News & Events

This is an outline of events produced by the Department for the current quarter. Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter to keep up-to-date with these and other events from our Students, Faculty, and Alumni! Submit items for the newsletter by completing the Submission Form.

Spring 2024

AS THE SUN WOUNDS THE SHADOW

Nathan Storey MFA Thesis Exhibition

Reception: April 5, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Performance: April 12, 5:00 p.m.
April 5 - April 12, 2024
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

In AS THE SUN WOUNDS THE SHADOWS, Nathan Storey presents various bodies of work, such as Traces and Stains, that propose printed matter as a facilitator, witness, and residue of gay desire. Storey's artistic practice explores the intricate relationship between printed materials and queer memory, collectivity, liberation, and loss. Words and images are printed, photographed, re-printed, re-photographed, collaged, and so on, recontextualizing gay and queer materials from collective and personal archives, blurring but not erasing the seams. – Dillon Chapman

Natural Defenses

Chloe Nickels Undergraduate Exhibition

April 8 - April 12, 2024
1:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Happy Moments Count

Kleo Zhou Undergraduate Exhibition

April 15 - April 19, 12:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Reception: April 18, 3:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Happy Moments Count brings in dialogues ranging from the fleeting nature of happiness to the fluidity of identity. Through the manipulation of color, form, and texture, I want to introduce nebulous realms of memory and emotion, inviting viewers to confront their own perceptions of reality. From intimate portraits to abstract installations, each artwork is trying to serve as a vessel for introspection. 

ALL I CAN LEAVE YOU IS THIS GLITTER

Deanna Barahona MFA Thesis Exhibition

Reception: April 19, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 19 - April 26, 2024
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

ALL I CAN LEAVE YOU IS THIS GLITTER refers to more than just material possession but the impression of memories and ephemerality. The exhibition responds to the maximalist visuals of a family party, and its "glitter" or remnants of identity carried through migration while settling in new places. The work reflects subcultures formed in the process of integration in Southern California as it weaves together elements of architecture, personal adornments, and symbolic motifs from the homes of the Latin American diaspora.

I hope we wake to a body we love

Jun!yi Min MFA Thesis Exhibition

Reception: April 19, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Performance: April 21, 4:00 p.m.
April 19 - April 26, daily 2:00 - 6:00 p.m.
SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

I hope we wake to a body we love is a performance exhibition that ruminates on death, rebirth and belonging through the endurance practice, a practice of waiting. In a world already violent, Jun! offers a critical sustainable approach to difficult endurance performances that confront death by offering a space where death, pain, love, and intimacy can coexist simultaneously. In doing so, Jun! reframes endurance as a practice of waiting for a better future, a future where we can wake to a body that we love.

Saba Zavarei

Remote Guest Lecture

April 22, 2024
11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
YouTube Livestream: https://youtube.com/live/iLedq9cGPHE

Saba Zavarei is a writer, researcher and artist, and the politics of body and space are at the core of her research and practice. Working across the media of text, performance and placemaking, she explores the ways in which bodies and performative interventions contribute to the production of space and the urban condition.

Francisco Eme

Artist Talk

April 22, 2024
6:00 - 7:20 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

Francisco Eme (1981) CDMX - OAX,  is a music composer, multimedia artist, and gallery director who lives in San Diego. The Arts & Culture Director at Casa Familiar and Gallery Director at The FRONT Arte & Cultura, a trans-border art gallery in San Diego, US - Tijuana, MX, Francisco primarily works with sound in his practice, integrating other diverse disciplines as well. He is a San Diego Art Prize Awardee 2024. 

Ojo de Liebre

Lillia Weissmuller Undergraduate Exhibition

April 22 - April 26, 2024 (click image for hours)
Reception: April 25, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

My exhibition dissects how ovarian cancer changed my mental, physical state, and gender identity through an abstract reality of nature. There are 4 phases in which my experience lives inside me; diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and healing. My work consists of multimedia pieces that attempt to unravel each phase, utilizing traditional and nontraditional mediums that reflect the emotion and causality of such thought.

Nikki Johnson

Computing in the Arts Lecture Series

April 29, 2024
5:00 p.m.
Mosaic 113, UC San Diego

Nikki Johnson is a new media artist and software engineer from Los Angeles, California. She graduated from University of California San Diego with a Bachelor’s Degree in Interdisciplinary Computing & The Arts. She is now working with Sphere Entertainment Co. as a Software Engineer building real-time tools and content for Sphere in Las Vegas. Her current artistic interests are audio/visual programming, floral arts, and ceramics.

Undulation of a Rupture

Chanell Stone MFA Thesis Exhibition

Reception: May 4, 2:00 - 6:00 p.m.
May 3 - May 10, 2024
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

Chanell Stone writes, “Driven by a profound yearning to trace, locate and connect with my ancestral origins and beginnings, I devoted myself to making in the Deep South – in what felt like a familiar first and soon became a multi-year dance between returning while arriving. I share with you all my leavings, encounters and exchanges with this land.”

