was born at the far end of the longhouse, but married Koh’s grandson and moved to one of the central apartments. There she lived with her husband and her mother-in-law, Iba anak Temenggong Koh, a renowned weaver.
While Iba was steeped in the full historical significance of Iban cloths (especially their association with the taking of enemy heads in warfare), Dapong came of age at a time when remarkable changes were coming to the interior of Sarawak. In order to give her two daughters a better education, Dapong left the longhouse and moved to Kapit, a trading port on the Rejang River. She opened a clothing store but had no time for weaving. When her daughters finished school and her husband died, Dapong became the manager of a canteen in a logging camp, and she also returned to weaving. Today Dapong balances the diverse circumstances of her life, although the cultural complex that once supported weaving has completely altered.
CREDITS:
Director: Roy W. Hamilton
Consultant: Traude Gavin
Videographer: Paul Hiew
Editor: Agnes Stauber
Narrator: Jeany Snider
Field Photographs: Traude Gavin
Studio Photographs: Don Cole
Weavers' Stories: Siti Samsiyah (Madura, Indonesia)This video was produced by the Fowler Museum for the exhibition "Weavers' Stories from Island Southeast Asia" on view August 1, 2010 to December 5, 2010. For more information visit http://fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/weaversstories
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Siti Samsiyah
Tanjungbumi, Madura, Indonesia
Still in her thirties, Siti Samsiyah is the moving force behind a batik enterprise on the island of Madura. She employs dozens of women in her community, mostly to do the labor-intensive waxing of the cloth that is the key to the batik process. Her company, called Giat Mandiri (roughly translated as “self-reliance”), operates with almost no infrastructure. The women gather to work simply sitting on the front steps of the house that belongs to Siti Samsiyah’s mother, or they may take their work home with them where they can supervise their children while working.
In a community where the men are away at sea on trading ships for long periods, the women who work for Giat Mandiri say they are simply passing time while earning a little extra income to help with their children’s schooling. Yet Siti Samsiyah manages complex tasks, overseeing the dyeing of the cloth with modern chemical dyes and marketing the finished products at trade fairs as far away as Jakarta. Moreover, the economic role of the batik industry in Tanjungbumi is substantial. Siti Samsiyah is one of the largest employers in her small town, and she has even used her income to purchase a stake in the ships in which the men of the town go to sea.
CREDITS:
Director: Roy W. Hamilton
Consultant: R. Diyah Larasati
Videographer: Koes Yuliadi
Editors: Wisnu Wijaya and Agnes Stauber
Translator: Roy W. Hamilton
Narrator: Jeany Snider
Music: Y. Subowo
Weavers' Stories: Sisilia Sii (Flores, Indonesia)
Weavers' Stories: Raden Ayu Brongtodiningrat and Wiwin Fitriana (Java, Indonesia)This video was produced by the Fowler Museum for the exhibition "Weavers' Stories from Island Southeast Asia" on view August 1, 2010 to December 5, 2010. For more information visit http://fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/weaversstories
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Raden Ayu Brongtodiningrat and Wiwin Fitriana
Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia
Raden Ayu Brongtodiningrat’s mother, who was renowned for her skill in making batik, was a daughter of Sultan Hamangkubuwono VIII of Yogyakarta. Growing up within the walled palace complex, her daughter learned not only how to wax batik with her mother and aunts but also the poetic meanings of the patterns and the complex rules of etiquette involving the cloth. Now seventy-five, Raden Ayu Brongtodiningrat is still actively involved in the life of the palace. She no longer makes batik herself, but when she needs a special cloth, she will take one that was made by her mother and bring it to her favorite batik maker to have a copy made in the old style.
Raden Ayu Brongtodiningrat’s daughter-in-law, Wiwin Fitriana, grew up as the daughter of a businessman and had little involvement with the etiquette of the palace or, for that matter, with batik at all. She became interested only when she found employment in a batik firm, although she was involved then only in marketing rather than design. Piqued by the artistic challenge, however, she soon founded her own firm, Batik Mataram. Today she makes batik for the fashion market, targeting upper middle-class buyers primarily from Jakarta. Wiwin Fitriana has developed her own specialty, based on the use of subdued colors and the mixing of various traditional patterns in a single piece.
