Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center at UCLA to Open
With Art and Design | Media Arts Exhibitions
Beginning this fall, local residents and travelers to Southern California will have an added incentive to visit UCLA, already well-known as a major cultural center in the West. The new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, opening on Sept. 14 on north campus, features “T.E.U.C.L.A.,” a 42.5-ton torqued ellipse by Richard Serra, which has been installed on the plaza. The Serra sculpture is the first work by the artist to be on permanent view in a public space in Southern California. The Broad Art Center, designed by Richard Meier & Partners Architects, is located adjacent to the internationally renowned Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden. The center enhances the campus’s rich cultural attractions, which include the Fowler and Hammer museums and UCLA Live, a major performing arts program.
The Murphy Sculpture Garden, one of the most distinguished outdoor collections of its kind in the country, spans five acres on UCLA’s north campus and features more than 70 sculptures by artists such as Alexander Calder, Claire Falkenstein, Barbara Hepworth, Gaston Lachaise, Henri Matisse, Henry Moore, Auguste Rodin, David Smith and Francisco Zuñiga.
Visitors will see the new installation of the garden, where some of the works have been strategically re-sited to other parts of the garden in order to accommodate the construction of the Broad Art Center. Jacques Lipchitz’s “The Song of the Vowels” and Isamu Noguchi’s “Garden Elements” now greet visitors at the southeast entrance to the garden near the campus’ Public Policy Building. Additional works by Jean Arp, Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, Pietro Consagra, Henri Laurens and Bernard Rosenthal have been relocated within the site. Anna Mahler’s limestone “ Tower of Masks” is now on view for the first time since it was restored after being damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. In addition, new landscaping and conservation on various sculptures have greatly improved the appearance of this beloved UCLA landmark.
The Broad Art Center, which houses the visual arts programs at UCLA, offers an ongoing public series of free exhibitions and lectures at the New Wight Gallery and the EDA (experimental digital arts) space.
The New Wight Gallery, established in 1995, is a vital center on the UCLA campus for the display and discussion of student art, design and media arts work. In winter and spring quarters, master’s of fine arts exhibitions representing work from the UCLA Department of Art and the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts are presented in the 5,500-square-foot gallery, offering each graduating M.F.A. student a professional exhibition setting for their work and an appropriate venue for review by their graduate faculty committees.
The UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts offers a variety of events throughout the year for the public’s education and enjoyment, including public lectures, workshops and demonstrations by leaders in the fields of design, new media, science, architecture and culture and society. The events are presented in the EDA (experimental digital arts), located on the first level of the new Broad Art Center. The EDA was conceived for talks and short-term fluid events and installations. Live streaming of the lectures is available on the Web.
Exhibitions of works by world-renowned artists who are members of the faculty in the UCLA Department of Art and the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts will highlight the opening of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center at UCLA. Designed by Richard Meier & Partners Architects, the building will open on Sept. 14. A sculpture by Richard Serra—“T.E.U.C.L.A.,” a torqued ellipse—has been permanently installed on the plaza.
The exhibitions will be on view from Sept. 14 through Oct. 26 in the New Wight Gallery and the first- and second-level spaces of the tower located in the Broad Art Center. Hours are noon to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday; open until 7 p.m., Thursday. Admission is free. The gallery is closed on Sunday and Monday. Campus parking costs $8 and is available in Lot 3. (Enter the campus at Hilgard Avenue and Wyton Drive.) Fully illustrated catalogues will complement the exhibitions.
For updated information and confirmation of events programming, the public may call the department of art at 310-825-0557 or log on to www.art.ucla.edu; and the department of design | media arts at 310-825-9007 or log on to www.design.ucla.edu.
Sixteen Tons, the department of art exhibition at the Broad Art Center—curated by Michael Darling, the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum—will feature works by faculty members John Baldessari, Jennifer Bolande, Chris Burden (emeritus), Barbara Drucker ’70, M.F.A. ’76 (chair), Roger Herman, Mary Kelly, Paul McCarthy (emeritus), Catherine Opie, Hirsch Perlman, Lari Pittman, Charles Ray, Nancy Rubins (emerita), Adrian Saxe, Don Suggs ’69, M.A. ’71, James Welling and Patty Wickman.
Second Natures, the department of design | media arts exhibition—curated by Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City—will feature work by faculty members Rebecca Allen, Robert Israel, Rebeca Méndez, Vasa Mihich, Christian Moeller, C.E.B. Reas, Jennifer Steinkamp and Victoria Vesna (chair). Faculty who teach theory in the department—Erkki Huhtamo and Katherine Hayles—contributed essays to the catalogue.
“The UCLA Department of Art has been crucial in the establishment of Los Angeles as perhaps the most exciting single city for cutting-edge art production anywhere,” said Michael Darling, curator of Sixteen Tons. “This exhibition features 16 current and emeriti faculty members, each of whom has built up distinctive oeuvres. In their work we can see the major vectors that have guided the international art world across the spectrum of possibilities and categories: in painting, photography, sculpture, video, film, performance and installation. The artists’ legacies are visible not only in the ambitious work of the ever-expanding community of UCLA alumni, but also in the license they have given to an international network of artists around the globe.”
“The works brought together in Second Natures construct a multifaceted picture of representations of nature—a picture that is very much of its time and informed by the current [social and cultural] climate,” curator Christiane Paul said. “The age of digital technologies has brought about profound changes in the depiction of nature: a shift towards a ‘second nature’ that is increasingly bound to mediation, data representation and simulation. The exhibited works, which range from interactive installation and software art to sculpture and painting, either simulate natural elements and organic structures or operate on an inherent tension between nature and design. Nature appears as processed—both in the sense of natural resources and medium—as designed, simulated, technologically connected and filtered through human perception, or as an imaginary space.”
Eli and Edythe Broad donated $23.2 million toward the construction of a renovated complex at UCLA that will provide modern facilities for the visual arts programs of the School of the Arts and Architecture (UCLArts), including interactive multimedia technology, studio space for students, updated classrooms, and galleries for student exhibitions and public presentations, as well as office and conference space. The facility will house the department of art, the department of design | media arts and the New Wight Gallery.
Reconstructing and seismically repairing the existing eight-story structure, severely damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, Richard Meier & Partners Architects transformed the building, creating a distinctive new home for the world-class visual arts programs of UCLArts, while integrating the complex into the surrounding campus. The contemporary building of architectural concrete, teak, stainless steel and glass is located on an important north-south pedestrian axis which is integrated into the building plan. The new Broad Art Center offers greatly improved program space that is both more appropriate for the working methods of contemporary artists and flexibly designed to accommodate future needs. The development of outboard structural buttresses on the west end of the tower as a major component of the seismic solution provides an innovative alternative to interior shear walls. The result is flexible internal space largely unencumbered by structural partitions, creating a loft-like floor plan perfectly suited to contemporary studio practice.
