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Outer Limits

Exhibition and Conference

April 10-11, 2026

Please join us for the inaugural Art History Graduate Symposium presented by UCSD's Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism.

Outer Limits Exhibition Closing Reception and Panel Presentations

April 10, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

The liminal expands across a spatio-temporal divide, limning demarcations between inside and outside, now and then, here and there, and us and them. Reaching for it, we might bump up against, and sometime erode, boundaries between the known and the unfamiliar. Yet, working through liminality engages not only with phenomenological experience but with processes and enactments. What might be necessary indeterminacies challenge ‘normative’ understandings or standard passages. Its affectual eventuations align with the anxieties of our current moment: an inexorable state of wait, being caught- in-between.

We are all a little on edge these days, and though we may feel trapped, reflecting on liminal conditions might imagine queer and other non-standard or resistant wayfinding in the project of conceptualizing future-bound transformation or roundabout, even unstable, ways of unsettling the false consciousness of the status quo. If edges delineate barriers, such limits can also be productive and goad us into thinking, seeing, and pushing beyond. Maybe Mean Girls (2004) had it right: suggesting a radical rethinking of liminality by announcing that “the limit does not exist.” Or, to reframe, what are the stakes of questioning the very nature of being limited? As Luce Irigaray suggested in This Sex Which is Not One: “Leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it.”

Panel 1: Superseeding Limits

  • 4:00 p.m. - Xelestial Moreno-Luz and James M. Dailey

Panel 2: Outer Limits

  • 4:15 p.m. - sarah bricke, Christine Negus, and Kamryn Olds

4:30 p.m. - Q & A  and Discussion

Exhibiting artists: Leila Abdelrazaq, Mina Bae, Dina Cline, CW Crawford, eden, bianca gabrielle goyette, Aambr Newsome, newspaper, Ana Villalpando

Outer Limits Conference

April 11, 11:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla

PLEASE RSVP

The University of California, San Diego, Department of Visual Arts, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), is honored to convene the inaugural Art History Graduate Symposium. This landmark event establishes a vital forum for scholarly exchange, assembling a North American cohort of emerging historians and practitioners to examine the evolving methodologies of visual culture.

The symposium’s three thematic sessions–Aural Pleasures, Interstitial, and Passing On–provide a rigorous framework for investigating the intersections of sound, memory, and the ephemeral. By interrogating the "afterlives" of the archive and the "monstrosity" of the spirit, these proceedings seek to redefine the boundaries of how art mediates historical identity and ontological presence.

11:00 a.m. - Welcome and Opening Remarks by Malik Gaines, PhD Director, Department of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

Panel 1: Aural Pleasures and the Edges of Sounding moderated by Christine Negus

  • 11:15 a.m. - Fiona Martinez, "Contrapuntal Poetics,” University of California, San Diego  
  • 11:30 a.m. - Tramaine Suubi, “Outer Limits: Between and Beyond Binaries through the grӕ,” University of California, San Diego  
  • 11:45 a.m. - Aiden Levy, “Stranger to Stranger: Queer, Immersive, & Cosmological Artistic Appropriations of Baldwin,” Tufts University
  • 12:00 p.m. - Q & A

12:30 - 1:30 p.m. - Lunch Break

Panel 2: Interstitial: Remains and Afterlives moderated by sarah bricke

  • 1:30 p.m. - Thomas Duncan, “The Photographic Coupling of Andy Warhol and Brigid Berlin,” University of California, Los Angeles
  • 1:45 p.m. - Bronwen Cox,  “Absent Bodies and Archives of Ephemera: Portraits of Loss in the Work of Rebecca  Belmore, Ana Mendieta, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” University of Toronto
  • 2:00 p.m. - Sila Ulug, “Where Art Begins and Ends,” University of Chicago
  • 2:15 p.m. - Elias Mendel, “Dear Martha,” University of Illinois Chicago
  • 2:30 p.m. - Q & A

3:00 - 3:15 p.m. - Break

Panel 3: Passing On: Monstrosity and Spirit moderated by Kamryn Olds

  • 3:15 p.m. - Alana Batten, “Death, Image, Spirit: Photography as a Mediator,” York University
  • 3:30 p.m. - Sarah Grace Faulk, “Domestic Technology: Lutz Bacher’s Video Practice,” University of California, Riverside
  • 3:45 p.m. - Gabriel Gaston, McGill University
  • 4:00 p.m. - Q & A & Close