COURTNEY STEWART/ Daily Bruin Senior art student
Lauren Dixon prepares her work to be displayed in
the Senior Art Show today.
By Howard Ho
Daily Bruin Reporter
Sure, you could take the bus and the tram ride up to the Getty
Center, or you could just walk over to UCLA’s New Wight
Gallery in Dickson Hall and see senior student art works for free
and without hassle.
Titled “Rash,” the show opens with a reception on
Friday night where art connoisseurs can mingle with the artists
rather than just see the works in a detached manner. The exhibited
art will also show a cross section of concerns and interests that
the art students, and by extension, students in general, may be
having.
“(The faculty) encourages (students) to bring their
learning and their observations about things other than art to
their practice,” said art professor Don Suggs, who teaches
painting and drawing. “There is art about art, of course,
which goes into theoretical questions. We don’t discourage
any subject and certainly we are not focused primarily on formal
concerns.”
The variety present in the exhibit allows for various subject
matter and media. The focus this year on painting does not worry
Suggs, who emphasizes freedom and experimentalism for the
students’ exhibit.
“It’s auto-curated by the students themselves so
they choose what they want to put in,” Suggs said. “The
only limitations on them are that they be seniors and art majors.
It’s kind of an ad hoc curating philosophy.”
This senior art show has the distinction of being the last one
held in the old Dickson building, which will be refurbished over
the next two years. In the meantime, the art department along with
the dance department will be moving down to a location near
Wilshire Boulevard, where potential exhibition space will be much
smaller than in the New Wight.
“We’ll be extreme South Campus. It’s an
adventure as much as it is a tribulation. This will be an
experiment in being flexible and resourceful,” Suggs
said.
 CLAIRE ZUGMEYER Student Dan Frost
positions his work on the wall of the Wight gallery for the Senior
Art Show. With a creative carte blanche, many students are
including pieces indicative not only of their artistic mastery, but
also their personal beings. Krystal Kelly, a fourth-year art
student, whose painting series “Ordeal Four (Set of
Three)” is on display, usually doesn’t show paintings
because she feels they are too personal. However, the senior show
has allowed her the opportunity to break that mold.
“My paintings tended to be more about solitude so the
audience was more of a private audience,” Kelly said.
“I always thought I was showing my paintings to a different
audience than the one I was showing my sculptures to, but I
realized that they are the same audience.”
Freedom also gives art students a forum to spread their ideas.
For Jeff Stehney, a fourth-year art student, his art is a way of
examining life’s spirituality, although he makes an appeal to
science as well.
“Genetics lends itself to existence after death.
It’s like immortality in a way and I find that pretty
interesting,” Stehney said.
Political issues are also one of the major themes of the show,
which includes Lorenzo Hurtado’s “Tres
Conchinitos,” a canvas painting with images of three pigs and
an American flag. Rather than a concrete political statement,
Hurtado, an art transfer student in his first year at UCLA, prefers
to create a surreal experience that is enjoyable.
“I’m interested in political issues. But once I get
them on the canvas, I’m interested more in the aesthetics and
more of how to keep a viewer interested,” Hurtado said.
On the other hand, Anyeline Ortiz, a fourth-year art and
international development studies transfer student, makes a very
concrete statement about the political and social problems of the
world. One of her works presents the viewer with disturbing
photographs of atrocities around the world that Ortiz collects.
“One of my issues is that the reality in America is, even
though we have newspapers, we don’t take the time to read the
articles to see what’s going on out there,” Ortiz said.
“I put (images) here in your face, telling you to just give
it a look one more time, because it is a problem.
“People are suffering and struggling just to survive each
day of their lives. As a senior, my perspective became more global
than one topic,” she added.
Getting an art work shown in an exhibit is a real world concern,
which the UCLA curriculum tries to cover with this exhibit as well
as the undergraduate exhibit. However, unlike the latter exhibit,
which is more competitive with a professional curator making the
selections, the senior exhibit gives equal chance to all
students.
“This show has the virtue of being democratic,”
Suggs said.
In addition to financing and making their own art works, artists
are required to learn how to hang, curate, and arrange their works.
Suggs takes pride not just in teaching students to paint, but also
in how to use power tools to hang their paintings.
“In practical terms, (students) have to learn because of
their professional status, which is neophyte,” Suggs said.
“We try to teach them professional resourcefulness on some
level.”
ART: The UCLA Senior Show’s opening
reception is tonight from 5-8 at the New Wight Gallery, Dickson Art
Center. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and it
will run through March 1. Admission is free.