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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 2025


DILATION( )/INTERSTITIUMthumbnail

erika roos 2nd Year MFA Exhibition

Reception: January 16, 5:00 p.m.
January 13 - January 17, 2025
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

DILATION( )/INTERSTITIUM is a durational sub/merging of light movement, & image.

in this study, dancer & mfa candidate erika roos considers how the fluidity & disintegration of time shape the in-betweenness of bodily forms.


Alongsidethumbnail

Walker Hewitt 2nd Year MFA Exhibition

Reception: January 16, 5:00 p.m.
January 13 - January 17, 2025
SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

Multimedia work considering the spaces we occupy, move through, and share, what it means to be a neighbor and the materials that build our environments.


Life in Resonanceposter thumbnail

UG students Noah Harvey, Malika Charles, Amanda Salatino Exhibition

Reception: January 16, 4:00 - 6:30 p.m.
January 14 - January 16, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Life in Resonance is a cumulation of our works focusing primarily on exploring themes of universal connections, spirituality, and human expression. Through a variety of traditional and digital media, we explored the intersections between these topics through abstract representational depictions.


Chimerathumbnail

Andrew Wharton 2nd Year MFA Exhibition

Reception: January 30, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
January 27 - 31, 2025, by appointment
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

Chimera is an exhibition using AI and surveillance to explore Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Trailcam Imagery, and the potential to reverse the gaze in predator/prey and creator/creation relationships.


Carmen Winantphoto of the artist

Guest Lecture

February 10, 2025
5:00 - 6:20 p.m.
B-202 Mandeville Center, UC San Diego

Carmen Winant is a Professor in the Department of Art at Ohio State University, where she is the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art, and an affiliated faculty member in Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies. Winant’s work poses a challenge to the ways that we understand women’s power, pleasure, labor, healing, and liberation to function, querying the aesthetic and political legacy of second-wave feminism.


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Getty PST ART Exhibition

Ongoing in certain locations

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.


Recent Publications


The Revolution Takes Formbook cover

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 #26Field Journal logo

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 Selfbook cover

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 Selfbook cover

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.

 


AutodriveAutodrive book cover

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 Lodgebook cover

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 Blocksbook cover

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 Blackphoto of the book cover

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

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

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

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. *

Mandeville Art Gallery