On Sunday, Mar. 1, UCR ARTS celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Gluck Fellows Program of the Arts with a community, family-oriented day held at the museum in downtown Riverside. The Gluck Fellows Program awards funds to graduate students to support their education through community outreach. Fellows go to schools throughout the Inland Empire and lead classes or engage with institutions such as UCR ARTS or the California Museum of Photography (CMP). Gluck Fellow and master's student of art history Nicholas Barlow has been collaborating with both museums as part of his work with the Fellows Program.

“For today's activity, I've made a selection of photographs from the California Museum of Photography,” Barlow said. “And the theme I selected was landscape photography — “What is a landscape?” This includes materials from our Keystone mass stereoscopic collection. A holding of Mexican photography, fine art photography, California photography, and contemporary artists from the 70s until now.”

The event, which began at 12:30, featured several arts-and-crafts stations, catering, art exhibitions, and more. Many current UCR graduate students supported the event: running booths, helping kids, performing, and even leading group workshops. Gluck Fellow and second-year PhD candidate in critical dance studies, Sriradha Paul led one group in dance.

“I was here to teach an Odissi workshop,” Paul said, “which is a South Asian dance form, which has a lot of storytelling and a lot of movement techniques that I shared with the participants.”

Paul led her group — which included children, UCR community members, and other guests — through various dance forms, including several that emulated the appearance and behavior of animals such as deer and lions. Paul improves her pedagogy by developing her own teaching curriculum. She observes the response students have to her teaching, and thinks about how else to apply it. Community outreach is a way for people to gain experience in these arts that they might otherwise be unable to access.

“Dancing is a tricky thing; some people want to do it, but it requires a lot of visibility — a pressure — and courage to come up,” Paul said. “So I think in that way, [the Gluck program is a] really an interesting program, because it gives them that platform to try it out. So some people want to imagine how monkeys walk, or how deer run. So I think it gives them a push towards their imagination and to be able to think how they can be creative, and how they can create, build their own story through bodies, without verbal communication.”

Other activities included a button-making station led by Gluck Fellow Maya Salem and collage-making, as well as performances and workshops by the UCR Taiko ensemble and Gluck Fellows Amelia Lee, Cal Plett, Fabiola Ochoa Torralba, and Jorge Calaf. The Gluck Fellows Program is dedicated to diversity and represents a broad spectrum of cultures and art forms that the community can engage with.

FEATURED PHOTO. UCR families embrace as they enjoy the musical entertainment.