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!
Spring 2026
Grit
Jon Picinich UG student exhibition
Reception: March 30, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m. with Performance: 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.
March 31 & April 1, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.; April 2, 2:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
To have "Grit" is to persevere, to endure, to revel in the feelings of physical pain and discomfort. Jon Picinich's exploration of this idea lends itself to a physical approach to mark-making, performance, and material. The work deals with physical expression as a vessel for finding identity while grappling with what it means to be masculine and how that is constantly questioned.
Deep Roles
Sophia Cleary MFA thesis exhibition
Reception: April 2, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 1 - April 4, 2026
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
Deep Roles investigates performance as both subject and inheritance. At its center is A Doll's House, an experimental documentary short that explores the legacy of growing up in a family of performers, where the theater served as a pathway to both create and avoid intimacy. An accompanying suite of drawings tucked away in the projection booth depicts heavy curtains and tomatoes — a meditation on the associative tropes that haunt an actor’s performance. Through drawing, installation, and film, Deep Roles asks what it means to perform for, with, and against the people that came before you.
Circular Stories
Nora Hagkull UG student exhibition
Reception: April 8, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 8 - April 10, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
Circular Stories is an exhibition of pieces that explore the enduring, yet constantly shifting nature of our world. I am interested in the many cycles that we see around us. The life cycle, for example, moves in a constant loop of birth, life, death, decomposition, and birth once again.
Stories Untold
Tessa Chan UG student exhibition
Reception: April 13, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
April 14, 3:00 - 5:00 p.m.; April 15, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
Stories Untold is a collection of narrative-driven works shaped by a love of nature, fantasy, and storytelling. Drawing on cultural influences, these pieces explore vivid moments, imagined places, and fragments of larger worlds. I rarely show my art or writing but with this exhibit, I hope to begin sharing them more openly, hence the name Stories Untold.
choreographies of becoming (a film)
erika roos MFA thesis exhibition
Reception: April 17, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
April 13 - April 17, 1:00 - 5:00 p.m. or by appointment
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
choreographies of becoming ( a film ) is a site-sensitive installation and durational performance with 16mm film. Through the interwoven, looping bodies of projector, film, screen, light,and shadow, this installation contends with how we hold memory: in movement, in muscle, in celluloid, in textile, in our relationships with one another.
16th Annual Adam D. Kamil Media Awards
Ceremony: May 15, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Exhibition: May 14 - May 20, 2026
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, Mandeville Center, UC San Diego
Applications due April 24th: 2026 Application Form PDF
The Kamil family, Department of Visual Arts, and School of Arts and Humanities at UC San Diego invite you to the 16th 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.
Recent Publications
Field Journal #32
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.
Homing In, Sharing Knowledge: Notes and essays on HISK laureates, 2016-23
By Professor John C. Welchman
The texts offer amplified meditations on the possibilities—but also defaults and limits—of the studio visit and on how this scene of encounter sets engagements with work that are dialogical and critically robust; respectful but also challenging; full of seeing into and through; and tactically combustible, in the sense of sparking future allusions.
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Learn about events produced by the Department and other news from our Students, Faculty, and Alumni!
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. *