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 2025
Celebrate the Arts
September 25, 2025
10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Epstein Family Amphitheater, UC San Diego
Stop by the Epstein Family Amphitheater to learn all about arts on campus. Talk to representatives from campus arts departments, academic departments, and student organizations and learn how you can be involved in the arts at UC San Diego.
Babushkas & Backgammon
Meltem Buyuran UG student exhibition
Reception: October 6, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
October 6 - October 16, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
"Inspired by my roots in the Caucasus, as well as my fascination with human emotion, most of my paintings reflect the cultural scenes and spirited individuals I’ve encountered on my travels through Azerbaijani towns and villages."
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Artist Lecture with INSITE
October 23, 2025
6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego
Nolan Oswald Dennis is an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization, questioning histories of space and time through system-specific interventions. Presented by INSITE, Nolan Oswald Dennis: Demonstrations(i) opens at The Athenaeum Music & Arts Library on October 25, 2025.
Unveiling
Blake Riesenfeld UG student exhibition
Reception: October 28, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
October 28 (2-5pm), October 29 (12-3pm), October 30 (2-5pm)
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
Blake Riesenfeld is a photographer and artist-filmmaker whose practice reconciles with his family’s history of the Holocaust in Germany. Riesenfeld is inspired by his great-grandparents' narrowly escaping Würzburg, Germany, in 1938, after being held at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
iris yirei hu
: Artist Talk
Longenecker-Roth Artist in Residence
October 30, 2025
6:30 - 8:20 p.m.
Franklin Antonio Hall, Room 1301, UC San Diego
iris yirei hu is a multidisciplinary journey-based artist from Los Angeles who works across paintings, installations, intercultural collaborations, writing, and public art. She roots her art practice in processes of material and spiritual transformation, as evidenced in labor intensive pieces and installations that explore the subterranean realms of grief and loss, cycles of life and death, the earthly and the otherworldly, and the infinitely evolving self.
LIGHTNING TALKS
Presentations by First Year MFA & PhD Art Practice Students
November 7, 2025
7:00 - 8:30 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego
Leila Abdelrazaq • Evan Apodaca • Shloka Dhar • Charles Glaubitz González • Ruby Gomez • Josh Graupera • Naima Lowe • J. Angelo Pezzini • Mavyn Vu
At the Table
Exhibition Presented by Undergraduate Visual Arts Students
Reception: November 10, 4:00 - 8:00 p.m.
November 10 - November 14, 2025
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
This art exhibition brings together artists from all backgrounds, each sharing their unique stories through a mix of mediums and styles, from painting and sculpture to digital art, photography, and more. It’s a place where different voices meet, where art sparks conversation, and where everyone is welcome to take a seat and enjoy the beauty of diverse expression.
PhD Program Information Session
November 21, 2025
9:00 - 10:00 a.m.
Sign-Up Here
Visual Arts PhD Director, Malik Gaines, will give an overview of the PhD programs and will be available to answer questions.
iris yirei hu
: Open Studio
Longenecker-Roth Artist in Residence
November 21, 2025
12:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Visual Arts Facility, Main Gallery, UC San Diego
iris yirei hu is a multidisciplinary journey-based artist from Los Angeles who works across paintings, installations, intercultural collaborations, writing, and public art. She roots her art practice in processes of material and spiritual transformation, as evidenced in labor intensive pieces and installations that explore the subterranean realms of grief and loss, cycles of life and death, the earthly and the otherworldly, and the infinitely evolving self.
Recent Publications
Field Journal #31
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.
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.
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.
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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.
KAMIL GALLERY ONLINE
The Adam D. Kamil Gallery is a site for undergraduate art shows and hosts the annual Adam D. Kamil Media Awards. The online gallery is available to students throughout the year and can be used to share documentation of gallery exhibitions, or exclusively online exhibitions.
The Mandeville Art Gallery is an institute for transformative contemporary art.
Previously known as the University Art Gallery, the Mandeville Art Gallery is a long-standing fixture on the UC San Diego campus with a five-decade history of presenting innovative art in the context of a major research university. *