Weavers' Stories: Luisa de Jesus (Tutuala, Timor Leste)This video was produced by the Fowler Museum for the exhibition "Weavers' Stories from Island Southeast Asia" on view August 1, 2010 to December 5, 2010. For more information visit http://fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/weaversstories
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Luisa de Jesus
Tutuala, Lautém, Timor Leste
Luisa de Jesus is a granddaughter of Lai Rusu, the first local ruler of Tutuala, located at the far eastern tip of the island of Timor. Luisa was raised in Pitileti, a hamlet of traditional houses raised high off the ground. After the Indonesian army occupied East Timor in 1975, the rugged terrain nearby became a stronghold of the rebel group FRETILIN. Pitileti was burned in the ensuing conflict, and the community was resettled by the Indonesian government.
Much of the textile wealth of Pitileti was destroyed in the conflagration, but Louisa saved a few scraps that her grandmother had instructed her to keep as mnemonic devices—preserving the patterns of striping for the main types of cloth and more importantly, as Luisa says, preserving for future generations “our name and the record of all our achievements.”
Until it was engulfed by conflict, East Timor was a neglected backwater where traditional culture endured with relatively little impact from modernization. For this reason, the story that Luisa tells—about the power of a cloth so potent that it could destroy a community’s coconut trees—is fundamentally conservative in its outlook. Rarely today would one find such a story told with as much conviction as it is by this remarkable woman who retains her aristocratic bearing despite the suffering her community has experienced.
Weavers' Stories: Margareta Taub Kapitan (West Timor, Indonesia)This video was produced by the Fowler Museum for the exhibition "Weavers' Stories from Island Southeast Asia" on view August 1, 2010 to December 5, 2010. For more information visit http://fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/weaversstories
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Margareta Taub Kapitan
Insana, West Timor, Indonesia
Margareta Taub Kapitan’s success as the leader of a women’s weaving group in the district of Insana is intimately connected with the sweeping political changes that overtook rural Indonesia during the Suharto era (1967–1998). The Suharto government established a new system, appointing village headmen throughout the country who were ultimately responsible to Jakarta rather than to local traditional rulers. In 1969 Margareta’s husband became the first headman of their village, which automatically made her the leader of the women’s family welfare group. Margareta seized this opportunity to promote weaving as a means of boosting women’s income.
She could not have succeeded in this endeavor without her intelligence and extraordinary force of personality. She stood out so much as a student in the local primary school that she became the first girl to be sent to a distant town for secondary education. When her husband was given an opportunity for training on a distant island, the couple set out for the port of Kupang—a seven-day journey on foot. After raising a family, she invented new styles of weaving and became the first to teach weaving as a part of the family welfare movement. Now in her seventies, Margareta’s charisma is still evident when she leads the women of her group in a spirited dance.
CREDITS:
Director: Roy W. Hamilton
Consultant: William Coury
Videographer: Koes Yuliadi
Post production services: Azbri Productions, Agnes Stauber
Narrator: Rita Marchelya
Translator: Roy W. Hamilton
Weavers' Stories: Rambu Pakki and Rambu Tokung (Sumba, Indonesia)This video was produced by the Fowler Museum for the exhibition "Weavers' Stories from Island Southeast Asia" on view August 1, 2010 to December 5, 2010. For more information visit http://fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/weaversstories
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Rambu Pakki and Rambu Tokung
Pau, Sumba, Indonesia
“Rambu” is a title for a woman of aristocratic standing in eastern Sumba. Rambu Pakki and Rambu Tokung are cousins, nieces of the late raja (ruler) of the village of Pau. Neither woman has ever married. This in itself is not so uncommon in Sumba, where aristocratic women often had difficulty finding husbands of suitable status, but what is highly unusual is that the two cousins share a home—inherited from Rambu Pakki’s father—without any male relatives on the premises. Bold and quick-humored, the cousins cherish their relative freedom from family constraints and especially the liberty it gives them to pursue their textile arts.
In the attic the women keep their collection of pahudu, devices made of sticks and string, which preserve complex textile patterns. Across the alley behind their house are the smaller dwellings of the “children of the house,” the descendants of a former class of slaves that once attended the Sumbanese aristocracy. Rambu Pakki and Rambu Tokung have seen to it that the women of these households can also weave, but they retain their finest patterns for their own use. Inside the cousins’ home, the primary space is given over to their two deceased fathers, wrapped in multiple layers of handwoven textiles while they await the lavish funeral that is one of the hallmarks of Sumbanese society.
