ARC Blog Archive

What makes a memory? Is it a fixed thing, or part of one’s imagination? Can history be considered a collective memory? Writer Deborah Miranda set out to explore these questions on January 29, 2024, through a reading of her work and a conversation with Professor Estelle Tarica. Tarica’s class, titled “Indigenous and Latinx Pathways of Memory in California” was in attendance, filling the room. She modeled her class after the concept of the “memory path,” a term revitalized in a contemporary anti-colonial context by the Bolivian indigenous scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui.

Alutiiq artist and scholar Tanya Lukin Linklater’s 2023 residency with the Arts Research Center was a gift. Tanya traveled to Berkeley with dance artists Ceinwen Gobert and Ivanie Aubin-Malo to explore her current choreographic work in progress, Ewako ôma askiy: This then is the earth. Open rehearsals were held at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive between November 1-4, 2023. It was an honor to bear witness to Tanya’s practice, which is intricate and intentional.

What’s in a word? On October 5, poet dg okpik visited the Arts Research Center to give a craft talk following her Lunch Poems reading earlier in the day. Interested in getting to the very core of a word, parsing it apart, and unfurling its layers, okpik described her process, background, and current life as a storyteller for her Inupiaq lineage.

What does it mean to be a Latinx poet? How is one’s identity at play in their artwork? Is a poem a static artifact, or a living thing? On September 28, poets J. Michael Martinez and Aracelis Girmay set out to explore these questions through readings of their work and a conversation facilitated by Professor John Alba Cutler. The room, busy and bright, was filled with Professor Cutler’s students who had recently read the poets’ work. Their attentiveness held Martinez and Girmay’s work tightly. 

When learning the Novel, you learn that the first novel emerged in the late 17th century. Such novels recorded voyages to strange new lands and evenstranger bodies who peopled the land. On their return, there grew a complete market to consume the literature that was the spectacle of difference. With the innovation of photographs at the turn of the century, every voyage was reserved with at least two weapons: the pen and the camera.

Poet Claire (Meuschke) Hong visited the Arts Research Center on March 2, 2023 for a craft talk following her reading through the Lunch Poems series. The full recording of the craft talk is available for viewing on ARC’s YouTube channel, here, and the Lunch Poems reading is available for viewing here.

How is nature poetic? How can Indigenous languages create a new sense of intimacy with one’s environment? On Thursday, March 23rd, three Hawaiian poets came together with author and professor Dr. Craig Santos Perez to explore these questions through a reading of their work. Featuring D. Kealiʻi Mackenzie, Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, and Noʻu Revilla, the three poets drew from similar wells of experience but imbued their poems with distinct styles and voices.

What does it mean to be a diasporic Indigenous writer? Is there such a category as trans-pacific Indigenous writing? How does an Indigenous poet write while living apart from their homeland? On March 8, poets Michael Wasson & Alice Te Punga Somerville came together virtually with Arts Research Center director Beth Piatote to address these questions through readings of their work and a Q&A.

How important is historical accuracy, and who determines an “accurate” account of the past? How does art allow us to access history in a more time-forward way? Dillon Chitto’s Indigifuturisitic play, Pueblo Revolt, sets out to answer these questions, reframing the 1680 Santa Fe Pueblo Revolt—the only successful Native uprising against colonial power in North America—through a modern lens. Following two orphaned brothers, Feem and Ba’homa, Pueblo Revolt watches what ordinary people do in the face of calamity.

Fall 2022 Poetry Reading and Craft Talk, held on October 6th 2022 (event info here). The full recording of the event is available for viewing on our YouTube channel, here.

Fall 2021 ARC Poetry Fellows Reading, held on December 08th 2021 (event info here). The full recording of the event is available for viewing on our YouTube channel, here.

I write to keep a question alive (even if I walk away from it).–Lindsay Choi

Say:

Camille Dungy & Ross Gay: Black Nature, Poetry, & Coexistence, in conversation with Aya de León and Maurya Kerr (event info here), held on Oct 20, 2021. The full recording of the event is available for viewing on our YouTube channel, here.

The imagination can accommodate whoever might come along.

Why not start at the darkest place?

Morgan Parker, before reciting any poetry from the page, speaks it naturally. Imagine her words: yourself, to begin with darkness. If we can see Darkness as a beginning, an end is not an end but a shift. Darkness is a transitory space that allows for a reposition, for an/other way or possibility. This returns to an earlier line of Cameron Awkward-Rich’s: “Some days I am the darkest thing I’ll see”. Imagine again: to see oneself darkly. And particularly, to know it is only a beginning opens deep relief. 

