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.

Fall 2024

Embodied Pacific

Getty PST ART Exhibition

All-Exhibitions Reception: September 26, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Gallery QI at Atkinson Hall, UC San Diego

Embodied Pacific is a platform of multisited exhibitions and events organized through a Getty PST ART: Art and Science Collide supported partnership between UC San Diego Visual Arts and Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, featuring projects by more than thirty artists working with researchers in laboratories, field sites, and archives in SoCal and the Pacific Islands. Exhibitions, workshops, and programs at our six venues are designed to invite immersive engagement in sensory oceanography, Indigenous design, and critical craft.

Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work

Getty PST ART Exhibition

Reception: September 28, 2:00 - 6:00 p.m.
September 28 - December 7, 2024
Mandeville Art Gallery, UC San Diego

As part of the Getty Foundation’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide, the Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego presents Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, a retrospective exhibition about the work of husband-and-wife team of Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, who were among the earliest and most notable ecological artists. Founding members of the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego, Helen and Newton were local San Diego artists for nearly four decades, where they developed their pioneering concepts of Ecological Art.

Human Nature

Exhibition by undergraduate student Janice Kang

Reception: October 11, 12:00 - 4:00 p.m.
October 10 - October 17, 12:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Each piece is designed specifically to engage uniquely with different aspects of the universal human experience. This exhibition is designed to invite viewers to subvert understood conventions and engage with philosophical introspection.

Tanya Aguiñiga: Artist Talk

Longenecker-Roth Artist in Residence

October 17, 6:30 - 8:00 p.m.
Robinson Auditorium, UC San Diego

Tanya Aguiñiga was born in 1978 in San Diego, California, and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. An artist and craftsperson, Aguiñiga works with traditional craft materials like natural fibers and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects.

Dilettante

Exhibition by undergraduate student Blake Riesenfeld

Reception: October 25, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
October 25 - November 1, 1:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Exploration of constructed space through photography and installation mediums.

Tanya Aguiñiga: Open Studio

Longenecker-Roth Artist in Residence

November 1, 12:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

The Longenecker-Roth Artist in Residence Endowment was established in 2016 to extend Martha Longenecker-Roth's legacy as an artist and educator. In the spirit of her historic impact on the visual arts in both local and global communities, this endowment brings to the Visual Arts Department of UC San Diego artists of national and international stature who will inspire our students to broaden the scope, appeal, and range of art as well as incite exchange with the faculty, the campus community and local artists and audiences.

Lightning Talks

New MFA Student Presentations

November 1, 7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

Learn about the work of artists new to the Visual Arts MFA program:

NUBE CRUZ • JAMES M DAILEY • XELESTIAL MORENO-LUZ • RYAN OH • KAMRYN OLDS • EMILY POLANCO • MICHELLE SUI • ZACHARY THOMPSON

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies

Exhibition by undergraduate student Sarah Obregon

November 4 - November 14, 2024
(Mo/We 3-6pm, Tu/Th 10-2pm)
Closing Reception: November 14, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Bodies, Bodies, Bodies is a solo art exhibition about the exploration of the human body by distorting its shapes and sizes. By designing figures experiencing the physical strain and discomfort of their bodies, viewers can contemplate the tangible toll such transformations could impose on these reimagined bodies as well as the human anatomy’s adaptability.

Cut-Up The Guardian: FA24

Exhibition by undergraduate class VIS 175

November 13, 3:30 - 6:00 p.m.
November 14, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
UpThere, 353 Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

The students were asked to create an experimental text collage each using a copy of the first edition of the quarter’s The Guardian newspaper. Lecturer Dino Dinco explained the parallel of the assignment to analog film editing when physical reels of film were cut with blades and reconnected with tape as an editor sought to build sequences and create meaning.

