From postcards to poems, UCLA arts units inspire storytelling at Block Party

UCLA students returned to campus last week, with the annual Bruin Block Party on Sunday Sept 21 welcoming thousands of new and returning students to the streets of Westwood to get to know their new neighborhood. 

For the second year, the Hammer Museum, Fowler Museum and Center for the Art of Performance partnered with the Common Experience initiative in the First-Year Experience, (which helps new students acclimate to campus life), for hands-on art-making activities at Block Party, set against the backdrop of music and dance performances from UCLA student groups. 

This year’s Common Experience theme is “The Power of Storytelling” and students will be encouraged to watch the critically acclaimed show “Reservation Dogs,” which aired on FX from 2021 to 2023. The comedy-drama followed the lives of four indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma.
These public art units at UCLA encouraged students to participate in some tactile and analog art-making inspired by the power of storytelling theme. 

The Hammer Museum's mobile art lab invited students to create their own postcards and tell a visual story of themselves and their hopes for a more just world. The Fowler Museum offered opportunities to create a new story out of something already told, with students blacking out words from pages of past exhibition catalogs to create new "erasure" poems. CAP asked students to write down a phrase or make a collage out of found materials that reflected a six-word story about the first friends they've made at UCLA, first memories or other first experiences as Bruins.

Students expanded on this prompt with other reflections and words of encouragement, leaving these stories on a display that grew in complexity over the course of the evening.

Story and images by Jessica Wolf
Posted 09.30.25