About
- Chair's Message
- Academic Mission
- Employment
- Give Now
Las Hermanas Iglesias, installation detail at SME Gallery, 2026.
Academic Mission
The University of California San Diego Visual Arts department was born out of the cultural and political ferment of the late 1960’s. Since its creation in 1966 it has been a leading force in the development of new creative practices, new forms of critical inquiry into the visual arts and new forms of artistic learning. This is a legacy that the Visual Arts department proudly carries into the future. At its founding the department was an outlier, departing from the conservatism of existing M.F.A. programs which remained focused on more traditional media. While our department has been home to many distinguished painters and sculptors over the years these practices always evolved in dialogue with, rather than segregation from, a broad range of other practices, from performance and conceptual art to film and photography to computational and electronic art. This transversal orientation is also evident in the department’s long-standing commitment to art practices that operate beyond the gallery and museum space, engaging with the broader social and political world in all its complexity and contradiction.
The Visual Arts department has, since its origin, placed artistic production in conversation with critical research in the history and theory of art, media and visual culture more broadly. While M.F.A. and Ph.D. programs are often housed in entirely separate departments at other universities, at the University of California San Diego they have always co-existed as part of a single learning community of scholars and practitioners. This linkage between artistic production and scholarly research in Art History, Theory and Criticism is also evident in the Art Practice Concentration within our Ph.D., one of the first programs of its kind in the country. As these examples demonstrate, the Visual Arts department has consistently pushed the boundaries of conventional art and research paradigms.
Our department features an extraordinary diversity of disciplines, research methodologies and modes of creative inquiry, from our genre-defining Speculative Design major, which explores the complex cultural manifestations of design as both practice and epistemological paradigm, to our renowned Studio area, to our Media major, which features cutting edge research in photography, cinema and new media, to our Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major, to faculty exploring the spatial politics of the built environment and the most urgent questions of climate change and artificial intelligence, to new theoretical and historical interventions in Performance Studies, modern and contemporary art, Chinese and Latin American art, Decolonial Studies, socially engaged art, and beyond. Across all of these domains, we seek to provide our students not just with theoretical road maps, but also with a deep knowledge of the concrete processes, both physical and intellectual, by which new insight is created.
Our department’s interdisciplinarity is further enhanced by its location in one of the leading public research universities in the country, rather than a private art school. This is an especially important resource, given the extent to which contemporary art is increasingly defined by its ability to engage with a broad range of other disciplines, fields and forms of knowledge. Here at the University of California San Diego our students have the opportunity to be in meaningful dialogue with faculty and students across a remarkably diverse academic community. Our campus is home to some of the leading researchers in the areas of biology, climate change, computer science, engineering, medicine, oceanography, and a dozen other fields, as well as world-class programs in History, Literature, Ethnic Studies, Philosophy, Music, Theater and Dance, Critical Gender Studies, and Communication, among many others. While the rhetoric of “interdisciplinarity” has become a commonplace in the decades since our department’s founding, at the University of California San Diego it is the very cornerstone of our identity.