CREDITS:
Director: Roy W. Hamilton
Consultant: Jill Forshee
Videographer: Koes Yuliadi
Editor: Agnes Stauber
Narrator: Anne Earley
Translator: Roy W. Hamilton
Weavers' Stories: Lang Kambay Dulay (Mindanao, Philippines)This video was produced by the Fowler Museum for the exhibition "Weavers' Stories from Island Southeast Asia" on view August 1, 2010 to December 5, 2010. For more information visit http://fowler.ucla.edu/exhibitions/weaversstories
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Lang Kambáy Dúlay
Tukó Lifá, Lake Sebú, Mindanao, Philippines
Lang Dúlay was already a young mother at the time of the Japanese Occupation during World War II. Through those turbulent years, she wove t’nálak cloth made from a fine variety of abacá that grew in the highlands of Southern Mindanao. A long lifetime of weaving has earned her a reputation as a master in her community. In 1998 she was awarded the Philippine national prize for traditional artists (Gáwad Manlilikhá ng Báyan). Since then, she has traveled many times to Manila and also as far as Washington, D.C., where she was a participating artist at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Although she can neither read nor write, Mrs. Dúlay maintains a bank account into which her lifetime stipend is deposited every month. She has used some of this funding to found and run a school for T’bóli weaving next to her home
Beh (esteemed grandmother) Lang, as she is fondly called, cuts a familiar figure in her community when she takes time out to visit one of her many grandchildren, perched on the back of a taxi-motorcycle with the key to her safe hanging around her neck. She is proudest of her role as grandmother to an entire village, including many youngsters she has put through school. Now in her eighties, she no longer sits at the loom, as that is a task she gives to her senior students, but she has not stopped teaching and she continues to dream—the source of many of the ikat patterns that she still ties and dyes herself.
CREDITS:
Director: Cherubim A. Quizon
Videographers: Daniel Bibiolata and Danny Ballasteros
Editor: Agnes Stauber
Narrator: Anne Earley
Translator and Research Assistant: Elizabeth Malinog
Additional archive footage provided by NCCA- Gawad Manlilikha ng Bayan and Emanual Ompang Jr.
Smithsonian Folklife festival photograph provided by Datu Minguelito Bangkas
Exhibition Trailer: Weavers' Stories from Island Southeast AsiaExhibition open: August 1 - December 12, 2010
In Weavers’ Stories from Island Southeast Asia, weavers and batik artists speak for themselves in videos recorded at eight sites in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and East Timor. What motivates them to create new patterns? How do they adjust to changing social and economic situations? A panoply of human emotions and experience—determination, longing, dream inspiration, theft, war, and more—emerge from the stories of these remarkable women. The videos are accompanied by newly made textiles created by each of the featured weavers and batik makers.
for more information visit: www.fowler.ucla.edu
House of Ancestoral Stories – East Sepik, Papua New GuineaThis video shows scenes of the final preparations and the opening ceremonies for a clan house named Assaur in Tongwajamb village of the East Sepik area of Papua New Guinea. In an interview, the leading patriarch of the clan talks about the transmission of intellectual heritage to a younger generation of men.
duration: 5:56 minutes
CREDITS:
Director/ Videographer/ Editor: Mark Eby
Field Work Consultants: Moses, Henry, David, Daniel Nanias, Yati Latai, Ambuningi Yamban
Narrator: Tom Dheree
Post-Production Supervisor: Agnes Stauber
Produced by Azbri Productions
Sisilia Sii, Weaver – Flores, IndonesiaThis video focuses on Cecilia Sii, a skillful weaver woman on the Indonesian island of Flores and her daughter, Grasiana Wani, who has followed into the weaving tradition of her family. The narration describes the role of the artist in creating the textiles, introduces the main steps in textile production, and depicts Cecilia Sii telling her story about becoming a weaver and learning different patterns.
duration: 7:18 minutes
Pageantry in the Palace – Bamum Kingdom, CameroonUsmanou Nsangou, a native Cameroonian from the Bamum Kingdom now living in Boston, shares his personal encounters with the Bamum king and the life at the royal court in the kingdom’s capital Foumban. He tells us about the vibrant annual ngoun celebrations and remembers the deep impressions some masks used in these gatherings left in him.