ARC is thrilled that our partnership with Engaging the Senses Foundation and our Poetry & the Senses initiative is a feature in California Arts Council’s premier new arts & culture magazine, DREAM!

You listened well – Ramona Naddaff
to witness the miracle of your heart on the outside. – Ken Ueno
I have never known myself any other way – reelaviolette botts-ward
What does it feel like to stretch without longing? – Vethea Cerna Cole
Fire makes a bad lover, the rumor goes – Sara Mumolo
and yet, you are still here – Elizabeth Zhiying Feng
I experience grief in space – Maw Shein Win
I put you down in the poem. – Noah Warren*

Yes, there is art that sits on canvas or the page but there is also art that sits on bodies. We know this because we feel. We feel because we want to live. And though it may seem at times an impossible task, it is one completely worthy of you. From here, we create.

Danez Smith and Patricia Smith, who were meant to read together on campus this past March, graciously joined us online instead. This past December, they spent nearly a half an hour each reading their poetry for our virtual audience, and afterwards, spoke with one another as well as some folks from ARC. Our Program Director, Laurie Macfee, as well as one of our 2020 Poetry & the Senses Fellows, Menat El Attamah, engaged them in a range of topics from the pandemic to the poetic imagination.

Ajuan Mance, a local artist and professor at Mills College, graced ARC with her virtual presence near the end of this past November. Her talk was focused on a project that she completed over the course of six years, from 2010 to 2016, called 1001 Black Men. Just as is implied in its title, the project is made up of 1001 portraits drawn of Black men whom Mance encountered personally, mostly in the Bay Area, but throughout the United States as well.

In spite of the many moments lost to the global upheaval this year, the Arts Research Center made an attempt to virtually celebrate an exhibit that has yet to make its date. On November 12, our director Julia Bryan-Wilson was joined by her co-curator Olivia Ardui to present the exhibition catalog for their show “Histories of Dance,” which was scheduled to take place in 2020 at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo but was drastically reduced due to the pandemic.

On this last and very tense election day, the Arts Research Center had the pleasure of virtually hosting Erin McElory of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, whose talk was a welcome distraction to us all. Topically, they began their talk by recounting the current president’s roots in the realm of private property and capital accumulation, noting that his father Fred Trump accrued his wealth in his role as a New York City landlord.

This semester, our director Julia Bryan-Wilson is teaching a class intertwined with our Visual Activism series, also called “Visual Activism.” Instead of generating our own account of Michael Rakowitz’s recent ARC talk, we’ve decided to feature five unique responses from students in the course.

This semester, our director Julia Bryan-Wilson is teaching a class intertwined with our Visual Activism series, also called “Visual Activism.” Instead of generating our own account of Alfredo Jaar’s recent ARC talk “When the Music Stops,” we’ve decided to feature four unique responses from the students in the course.

Tess Futterman:

All of us at the Arts Research Center were fortunate enough to kick off our Fall 2020 programming with a virtual visit from Favianna Rodriguez, a local Bay area visual artist whose work is inextricable from her aims as an activist. Her talk was the first in a series called Visual Activism, which was programmed in conjunction with our director Julia Bryan-Wilson’s art history course by the same name. 

You are allowed to laugh today. You are allowed more than a hidden giggled breath. Let this be a reminder that laughter that does not have to replace heaviness. You are allowed whatever joy knocks at your heart. For whatever length.

(These days, I laugh in short, quick bursts. My brother’s always sending me dad jokes: I be preaching on Amazon, call me Prime Minister)

anna’s mother began the day in her own bed in san diego a long way away from her birthbed in india. i began the day leaning over and remembering this marriage. i also recalled renee gladman beginning her day inside the world trying to look at it, but it was lying on her face making it hard to see. the light was shimmying and dull in the middle. our bed is not a front line and if not on the front line what do you do with these mounds of safety |

Northwestern University’s Shanya Silverstein came to campus on February 19 to present a specific component of her current research: the traditional dance of dabke and its relationship to the contemporary political turmoil surrounding the Syrian civil war. This form of performance, which is deeply tied to individual localities within and across Syria, has in recent years emerged more and more frequently through video footage posted to social media sites such as Facebook.

Poetry & the Senses has launched! | Our celebration of the launch of Poetry & the Senses was a joyous combination of indulgence in the arts and critical concern for this year’s theme. Participating readers—Indira Allegra, Chiyuma Elliot, and Lyn Hejinian—were introduced by our director Julia Bryan-Wilson, and further lauded by the director of the Arts + Design department on campus, Anthony Cascardi, Dean of Arts & Humanities.

