LOS ANGELES — It was a busy night at UCLA’s ever-buzzworthy annual event Open Studios graduate event on June 3. From vivid comic-derived paintings to a research project into a series of police raids that took place in the early 20th century, a lot of artistic ground has been covered in the halls of Margo Leavin Graduate Studios.
Regardless of the formal variety of open studios, certain content themes emerge every year, with this year’s MFAs placing a premium on identity. One such example is the visually arresting and technically impressive work of Nehemiah Cisneros, whose paintings fuse the graphic traditions of street art and comics with narratives of violence, struggle and inequality dating back to childhood experiences in Inglewood, California during the Rodney King Riots. Another artist, Samar Al Summaryblends fiction and memoir in her video work, an account of her experiences growing up in Arizona, where her family moved after leaving her home country of Saudi Arabia when she was 12 years old.
In his studio opposite, multidisciplinary artist Friend Sillah presented a series of recent photographs depicting people she knows, and sometimes herself, in various states of intimacy, ranging from the delicate intertwining of bedmates kissing to the casual smiles and laughter of revelers. The work has a half-staged, half-candid quality that recalls The Ballad of Sex Addiction (1986), Nan Goldin’s seminal photographic work that captured Goldin’s close-knit group of friends, a chosen family as they lived and loved together in New York before the spread of AIDS changed their whole life. When I spoke with Sillah about what united her group of new MFA students, she replied that although highly individualized, many of her students are strongly influenced by institutional criticism.
Other impressive studios included that of Jarvis Boyland, whose figurative paintings and drawings of mostly gay black men contain a poignant balance of respectful dignity and poetic tenderness. artist and witch Jamie Ross also housed an impressive exhibition of ephemera from his multidisciplinary art project “Neptune’s Closet” (2023), which the artist described on his Instagram as a “symposium of music, sculpture, rare books and lectures”, resulting from his work with writer Liz Brown. research into the 1914 Long Beach Vice Raids that resulted in the arrest of 31 people at private clubs where men allegedly cross-dressed and had sex.
Overall, this year’s Graduate Open Studios featured a number of artists with a strong commitment to representing their respective communities, past and present. The influence of social practice could be seen everywhere, even in relatively traditional paintings by artists such as Boyland or Cisneros. While some, like Summary, took a more narrative approach and others, like Sillah, focused on portraiture, UCLA students come across as decidedly extroverted in their interests, looking into their communities to find the inspiration, rather than just inside.