Latent Visions

Emily Greenberg MFA Thesis Exhibition

Reception: November 21, 6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
November 18 - November 22, 2024
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

Latent Visions, an MFA thesis show by Emily Greenberg, features two short films that explore generative artificial intelligence as a subject and medium. Created with generative video and found footage, The Imitation Game is a short narrative film about what it means to be human in a world increasingly mediated by simulations and representations. In Deep Drew, a surprisingly vulnerable and philosophical deepfake of Drew Barrymore confronts her own complicities and traumas while reflecting on the harms generative AI poses to writers, actors, and one’s own sense of self.

You Earned It

Exhibition by undergraduate class VIS 108

Reception: November 21, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
November 22, 25, 26, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

This is a studio art course for the advanced visual arts major, instructed by Geoffroy Tobe. After guided assignments, emphasis is on self-directed projects and portfolio development. This interdisciplinary course may focus on painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, film, video, photography, and new media.

Seaways

Embodied Pacific Project

November 22, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

A PST ART + Science Collide Embodied Pacific Project event featuring screenings and panels navigating Indigenous wayfinding across water, wine, and wildfire. Embodied Pacific features projects by 30 artists working with researchers in laboratories, field sites, and archives in SoCal and the Pacific Islands.They invite immersive engagement in oceanography, Indigenous design, and critical craft through exhibitions, workshops, and programs at our six venues.

Beyond Now Near Futures

Exhibition by undergraduate class VIS 108

Reception: December 5, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Mandeville 201B, UC San Diego

Students were tasked with creating original new works of any medium that illustrate their vision for the “near future” – warts and all. Radical climate disturbance, AI and personal identity, dystopia and utopia, and the relation of technology to human connection are some themes revealed in their work.

Mail It In

Exhibition by undergraduate class VIS 107A

Reception: December 5, 4:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Mandeville 201A, UC San Diego

Mail It In is an eclectic collection of sculpture work from the students of the VIS 107A class. They focus on themes of introspection, nostalgia, intimacy, and ultimately how their individual backgrounds from across the country and world come together to create beautiful and evocative works, and ultimately are mailed into one space full of artifacts of the lives of this diverse group of artists. 

VIS 80: Exhibition

Exhibition by undergraduate class VIS 80

Reception: December 5, 6:30 - 8:20 p.m.
Performances begin at 7:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

VIS 80: Exhibition showcases the creative achievements of 240 students in Introduction to the Studio Major. Featuring a diverse array of media, painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. The exhibition invites viewers to engage with both conventional and experimental materials. Many works build on earlier explorations, serving as extensions or refinements of concepts developed throughout the quarter.

Tentacular Currents

Exhibition by undergraduate classes VIS 147A & 142

Reception: December 9, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
December 9 - December 12, 2024
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Students have developed artworks and installations that utilize digital electronics. Techniques in digital electronic construction and computer interfacing for interactive control of sound, lighting, and electromechanics are used to create an electro-sculptural art exhibition.

Nothing to Lose: Expressions of Bold Vulnerability

Undergraduate Art Exhibition

December 11 - December 13, 12:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Commons Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

This exhibition delves into the theme of bold vulnerability, presenting raw, fearless expressions through a variety of mediums, including photography, paintings, sculptures, videos, and more. We encourage you to stop by during the opening or anytime throughout the week to immerse yourself in this inspiring showcase.

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 hosts online representations for the annual Graduate Open Studios. Documentation of gallery exhibitions and the screening program are viewable, along with links to each participating artist's studio page. Past Open Studios and MFA Thesis exhibitions are also viewable.

visarts.ucsd.edu/gradexhibitions

KAMIL GALLERY ONLINE

The Adam D. Kamil Gallery is a site for undergraduate art shows and hosts the annual 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. The online gallery is available to students throughout the year and can be used to share documentation of gallery exhibitions, or exclusively online exhibitions. All videos submitted for the Kamil Media Awards are viewable in the online gallery. Past online exhibitions remain viewable with the artists' permission.

visarts.ucsd.edu/kamilgallery