Poetry and the Senses has launched! This program has been in development since October of 2019 following the most generous grant in ARC’s history, courtesy of the Engaging the Senses Foundation. The two-year initiative kicked off this January and will continue throughout the year. 

On November 12 of this past year, ARC celebrated the completion of the upcoming issue of Third Text, a journal of critical perspectives on contemporary art and culture, guest edited in part by our director Julia Bryan-Wilson. We hosted a small get-together at the Beta Lounge in Berkeley to collect our community around the concept of amateurism, and its many intrigues and merits.

December 1st is World AIDS Day, dedicated to a crisis which is still in its deepest throes. ARC co-sponsored a special film screening to commemorate the day with the California College of the Arts—this being the 30th Annual Day With(out) Arts film “Still Beginning.” Composed of seven contemporary short films solicited by the film’s producer, Visual AIDS, “Still Beginning” screened in over 115 venues on that same day all over the world.

Thursday, November 7th of 2019 was marked by a conversation between Mark Godfrey and Kenyatta Hinkle, hosted by ARC at the David Brower Center. The two—Godfrey of the Tate Modern and Hinkle of UC Berkeley’s Art Practice Department—came together to discuss the opening of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at the de Young Museum the night prior. By the time the collection reached the de Young it had travelled to five different locations throughout the United States.

Julie Mehretu has already entered the canon as a contemporary painter and artist, despite having just begun curating her mid-career exhibition. She took a brief hiatus from this work in Los Angeles to fly to Berkeley and engage in conversation with our director, Julia Bryan-Wilson. The two traversed a variety of topics concerning Mehretu’s lifetime of work, including her inspirations, her processes, her negotiations of history, and living in the present time.

Arts Research Center Partners with Engaging the Senses Foundation

to Fund Poetry Program at UC Berkeley

“Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”Frantz Fanon

AW: Claudia La Rocco’s And What’s More is the third installment of her science-fiction Olivia Trilogy, a literary, performance, art, and sound project that plays with traditional audience/maker/doer relationships. I was one of four artists commissioned by La Rocco to “read” And What’s More in and through their respective art forms.

When we talk of the reproduction of sound, or of music, we usually mean either a musical score–perhaps in the Western script of five-line staffs, clefs and bars–or a sound recording, whether analogue (on an external support like a disc, cylinder, tape) or digital recording. We don’t usually consider sound “reproduction” in relation to biological reproduction–the sort involving, for example, sex, embryos, mothers, fathers, to say nothing of the asexual reproduction of cells, bacteria, and viruses.

ARC Fellows: The Archaeologist and the Replica: 3D printing at Aidonia (Greece)

Submitted by our 2019 ARC Fellow Team:

Kim Shelton (Classics/Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology) and David Wheeler (Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology)

The Art as Critique Conference that took place on Friday, March 1st 2019, arose out of a series of collaborative discussions on the project of maintaining, claiming, and mobilizing art as political critique, as something wrapped up with ongoing global struggle and crisis. The day long symposium was concluded by a joint lecture and discussion with Koyo Kouoh, co-founder of the Senegalese RAW Material Company and recently appointed director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, and Vìctor Albarracin, Artistic Director of lugar a dudas.

The ARC Fellows Program advances interdisciplinary research in the arts at UC Berkeley by supporting self-nominated pairs of graduate students and faculty members as they pursue semester-long collaborative projects of their own design.

The goals of this program are:

• to encourage collaboration across disciplines, departments, and colleges;

• to cultivate a community of artists and arts scholars with interdisciplinary interests;

How do we address the divided histories that define who we are?

After completing her masters and Ph.D in art history at New York University Aruna D’Souza began what would become an acclaimed career as a writer. In conversation with Allan deSouza the two talked about Aruna’s thoughts on art historical practice and where it has led her as a writer. “I didn’t want to write in footnotes” D’Souza said, “I wanted my intuitions to coalesce into thinking”. D’Souza spoke of feeling confined by art historical practice, and frustrated when she was unable follow her own trajectory of thinking using art history’s typical methodology.

Concerned with the way in which a white epistemology breeds a racial, capitalist consciousness, SA Smythe — writer, translator, performer, and scholar — began their presentation with a performance of their poems “Some Call it a Comeback” and “Languish”, a small selection of their greater body of poetic works that speaks to the Black diaspora, Black Mediterranean epistemology, cultural memory, and trans embodiment.

Susan Meiselas’ latest exhibition Mediations, on display at SFMOMA until October 31st, is a summation of her most important work from the past several decades. In conversation with Natalia Brizuela, Interim Director of the Arts Research Center, and Leigh Raiford, associate professor and chair of the African American Studies department, Meiselas discussed the curation of her exhibition, revealing the importance of her artistic hand in constructing transitional narratives.