CREDITS
Content Consultant/ Videographer/ Still Photographer: Christraud Geary
Narrator: Usmanou Nsangou
Director/Producer: Agnes Stauber
Editor: Mark Eby
The Spirit of the Barong - Bali, IndonesiaBarong processions and dances are a vital part of ceremonial life in Bali. The Barong is considered the village guardian and is being performed once every six months to expel misfortune and evil from the community.
duration: 5:14 minutes
CREDITS:
Director/ Viddeographer/ Script: Koes Yuliadi
Producer: Roy W. Hamilton
Editor: Dhimas Aryo V.A.
Sound: Yusmawati
Research: R. Diyah Larasati, Gede Ngurah Eka
Post Production Supervisor: Agnes Stauber
Thanks to: I Wayan Dana, Dag Yngvesson
Nick Cave Soundsuit Invasion in Westwood Village, Los Angeles (courtesy Fowler Museum at UCLA)Nick Cave's Soundsuits were in Westwood Village, surprising passersby and having fun.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
in Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA
These happenings are presented by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in conjunction with the exhibition "Nick Cave: Meet me at the Center of the Earth" - on view January 10 - May 20, 2010 at the Fowler.
To get notice about upcoming soundsuit invasions
... follow www.twitter.com/FowlerMuseum
... join www.facebook.com/FowlerMuseum
Visit our website for more information about the exhibition and related events: www.fowler.ucla.edu
Nick Cave Soundsuits at Fowler Museum for UCLA Art Happenings WeekendUCLA Art Happenings Weekend
Events at Fowler Museum and Royce Hall on January 22, 2010
For more info on the Art Happenings Weekend, see http://www.happenings.ucla.edu/artparty/
Nick Cave's Soundsuit Invasion No. 1 in LA, courtesy Fowler Museum at UCLASoundsuit Invasion at the Los Angeles Art Show Opening Gala, January 20, 2010. Music by Killsonic.
Presented by the Fowler Museum at UCLA in conjunction with the exhibition "Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth." On view January 9 - May 30, 2010 at the Fowler.
For announcements of upcoming Soundsuit Invasions in Los Angeles, follow the Fowler on
-- Twitter (twitter.com/FowlerMuseum) and
-- Facebook (facebook.com/FowlerMuseum).
CREDITS:
Filmed and edited by Agnes Stauber
Nick Cave Lecture at Fowler Museum, Jan. 9, 2010A lecture presentation by Nick Cave about his signature Soundsuits is followed by a conversation between Nick Cave and the Fowler Museum's director Marla C. Berns about the global resonances in the artist's work.
This event was organized in conjunction with the exhibition "Nick Cave: Meet Me At The Center Of The Earth" which is on view at the Fowler Museum at UCLA January 10 - May 30, 2010.
For more information visit www.fowler.ucla.edu
Soundsuits After Dark presented by the Fowler Museum at UCLA and KCRWSoundsuits After Dark was presented on May 22, 2010 by the Fowler Museum at UCLA and KCRW.
DJs: KCRW's Jason Bentley and Garth Trinidad
Still Photography: Reed Hutchinson
Footage: Sara Stranovsky, Josh Abarbanel, Agnes Stauber
Nick Cave Soundsuits at Downtown Art Walk (courtesy Fowler Museum at UCLA)The latest soundsuit invasion happened at the monthly Art Walk in Downtown Los Angeles.
May 13, 2010
CREDITS:
Live music by KILLSONIC
Soundsuits by Nick Cave
Performed by dancer of UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures
Choreography by Rachael Lincoln
Filmed and edited by Agnes Stauber
Exhibition: Silver Seduction - The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio PinedaSilver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda
August 10, 2008 to March 15, 2009
Experience the work of internationally renowned silversmith Antonio Pineda, one of Taxco's great innovators. Known for his bold designs and ingenious use of gemstones, Pineda’s extraordinary talent and creative vision are evident in his sensual jewelry and outstanding hollowware and tableware. The exhibition traces the evolution of Pineda’s work from the 1930s to the 1970s and highlights his important contributions to Mexican modernism as well as to the creation of a Mexican artistic national identity.
Inscribing Meaning on KTLAGayle Anderson of KTLA Morning News visits the Fowler to see the exhibition "Inscribing Meaning."
October 2007
Mami Wata on KTLAGayle Anderson of KTLA Morning News visits the Fowler to see the exhibition "Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diaspora."
