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Singing for Bernie After a 10k run, Laura Jean Anderson still had the energy to fire up a crowd
For most people, running one’s first 10k would make for a pretty memorable day, but for Laura Jean Anderson (Music 13), that was just the beginning. The rising singer-songwriter—who’s garnered attention by delivering electrifying anthems around Los Angeles and the US at large—finished her race only to learn that she’d been invited to perform at the Bernie Sanders rally on that very same day. “It was a last-minute scramble!” enthuses Anderson, who describes the rally as “one of the most amazing experiences of my musical life.” This was the Vermont senator’s first stop in LA on his 2020 presidential campaign, and Anderson reports that she could feel hope in the air. “It was amazing to meet Bernie and to hear him speak,”
“It was one of the most amazing experiences of my musical life.”
Laura Jean Anderson performs on stage in Grand Park, downtown Los Angeles.
she says. “The energy was alive at the rally—I felt that people were in this fight together.” Anderson’s latest record, Lonesome No More, was released last October, and with tracks such as “Silence Won’t Help Me Now,” her pairing with Bernie couldn’t be more appropriate. “Having a big group of people gather like that for change,” she says, “gave the songs I play every day a new meaning.”
Earlier that day, after the 10k race.
— Laura Jean Anderson
Charles Gaines Wins the 2019 MacDowell Medal School of Art faculty Charles Gaines has won this year’s MacDowell Medal that was founded by composer Edward MacDowell who, with his wife Marian, established a retreat for artists, the MacDowell Colony, in 1907. The Medal has been presented since 1960, in recognition of one person, annually, for outstanding contribution to American culture and the arts. Artists in seven disciplines—architecture, visual arts, 18
CalArts Alumni Magazine
music composition, theater, writing, filmmaking, and interdisciplinary art—are considered. Past recipients in the visual arts have included Alexander Calder, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Georgia O’Keefe, and Betye Saar. Gaines’s influential conceptual work includes drawings, photographic series, and video installations, engaging formulas and systems that often address relationships between subjectivity and objectivity. His past awards include a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grant in 1977, a California Community Foundation (CCF) in 2011, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013, and the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) Award in 2018.