Trevor Paglen’s work and interpretation of space are great examples of the association between art and research. Blending photography, installation, investigative journalism and science, Paglen’s approach reveals that there is always more to an image than what we anticipate, and that these perceptions announce strong political meanings as well.

Eric McDougall, designer and advisor for tech companies and artists across the Bay Area, adopts the term “Social Architecture” trying to make connections between design strategies and their interactions with the world around them. After graduating from the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, McDougall’s experience with music and set design brought him to work closer with this industry. As he explains, eventually video took over much of the space of live stage concerts, and that was when the designer started pursuing graphic works more intensively.

Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s works show us how open and collaborative video games can be. Their role as a designer, programmer, curator, and writer is an example of the broad spectrum of reach the game media has, and that the creative process comes both from the idealizers but the users as well.

Acclaimed Spanish architect and recent Berkeley-Rupp Prize recipient Carme Pinós shared some of her work and thoughts on architecture with a packed audience that Monday night at BAMPFA. “The first part of this talk, I will talk about the city. The second part will be about structures.” Pinós explained how she approached her projects, and the selections she had made for that talk.

Until recently, Silicon Valley was known as a diffuse agglomeration of unprepossessing office parks stretched out along the freeways extending some 100 miles down the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose. This amorphous place began to take a decisive form following WWII, when land rich but cash poor Stanford University sought new means of generating much needed income—they could not sell any of the 6000 acres they owned.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work as a new media experimental artist was always ahead of its time. “My work is waiting for your generation to be born, because it is your generation that actually understands it”, Hershman Leeson says when reflecting on the repercussion her pieces had. The artist’s provocative works discussing the relationships between humans and technology pioneered the fields of net-based media art as well as video, film, sculpture, performance, amongst others.

By the end of the performance, the stage of Zellerbach Playhouse was strewn with costumes, toys, and vegetables. Five white squares that had served as platforms and pedestals for dancing were empty. The microphones the performers used to address us, to sing, and to provoke “historical impossibilities” lay silent on a table.

“We are all experts in amateurism”, stated ARC Director Julia Bryan-Wilson during her introductory remarks for the “Amateurism Across the Arts” Conference. The events were hosted at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and that was a special addition to the day’s atmosphere, because the museum’s current exhibition “Face to Face: Looking at Objects That Look at You” was itself within the context of the conference, co-curated by the Hearst staff and 14 UC Berkeley first-year students.

“Perennial is a neologism, a new term, and I am here to present this new term for you today”, started the lecturer Gina Pell. One important characteristic of “Perennial” is that it is, on top of everything else, a mindset. Pell explained how the term in a sense is a response to generational divisions or groups, such as millennials, but that it also tries to break off with the idea of categorizing each generation in the first place.

Nowadays a very effective way of understanding and calling attention to some absurdities happening in our world is to address them with a hint of sarcasm. That is precisely the way the “Natural History Museum”, their project, was idealized. Co-founder Beka Economopoulos shared with the audience how this project came to be, and some of the actions performed over the last few years. The museum’s “Trojan Horse” strategy is not only an approach to surprise the “enemy”, but to recognize that once being an insider, there is space for conversation.

In this week’s lecture, Jacob Gaboury, assistant professor of new media history and theory at UC Berkeley presented the connections between experimentations in Computer Sciences and Art. Focusing on the period of the 1960’s to the 1980’s, Gaboury organized the talk in three parts: First presenting two case studies on experimental computer sciences, second exposing the relationship between public and private funding in experimental research, and third, focusing on the Bay-Area scene and its specificities.

The idea of translation can give a lot of room for interpretation. To translate is in itself already an action that can have multiple meanings. Presenters Ahmad Diab, Anneka Lenssen, and Kathy Zarur interpreted some of the outcomes related to this discussion through an informal roundtable around one particular piece of writing that broadened the idea of translation beyond words.

Invited to UC Berkeley through the Art Practice 2018 Regents’ Fellowship program, Emily Jacir’s lecture at BAMPFA was the very first activity on the artists’ agenda while spending time in the Bay Area for the next ten days.

“Is this a required lecture for a class?” Asked the person seating next to me in a packed auditorium. Seeing Nicholas Negroponte’s talk was definitely an event not to be missed. Founder of MIT’s Media Lab, and the One Laptop per Child Association, Negroponte’s visionary thinking is inspirational and encouraging, and also shows us the importance of timing, collaborative works and, mainly, to think one step ahead, “visiting the future”, as he says.