Carmen Winant

Guest Lecture

May 7, 2024
6:30 - 8:00 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

Carmen Winant is an artist and the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University. Her work utilizes archival and authored photographs to examine feminist care networks, with particular emphasis on intergenerational, multiracial, and sometimes transnational coalition building. Winant is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in photography, a 2020 FCA Artist Honoree and a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters award recipient.

Boots Riley

Adam D. Kamil Guest Lecture

May 16, 2024
6:30 - 8:00 p.m.
The Jeannie, Sixth College, UC San Diego

Boots Riley is a director, activist, screenwriter, producer, poet, rapper, and speaker. His directorial debut "Sorry to Bother You" premiered to strong critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival. By embedding messages regarding economic and class critique as well as politically progressive movement building into dystopian science fiction satire, "Sorry To Bother You” brought issues surrounding income inequality into wide public discussion in the United States and abroad.

14th Annual Adam D. Kamil Media Awards

Ceremony: May 17, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Exhibition: May 16 - May 23, 2023
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

The Kamil family, Department of Visual Arts, and School of Arts and Humanities at UC San Diego invite you to the 14th Annual Adam D. Kamil Media Awards Ceremony. Please join us for an evening of film and creativity to honor the memory of Adam Douglas Kamil and showcase the talent of undergraduate UC San Diego students.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Guest Lecture

May 21, 2024
6:30 - 8:00 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

Kameelah Janan Rasheed was born in East Palo Alto, CA. Rasheed lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MA in Secondary Social Studies Education from Stanford University (2008) and a BA in Public Policy from Pomona College (2006). She was an Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa (2006–7). A learner, she grapples with the poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information technologies, [un]learning, and belief formation.

LaJuné McMillian

Guest Lecture

May 28, 2024
6:30 - 8:00 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

LaJuné is a Multidisciplinary Artist, and Educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our contemporary forms of communication. They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination. LaJuné was previously the Director of Skating at Figure Skating in Harlem, where they integrated STEAM and Figure Skating to teach girls of color about movement and technology.

Recent Publications

The Revolution Takes Form

By Assistant Professor Jordan Marc Rose

During the French Revolution of 1830, insurgents raised some four thousand barricades. Afterward, lithographs of the street fighting flowed from the presses, creating the barricade’s first imagery. This book documents the changing political valence of the revolutionary ideals associated with the barricade in France from 1830 to 1852.

Field Journal #26

Founded & Edited by Professor Grant Kester

We are living through a singular cultural moment in which the conventional relationship between art and the social world, and between artist and viewer, is being questioned and renegotiated. FIELD responds to the remarkable proliferation of new artistic practices devoted to forms of political, social and cultural transformation.

Beyond the Sovereign Self

By Professor Grant Kester

In Beyond the Sovereign Self Grant H. Kester continues the critique of aesthetic autonomy begun in The Sovereign Self, showing how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester shows how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation.

The Sovereign Self

By Professor Grant Kester

In The Sovereign Self, Grant H. Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society.

Autodrive

By Professor Jordan Crandall

Autodrive is a work of literary fiction that melds techno-scientific inquiry and storytelling, critical theory and comedy, speculative fiction and satire. It is a road novel of sorts, an odyssey along the highways at a time when a new form of superintelligence has emerged.

Royal Book Lodge

By Professor John C. Welchman

A study and a guidance device, the first book on the Royal Book Lodge (RBL) is the culmination a three-year exploration by art historian and cultural commentator John C. Welchman. It examines the contribution of the RBL to an array of art, film and performance practices including photography, ceramics, writing, and publishing—centered on the creation of artist books and the powerful and wide-ranging dialogue and material experimentations they engender.

Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks

By Professor Teddy Cruz & Fonna Forman

With these thirty short, manifesto-like texts—building blocks for a new kind of architecture—Spatializing Justice offers a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth in architectural and planning practice, urging practitioners to adopt approaches that range from redefining infrastructure to retrofitting McMansions.

Michael in Black

By Associate Professor Nicole Miller

This first monograph on artist and filmmaker Nicole Miller focuses on a single sculpture by the artist: Michael in Black (2018). This book brings together a cohort of writers and other artists through newly commissioned texts and works for the page, as well as republished texts and images that exist as their own whole.

GRAD EXHIBITIONS ONLINE

This site includes documentation of solo thesis shows from graduating MFA students as well as First Year Reviews. Past exhibitions include the 2022 & 2021 Open Studios and the 2021 & 2020 graduating MFA exhibitions.

visarts.ucsd.edu/gradexhibitions

KAMIL GALLERY ONLINE

The Adam D. Kamil Gallery is now also online. This gallery is a site for undergraduate art shows and hosts the annual reception and exhibition for students that participate in the Adam D. Kamil Media Awards. Visual Arts majors and minors at the junior or senior level are eligible to submit a proposal to show in the Kamil Gallery for one week during the academic school year. Past online exhibitions remain viewable with the artists' permission.

visarts.ucsd.edu/kamilgallery