Academic and Professional Resources
The Hammer Museum, the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and UCLA Live are major resources for students in the Department of Art. The Hammer exhibits a wide range of contemporary art as well as offers lectures, readings, concerts, and films. The Fowler Museum at UCLA includes major works from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Pre-Columbian North and South America. UCLA Live, at the vanguard of dance, music, spoken word, and experimental theater, presents and produces over 200 performances each year on and off campus.
The New Wight Gallery is vital for the visual arts on campus, both as a venue for exhibiting student work and as a forum for discussion. Graduate students organize a biennial exhibition of graduate-level artwork selected from on-site studio visits by graduate students to a number of the most prestigious art schools and university art departments in North America and abroad. MFA exhibitions take place in the New Wight Gallery throughout the academic year.
Prominent guest artists visit classes each year, and distinguished artists are brought to campus annually with funding provided by the UCLA Art Council. The department hosts a Visiting Artists Lecture Series and sponsors symposia with specific themes and core groups of students who act as respondents. Symposia speakers represent internationally acclaimed artists and theorists from various disciplines, including architecture, film, art, and art history.
The University's many resources include several special archives and collections. The Arts Library contains more than 270,000 volumes on art history, architecture and architectural history, design, studio art and related areas, as well as a comprehensive collection of artists' books. The Boni Collection in the Department of Special Collections in the Young Research Library is an outstanding collection of historical photographic prints, literature, and related material. The Visual Resource Collection, housed in the Department of Art History, includes a teaching collection of approximately 320,000 slides documenting the history of art from neolithic times to the present. Additionally, the UCLA Library subscribes to ARTstor (www.artstor.org), an online database providing access to approximately 700,000 images of art, architecture, and other culturally significant objects spanning pre-history to the present day.
Los Angeles is home to world-renowned museums including the J. Paul Getty Museum (located four miles north of campus), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as well as colleges and universities throughout the region. A vibrant art scene exists with galleries throughout the city. Los Angeles also is a regular stop for touring art exhibitions, dance companies, theater productions, and music ensembles from all over the world.