“I am a lesbian feminist filmmaker”, Barbara Hammer emphasized as the lecture started. Her production of over eighty iconic films and videos touches upon topics that were just starting to be discussed almost fifty years ago, when her career started. Hammer is one of the most important names when it comes to woman directors working on experimental film and performances, thinking about cinema beyond the big screen.

Craig Baldwin’s pace and excitement as a presenter directly reflects on his professional production. Media artist, filmmaker, instigator, provocateur… For the past thirty years Baldwin’s work is a great example of San Francisco’s alternative arts community. Known as an experimental filmmaker, Baldwin is also the main person behind the “Other Cinema”, an independent art house/ movie theater that works as a venue for counter-culture film and events located at Mission District, promoting and supporting alternative forms of film-making.

UC Berkeley’s Journalism school started off the Arts + Design lectures this semester by showcasing their understanding of assemblage through the various works and projects their students have been involved in the past few years. Journalism today is one of the key professions that has been learning how to reinvent the way they communicate with this fast changing world we live in. But one thing seems to remain the same: the focus of the discussion is not about the medium they use, but it will always be about the story they produce.

Assembling through music happens all the time, but often we fail to notice how powerful this can be. Writer, curator and professor Josh Kun make this statement evident through his work “Hit Parade: Live in San Francisco”, that combines research, performance and curatorial works while discussing topics of gentrification in the Bay Area.

It might seem hard to believe for some of the younger generation today, but video and electronic art was not always a popular form of expression. “Today this kind of media is progressively being used by contemporary artists somehow through their work,” reflected Aebhric Coleman, director of the Kramlich Collection, the most influential private collection of new media/time based art in the world.

As an architect myself, I could hear the buzz amongst the students from the College of Environmental Design about that Monday’s lecture. Michael Rock’s reputation in the design community is very high, and the slideshow presentation in itself was already causing excitement. Rock’s current work as a creative director clearly builds on from his background as a designer, as he explains: “being a creative director – and no one really knows what that is- is taking different things and making them work together […] Creative directors structure stories”.

Artist Angie Wilson inspired the audience with her approach to textile art and the idea of “making” as a tool of empowerment. From “introspection rugs” to “protest curtains”, everyday objects are transformed through their materiality and meanings. Questions of tactility and texture intertwine with representation, individuality and resistance forming interactive pieces that are in conversation with numerous audiences, including our introspective selves.

Will Rawls’ strong and remarkable presence on stage is not limited to dance. In order to tell the audience about his experience, he decided to share a piece that he wrote about his life and its connections to movement and performance, that were represented through some of his inspiring anecdotes. “Rawls’ work addresses what it is to be black in performance and art”, introduced Julia Bryan-Wilson, Director of the Arts Research Center and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at UC Berkeley.

It was hard to find an empty seat that evening in the auditorium. Kimberly Drew was the guest speaker and Berkeley was excited to hear how outspoken she probably would be in person, as she is online. Kimberly Drew represents an important voice for black artists and the arts community. Creator of the Tumblr blog “Black Contemporary Art”, Kimberly Drew gained a lot of space on social media while still in Smith College, where she graduated with a B.A. in Art History and Africana Studies, and a concentration in Museum Studies.

Tony Abeyta and Corrina Gould’s presentation had a special connotation as it was held during Indigenous People’s day. While many parts of the country celebrate Columbus Day, Berkeley was actually the first city to, alternatively, establish Indigenous People’s Day, challenging the idea that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America. Although there is an effort towards the recognition of these debates, this is only one step towards change. And that resonates on the importance of the works of people such as Abeyta and Gould.

“To start this conversation, let’s watch a movie”

Tania Bruguera calls herself an “initiator”. Known for her political art and performance, Bruguera explains how her works create opportunities for reflection and conversation through the experiences they allow people to have. Born and trained in Cuba, from an early stage in her carrier Bruguera had to deal with repression and political implications related to her art. She believes those reactions actually tend to help “feed” her work and broaden the discussions she is trying to raise.

“Performance is happening everywhere today”, began Shannon Jackson, Associate Vice Chancellor for Arts + Design, UC Berkeley. Even though many would connect this term with theater, music or dance, it is easy to recognize how it can be related to several different practices and disciplines. From the practices of every-day-life, to speech and protests, we are constantly encountering examples of what performance means in our contemporary settings.

The work of a curator is one of great responsibility, but often in different ways. Not only does the curator construct stories and introduce different topics to the audience through creative approaches, but also, and mainly, they start a conversation.

About The 2017-18 Critical Theory Working Group “Collaborations, Co-Operatives, Coalition-Building”: Composer, historian, and civil rights activist Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon once asserted, “if you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition.” Echoing Reagon’s sentiment, Judith Butler asserted in a recent public discussion at the BAMPFA that we do not have to have breakfast together, but we must try to find common interests across our divisionary lines.

