Theater ads become art

Ukiyo-e now part of Pierce art collection

Lynn Levitt Roundup Reporter

The Pierce College Art Gallery opened its doors with a Japanese flair using paper lanterns, tatami mats and floor pillows to present hundred-year-old woodblock prints, from the Edo period of Japan, on March 20.

The `Ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) were generously donated to the Pierce Foundation and are now part of Pierce’s permanent collection.

“The prints were found in boxes in a garage,” said former Director of the Foundation for Pierce College Dennis Washburn.

Quartet hits high notes with audience

Concert

The UCLA Gluck String Quartet performed a stellar presentation for Pierce College in a jam-packed music hall at the Concert at Pierce event March 20, sponsored by the Pierce College Associate Student Organization.

James Bergman, music adjunct and host of the Thursday concert events, started off the recital with his praises. “They [UCLA] have an amazing program,” Bergman said. “We’re glad to have the Gluck String Quartet perform for us at Pierce.”

The group, Amy Tang, Timothy Chin, Theo Ma, and Andrea Yu, is composed of two violinists, a violist, and a cellist respectively. The quartet delivered a moving performance for the people in attendance.

Playing compositions by Mozart, George Gershwin, and Tchaikovsky, the quartet showed their musical versatility while feeding off the energy from each other and the audience. The group did a total of seven compositions.

Starting the concert was Mozart’s Divertimento in D major. The classical composition epitomizes chamber music, gradually picking up pace and leading with riveting violin riffs.

During the performance, the group broke down each composition and provided information as to which instruments served what purpose.

Ma talked about the pros and cons of playing the viola in chamber music and in music as a whole.

“It’s kind of a hard position to be in,” Ma said. “The violist is more of a pace setter, it doesn’t really stand out as much as the other instruments.”

Another composition they performed, Rhapsody in Blue, resembled the score of an old Tom and Jerry scene, with several changes of pace and a pizzicato interlude which fell right in the middle of the song.

For their last composition, the group performed a medley of 50’s era R&B, doo-wop, country, and rock n’ roll hits. This composition was especially interesting because they’re not normally performed in a chamber music fashion.

Along with their performance, the quartet cellist Yu offered perspective to the audience about the specific mind sets that the composers were in when they created their music.

“Apparently Mozart liked to party,” Yu said. “Were these composers writing these pieces because it came from the heart? Or was he writing them to support his habit?”

Altogether, the quartet’s talent and execution brought culture to the audience while still managing to give a great performance.

The Ruslan Biryukov trio is set to play at the next Thursday concert March 27, in the 3400 Music Building. with the doors opening at 12:45 p.m. and free admission.

Washburn facilitated the exchange by appraising the work and filling out a charitable donation form.

Featured student co-curators Heather Bourse and Grace Culbertson installed the show with the help of Art Professor Monika Del Bosque.

“This is the first time the gallery has ever had student curators,” Del Bosque said. “The prints themselves span over 100 years of the Japanese woodblock printing tradition and I am incredibly excited to share them with the public.”

Culbertson and Bourse have been working on this project as an independent study under Del Bosque for the past three semesters.

The collection is seen as fine art, and examines the art form and beauty of the traditional woodblock printing process. It also tells the story of how prints functioned within Japanese society at the time they were made.

“The exhibit took me back to Japan,” art major Michelle Basche, said, “and perfectly reflected the precise patience, eloquent design and profound beauty which is found in the culture.”

Aside from the great masters,

“The exhibit each print became a collaboration of four experts: the artist who designed the prints, the engraver who carved the blocks, the printer who inked and pressed the woodblocks onto hand-made paper and the publisher, who financed, promoted and took care of distribution.

The art in its original form were posters, advertising theater performances and brothels, or portraits of kabuki actors. With time, Ukiyo-e subject matter expanded to include famous romantic vistas and eventually, in the final years of the nineteenth century, dramatic historical events. Being on display in the show enlivens the prints to become a vibrant reflection of yesterday’s Japan, and today’s life.

The Pierce College Art Gallery is located on Art Hill in room 3301.

The show will be open from March 20 to April 23 Mondays and Tuesdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesdays and Thursdays 2 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Every fall semester for the last six years, Associate Professor of Architecture Beth Abels takes a group of students on a trek from one end of the Los Angeles River to the other.

This select group of architecture students go on the trip as part of a design studio course of the river. The course involves researching and touring the river, and leads up to eventually drafting centers to mark headwaters.

“In this city, there’s maybe a thousand people who know a lot about the river, and Pierce architecture students are 40 of those thousand people,” she said. “I think that’s so cool. I love that.”

A practicing architect, Abels received her first taste of working as an educator right after she had her first child. At the time, she was volunteering at an elementary school.

“It wasn’t like I was thinking,

‘Oh, I should be a professor.’ It kinda just happened,” she said. “I found I really liked it.”

She discovered the job opening for Pierce College’s architecture program through a Craigslist ad, and, when accepted, started in 2008.

“I thought it might be fun to teach full time and I was ready for a change from my practice anyway, so it seemed like a good switch,” she said.

Because of her heavy workload as the only full-time architecture professor at Pierce, she has been forced to take on less building projects. She plans on getting her practice up and running again in the next year.

“I feel like I’ve been at Pierce long enough that our program is running relatively smoothly,” Abels said.

She credits her passion for architecture to her affinity for art and desire for social justice, a trait that she inherited from her activist parents.

This zeal is passed along to her students by going the extra mile as a professor with the LA Rivercentric class.

“The L.A. River’s been ignored pretty well,” she said. “It can be this fabulous asset for us as a city.”

This fact has stuck with architecture major Juan Becerril, 21, who took the class with Abels during fall 2013.

“A lot of people look at the LA River like it’s a giant water drain,” he said.

Through the course, she’s able to teach her students the importance of relating the area they are in to the surrounding places, as well as the city as a whole.

“For architecture education, it’s very important to understand what the layers are and how things are connected,” Abels said. “Almost like when you think about the structure of a body, with the veins and arteries and flesh and bone, cities are like that.”

Abels says that while the LA River has been more accessible these days because of ongoing resurgence, in the past there have been areas that were closed off to the public.

“I’m careful. I don’t take my students to those places, but there are places where you think you’re going in and you find out you’re not supposed to be there,” she said. “We’ve been pretty lucky.”

She says that although none of the students who have taken the class have moved on to work directly with the LA River, they have been able to incorporate what they’ve learned into their next career or educational choice.

The class also personally impacts the students who take it.

“Many of my students have transferred to architecture programs where their expertise with the LA River is what made them a desirable candidate,” she said. “I have a lot of students who are becoming experts in sustainability, and that expertise comes from their developing this understanding of how water systems work.”