Announcing Our 2019-20 Cultural Partners & Themes!
artworxLA is excited to announce this year’s three Level 1 Cultural Partners: the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Skirball Cultural Center, and the Vincent Price Art Museum! We look forward to working with these wonderful institutions in coming months as we gear up for the 2019-20 school year. Read on to learn about this year’s programming themes!
Banish Stigma: The Power of Personal Voice and Representation
UCLA Art & Global Health Center/Fowler Museum at UCLA
How can the arts be powerful tools for combatting stigma? Through exhibitions at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, artworxLA students will explore personal voice and nuanced storytelling in digital media, installation, and mixed-media assemblage. Through Positive Eyes illuminates the life experiences of individuals living with HIV and AIDS from ten major cities across the globe. The exhibition includes powerful photo essays that address key themes of the AIDS epidemic: widespread stigma, extreme social inequality, and limited access to lifesaving medication. The retrospective Rina Banerjee: Make Me A Summary of the World guides viewers through the artist’s interpretation of the world while revealing the associations and experiences viewers bring to the trip. Galvanized by both exhibitions to confront stigma in their own lives, students will create projects that build empathy, challenge labels, and stamp out judgment and bias.
After the Flood: Building Community through Rituals of Care
Skirball Cultural Center
In what ways might the artistic process be a space for healing and care? Inspired by the immersive Noah’s Ark installation at the Skirball Cultural Center, artworxLA students will build a metaphorical ark of their own through the creation of rituals that traverse self-care, intergenerational care, care for community, and care for the environment. Learning from ancient flood stories across cultures and the transformation of materials in the interactive Noah’s Ark galleries, students will draw from traditions and imagine new iterations of “care- giving” and “taking care.” Rituals might include dance, sound, ceremony, media, or design, and projects will explore the role of the artist as a practitioner for healing communities and building resilience.
Double Vision: Art at the Intersection of Identities
Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College
How does art embody, investigate, and reimagine our shifting and multiple identities? Engaging with the work of contemporary artists on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum, artworxLA students will consider how art is interpreted and created from intersecting identities. Since the 1950s, photographer George Rodriguez has documented multiple social worlds. The exhibition Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez is a rare mix of Hollywood and Chicano L.A., film premieres and farmworker strikes, album covers and street scenes, celebrity portraits and civil rights marches. Students will also explore the work of Carolina Caycedo, Yolanda González, and Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers) and produce their own works that highlight their relationships to family, space and place, the past and the future.