As I was walking down the hallway at the Berkeley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archive, I overheard: “This is where all the arts, curators and creative people in Berkeley will be tonight.” What a promising event! And I did not expect anything different.

It is always a great pleasure to have the opportunity to participate in a lecture with a curator that has a show on view.

Download the Arts + Design Access App and Claim Free tickets to Experiences!

Claim FREE tickets to arts and design experiences, performances, events, exhibits and more on Campus and in the bay area!

This semester the Arts + Design Initiative presented a Spring 2017 season of lectures as part of our program Arts + Design Mondays @ BAMPFA. Lectures were organized with multiple units on campus including the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, Arts Research Center, and The Future of Cultural Criticism.  Leaders and educators in arts and design from around the world spoke on Monday evenings at BAMPFA’s Theater.

This spring 2017 semester at UC Berkeley featured an engaging and informative lecture series Thinking Through the Arts and Design at Berkeley: California Countercultures, organized by Big Ideas Courses and the Arts + Design Initiative. The course and embedded lecture series, which will occur again in Fall 2017, is open to the public each Wednesday at noon in BAMPFA’s Theater.

Cinema can be useful for landscape architects and other designers of the built environment. Over the course of the Spring semester, Professor Chip Sullivan and I have been exploring this proposition. We have delved into the body of previous theory on the intersection between architectural design and the art of filmmaking.

What do classes in costume design, product development, solar powered vehicles and needfinding in the wild all have in common? All four courses — along with dozens of others across departments and disciplines on campus — will be offered to UC Berkeley undergraduate students as part of a new certificate program that introduces design thinking as the critical and creative means to innovate, imagine and advance a globally just future.

UC Berkeley’s Spring Arts and Design Showcase:

Experience what’s being “Made at Berkeley”

 

Through this series my peers and I have been given chance to think together with some of the sharpest commentators on contemporary culture.  We glimpsed the dizzying possibilities of new genres of performance and cultural expression made possible by new media platforms.  The February  27th edition of the series was especially delightful. The evening featured two award-winning young black women on stage in conversation with each other. Against the fuschia backdrop a visor-clad, blue-black Alek Weck bursts forward as if from some sartorial future.

It was January 30th. By 6:30 pm the queue was already wrapped around the railing of the Berkeley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archive. It was starting to feel like a bit of a party. Like a good Aquarian I am prone to read auspiciousness into the fact of sharing my 40th year with the inauguration of the Spring 2017 Arts and Design Mondays series by Judith Butler and Maggie Nelson’s talk. 

As Chancellor Dirks announced to the UC Berkeley community in November, our campus remains steadfast in our values, committed to the safety, growth, and well-being of all of our students, faculty, and staff.  The first week of our new semester (January 13-20, 2017) coincides with the Inauguration of a new President of the United States.  Recognizing that our campus is brimming with activities and events that address the timely issues of our shared political landscape, the offices for Equity & Inclusion and of Arts + Design have collaborated with Campus Public Affairs to 

From sculptures made of found wood stacked like a Rube Goldberg machine to wheeled robots that navigated obstacle courses, craft and creativity were on display across UC Berkeley’s campus at the end of the Fall 2016 as students across disciplines presented their final projects of the semester. The student creators were on hand to discuss their work, and most of the events were free and open to the public, giving the community an in-depth look at their projects.

Dear Campus Community,

We are thrilled to announce the creation of a new faculty leadership position, the Associate Vice Chancellor of Arts and Design, and equally delighted to inform you that Professor Shannon Jackson has agreed to take on this role.  As the current Director of the Arts Research Center, and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Shannon is uniquely qualified and positioned to develop and advance our aspirations in the realm of the Arts and Design.

UC Berkeley’s Fall Arts and Design Showcase: Bringing Talent into Focus

At a time when many tout the importance of “creativity,” Berkeley’s arts and design landscape offers a uniquely bracing context for creative experimentation, one enriched by the scientific and cultural wealth of a world-class research university, one propelled by our historic commitment to public access and social impact.  The Arts + Design Initiative supports faculty artists and scholars in a shared effort to identify the broad and distinctive strengths of UC Berkeley’s arts and design profile.

Welcome Back! We are all getting ready for a new academic year filled to the brim with exciting courses, exhibitions, performances, and a range of public events that feature UC Berkeley’s rich and bracing creative culture. After reviewing our first start-up year of the Arts+Design Initiative, it is a thrill to anticipate a new one.

