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.
Winter 2026
Joey Terrill
Russell Lecture with MCASD
March 12, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Jacobs Hall, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Since the 1970s, Joey Terrill, a Los Angeles based Chicano artist, has explored the intersection of his Latino and gay male identities in his art. A native Angeleno, he studied at Immaculate Heart Collage and California State University, Los Angeles. Living with HIV for 45 years, his art career has paralleled and documented his four decades as an AIDS activist.
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. *