A Creative Space
Mayu Sasame was nine years old when she walked into a community center near her neighborhood in Tokyo and found a man whose room was filled with broken televisions, old telephone parts and things other people had thrown away. Sanjiro Kamiyama made art from all of it. One day Sasame came in not wanting to create anything, and he handed her a glass jar of some kind of fluid and told her to sit by the window and stare at it. She did. Something shifted.
She went back to his art-making space for the next five formative years.
"I know that if I never met him, I would not be attending UCLA now," Sasame said. "He not only gave me a creative space, but also a life-changing experience to learn about the power of believing in yourself."
The Visual and Performing Arts Education program's teaching practicum brought her to Overland Avenue Elementary School, where she taught five weeks of art classes to first-graders. She made aprons for them on the first day so they could protect their clothes for what came next: painted treasure chests, origami decorations, Shrinky Dinks she diligently baked in the one campus kitchen on the Hill where she lived and brought back in time for the kids to be astonished at the evolution of their tiny creations.
Her capstone project is a battery recycling education campaign for campus. An internship in Bali with a marine conservation organization fed the same thinking. And Sasame said she was inspired by her time interning at the Fowler Museum for a quarter. Her ultimate goal, after some time back in Japan, is public education around climate action — using art as a bridge.
"Art is a universal language," she said.
Sasame said she was also inspired by her time interning at the Fowler Museum, especially working on exhibitions that highlight on indigenous communities.