The past haunts us. It drives our need to recover archives; to activate fragments of a time lived before (by one or by others) into a new experience. Memory is one of the most recurrent themes in contemporary art. It is considered to be characteristic of Latin American art, but it is not. European cities (particularly Berlin) as well as those of Latin America (especially Buenos Aires) have become huge memorials. Centotaph cities.

Seniors Brenda Romero and Andrew Wong will graduate from UC Berkeley in May, but not until this semester had they set foot in the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) or attended a dance, theater or musical performance in Zellerbach Hall.

Chavez Ravine is a play about people, politics, and change. More specifically, it’s the story of residents displaced from their homes in Los Angeles on land that eventually became Dodger Stadium. Yet to summarize these events into one simple sentence is impossible: the production honors multiple histories, gives visibility to people who have been marginalized, and sparks insights into our current political and economic crises.

How do bodies construct and inhabit public space?

In the past week I had the opportunity to participate in three transformative workshops—two sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative–that used dance, movement, and mindfulness to explore public space.

Meaningful connections between realist literature and verismo opera are surprisingly elusive. As a term of opera criticism, verismo describes a style of opera popular during the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s, which saw French, Italian, and German composers emulating literature by incorporating more ‘realistic’ subjects, dramatic strategies, and musical materials – all to make opera as arresting as the contemporary novel. By all estimations, verismo opera would seem an ideal topic for fostering interdisciplinary discourse.

On the occasion of our campus opening the new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley News featured the upcoming celebrations and the Arts + Design Initiative.

The new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive — with its fresh design, expanded programs and prime town-and-gown location — is about to be celebrated with a four-day grand opening that starts this Thursday, Jan. 28, and culminates in a free public open house on Sunday, Jan. 31.

“Where would our society be,” asks Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, “without the aesthetic dimension of life centering on form, image, language, movement, narrative, and expression? Without art, we would cease to be human.” Read on. How poignant to have this reminder from our campus leader – and our boss –  about the importance of creative imagining for our students and throughout public life.

Here in Paris, international leaders wrangle about how to address the effects of climate change in ways that are both globally expansive and equitably conceived; the debate often focuses on measures that would stall the rising temperature of the earth’s core. Those ‘measures’ are of course complex, ambiguous, and under-felt for many of the world’s leaders and the world’s citizens, a fact that makes the hope of deploying new science to instill new behavior uncertain as well.

In his monthly op-ed for the Daily Cal, Chancellor Dirk highlights exposure to the arts as central to the undergraduate experience.

Academic study and practice in arts and design fields can have an incredible impact on our work…as well as in our lives. These disciplines encourage creativity and imagination, expose people to new ideas, bring different cultures and viewpoints into dialogue, provide opportunities for performance and self-expression and much more.

At an Artist Talk on November 14, Janet Cardiff and her partner, George Miller, spoke about their ongoing interest in projects that merge live and recorded moments, and how these two worlds merge to create a third realm. In Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet, the acoustic landscape carries a tangible effect, like a blanket that wraps around a listener, and shifts according to where a person stands and moves.

114 countries, 29 guest speakers, 2 teachers, 4,000+ enrolled participants: These are some of the elements of the Art of the MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course or MOOC, designed by artist and Duke University professor, Pedro Lasch, and co-taught with Creative Time chief curator, Nato Thompson. The course is available from October 19 to December 6, 2015 and offered on a Coursera landing page.

It’s an exciting start to the fall semester, and already our many departments, centers, museums, labs, and theaters are mobilizing the creativity of our campus with new classes, exhibits, performances, lectures, and social events. It is also an exciting time for the Arts Research Center (ARC) as we reimagine ourselves in relation to the ambitious goals of our Chancellor’s Arts + Design Initiative at Berkeley.

What inspired you to write The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater?

Dear Campus Community,

We are thrilled to announce the creation of a new faculty leadership position, the Associate Vice Chancellor of Arts and Design, and equally delighted to inform you that Professor Shannon Jackson has agreed to take on this role.  As the current Director of the Arts Research Center, and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Shannon is uniquely qualified and positioned to develop and advance our aspirations in the realm of the Arts and Design.

On Friday March 13, ARC hosted the Questioning Aesthetics Symposium, where we invited a range of scholars and artists to help us think through three unique yet connected frames of “aesthetics,” asking: When is art participatory? When is computing aesthetic?

On Tuesday, January 13, The Arts Research Center was delighted to welcome Laura Callanan, the newly appointed Senior Deputy Chairman at the National Endowment for the Arts, for a salon conversation on Innovation, Entrepreneurship and the Arts with ARC Director Shannon Jackson.

In addition to public conferences and symposia, the Arts Research Center organizes other, small-scale gatherings meant to advance and celebrate faculty research in the arts:

The Arts Research Center would like to thank our community’s support of ARC’s 10-day whirlwind residency with artist Rick Lowe! Rick’s stay with us was jam-packed with a range of activities, from lectures, symposia, tours and studio visits, and we are so grateful for his unceasing energy and inspiration throughout.  

In a double bill traversing earthy African blues and hypnotic ancient grooves, the Afropop Spectacular features performances by virtuoso ngoni player Bassekou Kouyate and the Ethiopian trio Krar Collective. Kouyate descends from a long line of Malian griots and combines generations of tradition with innovative rock-inflected techniques on the banjo-like ngoni.

The Arts Research Center kicked off the fall season of programs and events with a “birthday party” celebration in honor of its 15th anniversary on campus, held at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on August 25, 2014. Below is the short synopsis, and a welcome to the fall arts season, written by ARC Director Shannon Jackson:

In 1960 Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) described the just-completed painting Summer Bliss as one of his finest. At the suggestion of Erle Loran, then chair of the UC Berkeley Art Department, Hofmann offered Summer Bliss to the University in honor of professor Worth Ryder, who had passed away earlier that year. Ryder, who like Loran had studied with Hofmann years earlier in Germany, had invited Hofmann to teach at Berkeley in 1930, initiating what Hofmann later identified as his “start in America as a teacher and artist.”1

Let’s Ask Ourselves…

[A Dance-based Addendum to the “Grey Matter” Quiz]

Read ARC Director Shannon Jackson’s summary of the 2012-14 academic years, highlighting ARC’s many accomplishments (Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space, Impact in the Arts Think Tank, Living Time: Art and Life After ‘Art-Into-Life’, Bruce Beasley: The Rondo Series in Context, Nordic Time Zones: Time-based art across disciplines in the Northern Landscape, and Valuing Labor in the Arts: A Practicum) and plans for the coming year.  To download the full report, click

World-renowned filmmaker, artist, and critical theorist and ARC Affiliate Trịnh Thị Minh Hà (Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Rhetoric) will read from her new book D-Passage in San Francisco on November 14 and Berkeley on December 4. “D-Passage is a nuanced and original intervention in new media and digital arts.

 Keyword: Public | In cross-disciplinary gatherings at ARC, we have found it worth going over territory that we all think we know, to review the staples, the bread and butter of our fields, in order to expose blindspots and to jostle ourselves into new perspectives on the heretofore obvious. But should I really reflect on the term “public”?

The Arts Research Center saw a whirlwind of activity in recent weeks, when Taiwanese playwright/director extraordinaire (and UC Berkeley alum) Stan Lai came to campus as an ARC artist-in-residence and Avenali Resident Fellow January 28 through February 8, 2013.  A photo album capturing some of his activities can now be viewed on the ARC Facebook page

Ralph Lemon, choreographer
Introduced by Julia Bryan-Wilson, History of Art, UC Berkeley
Response by Joe Goode, Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

Watch the video here!

A symposium focusing on thinking across media across a range of histories and also across a range of theoretical paradigms, watching what happens when  different kinds of temporal forms are joined— what it means for certain forms that didn't understand themselves to be durational to be made.

Featuring:

Rebecca Schneider, Theater Arts & Performance Studies, Brown University

Peter Taub, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Jens Hoffmann, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, California College of the Arts
Introduced by Christina Linden, independent curator
Response by Rebecca Schneider, Theater Arts & Performance Studies, Brown University

Watch the video here!

It gives us great pleasure to introduce you to Susan Miller, our new Director of Organizational Strategy for the Arts + Design Initiative!

Susan Miller is a seasoned arts and academic professional who has held key posts in numerous presenting institutions, universities, and non-profit cultural centers. She brings deep experience in organizational development, planning, fiscal management and community engagement, and a commitment to public education in her new appointment with us at the Arts + Design Initiative.

Michael Roth's lecture was co-sponsored by the Arts Research Center and the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. Currently President of Wesleyan University, Roth has served as President of the California College of the Arts, Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and Director of European Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He was also H.B. Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, where he founded and directed the Scripps College Humanities Institute.

The first panel of the daylong symposium "Curating People," presented by the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley (arts.berkeley.edu) on April 29, 2011, this discussion of "When Presenters Become Curators/When Curators Become Presenters" is introduced by Shannon Jackson (UC Berkeley), moderated by Leigh Markopoulos (California College of the Arts), and features Betti-Sue Hertz and Angela Mattox (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Erin Doughton and Kristan Kennedy (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art), and David Henry (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston).